Global Mobile News: The Times is On It

Four highly relevant news hits from the Grey Lady in the past few days:

- The number of text messages Americans are sending is, well, a lot, and growing very quickly:  135 Billion in June '09 vs. 75 billion in June '08. We're catching up to the rest of the world in our love for SMS.

- The Business section on turning cell phone cameras into microscopes. Best of all is that these tools are relatively inexpensive. There's great potential here for community health workers in the developing world to take microscopic photographs of a blood sample or something else, send it to a laboratory thousands of miles away, and get results back almost immediately. True mobile health.

- An interesting column exploring the nature of Twitter, its searchability, and how "Proximity can be a proxy for relevance," in the words of Ryan Sarver of Twitter. Erik Hersman of Ushahidi, one of my favorite SMS-based social applications, is quoted talking about how his service maps information in both time and place.

- From the Bits blog, a wild new technology that could allow potential computer/smartphone users in the developing world to skip mice, keyboards and screens: A small projector and camera, hung around the neck, that can use any wall, hand, or other surfaces into touchable projection screens to navigate a user interface. The hardware is relatively cheap, at around $350, and the software, already running on Windows Mobile and Android, could be adapted to run on simple Nokia devices. (h/t Dan)

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