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TheStar today reported that soon all the Malaysian buildings (commercial/residents) must equip with broadband infrastructure.

The Uniform Building By-Laws may be amended to make it a must for developers to provide broadband facilities in residential and commercial areas, said Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin.

The Deputy Prime Minister said the facility was now deemed as crucial as having electricity and water supplies in one’s home, adding that almost every household had computers and Internet connection.

He said the Housing and Local Government Ministry had been directed to study the possibility and take up the matter with stakeholders to ensure the policy could be implemented.

“If this service is not provided now, it will cost more to have broadband facilities installed in the future,” he told reporters after chairing the Cabinet committee on the implementation of broadband services nationwide.

To my personal point of view, if By-Laws has been successfully amended, then the broadband charges should be way much lower since the ISPs are not worry in investing the cost of the infrastructures.

Reported by India Times, in poor countries or development countries, mobile phones has became a tool for users to do banking service.

Mobile money applications are emerging as potent financial tools in rural and remote areas of the globe, allowing people with no bank accounts to get paid, send remittances or settle their bills.

“One billion consumers in the world have a mobile phone but no access to a bank account,” said Gavin Krugel, the director of mobile banking strategy at GSM Association, an industry group of 800 wireless operators.

Mobile banking began to emerge six years ago in the Philippines and South Africa, where 8.5 million and 4.5 million people, respectively, use such services.

Today, 40 million people worldwide use mobile money, and the industry is growing, according to the GSMA.

“Africa and Asia are the most active regions right now,” Krugel said. “We expect Latin America pick up this year.”

There are 18,000 new mobile banking users per day in Uganda, 15,000 in Tanzania and 11,000 in Kenya, he said.

Mobile phones can offer a wide range of banking solutions, from sending transfers to a relative to buying goods in a store or putting money aside for a rainy day — all by dialing a few numbers on one’s handset.

read the full article

The famous mobile operating system (OS) Symbian – today announced it is fully open source and you can start downloading the source code.

Quoted from the news released:-

Lee Williams, Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation, comments: “The development community is now empowered to shape the future of the mobile industry, and rapid innovation on a global scale will be the result. When the Symbian Foundation was created, we set the target of completing the open source release of the platform by mid-2010 and it’s because of the extraordinary commitment and dedication from our staff and our member companies that we’ve reached it well ahead of schedule.”

IDC Analyst John Delaney remarks: “It’s increasingly important for smartphone platforms to offer developers something unique. The placing into open source of the world’s most widely-used smartphone platform emphatically fits that bill. It will be exciting to see where this takes the industry.”

All 108 packages containing the source code of the Symbian platform can now be downloaded from Symbian’s developer web site (tiny.symbian.org/open), under the terms of the Eclipse Public License and other open source licenses. Also available for download are the complete development kits for creating applications (the Symbian Developer Kit) and mobile devices (the Product Development Kit). These kits are compatible with Symbian^3, the very latest version of the platform, which is now fully open source and will be “feature complete” during Q1 of this year.

Reported by Portio Research that current SMS  revenues in excess of USD150 billion despite of the economy downturn and set to continue growing to more than USD233 billion by year 2014.

The performance of SMS over the last five years has been staggering and remains so mainly because it is cheap, easy to use, convenient, discreet and universally acceptable to some 4 billion consumers worldwide. During 2009 SMS continued to grow in all markets and the report confidently predicts that it will continue to do so for several more years. In 2009 worldwide SMS traffic topped 5 trillion messages, and that figure is set to exceed 10 trillion in 2013.

Today MMS, often cited as a failure, is a massive revenue-generating segment of the market. Full year revenues for 2009 amount to almost USD 27 billion, an impressive figure, and lest people forget, not far off what SMS was generating a mere 5 years ago. MMS is growing fast in all major regions around the world as affordable camera-equipped handsets flood the market and increasingly become the norm.

