Nokia and IBM today announced IBM Lotus Notes support for a number of Nokia’s S60-based mobile phones, meaning that millions of Lotus Notes users are now able to access email with their Nokia devices.

This also represents a significant market opportunity for IBM Lotus Notes — which has 140 million licensed users — with many Nokia customers now able to purchase Lotus Notes and access its collaboration capabilities on the go.

With this announcement, more than 80 million people - the number of Nokia S60 3rd Edition devices shipped globally* - can connect to corporate email accounts via Lotus Domino Server software known as Lotus Notes Traveler. This software provides real time access to email, calendar, address book, journal and to-do list data and will be available for Nokia devices in December 2008.

According to IBM’s Institute for Business Value, this year, for the first time, more people in the world will have a mobile device than a land-line telephone. IBM predicts one billion mobile Web users by 2011 and a significant shift in the way the majority of people will interact with the Web over the next decade. In fact, mobile devices now outnumber television sets, credit cards and personal computers.

“This is another strong affirmation of our business mobility vision, which is to establish partnerships with the world’s leading enterprise vendors. This collaboration means nearly 90 percent of business email can be mobilized with Nokia devices, without needing to purchase additional servers, middleware or licenses. With the presence, position and technology that IBM have in the corporate email market, they are an essential partner for us in enterprise,” says Soren Petersen, senior vice president, Nokia. “People need to be connected to their email, information and network when they are out of the office and that has to be done conveniently and on their terms. Lotus Notes Traveler for Nokia devices is a great example of that.”

“We are excited about IBM’s growing relationship with Nokia and what this does for the build-out of the mobile Web,” said Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president of IBM Lotus Software. We are literally freeing millions of people using Nokia’s Symbian platform from having to rely on a desktop or laptop to access their important business communications. Working with the market leader like Nokia is a natural fit for attaining IBM’s goals of maintaining the flow of business, regardless of time, distance or location — all for no additional charge for both of our companies’ current customers and a new opportunity for new customers.”

This announcement is a major development in IBM’s efforts to expand mobile support for the Lotus software portfolio. The ability to connect securely to business email is an example of Tomorrow at Work, an IBM initiative that examines a changing work environment and anticipates trends in technology, business, society and culture. Other IBM Lotus technologies that can be mobilized for anytime anywhere work include Lotus Sametime for instant messaging and unified communications, Lotus Connections for enterprise social networking and Lotus Quickr for social content sharing.

*The number of Nokia S60 devices shipped as of the end of July 2008

About Nokia
Nokia is the world leader in mobility, driving the transformation and growth of the converging Internet and communications industries. We make a wide range of mobile devices with services and software that enable people to experience music, navigation, video, television, imaging, games, business mobility and more. Developing and growing our offering of consumer Internet services, as well as our enterprise solutions and software, is a key area of focus. We also provide equipment, solutions and services for communications networks through Nokia Siemens Networks.-Nokia

Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) has signed a EUR 72 million contract with Chunghwa Telecom, the largest mobile operator in Taiwan, to increase the capacity of its 3G network, in a bid to significantly improve transmission speeds and to enhance coverage, according to industry sources.The Finnish-German company will provide Chunghwa Telecom its technology and services to facilitate speeds of up to 2 Mbps in uplinking and 14 Mbps in downlinking, as well as network implementation and design, optimization, systems integration and maintenance services.

It was reported that the project would start immediately and be completed by July 2009.

Chunghwa Telecom will run trials of Nokia Siemens Networks’ Internet High Speed Access (I-HSPA) network, which is expected to pave the way for a smooth transition to a flat IP architecture, the first such trial in Asia-Pacific region.

Last week, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) won a network expansion contract worth EUR 550 million (US$865 million) from China Mobile Communications Corp.

A Mexican wolf’s eerie howl does double duty as a ringtone and a reminder of habitat destruction. Barack Obama’s campaign offers text message updates, wallpaper, and ringtones with sound bites like “What I do oppose is a dumb war” over a hip-hop beat. A local community support group has turned volunteers with an hour or two between tasks into a network of translators.

Often seen as a platform for socializing or time-wasting novelties, cellphones also present a unique opportunity for social good. Portable and personal, the gadgets provide a discreet channel for people to receive information and a broadcast platform to rally like-minded activists around shared interests.

In other parts of the world where landlines and broadband connections may be scarce, cellphones have been used in election monitoring; to bring banking and economic development to poor, rural areas; or to remind HIV patients to take medication. Now in the United States, cellphones are beginning to catch on as an agent of change, too.

Text message use in the United States has steadily increased, from 65 million people who sent or received messages in January 2006 to 108 million this past January, according to M:Metrics. At the same time, “people are inundated with e-mail . . . they have e-mail coming out of their ears at home, at work, you name it,” said Katrin Verclas, cofounder of MobileActive.org, a network for organizations focused on using cellphones for social impact. “The phone is still a medium where you can reach people, and if you have a relationship with an organization or really care about an issue,” people are willing to get that information on their handsets.

