ipadio combines the telephone with the blog to create an audio “phonecast” which is streamed Live to the Internet.

You can phonecast from any phone, anywhere in the world - no need for a computer or even access to the Internet.

Phonecasts can be cross-posted to social media and blogging platforms, embedded on any number of websites, or securely integrated with corporate databases and CRM systems.

Phonecasts can be converted to text, geo-located and put on a map, and either streamed live or moderated (plus about 100 other options).

As well as making phone blogging an easy means of communication for people around the world, this combination - the flexibility & power of the Internet plus the reach & simplicity of phones - has made ipadio ideal for business communications and operations.

We need to stop assuming that pure market forces will blissfully take us towards an innovative future. We need a deeper understanding of where we are going in order to encourage more innovation. Raw capitalism is fantastic at improving quality and driving down costs but it also rewards a monopolistic lock-in that tends to discourage companies from playing nice with others.

The entire purpose of this "Beyond Mobile” blog is to discuss and explore unlocking the future of smart devices. I feel strongly that this is being held back by a number of forces, but a critical one is being able to liberate web applications on handsets.

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The mobile web community is a crazy, amazing, determined bunch and they are fervently working on making the mobile web reach it’s potential. In many ways this community feels a bit like barbarians at the gate. What will hold this crowd back isn’t their energy but the foot dragging that we’ve already seen in this industry. The Browser Ghetto isn’t an accident, its more ‘abuse by neglect’ on the part of Apple and Google. They’ll get around to it, but only eventually.

The PaperPhone will be officially be unveiled at the Association of Computing Machinery's CHI 2011 in Vancouver, Canada by Roel Vertegaal—an associate professor of Computer Science and director of the Human Media Lab at Queen's University in Canada.

In an exclusive interview, Vertegaal said, "This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years. The computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper. You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen. This is not a maybe. This is a definite. This is what your phone will look like."

Marketers are tracking smartphone users through "apps" - games and other software on their phones. Some apps collect information including location, unique serial-number-like identifiers for the phone, and personal details such as age and sex. Apps routinely send the information to marketing companies that use it to compile dossiers on phone users. As part of the What They Know investigative series into data privacy, the Journal analyzed the data collected and shared by 101 popular apps on iPhone and Android phones (including the Journal's own iPhone app). This interactive database shows the behavior of these apps, and describes what each app told users about the information it gathered.

Q: How will the advent of 4G change the computing landscape? Will we see new types of applications become possible?

A: This is the capacity question, and right now data-intensive applications cause bandwidth challenges. The interesting thing is we have tolerance thresholds for new features, where we want to keep doing things as long as it’s fast enough, but if the performance is below that threshold, we’ll just tinker with it for a bit and, and I think real-time online media streaming will become more prevalent. Right now the latency time is not good enough. You can’t have 20 million people streaming their personal video streams around the world in real-time right now — that is not possible yet, but will become so. There will definitely be new applications emerging — it won’t just be the old ones getting faster.

TED: Future of Mobile With Henry Tirri, Head of Nokia Research [INTERVIEW]

Success factors in mobile viral marketing

• Perceived usefulness by receipient
• Reward for communicator
• Perceived ease of use
• Free mobile viral content
• Initial contacts
• First mover's advantage
• Critical mass
• Scalability
  

According to Eagle, local incumbent Safaricom had started a minute-sharing service for its prepaid cell phone plans a few years back. The idea was to enable users to send minutes to family members in rural areas, who weren’t otherwise able to buy prepaid phone cards. However, Kenyans quickly came up with other uses. “Lots and lots of people were using it as a surrogate for currency,” Eagle said. “[You] could literally pay for taxi cab rides using cell phone credit.”

I always enjoy the real creativity of customers-driven side-uses of emerging technologies and services.