So talking about the MMS, do you think is it really a failure? Do you send MMS as often as SMS?

Around 87% of WiFi enable phone is going to have 802.11n as standard wireless communication reported by ABI research.

“Driven by chipmakers more than by handset vendors, 802.11n is making its official debut in higher-end smartphones in 2010,” said ABI Research industry analyst Michael Morgan. “802.11n is arriving in the handset just at the right time. We had to wait for consumers to switch over to 802.11n access points, and we’re just now reaching that tipping point. Something like 50% of the Wi-Fi access points on offer are now 11n. Consumers are becoming aware of what it can do.”

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Google’s Nexus One start selling in Britain in the next few weeks and France and Germany likely to follow soon.

The touch-screen device, launched on Tuesday and produced in collaboration with Taiwan electronics group HTC, poses a direct challenge to Apple’s top-selling iPhone.

“I can confirm that Vodafone is the first operator to partner with Google to offer the Nexus One in Europe, starting soon in the UK, in a few short weeks,” a Vodafone spokeswoman told AFP.

Customers will be able to purchase a subsidised Nexus One phone with a Vodafone contract. The device will also be available directly through the Google web store.

Google said earlier it had reached “strategic partnerships” with telecom firm Verizon in the United States and Vodafone in Europe. Vodafone added Wednesday that the group was in talks to sell the Nexus One in France, Germany and other European countries this year. “We’re in early discussions with Google to introduce the offer in France (through SFR) and in Germany and Spain, and more European countries are expected during 2010,” the spokeswoman said.

So when is it going to start selling here in Asia?

Read the full article HERE

[Updates] now you can check the Google’s ever first phone here .

And also check out the specification also. The spec is not bad .. or you wanted to know more about a review, click here

For now only US market is available and not sure when Google is going to sell to the rest of the country.

We shall also see how’s the mobile phone industry react to it and the consumer as well.

What a good year to start with, Nexus One is one hell of the hottest news in the start of the year.

If you still do not know what is Nexus One .. try here .

Google is show casing it’s latest/first phone today at CES 2010.

If you can’t wait till the launching, you can go to Engadget to read the review. (picture taken from Engadget)

Reported by TheEdge Malaysia that, Malaysian government is going to revise/fine tuning of its E Commerce Act to have a more protection for the online consumers when they do a online purchase.

The Electronic Commerce Act will be fine-tuned by inserting more information to protect consumers who conduct business transactions through the Internet, Domestic Trade, Cooperative and Consumerism Minister Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob said today.

He said the insertions would be brought to parliament for tabling in March next year.

“This has to be done because currently, in terms of action, penalty, etc, they are under the Consumers Protection Act,” he told reporters after opening the Cooperative College of Malaysia’s (MKM) Open Day and a discourse on business through the Internet at the college here.

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A woman in Australia is suing her government for receiving a SMS warning of bush fire.  This is because the emergency text message of bush fire is not complete with sufficient of information like the exact location of the fire took place.

“The text message doesn’t really tell you anything, because the area they are talking about is really huge,” she said. “I spent all night trying to find out information about it and it was next to impossible. The 1800 phone numbers they give you are just recorded messages of the same information on the website and I just found it totally frustrating.

“I understand in an emergency everyone is stretched to the limit but this new system was supposed to keep you in the loop.”

RFS assistant commissioner Rob Rogers said as the fire situation was changing quickly, it was difficult to give precise locations.

He also said the text messages were limited to 160 characters, so using specific addresses or even GPS co-ordinates would mean less information in the messages. “Specific addresses could change minute by minute, making GPS or map co-ordinates inaccurate. Also, GPS co-ordinates may not be clear to many people.”

In September the federal government awarded $15 million to Telstra to build a national emergency warning system to send text and voice messages to the mobile phones and landlines of residents threatened by bushfires.

The system was officially used for the first time on Thursday in Michelago, Tooma and Gerogery.

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