Thursday, November 29, 2007

Global cell phone use at 50 percent

According to Reuters, half of the World's population owns a cell phone


But 59 countries have over 100% penetration!

Click here to read the full Reuters article

"Worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions reached 3.3 billion -- equivalent to half the global population -- on Thursday, 26 years after the first cellular network was launched, research firm Informa said.

Since the first Nordic Mobile Telephony (NMT) networks were switched on in 1981 in Saudi Arabia, Sweden and Norway, mobile phones have become the consumer electronics sector with the largest volume of sales in the world.


'For children growing up today the issue is not whether they will get a mobile phone, it's a question of when', Newman said.

In recent years the industry has seen surging growth in outskirts of China and India, helped by constantly falling phone and call prices, with cellphone vendors already eyeing inroads into Africa's countryside to keep up the growth.

But although mobile subscriptions have reached the equivalent of 50 percent of the population, this does not mean that half the people in the world now have a mobile phone, since Informa said 59 countries have mobile penetration of over 100 percent -- where some owners have more than one phone.


According to the International Programs Center of the U.S. Census Bureau, the total population of the world reached 6,634,294,193 on Thursday.

At the same time 2,571,563,279 people were using the most widely used mobile technology, GSM (Global System for Mobile communications), according to global trade body GSM Association.

The second largest mobile technology, CDMA, had 421.4 million users at end September."



The North America is the biggest market for CDMA. I think that is one of the reasons why the US is not keeping up with the rest of the world so far as mobile technology is concerned.

Monday, November 26, 2007

QR Codes

Are QR codes leading the way to interactive learing on mobile phones?


QR codes seem to be big news in some circles.

With as many as 60 million phones around the world with QR code readers installed, QR codes are gathering recognition.

QR Codes are the '2D' bar codes that are becoming increasingly popular. These are already being used in education, I mentioned them earlier as being used in 'treasure hunt' style learning activities in schools. Here's a couple of links

"...you can scan the code, and your mobile device will fire up a web page. Wow."
wikipedia QR Code
clicmobile.com blog, Mobile 2.0 Categories: QR-codes
Macdonalds introduces qr codes on its sandwiches in Japan

eLearning Guild QR coded their DevLearn eLearning conference guide/
Research Paper: Using Mobile Phones and QR Codes for Formative Class Assessment
Hitoshi Susono, Tsutomu Shimomura


I separated out the last two as they are more associated with mLearning, whereas the others are flag-waving or marketing...

3d Interactivity on a mobile phone?

Wellington Zoo (New Zealand) is using advanced mobile technology to advertise the zoo


With this imaginative fusion of mobile and virtual technologies, you'll never see your phone in the same light again!

I found this on the Mobile Learning blog.

This video demonstrates what can be achieved by the convergence of mobile and virtual technologies. Created as a promotion for Wellington Zoo (New Zealand), it allows printed codes to “come to life” using a mobile phone. As you move your mobile phone camera around the code, a virtual 3D model rotates, pans and zooms as if it were an invisible spectre standing on the surface, viewable only through the camera lens:



View the entire article