Mobilize, “the next generation mobile conference” presented by the GigaOM team, takes place today in San Francisco. Selected coverage follows below from this morning’s speakers.

Hyperconnectivity, Wideband and Innovation
Om Malik spoke with John Roese, chief technology officer of Nortel Networks on the issues of developing high capability networks. The saturation of the Western European market (112 percent mobile users), including Italy (147 percent) makes an overwhelming argument about the importance of system robustness. The US trails sadly behind other countries in terms of the quality of the 3G network and market consistancy.

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John McCain’s presidential campaign is sidestepping heat in what they now call a “boneheaded” statement by one of the campaign’s top economic policy advisors. The gaffe occurred September 16 while discussing McCain’s economic experiences on the Commerce Committee during his years in the Senate. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the campaign’s senior domestic policy adviser, reached in his pocket and held up his BlackBerry cell phone.

“Telecommunications of the United States, the premiere innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create,” Holtz-Eakin quipped.

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A passenger train headed north in San Fernando valley passed through track-side warning signals on Friday, crashing into a freight train. 26 fatalities have been recorded thus far, including the engineer, who was supposedly text messaging up to minutes before the collision. This has been claimed by two fourteen-year-old boys, train enthusiasts who knew Metrolink engineer Robert Sanchez, 47.

Yesterday the National Transportation Safety Board revealed that the track signals were working properly, leaving few possibilities about the fault of the collision and the circumstances that made it possible. Usually the conductor and engineer communicate regarding track signals, but no such communication has been discovered. No word yet about possible radio disruption. Discussion also includes sudden illness or sun glare.

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“What are you doing?” Would you answer this question if you are a reporter at a funeral?

Three-year-old Marten Kudlis was killed last week in an accident involving cars plowing into an ice cream shop in Aurora, CO. The parents allowed press coverage of the funeral, and Berny Morson of Rocky Mountain News liveblogged from the chapel and burial site via 27 Twitter updates. Since then, controversy has sprung up about the nature of on-site blog practice, the professionalism of the newspaper and the journalist, the morbidity and inappropriate coverage of the funeral… all aspects of the basic question: Is it okay to Twitter a funeral?

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Companies lose billions of dollars per year due to stolen data by malware on users’ computers. Waltham, MA, data-protection company Verdasys hopes to change that.

Running under the assumption that a computer is already affected by malware, Verdasys’ SiteTrust, released Monday, bypasses operating systems and browsers to protect transactions.

“Our premise,” said Verdasys chief technology officer Bill Ledingham, “is that, rather than trying to clean up the machines, assume the machine is already infected and focus on protecting the transaction that goes on between the consumer and the enterprise website.”

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Ever wanted to turn a simple home video into a slapstick cartoon? According to representatives at the 2008 TechCrunch50 Conference in San Francisco, BeFunky plans to soon offer the service to its Web site users as an addition to their upcoming service, “video cartooning.” The service will enable the user to manipulate the physical features of video actors, putting the ability to create full motion animation at her fingertips.

If you have seen Richard Linklater films like A Scanner Darkly or Waking Life, you can appreciate the art of rotoscoping. While rotoscoping is available on professional editing software such as Final Cut Pro, BeFunky plans to offer such services online and catered to the amateur video editor. Additionally, the amateur user will soon be able to make exaggerated cartoons from these rotoscoped videos.

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That employers (and sentencers) use social networks like MySpace or Facebook to screen potential employees is nothing new. What is interesting is the amount of them that do, according to a CareerBuilder survey released last week.

In the survey of 3,169 hiring managers and human resource professionals and 8,785 employees, 22% of hiring managers say they use social network profiles as part of their hiring decision.

“Of those hiring managers who have screened job candidates via social networking profiles, one-third (34 percent) reported they found content that caused them to dismiss the candidate from consideration.”

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The Wall Street Journal will launch Tuesday its revamped site, more streamlined than its current iteration, designed six years ago. The overhaul will also see the Journal, which has the tenth-largest audience of an online newspaper in the U.S., incorporate social media elements into its presentation.

The WSJ, purchased last year by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, is one of the few online newspapers that still follows the subscription model. While much of its news is available to everyone, most of the Journal’s raison d’être, business news, is available only to its one million paying subscribers.

The revamped site will further the incentive to subscribe, as that’s where the social media aspect, the Journal Community, will reside.

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One of the more intriguing ideas in the current tech scene is the attempt to “virtualize” the physical world. How this will translate into mainstream usage is really still conceptual, but we’re beginning to see more and more attempts to bridge the gaps between “the two worlds.”

One such effort is tikitags. Tikitags are stick-on labels that link to a URL, and are read with readers using Near Field Communications (NFC) technology.  In layperson’s terms: place the information on the sticker, put the sticker on the thing, read it with a reader (your cell phone), and voila!

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The victory of Yammer (www.yammer.com), a copy of Twitter but with a business plan, at the TechCrunch50 last week has surprised me and raises important questions regarding the organization of the conference and possible conflicts of interest between start-ups and organizers of the event.

It is rumored that the choice would have been broadly supportive of this West Hollywood based start-up through a close relationship with one of the sponsors of TC50 and Michael Arrington, co-founder of the event.

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