In addition to looks back at the last year, this is the traditional time for looks ahead at the year to come, and Seth Weintraub has an interesting one in Fortune’s “Fortune Tech” blog. Weintraub predicts that, due to falling prices and improving networks, 2011 is going to be the year the smartphone (particularly the Android smartphone) really takes off, bypassing traditional computers as the way the majority of the world’s population accesses the Internet. In terms of price, Weintraub points to new and forthcoming chipsets from Broadcomm that should allow Android smartphones to retail for under $100, possibly...

From ad-supported fiction to free textbooks: Ars Technica has an article looking at Scitable, a venture of Nature Publishing Group that provides free life-science educational material on-line. Ars first covered the venture in 2009, and now looks at how far it has come. And one thing that Scitable does not have is advertising. It does have sponsors, however, such as biotech and pharmaceutical companies that sponsor educational material often based on their own fields of research or manufacture. Further, a number of other publishers have started their own free on-line services. Many seem to be using them as “freemium”...

Are the days of unlimited wireless data plans numbered? ReadWriteWeb reports on a speech by a wireless researcher who believes that they are. Dr. Reinaldo Valenzuela, director of wirelss research at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, notes that the more people use smartphones, the more data usage is going to go up. Only 10% of all smartphone users are using the majority of data, and as that usage grows, soon the cost of providing “unlimited” bandwidth data plans will surpass the revenue it brings in. Valenzuela believes that metered pricing is one possible answer, but there are also...

Audrey Watters of Read Write Web reports that the final version of the National Education Technology Plan (NETP), centered around improving educational uses of technology, calls for making sure that educators and students have 24/7 Internet access and for implementing policies that “enable leveraging the technology that students already have.” As Watters points out, the most ubiquitous technology among students is cell phones—more than 75% of kids between 12 and 17 own them, and a lot of schools have policies regulating or banning their use. Cell phones’ drawbacks include that they could distract from learning, contribute to cyberbullying, pose...

Alexia Tsotsis has a post at TechCrunch pointing out that the phone call is “dead” (in the sense in which the term is used in the tech industry these days—meaning “on the decline”). The article itself is interesting enough, though it says much the same things as a piece I covered here already. But it seems to me that the “decline” or, perhaps, transmutation of the mobile industry might have some implications for “telereading”, too. E-books are just one aspect of telereading, after all. Other aspects include magazines, newspapers, blogs, and other textual Internet sources—and getting those in a...

Mobile technology is amazing, isn’t it? Various companies and charitable organizations have made a big deal out of the necessity of getting to a $100 netbook or tablet for third-world educational purposes, and for the sake of domestic poor and homeless who might not otherwise be able to afford their own computer. And we’ve been getting there—though netbooks actually of sufficient quality to be useful are still around $130 in refurbished form. But another form of mobile technology has fallen to the point that it’s pretty much already at universal affordability: the prepaid cellular phone. As I was...

So says an article in The Christian Science Monitor. According to the article they are especially popular among school dirls and the most popular novels eventually wind up printed. Media-sharing website Maho i-Land boasts 1 million online books and 6 million users who read and/or write novels on the website for free. Many users tap away and compose using their cellphones, simply following a word limit of 1,000 or less characters per page. Budding authors can choose to “publish” their online story immediately or keep it unlisted. Many upload their content as they finish and choose to receive feedback from...

On The Literary Platform, Tony White (of Piece of Paper Press, which I covered here a couple of weeks ago) writes about an interactive storytelling project he has been working on with renowned artists Blast Theory. The project, Ivy4Evr, is aimed at drawing teens into the drama via messaging on their cell phones. White writes that over the course of planning the project, it was necessary to “forget about apps and ebooks for a while”, because they made a number of interesting discoveries. Most notably, most young people don’t have smartphones—but the phones they do have are almost...

The closed nature of the Apple platform has let it in for a lot of criticism, especially when that closed nature affects e-books or e-book applications. For example, Apple famously made David Carnoy change a swear word in his first iteration of the Knife Music appbook (though let it through in a later version), and rejected an e-book app for being able to access the public domain Kama Sutra e-book. And let’s not forget the great mature app purge, which probably caught some e-book-related apps as well. A number of people have been touting cell phones based on...

Ben Kunz at Bloomberg Businessweek has an interesting post on Apple’s pricing practices. Kunz posits that Apple uses psychological pricing tricks such as reference prices and price “decoys” to boost sales of more expensive items. I can’t say I agree with all of his points, but he brings up some interesting things to consider. Kunz first discusses price decoys, items that don’t really look like very good deals in order to make slightly better items look much better. He suggests that the rumored 7” iPad is such a price decoy, to make a 10”, more featureful version look...

E-books aren’t the only way to “TeleRead”. Whenever we receive a text message, or an instant message on line, you could say we “TelePhoneRead”—as different a form of communication from the phone calls of old as e-books are from printed books. I covered a similar article from TechCrunch a couple of weeks ago, but Om Malik of GigaOm has posted a piece on “Why we never talk anymore”—an article about the decline in phone voice communications and the rise in other forms such as text and possibly soon video. Malik talks about his personal history growing up...

I’ve written about using a MiFi or similar device—pocket routers that channel cellular Internet into secure WiFi—to “retrofit” 3G-style everywhere-connectivity to WiFi-only e-book and other devices. While there is a monthly charge for this Internet service, unlike the Kindle and Nook’s 3G, it is available for many more potential uses than the freebie connectivity baked into those devices. You can use it with any or every wireless device you own—at the same time. At least, as long as your bandwidth holds out. At the time I wrote the aforementioned article, Verizon was offering 250 megabytes per month for...