Peace Now releases 'Facts on the Ground' application in which the settlements are marked in blue, the outposts in red, and clicking on a place name displays demographic statistics.

Want to know what's happening in the West Bank settlements in real time? In addition to 'Sudoku' and 'Street Fighter,' iPhone owners will now be able to install the "Facts on the Ground" application, which monitors the expansion of settlements in Judea and Samaria, created by Americans for Peace Now.

“This new app shows the unfiltered realities that settlements create on the ground of the West Bank. While people are entitled to their opinions on this divisive issue, there is only one set of facts, and our app makes these facts available in unprecedented clarity and detail,” said Debra DeLee, APN’s President and CEO.

Settlements are symbolized by little blue houses on the map. Clicking once on the icon gives its land area. A second click brings up a window with more details: the year it was established, population, ideology (or lack of), character (secular or religious), amount of 'private Palestinian land' it occupies, and a graph that tracks its population growth.

iPhone users can also zoom in on outposts marked in red. The map includes the route of the Green Line, Jerusalem's municipal boundaries, and the various zones under different security arrangements, Area A and Area B.

“One of the things that make this tool so powerful is that it democratizes data,” DeLee said. “In the past, not many were able to tour the settlements with an expert guide. With the introduction of our app, anyone can explore the West Bank with just a click of a mouse or a touch of a finger.”

APN intends to update the map regularly with new information, including the establishment of outposts and their dismantlement, and violent incidents on the part of Palestinians and settlers. Their intention is to turn the app into a "comprehensive real-time view of what is happening on the ground in the West Bank."

The application is currently only available in English for the iPhone and iPad, and for a desktop or laptop web browser, but Americans for Peace Now has said that a Hebrew version of the mobile phone app is under production, and that they are in the process of porting it to the Android operating system.

The application can be downloaded here.

(By Natasha Mozgovaya and Haaretz)

• lifestreams - your life live

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• Handy Designer's Tools "On The Fly"

Noupe is a design weblog created to inspire creativity by sharing innovative resources and websites to bloggers, freelancers and web designers.

• Site-Perf.com - Know all about your site performance

Website performance analyzing tool. This online tool emulates natural browser behaviour downloading your page with all the images, CSS, JS and other files. Spot bottlenecks, balance your site load and reach perfect performance with Site-Perf.com

• Free SMS Text Reminders - Send Text Messages for Free | TextReminders.net

TextReminders.net is a free SMS text message reminder system that allows you to send text messages to all types of cell phones for free. You can setup recurring reminders, and share messages with friends.

• Schedule Future-Dated Twitter Tweets » TweetLater.com

Keep your Twitter stream ticking over with new tweets even when you're not in front of your computer. Or, use it as your personal reminder system.

• Screencast-O-Matic

Screencast-O-Matic is the free and easy way to create a video recording of your screen (aka screencast) and upload it for free hosting all from your browser with no install!

• Apple iPhone vs. Google Android - Mobile Software War Between Google and Apple - Popular Mechanics

Google is hoping to transform cellphones the way it did the Web, but if it really wants to dominate the mobile market, it will have to prove that it can out-do (or get third parties like HTC to out-do) Apple's iPhone.

Hugms connects to your mobile phone via Bluetooth and then when you squeeze it, is sends a "hug" text message to the person of your choosing.

UK paramedics have launched a campaign with Vodafone to encourage mobile phone owners to program emergency contact details into their phones:

By entering the acronym ICE – for In Case of Emergency – into the mobile’s phone book, users can log the name and number of someone who should be contacted in an emergency.

So that paramedics can easily contact your loved ones just in case. Several different contacts should be noted ICE1, ICE2, ICE3, etc.

The idea follows research carried out by Vodafone that shows more than 75 per cent of people carry no details of who they would like telephoned following a serious accident...

After all, since more than a quarter of the people on the planet already carry cell phones, and hundreds of millions are joining them every year, why should they bring along credit and debit cards when a mobile device can make payments just as well? This is not new, in fact this is already a reality in Japan, where NTT DoCoMo Inc. says 3 million cell phone subscribers use its Mobile Wallet service to buy things at 20,000 stores and vending machines.

The new trick comes from a small technology company named C-Sam Inc. recently succeeded in launching its OneWallet cell phone platform with corporations in the United Arab Emirates, India and Japan.

