Numbers of the world of mobile phones

A very useful summary of the International Telecommunications Union’s 2009 edition of  Measuring the Information Society – The ICT Development Index (PDF, 1.53MB) has been published by Antonella Pastore on the blog of the ICT-Km Program.

A very interesting question comes out of the analysis: “is this the end of the Web as we know it?“

The question is originated by the fact that mobile growth is so strong, also in comparison with the fixed line network, that mobile communication could overpass it pretty soon. Have a look at the stats about the cellular penetration growth in The Gambia and in Africa between 2002 and 2007:

So doing, we go back again to the question that we have been treating many times in this blog: what’s next? What is the shape of the future communication and knowledge sharing tool/platform/device?

We arrive again to the matter of convergence between mobile and the Internet and the features it will have as you can read in the some related postings:

- Who is using mobile phones for development

- Who is using mobile phones for development – part 2

- This closer marriage between Mobile and Internet

- Will cellphones replace other ICTs?

LinuxDay 2008 in Italy

25th October: Linux Day 2008 in Italy

Google and knowledge management

As described in a post on TechCrunch called “Is This The Future Of Search?” and as appearing in this Video proposed by Adrian Pike, Google is getting closer and closer to amplifying its core activities, the Search, with some Knowledge management flavor.

Google digg-style screenshot

As you can see from the image above, this approach will offer users the opportunity to: manage search results, rate them, redefine the list of results, cancel results and add comments.

So doing, it seems like the “next” search will be deeply influenced by KM activities, precooked by other surfers on the same keyword. Google by definition is an engineer company: automation and machine-driven activities have been a given approach until now. Things seem to be changing and a new “victory” of collaboration is on the way!

Let’s set a new world record: Firefox 3 DOWNLOAD DAY!!!!

KM4Dev 2008 meeting

Last year KM4Dev met in Zeist, Holland for the annual meeting as you can see in the image below and in the album on flickr.

This year, we will meet in June in Portugal, just outside Lisbon. Everybody interested in knowledge management and knowledge sharing is invited.

Follow us and the preparation of the meeting on our blog and our wiki.

Are we close to the end of the bubble?

Always more and more people talk a lot about the bubble. Maybe the money facebook is able to absorb from the market is a tangible example…

To me, the great difference between now and the early 2000 is that today only some companies are close to crash while at that time most of the start-ups were close to collapse. And this shows the solidity of the Net today.

Let’s see what will happen.

Time for mapping

These days I see a lot of maps coming out of the Web. I suspect that, being so complex and full of millions of items, design and graphic art is the way to try to represent it at best. And, being myself a “visual” kind of person, I like this way to represent things more than others.

So, have a view of this maps which represents the Champions of the WWW

and the main Online Communities at the moment.

Gapminder sw

I found this very interesting application, Gapminder, to show dynamic data evolution in time and in comparison with other data. I have already seen it in action in a quite famous video of Professor Hans Rosling speaking at the TED-conferance 2006 about “Myths on Developing World“.

Some more notes about it: Google, always them, acquired the software few months ago and will add it to their free sw package pretty soon. Let’s reflect on this approach.

Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Distributing software for free helps doing that. Google will redistribute it for free as it is doing with other tools like Picasa, Analytics, Google Earth, etc. This can be considered good or bad, according to the point of view.

At the moment my judgement is positive: having this software for free means that we can transfer knowledge and capacities in an easier and faster way. Obviously there a price to pay. It is not visible, and not quantifiable, but there is: our data will be known, analysed and used by someone. At this point of the reasoning, the question is still open: I can considered myself “supported” or “spied” according to pros being more or less of counts. I have not yet formulated my idea as, until now, I’ve seen only the first and not yet the second…