Interesting Snippets

Virtually no one older than 25 uses it, but Pinger, an app that turns iPod Touches, a parent’s castoff iPhone without a service plan, or Wi-Fi-only iPads into “phones” with texting and calling capability, has drawn 8 million active users, with 80% of them between the ages of 12 and 24. Pinger assigns phone numbers and, using software and Wi-Fi, allows kids to call and text for free in exchange for viewing advertising. “We turn non-phones into phones,” said Pinger CMO Terrence Sweeney. Especially for the playground set.

The M-Pesa system is quite reasonable when it comes to fees; around 2.5%, as compared with 20% or more for the other transfer systems it has largely replaced… But the cost of the data provided by Safaricom and other mobile operators can be another story… SMS text messages cost little individually, but globally add up to 150 billion dollars per year, or more than global music, videogames, cinema box office, and internet content revenues combined… Texts serve as the emails, letters, telegrams, and often telephone calls of the developing world, all rolled into 160 character missives… For many poorer Kenyans and others in the developing world, communication is now among the major expenses after food and shelter.

My sister maintains that Snapchat is up there with Instagram, in terms of usage amongst her peers. Her exemplary use case was a moment that she captured in the airport of a funny looking man who was snoozing in an awkward position. It’s the type of thing that you want to share with somebody, but it’s insignificance would make it awkward in a text or status update. “It’s a way to connect with friends when you don’t really have anything to say.

It may sound ridiculous to say that Bell and his successors were the fathers of modern commercial architecture—of the skyscraper. But wait a minute. Take the Singer Building, the Flatiron Building, the Broad Exchange, the Trinity, or any of the giant office buildings. How many messages do you suppose go in and out of those buildings every day? Suppose there was no telephone and every message had to be carried by a personal messenger? How much room do you think the necessary elevators would leave for offices? Such structures would be an economic impossibility.

Outbox … securely intercepts and scans physical, letter-sized mail, catalogs, bills, and anything else that one would receive in the mail. With same-day turnaround, the service then pushes the email to your iPad, where the mail can be read, tagged, and stored indefinitely… The user can then decide to have the mail sent physically – more common for personal, handwritten letters that have sentimental value – or can have the mail shredded.

Message Optimizer turns every mobile phone into a mobile computing and mobile authentication device,” states ForgetMeNot Africa. The MO allows “more and more of our subscribers to get access to the internet without having to purchase expensive smartphones,” according to Douglas Mboweni, the chief executive officer of Econet Wireless Zimbabwe, a mobile network. How does the MO deliver messages without the internet or a personal computer? First, a mobile phone subscriber sends an SMS to a given short code. The message is received in the mobile company’s message centre, which then forwards to ForgetMeNot Africa’s internet servers. The servers process, route and deliver the message to the subscriber, who can then respond… The company currently has around 48 million users, having made inroads into east, west, southern and central Africa

Little Printer may seem like a throwback at first, but it’s actually a disruptive, weird, but undeniably innovative way to liberate digital content from its screen-based prison. It’s about making “the cloud” tangible and intimate again, by bringing it into the home in a physical way. “Little Printer is more like a family member or a colleague than a tool,

2011: 3.1 billion email accounts
2015: predicted 4.1 billion
Typical business user sends and receives 105 messages daily
2011: 2.6 billion instant messaging accounts worldwide
49% of email users live in the Asia Pacific region
Source: The Radicati Group, Inc. May 2011

As of today, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority has ordered mobile phone companies to filter its list of 1,600 “offensive and obscene” words, according to AFP. Many of the words are in fact obscene. But a ridiculous number seem to have been copied off English language t-shirts spotted in the Tokyo subway.