In the United Arab Emirates, OneWallet is being marketed by U.A.E. Exchange as a convenience to that nation's huge work force of expatriates from India who regularly wire money home. So far, there are about 400 users.

Alphonso Francis, a Bombay native who works for U.A.E. Exchange in Dubai, sends money three times a month to his family in India.

Using OneWallet on his phone, he enters his PIN number and designates which account the funds should come from, the recipient, and whether it should go to a bank account or a Western Union-type outlet in India. The order is transmitted over the cell phone's Internet connection in seconds.

The phone would supplant not only credit and debit cards, but also checkbooks, Web sites, computer programs such as Quicken and online bill payment services such as PayPal or CheckFree.

INDEX: is a world event for design and innovation set to take place every four years in Copenhagen. INDEX: is launched in 2005.

Among the nominees: Mobile.Seed - It is a fully biodegradable mobile phone that contains a visible seed inside. One can plant it as a different disposal mode, and after a while a flower sprouts from it.

how does it work?
The seed germinates as soon it comes into contact with water. This takes a while because the biodegradable protection capsule needs to degenerate a bit and allow the water to enter.

how do I plant it?
Just plant your mobile phone upright, covered with soil, no more than 2 cm deep. Keep it well-watered for four weeks until it sprouts. Then care for it as you would with any plant.

why a seed?
A seed or a plant is one of the most obvious examples of how to take advantage of biodegradable materials, nourishing from them and processing them into new forms. At the same time, seeds are full of connotations and associated meanings. They are more then just a possibility for a beautiful flower in a vase. A seed symbolizes the carrier of a new life, a chance for change. In the case of Mobile.seed, the seed symbolizes the mobile phone returning to nature, closing a biological cycle, and the chance to raise interest in develop technological objects as partners in the process of looking for social and environmental well being.

17-year-old boy and 19-year-old girl, both UAE nationals, were each sentenced to spend one month in jail. The teenagers were exchanging "indecent" pictures through their cellphones and sending pornographic pictures through email. The Dubai Court of First Instance heard that one of the girl's friends was jealous of the relationship she had with her male friend. This friend tipped off authorities that the two were exchanging indecent material... Be ware of jealous girls ;-)

NASA is developing a subvocal speech system that could enable you to make a phone call while keeping your lips sealed. How do you talk to someone without opening your mouth? Psychics call it telepathy. NASA refers to it as subvocal speech. Scientists at the NASA Ames Research Center in California have developed a system of tiny sensors that read nerve signals in the throat that control speech. You may not make a sound when, say, you read silently, but your nervous system is buzzing with activity. Recently, they used the system to make the first subvocal cell phone call.

AwareFashion are clothes that react to invisible communication technology in the surrounding and thus enable the wearer to sense their immediate digital environment. The detection device is hidden in a detachable pocket and the fiber optics sewed into the cloth. When a mobile is near, small light spots appear on the sleeve.

Good news for mobile phone users. Emirati government licenses new telecom company with 1.08 billion dollars, breaking Etisalat�s monopoly.

Palestinian youths do not buy mobiles just to hear them ring.

�We send SMS alerts to university students in the Gaza Strip informing them about exam and registration dates and keep them updated on the latest developments in their respective universities. All they need is just o send us their full names, their universities and their mobile numbers."

The following article was published in Washington Post yesterday. The author made it sound as if the Gulf countries are the only people in the world using the sms's for social, political, etc... reasons. He made it sound so strange that made me wonder after I read it, SO? What is strange? I just can't understand what makes us so different from rest of the world!

Here it is in full. Read it if you like, maybe you can find something I missed:

Text Messaging Is New Tool Of Political Underground

By Steve Coll
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, March 29, 2005; Page A01

KUWAIT CITY -- Rola Dashti's cell phone buzzed on the heady evening of March 7, hours after she had helped lead the largest demonstration for women's voting rights in Kuwait's history, a clamorous protest that ended when hundreds of activists were expelled from parliament for shouting from the gallery.

She pressed her phone's text message button and read an anonymous insult circulating on hundreds of Kuwaiti phones, digital graffiti that attacked her family's Persian ancestry and disparaged her Lebanese-born mother. "Here's what voters will gain if they vote for Rola Dashti," the text message read, as she recalled it. "They will learn the Iranian accent. They will learn a Lebanese accent. And they will learn how to work with the American Embassy to get money."

