Data collection: Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas
IF YOUR mobile phone could talk, it could reveal a great deal. Obviously it would know many of your innermost secrets, being privy to your calls and text messages, and possibly your e-mail and diary, too. It also knows where you have been, how you get to work, where you like to go for lunch, what time you got home, and where you like to go at the weekend. Now imagine being able to …

This Islamic country, located in the mountainous region neighboring to the Central Asia and the Middle East, is the sixth most populous country in the world and has the second largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia. That is Pakistan. The country is listed among the “Next Eleven” economies that means it’s among eleven countries, such as Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, The Philippines, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam, identified by Goldman Sachs investment bank as having a high potential of becoming the world’s largest economies in …

Frozen credit markets present an opportunity for some
INNOVATION is a dirty word in finance these days but, with securitisation markets gummed up, fresh thinking may be just what credit markets need. Prosper and DebtX, two online marketplaces with very different customers, are among those who think they stand to gain.
Prosper’s principal business is as an online peer-to-peer lender, matching up individual borrowers and lenders. Since October, Prosper has been dormant as it goes through registration with America’s Securities and Exchange Commission. But on April 28th, thanks to special dispensation from …

Internet television moves from the computer to the living room
IN THE land of free enterprise and the home of discount shopping, there can sometimes be an appalling lack of competition. High-speed access to the internet is one. Cable television is another. The reason is that in America cable-television companies, which provide a lot of the high-speed access, do not want their customers to cancel their contracts and watch television over the internet instead. Yet a growing number of people are poised to do just that.
At your correspondent’s home-from-home in Japan, …

UK copyright laws “needlessly criminalise” music fans and need to be updated, a consumer watchdog says.
UK laws that make it a copyright violation to copy a CD that you own onto a computer or iPod should be changed, says Consumer Focus.
The call came after global umbrella group Consumers International put the UK in last place in a survey of 16 countries’ copyright laws.
Consumer Focus said the UK had to catch up with the rest of the world.
“UK copyright law is the oldest, but also the most out of date,” said …

By David Reid
Reporter, BBC Click
Electronic book readers are still a minority pursuit for book lovers, but the devices have the potential to become the norm one day.
With newspapers in crisis, there are now suggestions that e-books might offer journalism a new portable platform and subscription model.
One French firm already taking advantage of the electronic subscription model is Ave! Comics which provides cartoon strips to paying e-book users.
“Our idea is to get cartoons more widely distributed to another public and in the end an international public,” said Allison Reber from Ave! …

A study into spam has blamed it for the production of more than 33bn kilowatt-hours of energy every year, enough to power more than 2.4m homes.
The Carbon Footprint of e-mail Spam report estimated that 62 trillion spam emails are sent globally every year.
This amounted to emissions of more than 17 million tons of CO2, the research by climate consultants ICF International and anti-virus firm McAfee found.
Searching for legitimate e-mails and deleting spam used some 80% of energy.
The study found that the average business user generates 131kg of CO2 every year, …

By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley
Small can mean big bucks in the world of gaming where micropayments are being seen as playing an increasingly important part in making money for the industry.
Amid a downturn in advertising revenues, a recent survey at the GamesBeat conference in San Francisco found that 66% of those polled “were excited about this growing trend” which is most often seen in so-called ‘free to play’ games.
That is where it costs nothing to play but developers sell items or different levels …

By Greg Sandoval
(CNET) — Universal Music Group and Google are now partners in the music-video business.
The largest of the four top recording companies and YouTube’s parent company announced on Thursday that they are working together on Vevo, a new music and video entertainment service set to launch later this year.
YouTube will handle the technology while Universal Music supplies the content. The two companies will share ad revenue.
The companies said and at this point it appears that Universal’s content and artists will be the only label represented on the site. However, …

By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News website
More than 97% of all e-mails sent over the net are unwanted, according to a Microsoft security report.
The e-mails are dominated by spam adverts for drugs, and general product pitches and often have malicious attachments.
The report found that the global ratio of infected machines was 8.6 for every 1,000 uninfected machines.
It also found that Office document attachments and PDF files were increasingly being targeted by hackers.
Microsoft said people should not panic about the high levels of unwanted e-mail.
Cliff Evans, head of …