The consumption of mobile data is constantly growing. According to ABI Research’s report “Mobile subscriber ARPU, Voice, Messaging, and Data Traffic Forecasts,”  American consumers will use an average of 159 megabytes of data in 2010, compared to 100 megabytes last year.

ABI forecasts more than 55 percent growth in mobile data consumption between 2009 and 2015 in the U.S., and 42 percent annual growth in Europe.

“Mobile voice has already been surpassed by mobile data traffic on some networks, and this trend will only accelerate,” says ABI Research wireless analyst Bhavya Khanna.

“This boom in usage is driven by the rapid adoption of smartphones in these markets.”

Despite this explosion in the use of mobile data, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) will not exceed 20 percent in the U.S., due to the popularity of fixed unlimited data contracts among consumers, which have caused revenue to plateau. With the large investment that operators have made in 4G networks, these small returns will lead furnishers to change the way they manage their services.

Despite this, emerging markets still represent an important market. For example, Africa, where despite stiff competition among operators, the growth in calls, by minute, has grown 9 percent between 2009 and 2010.

According to a recent report by Ernst & Young, the growth of mobile data will create another risk for operators: to become less important than phone manufacturers and providers.

Originally published by L’Atelier France.

Entrepreneurs and VCs are in Washington DC this week to promote the StartUp Visa Act.

The Act, introduced February 24th by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), would make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs to start their business in the U.S.

The Act would create a new visa, the EB-6, which would grant a two-year green card to foreign entrepreneurs who can secure $250,000 in U.S. VC funding.

The EB-6 Visa is a modified version of the current EB-5 Visa, with requirements that are easier to meet than the current one. The EB-5 grants a green card to foreign nationals who invest $1 million in the U.S. and create ten jobs here.

Under the EB-6 Visa, after the initial two-year green card, entrepreneurs would become permanent U.S. residents if they have either created five full-time jobs in the U.S., raised an additional $1 million from investors or have earned $1 million in revenue.

The Act’s goal is to keep U.S. startup activity globally competitive.

“I think this is mandatory for the U.S.,” said Stéphane Delbecque, CEO and co-founder of Footbalistic, a French startup based in San Francisco. “If you rely on only local people that’s great, but if you bring people in from around the world, that’s better.”

“It’s one of the best ideas of the last ten years,” Delbecque said.

ICANN, the international organization responsible for domain names and IP addresses, has approved the use of non-Latin scripts in internet addresses. The Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process will launch on Nov 16.

“The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago,” said ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush.

“Right now Internet address endings are limited to Latin characters – A to Z. But the Fast Track Process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names.”

The non-Latin domain names will initially be available only for country codes. For example, a website ending with .kr will now be able to use the Korean script instead of the Latin letters. Eventually, all parts of an internet address will be able to be written in non-Latin scripts.

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We’ve seen entire industries fall during this recession, and even a sector as apparently insulated as technology took a good hit. So is the U.S. still the top place for innovation?

Yes it is, according to the London-based Legatum Institute’s 3rd annual Prosperity Index, which ranked the U.S. number one globally in its Entrepreneurship and Innovation category.

Legatum’s Prosperity Index is a measure of countries’ wealth and well-being; it purports to account for 90 percent of the world’s population and is based on the analysis of years of data and surveys. In all, the Institute bases its conclusions on 79 key variables.

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

There is a part of cyberwarfare that is more dangerous than shutting down networks and government sites. It can directly affect the lives soldiers and their families.

The Washington Post published this morning a troubling story about the tens of thousands of US soldiers whose personal information – and the information of their families – has been stolen from P2P networks by hackers in countries like China and Pakistan.

This data includes social security numbers, phone numbers, email address as well as the names of their family members of soldiers including Special Forces.

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On September 22nd, celebrate OneWebDay, a day inspired by Earth Day and intended to help shrink the digital divide.

OneWebDay is both a celebration of our digital lives and an attempt to make those lives available to all.

“The Web is a vital shared resource, but most people are not empowered to take part in defining the direction of this now indispensable resource,” according to the event’s website.

“Some take it for granted, some cannot breach the barriers to access, and some relinquish control to authoritative institutions that are all too happy to fill the void of public leadership,” according to the site.

OneWebDay was founded in 2006 by Susan Crawford, professor of law at the University of Michigan and President Barack Obama’s Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy.

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1. Despite the growing mobile infrastructure at Burning Man, I think I only saw one person using a computer during the week, though the amount of people at center camp using a phone grew as the event stretched on.

Even so, there weren’t all that many.

Though the place was full of us valley types, a surprising number of us stayed — at least publicly — disconnected.

2. There’s a stereotype of the army of Silicon Valley types who descend on Black Rock City. According to legend, one of the reasons Eric Schmidt got the Google gig was because he was a burner.

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In a story that evokes the narrative of the classic Rupert Holmes song “Escape” (better known to music lovers as “The Piña Colada Song”), a Virginia man was surprised to see his wife’s photo advertising a site for “hot singles.”

She wasn’t advertising and he wasn’t looking. Her photo was used because she hadn’t opted out of a Facebook setting that allows advertisers to use your image in their ads.

In a more serious but also hilarious case, UK police stormed a man’s 30th birthday barbecue because he had advertised the party on Facebook as an “all-nighter.”

“What effectively the police did was come in and stop 15 people eating burgers,” said Andrew Poole, who had advertised the party as an all-nighter in case some of his family and friends wanted to crash at his place.

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DatArgo won the Yahoo! Green Award given to the best use of social technology to help the environment.

DatArgo was awarded because of its “use of mobile technologies in an innovative way to provide farmers with critical information that promotes sustainable farming and improves local livelihoods,” according to the conference blog.

“The Yahoo! judging panel is ‘especially impressed with their detailed implementation plan, the partnerships they’ve already established with local organizations, and the specific information they plan to distribute,’” according to the blog.

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At most tech conferences, the number one question asked of a demoing company is “What’s your business model?”

At N2Y4, the question is “How can I help?”

The event is more participatory than most, beginning with the setup: groups of tables instead of rows of chairs; a collection of ever-shifting islands instead of an assortment of individuals receiving a centralized message. Sessions begin as presentations and end as dialogues.

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