If a woman in Tajikistan receives an SMS reading “Taloq, taloq, taloq,” she’s reportedly on her own, since according to Muslim ritual men can dump their wives by repeating this word for “divorce” three times.The tradition still holds even over the phone, though clerics are divided on whether texting is too impersonal a way to [...]
Pre-term births can result in dangerous deliveries for mothers and life-long medical problems for children. Currently, one in ten babies are born prematurely, but a new project called SMART Diaphragm is working to change this through an early detection system. SMART Diaphragm is an early warning system for high-risk pregnancies. Pregnant women insert a sensor-enabled [...]
Interested in the genration of QR codes for your business. The Gomotext Campaign Manager supports the generation and use of QR codes. Read on to see how QR codes are becoming popular. QR codes are popping up in more and more places, from billboards to business cards, and mobile consumers are responding: 32% of smartphone users say [...]
Reading the news on a mobile device while waiting in line at a coffee shop may seem like you’re cutting yourself off from the people around you, but a new study from the University of Michigan suggests the opposite: The more people use their phones in public to stay up on news, the more likely [...]
Elections from the 17th century have been a formal process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office.But the gulf between campaigning by party forces and actual decision-making by the electorate appear to have made politics mud balls. In this report, George Okojie appraises the impact of short message services (SMS) as [...]
A team led by a Libyan-American telecom executive has helped rebels hijack Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s cellphone network and re-establish their own communications. The new network, first plotted on an airplane napkin and assembled with the help of oil-rich Arab nations, is giving more than two million Libyans their first connections to each other and the [...]
Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWB) is an initiative by a group of scientists, animators and extension tutors at the University of Illinois to create short videos that can be sent and downloaded to mobile phones. Each video features a character demonstrating how to do certain agriculture-related tasks. One video, for example, shows viewers in Africa [...]
Across Afghanistan, insurgents have destroyed mobile phone network towers of companies that refuse to shut them down when ordered, arguing foreign forces use the signals to monitor militants. Telephone operators were ordered to cut all signals in Helmand about two weeks ago, and complied immediately, a reminder of militant power in a highly contested area [...]
Half of consumers are using their phones to help make shopping decisions, suggesting that old-style feature phones have a place in the market, according to a new survey. The report, by Arc Worldwide, based on a survey of 1,800 U.S. mobile phone users and a smaller qualitative study with 30 mobile shoppers, shows 50% of [...]