In this roiling political spring of protest and debate about democracy in repressive Arab countries, cell phone text messaging has become a powerful underground channel of free and often impolite speech, especially in the oil-rich Persian Gulf monarchies, where mobile phones are common but candid public talk about politics is not.

Demonstrators use text messaging to mobilize followers, dodge authorities and swarm quickly to protest sites. Candidates organizing for the region's limited elections use text services to call supporters to the polls or slyly circulate candidate slates in countries that supposedly ban political groupings. And through it all, anonymous activists blast their adversaries with thousands of jokes, insults and political limericks.

"It means I'm making them nervous," Dashti said of the lambasting she received. "I'm on their list," she said, referring to Kuwait's conservative Islamic activists, "and I'd better get used to it so I'm not shocked when it happens during the election." Dashti hopes to run for office if the long campaign for women's suffrage in Kuwait succeeds, as many participants expect it will when the elected National Assembly formally considers the issue, perhaps as soon as April.

At about 40 cents per missive, text messaging can be an expensive way to mobilize the masses, but the Gulf countries are lightly populated and afloat on record oil revenue. With political debate at a fever pitch this year, many of the region's well-heeled activists find it hard to resist the chance to compose their own uncensored statements and deliver their political wisdom to targeted audiences.

"My bill is going sky high," said Abduljalil Singace, foreign affairs director of Bahrain's Al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, the island emirate's largest opposition grouping, a Shiite Muslim movement that is noisily boycotting the country's three-year-old, limited parliament.

Singace was fired as an associate professor and department chair at Bahrain University in mid-March after he traveled twice to Washington to lobby against his country's royal government, a close U.S. ally. He said Bahrain's security services also told him to stop sending dissident text messages. The Bahrain government says Singace was discharged for neglecting his duties at the university.

"They warned me against text messaging on demonstrations," Singace said. Before the warning, he said, "I was not sure they were reading my text messages. Now I'm telling everyone."

Still, he remains proud of some of his compositions. When American management consultants issued a report recently about how Bahrain's government could accelerate reform of its free-trading economy, Singace whipped off a reply and paid a commercial service to distribute his message throughout the island.

"Economic reform without political reform is like a bird with only one wing," he wrote. "How can it fly?"

Text messaging is only the latest in a wave of border-hopping communication technologies to rewire patterns of Arab dissent during the past 15 years. Saudi exiles and Islamic activists waged an underground war of faxed pamphlets during the early and mid-1990s. Satellite television channels transformed the images and ideas available to Arab viewers during the same period. More recently, CDs, DVDs and the World Wide Web have dominated underground political publishing in the Gulf.

As each new technology has spread, the region's authoritarian governments have tried to fight back. They have sent censors to license fax machines and block dissident Web sites, and they have pushed government-friendly investors to buy and manage satellite channels. But the Gulf's monarchies have not yet figured out whether or how to control text message channels.

If they do, they will sorely disappoint the region's profit-engorged cell phone companies, whose stock prices have soared as phone and messaging use has exploded. About 55 percent of Kuwaitis and a third of Saudis now own cell phones, according to mobile service providers, and growth rates show no sign of slacking.

The Gulf's huge youth population stands at the center of the boom. As young people come of age in societies that discourage unsupervised contact with the opposite sex, text messaging offers a way to duck parents and defy gender segregation. In one of Riyadh's gleaming shopping malls on a recent Thursday night, veiled teenage girls in black-robed flocks giggled as they messaged boys across the food court. Teenagers send messages to flirt, plan social events and even set up clandestine dates, Saudi parents and teenagers said.

Less innocent slander and pornography also flow through text channels. When a Saudi mobile phone provider announced new photo and video messaging services this month, it issued an unusual press release to encourage socially responsible use of mobile phones and to argue that innovative technology should not be blamed because a few people abuse it.

In Gulf politics, too, text messaging "allows people to send messages that they would not say in public," said Fawzi A. Guleid, program officer with the National Democratic Institute in Bahrain. "It is alarming to me the messages that come."

Activists have learned how to blast thousands of attack messages while hiding their own identities. "People who use those messages are denouncing, insulting opposition figures, members of parliament and the government," Guleid said, suggesting that the new technology encourages unrestrained personal invective as new democratic cultures are formed.

Many of the insults and comments would sound tame to an American politician.

