This Week in Global Mobile | September 24, 2010

At times it's difficult to keep pace with the latest global mobile developments. I hope this selection of news stories from the past week will help you navigate the growing global network of connectivity:

  • IBM announced plans to back a Kenyan initiative to provide rural areas with computer services by providing support for the Digital Villages program created in 2008.
  • Google released the Transparency Report, an interactive map which tracks requests from governments around the world who request that Google take down or censor content.
  • Internet at Liberty 2010, an event sponsored by Google and the Central European University in Budapest, gathered this week to address the boundaries of online free expression. Our very own Sam DuPont is at the conference and reports back here.
  • Hossein Derakhshan, a Canadian-Iranian blogger who rose to fame for his arrest in Iran after translating Blogger.com to Persian, is now facing the death sentence for “collaborating with enemy states” through various online outlets.
  • Speaking before the UN General Assembly yesterday, President Obama promised to continue to “promote new tools of communication...and a free and open Internet.”
  • Patrick Meier at iRevolution reviews a recent study released by Yahoo which validates the veracity of Tweets following Chile’s earthquake, conluding that the Twitter community “works like a collaborative filter of information.”
  • Dataix reports that the mobile subscriber base in Egypt soared past 60 million last month, representing a 25% year-on-year increase in a country with 80 million people.
  • Gearing up for the midterm elections, Google introduced a high-powered digital tool which tracks daily changes in red and blue states across the country.
  • Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan has turned to Facebook and YouTube videos as part of his campaign for re-election -- just days after using the social network to announce his candidacy.
  • A new Android app created by scientists at the University of California School of Engineering asks users to take photographs of the air around them, which are scanned by the app in order to analyze and map air pollution levels.
  • Finnish analytics companies Zokem examined usage of 6.5 million smartphones around the world, concluding that smartphone users spend 300 minutes a month browsing the mobile Web -- a number that’s comparable to traditional voice usage.
  • While Internet-enabled mobile devices in Africa remain few and far between, Yu telecom company just released a new platform which allows subscribers without smartphones to access e-mail over the Internet.