Ethan Zuckerman writes an amazing article on cell phones and social activism that I wanted to share with you. We are all familiar with a handhelds increasing ability to post thoughts and images from anywhere and the development of the so called "mobile web" but have we really looked in depth at its ability to foster activism especially in countries where there is lack of personal freedoms and media censorship?

Suddently everyone seems to be talking about Twitter and micro-blogging. Well not everyone but just the people you know or perhaps secretly admire. They seem to have abandoned MySpace and traditional social apps for the good old handheld phone and now you can barely get a word in between their incoming beeps. The issue is you're a Twitter noob and they're proud of being Twits. What can you do?

Japanese and South Korean consumers are early adopters of new technologies, and today, nearly 14 percent of all mobile handsets in South Korea support Digital Mobile Broadcast television. This high percentage is just one indicator of the continuing flow of innovation coming from Korean and Japanese handset designers, a trend explored in a new study from ABI Research on the topic of mobile phone research and development initiatives including 4G.

It's finally happening - Worldwide mobile handset shipments are slated to reach a billion units this year with Q3 results totalling almost 255 million - a  7.9 percent increase from last quarter and almost 21 percent higher than a year ago. As expected, China and India represent much of this growth but all is not lost in Europe or the highly developed North American markets either. As early holiday season shopping gets underway, incentive pricing for normal upgraders and premium devices for trend setters continue to drive demand. Samsung pairing with Sony for rebranded Cybershot phones seems to be playing well for both parties.

Telephia drives home the increasing popularity of moible/phone video with some latest figures based on upload statistics from popular sites such as YouTube Facebook and Myspace, saying that over 8 million users are using their phones to capture and share video. Although that represents only 3% of US phone wireless subscribers, it's a massive increase in such activity especially for Motorola RAZR, Nokia 6105 and Motorola E815 users.

Ok, so as predicted, the US largely ignored this event but the rest of the world knows that soccer is king! From the German collaborative mobile blogs and other projects reported by this site and countless others, we knew that World Cup 2006 was as much a testbed for mobile technologies as watching the worlds finest dribble the football ball across the field. Italians led the mobile video field with 6% of users checking out footage followed by the French with 3% with 3G users comprising 14% of all usage.

Almost 13.5 million mobile subscribers downloaded a game onto their handsets in Q2 2006 representing a huge increase in such activity and almost $47 million profit for the companies involved. As expected companies such as Namco and Gameloft ranked among the top. This is great proof that  increasing number of people are using their phones for advanced functions and gives a boost for those creating moblogging products independant of provider and service sites. Developers would now be encouraged to produce commercial grade products for this as yet largely untapped market. Better software and more choices could see moblogging explode.

Ajit Jaokar writes writes about the "Mobile Web" and how it can be extended to allow collective intelligence to "restricted devices" ie/ anything with a battery such as cell phones or pda's. Using the web an information source and the pc as a local cache, virtually limitless information could be accessed by handheld phones and media devices or really anything carried by a person.