Do I see the Tower of Babel here?

These are the enumerated challenges facing humanity today:

• Make solar energy affordable
• Provide energy from fusion
• Develop carbon sequestration
• Manage the nitrogen cycle
• Provide access to clean water
• Reverse engineer the brain
• Prevent nuclear terror
• Secure cyberspace
• Enhance virtual reality
• Improve urban infrastructure
• Advance health informatics
• Engineer better medicines
• Advance personalised learning
• Explore natural frontiers

I have just deleted my device out of yahoo mobile since I won’t need it that much anymore anyway, for I switched another chip on my phone. But it was really good service from Yahoo! oneSearch™ on mobile, redefining how you use the phone to get info on the go, find just the answers you need with fewer clicks. Yahoo Inc. will provide mobile search services to nine more cell phone operators in Asia, the new partnerships include mobile operators in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Singapore. The company already has seven partnerships the region, including in South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. The latest deals bring Yahoo’s total worldwide distribution partnerships to 20 mobile operators in 19 countries. Yahoo’s announcements come the week after larger rival Google Inc. said it is developing a free mobile software package that will be available in the second half of next year. Called “Android,” Google’s mobile software is designed to make it easier to use the Web over cell phones and other mobile gadgets.

Key iPhone rivals

Nokia N95
Sony Ericsson W960
LG LGKS20
HTC Touch
Palm Centro
Blackberry Pearl
Samsung Blackjack
T-Mobile Sidekick Slide

Nokia’s answer to the iPhone

The world is getting smaller, the competition is getting stiffer. Nokia’s answer to the iPhone: N810. Nokia’s latest handheld Internet access device browses the Web, runs Flash and has GPS. It’ll sell for $479 when it comes out in November. The downside: it has no cellular modem built in, so you have to use Wi-Fi or reach the Net via a Bluetooth link to your phone, that is, the N810 is a pure Internet-only device, relying only on Wi-Fi and cellular Bluetooth to get online.

$100 laptop’ production

‘$100 laptop’ production begins
Five years after the concept was first proposed, the so-called $100 laptop is poised to go into mass production with the government of Uruguay being the first country to take concrete actions to provide laptops to all its children and teachers ordering some 100,000 of the machines for schoolchildren aged six to 12, and a 300,000 may be purchased to provide a machine for every child in the country by 2009.

$100 Laptop’s chief software engineer Chris Blizzard on how the innovative memory and screen save energy.