Interesting United Nations report on E-goverment

Interesting report on lots of levels the interesting is how certain nations are leap frogging up the table using mobile technologies. Also highlighting gains in this area when governments invest in it !

Read full report at http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan038851.pdf or  summary web page http://govinthelab.com/the-2010-united-nations-e-government-survey/

So the change begins

 
O2 redefines Wi-Fi landscape with launch of O2 Wifi

So its not the biggest thing since ***** whatever but it is a huge leap forward. O2 need to be congratulated for this brave step it will build there consumer base i believe as an unexpected consequence .

But anybody giving us more free wifi anywhere is worth giving a round of applause . I choose where I drink my coffee by if its got good coffee and Wifi I might do the same for shopping .

Part of press release says
"O2 is aiming to create a scaled Wi-Fi platform that will be at least
double the number of premium hotspots currently offered by BT Openzone
and The Cloud combined by 2013. It will begin rollout immediately by
replacing its existing 450 Cloud hotspots in its retail and office
estate. It will continue to extend the reach and scale of O2 Wifi
through partnerships with strategic venues, to include shops,
restaurants, retail outlets and outdoor and indoor locations across the
UK. "

read more at http://news.o2.co.uk/Home-Page-Body-Announcement/O2-redefines-Wi-Fi-landscape-with-launch-of-O2-Wifi-2e9.aspx

100 $ smartphone huaewei IDEOS launched in Kenya

well its only $100 its got 3.2 mega pixel camera wireless (n) , 512mb ram memory 4gb of rom memory , running android 2.2 touch screen and by the way its a phone and at $100 an amazing prize . have read about its launch in Kenya at

http://www.kachwanya.com/2011/01/huawei-ideos-the-worlds-first-affordable-smartphone-launched-in-kenya/
what is more amazing is  about a year ago there were 3 million internet users in Kenya and that increased to about 7.5 million users now !

Facebook goes down market targeting lower end mobile devices

Facebook has launch a java (remember that) app aiming to work on at least 2500 lower end non smart phone handset . The develepors snaptu reckon it will work on 80% of the worlds phones .

What is also clever is recruiting Operators to have signed up to the agreement allowing 90 days free access  already are: Dialog (Sri
Lanka), Life (Ukraine), Play (Poland), StarHub (Singapore), STC (Saudi
Arabia), Three (Hong Kong), Tunisiana (Tunisia), Viva (Dominican
Republic), Vodafone (Romania), Mobilicity (Canada), Reliance (India),
Telcel (Mexico), TIM (Brazil), and Vivacom (Bulgaria).


Read more about it http://www.telecoms.com/24072/facebook-targets-lower-end-mobile-devices/

Making Waves and Plain Sailing

Those great people at TechDis have worked with BIS to luanch the following

JISC Techdis is running two competitions on behalf of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, designed to promote independent learning. This website provides links to information and documentation for organisations that may be interested in applying.

Competition one is about Gesture communication
Description of competition is
Communication is very important; for most people effective communication is a learned skill, but communication is also a basic human right.

Learners with disabilities may lack independence due to an inability to communicate by speech or due to a lack of motor control. If gestures could be easily learned, recognised and converted to digital data, a whole new world of opportunity would be opened to them. Gestures need not only be converted to text or audio output to be helpful to learners, they could also be converted to electronic command signals so that those with limited motor control can gain greater independence.

Competition two is about creating easily navigable and personalisable digital information.
That aims to unlock the potential of making digital information accessible . To try and address the complete nightmare that is often the experience of trying to navigate digital information.

The competition is open to developers in SME further detail can be found at http://www.jisctechdis.ac.uk/sbricompetitions.

Learning without frontiers the speakers that made me think number 1 David Candless

David Candless Information is beautiful author stunning talk in the round made me think about how I view data and how I explain it to other people.

I am a geographer by training and have been taught many ways to display data but this guy made re think how we explain display data . I love his description of himself as a data journalist and data is the new oil or lattery the New soil. The Lwf filming is out this week but for now watch his ted talk which in the states cost $6000 dollars a tickets Graham LWF was a lot better and a lot cheaper . Love it

David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization

Great web presence to http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

The New frontier Learning without frontiers conference

I have been lucky to have been present at all the Handheld Learning conference since its first (I hate to use inaugural) in 2005  and Handheld 2009 was the last because it has now joined with conferences in Games Based Learning and Digital Safety to become learning without frontiers .
The area of handhelds  (or is it just mobile now) has gone from a minority sport to be frank the biggest shown in town. Like the humble text message that is now sent 6.1 trillion times in one year or 200,000 a second . Like mobie growth in some parts of  africa that gone from 1% penertration at the turn of the century to 20- 30 % depending on how you measure ownership .
As we meet and participate in the free day 1 of Learning without frontiers Let us play  http://www.learningwithoutfrontiers.com/sunday-service-ldn/
Just think how remarkable the global picture is going from a situation in many countries where people would die having never made a phone call to owning phone.
The mobile device is rapidly becoming an extension or projection of many s personality and also a augmentation of there memory and personality. 
The renaming of the handheld Learning conference reflects that seismic shift in technology and human interactions   . These are and no double will give rise to great opportunities and challenges for those involved in education.