Cellphone activism runs a wide gamut. It offers people the luxury of getting information they can act on immediately, without returning to their home computers.

For instance, a person browsing a store’s electronics or apparel aisles who is interested in finding out about a company’s environmental practices can text “cc” and the company’s name to 30644 to get Climate Counts’ report about the company. A diner browsing a menu for the most sustainable seafood selection can text the word “fish” and the name of a particular species to the same number to get information from the Blue Ocean Institute. A diner considering monkfish would get a reply indicating there are “some environmental concerns” and that catfish, rainbow trout, or tilapia may be a friendlier option.

It also provides a private channel that may be a good medium to connect with people about sensitive issues.

SexInfo, for instance, a text-messaging information line launched in San Francisco, is an effort to reach teens who may have pressing questions about topics they feel they cannot talk about.

Reverse cell phone lookup is something you and I may need to do at times. Almost everyone with a cell phone has experienced receiving phone calls from people we do not know. The person on the other side could be playing a prank on us and make repeated calls. We want to put a stop to it. Or it could be a situation where the person on the other line is a long lost friend and we wish to keep in contact. This is why you need more information about the cell phone number and this is how reverse cell phone lookup comes in.

Why do you want to conduct a reverse cell phone lookup?

Basically, with a reverse cell phone lookup, you can locate the address and name of the caller. This is so useful if you want to find out who is the one making all the prank calls, the home address of an old classmate or who is the gal or guy your partner is talking to secretly.

Though a reverse cell phone lookup is helpful to you, you do need to know which service to use before you conduct a search. If you do a quick search online, you may find some free reverse phone search directories or services. They are completely useless when it comes to searching for numbers other than landline numbers. You will get nothing out of them when you need cell phone numbers or other unlisted numbers. There is therefore a high probability that you will not find what you are looking for.

So where can you do a proper reverse cell phone lookup?

Go for paid services that provide directories for cell phone numbers as well. Like what was mentioned earlier, free directories will only give you landline numbers and not mobile phone numbers. This is because landline numbers are easy to collect and organize since they are public domain property. Mobile numbers on the other hand has to be collated manually and so it costs the services in order to provide such a service to us.

The whole process of signing up with paid services is simple and the search is effortless. All you need to do is to enter the number you are searching for, the area code and 7 digit number and the service will run through its database and return you matched results.

Not all sites are created equal though. Some of the paid services are unable to find the results and yet still charge you for it. But there are of course reputable ones that make it their business and responsibility to offer you a 100% guarantee. Find out from my phone search blog which is the most reliable service to use for reverse cell phone lookup.

Ringtones are now part of the mainstream media market, and have been around in some form for nearly a decade. For many people, ringtones are a fad, and a nuisance, but they remain a significant part of modern life, that continues to have cultural and social relevance. So, what are the key trends shaping the future of ringtones and how can we expect them to evolve going forward?

The first key trend is towards do-it-yourself or D-I-Y. The ringtone market has a history of high prices being charged both for single items (a ringtone can cost $7 compared to $0.99 for a full track music download) and, more recently, and notoriously, subscription ringtone services frequently charge a weekly or monthly fee in return access to a certain number of downloads or “club”. However, with the advent of mp3 support in most mobile phone handsets, it is now possible for consumers to easily create their own ringtones, either by loading a full track onto their handset or creating a ringtone by editing an mp3 file using cheap and readily available software. Therefore, the high prices sustained in the past are unlikely to be tenable in the future and the price of ringtones is slowly falling towards zero.

However, music on mobile is moving beyond ringtones, as mobile becomes the default device for listening to music on the move. On any form of public transport you can now see people listening to their music collection on their mobile phone, in a similar way to using an ipod. Already, in Japan, more music is downloaded onto mobile phones than onto PCs. A part of this trend is the increasing tendency towards teenagers using mobile music as a form of identity, far beyond using a simple ringtone. A common site in many cities is for young people to play music out load from their mobile phone speaker as they walk along the street, or sit on the bus, as a kind of “call-sign” or “boom-box”.

Finally, as the traditional ringtone industry declines, a range of new innovations are emerging. For example, ringback tones are ringtones carried over the mobile phone network, which are heard by the caller instead of a normal dial tone. A company called Vringo is marketing a similar service which provides an application that allows users to send each other ringtones when they call, so a user calling another can decide what ringtone is heard at the other end. At the moment, it is uncertain whether these innovations will be successful or not.

So, at present, the future of ringtones is uncertain, they could continue to exist in the future, but sold and produced for virtually nothing, with the focus on creating and sharing. Or, alternatively, new innovations may continue to keep the market alive, just in another form such as full track music downloads or music clips to be played on the move.