The technology also helps democratic organizers who are often badly overmatched by the Gulf's authoritarian governments. In a region where formal political parties are banned but loose political societies are often tolerated, text messaging allows organizers to build unofficial membership lists, spread news about detained activists, encourage voter turnout, schedule meetings and rallies, and develop new issue campaigns -- all while avoiding government-censored newspapers, television stations and Web sites.

The Gulf's network of Muslim Brotherhood chapters has been especially aggressive in adopting such tactics, several of its leaders and campaign managers said in interviews. The Brotherhood is a global network of conservative Islamic political activists, often drawn from elite professions, who seek to establish religious governments and societies, usually by peaceful means. Its members control student and professional unions across the region and have won seats in several of the Gulf's limited parliaments.

Before text messaging went commercial, black marketers sold CDs containing lists of cell phone numbers smuggled out of government ministries or phone companies, said Mohammed Dallal, a lawyer and Brotherhood campaign manager in Kuwait City. Now "the mobile companies are giving the services," he said. "You give them the message, they'll send it to 40,000 people" for a fee.

Before this year's municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, the first in the kingdom in decades, Dallal spoke to prospective candidates and campaign managers in three Saudi cities. "I try to convince them to use the technology," he said.

In Bahrain, Shiite opposition organizers who frequently stage unauthorized or illegal demonstrations said they used services originally meant for commercial advertisements to keep protests on track even as the government tries to shut them down.

Kuwaiti women organizing protests for voting rights said they had been more effective during their 2005 campaign than during their last serious effort five years ago because text messaging had allowed them to call younger protesters out of schools and into the streets.

For all of these appealing practical benefits, text messaging also appears to be popular because it has captured Arab pop literary imaginations. In Gulf societies, where rhetorical speech is celebrated and poetry is prominent, the short, quipping format of a text message offers a new twist on tradition. Activists deliberate over their compositions and memorize their favorite zingers, passing them from phone to phone.

For Dashti, the women's suffrage activist insulted for being of less than pure Kuwaiti ancestry, the sting was salved by the message her own group blasted out that same night of the historic demonstration about the speaker of the Kuwaiti parliament, Jassem Kharafi, who had shut down their rally. The activists accused him of being more interested in making money from business contracts than in helping Kuwait advance democratic reforms.

"If you want Kharafi to vote for women's political rights," an anonymous member of the suffrage movement wrote, "just issue the right as a tender contract."

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German telecommunications company said on Tuesday it is developing the first mobile phone that will alert users when their breath is bad or if they are giving off offensive smells.

The phone will use a tiny chip measuring less than one millimeter to detect unpleasant odors, a spokeswoman for Siemens Mobile said. A research team in the southern city of Munich is developing the device using new sensor technology.

"It examines the air in the immediate vicinity for anything from bad breath and alcohol to atmospheric gas levels," the spokeswoman said. "Some people take smelling good rather seriously."

I don't know how many of you remember the joke about the Japanese, American and Baladiat all setting in the same room. The Japanese receives a call and what he does is actually putting his finger in his ear coz he had the phone installed in his finger, the story goes on.... Our Baladiat "Shacks" and when he is asked, he says he is receiving a fax!

Well, it's coming true. Read on:

A wristwatch phone that lets you listen by sticking a finger in your ear, an MP3 player that vibrates the bones in your skull to play music that only you can hear -- these are some of the products being developed using a technology called bone conduction that sends sound waves through the bones around the ear.

Source: Wired

Mobile phones have been at the centre of numerous health scares, we all know that. But never before has there been widespread panic that, simply by answering one, you might be risking immediate death.

Until now, that is. In a story bizarrely reminiscent of Japanese cult horror flick The Ring, a rumour has washed through Lagos, Nigeria that, if you accept a call on your mobile from one of a group of 'killer numbers', you will cease to be. Apparently, experts and operators have been busily assuring the public that you can't die from such a thing. (The capability was intended to be part of the initial GSM specification, actually. Designed as a means to dissuade users from defaulting on bills, the killer numbers were originally to be known only to a shadowy cabal of operator CEOs which some believe to be the forerunner of the GSMA's executive board. But it was eventually dropped from the spec.)

Nonetheless, Nigerian users -; a superstitious bunch by all accounts -; remain convinced that the Grim Reaper could be just a phone call away. So far there have been no official reports of any such expirations. According to the BBC, a few years ago another rumour did the rounds in Lagos that suggested shaking hands with certain people could make your genitals fall off.

Bear that in mind at the next industry conference you go to!