Research firm Gartner has identified eight mobile technologies that will evolve significantly through 2009 and 2010, impacting short-term mobile strategies and policies.

“All mobile strategies embed assumptions about technology evolution so it’s important to identify the technologies that will evolve quickly in the life span of each strategy,” said Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at Gartner. “The eight mobile technologies that we have pinpointed as ones to watch in 2009 and 2010 will have broad effects and, as such, are likely to pose issues to be addressed by short-term strategies and policies.”

Here are the eight mobile technologies to watch for in future.


Bluetooth 3.0

Bluetooth 3.0 specification will be released in 2009 (at which point its feature set will be frozen), with devices starting to arrive around 2010. Bluetooth 3.0 will likely include features such as ultra-low-power mode that will enable new devices, such as peripherals and sensors, and new applications, such as health monitoring.

Bluetooth originated as a set of protocols operating over a single wireless bearer technology. Bluetooth 3.0 is intended to support three bearers: ‘classic’ Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and ultrawideband (UWB). It's possible that more bearers will be supported in the future. Wi-Fi is likely to be a more important supplementary bearer than UWB in the short term, because of its broad availability. Wi-Fi will allow high-end phones to rapidly transfer large volumes of data.

Mobile User Interfaces (UIs)

UIs have a major effect on device usability and supportability. They will also be an area of intense competition in 2009 and 2010, with manufacturers using UIs to differentiate their handsets and platforms. New and more-diverse UIs will complicate the development and support of business-to-employee (B2E) and business-to-consumer (B2C) applications.

Organisations should expect more user demands for support of specific device models driven by interface preferences. Companies should also expect consumer interfaces to drive new expectations of application behavior and performance. Better interfaces will make the mobile Web more accessible on small devices, and will be a better channel to customers and employees.

Location sensing

Location awareness makes mobile applications more powerful and useful; in the future, location will be a key component of contextual applications. Location sensing will also enhance systems, such as mobile presence and mobile social networking.

The growing maturity of on-campus location sensing using Wi-Fi opens up a range of new applications exploiting the location of equipment or people. Organisations delivering business or consumer applications should explore the potential of location sensing; however, exploiting it may create new privacy and security challenges.

802.11n

802.11n boosts Wi-Fi data rates to between 100 Mbps and 300 Mbps, and the multiple-input, multiple-output technology used by 802.11n offers the potential for better coverage in some situations. 802.11n is likely to be a long-lived standard that will define Wi-Fi performance for several years.

High-speed Wi-Fi is desirable to stream media around the home and office. From an organisational perspective, 802.11n is disruptive; it's complex to configure, and is a "rip and replace" technology that requires new access points, new client wireless interfaces, new backbone networks and a new power over Ethernet standard.

However, 802.11n is the first Wi-Fi technology to offer performance on a par with the 100 Mbps Ethernet commonly used for wired connections to office PCs. It is, therefore, an enabler for the all-wireless office, and should be considered by companies equipping new offices or replacing older 802.11a/b/g systems in 2009 and 2010.

Display technologies

Displays constrain many characteristics of both mobile devices and applications. During 2009 and 2010, several new display technologies will impact the marketplace, including active pixel displays, passive displays and pico projectors.

Pico projectors enable new mobile use cases (for example, instant presentations projected on a desktop to display information in a brief, face-to-face sales meeting). Battery life improvements are welcome for any user. Good off-axis viewing enables images and information to be shared more easily. Passive displays in devices, such as e-book readers, offer new ways to distribute and consume documents. Display technology will also become an important differentiator and a user selection criterion.

Mobile Web and widgets

The mobile Web is emerging as a low-cost way to deliver simple mobile applications to a range of devices. It has some limitations that will not be addressed by 2010 (for example, there will be no universal standards for browser access to handset services, such as the camera or GPS).

However, the mobile Web offers a compelling total cost of ownership (TCO) advantage over thick-client applications. Widgets (small mobile Web applets) are supported by many mobile browsers, and provide a way to stream simple feeds to handsets and small screens. Mobile Web applications will be a part of most B2C mobile strategies. Thin-client applications are also emerging as a practical solution to on-campus enterprise applications using Wi-Fi or cellular connections.

Cellular broadband

Wireless broadband exploded in 2008, driven by the availability of technologies such as high-speed downlink packet access and high-speed uplink packet access, combined with attractive pricing from cellular operators.

The performance of high-speed packet access (HSPA) provides a megabit or two of bandwidth in uplink and downlink directions, and often more. In many regions, HSPA provides adequate connectivity to replace Wi-Fi "hot spots," and the availability of mature chipsets enables organisations to purchase laptops with built-in cellular modules that provide superior performance to add-on cards or dongles.

Near Field Communication (NFC)

NFC provides a simple and secure way for handsets to communicate over distances of a centimeter or two. NFC is emerging as a leading standard for applications such as mobile payment, with successful trials conducted in several countries. It also has wider applications, such as "touch to exchange information" (for example, to transfer an image from a handset to a digital photo frame, or for a handset to pick up a virtual discount voucher).

Gartner does not expect much of the NFC payment or other activities to become common, even by 2010, in mature markets, such as Western Europe and the US. NFC is likely to become important sooner in emerging markets, with some deployments starting by 2010.

India will be vulnerable to more terrorist attacks along the lines of Mumbai, terrorism analyst Brian Jenkins from RAND and Ashley
Tellis have told the US Senate’s committee on homeland security.

“India will continue to face a serious jihadi terrorist threat from Pakistan-based terrorist groups. However, India lacks military options that have strategic-level effects without a significant risk of a military response by Pakistan. Neither Indian nor US policy is likely to be able to reduce that threat significantly in the short to medium term,” they said.

Tellis said, “LeT represents a threat to regional and global security second only to al-Qaida. Although LeT is linked in popular perceptions mainly to the terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir, the operations and ideology of this group transcend the violence directed at India.” He cautioned that US should work with India to deal with terrorism from Pakistan, otherwise India would be tempted to take steps that could endanger regional security.

“To the chagrin of its citizens, India has also turned out to be a terribly soft state neither able to prevent many of the terrorist acts that have confronted it over the years nor capable of retaliating effectively against either its terrorist adversaries or their state sponsors in Pakistan,” the two experts said. Jenkins added that the poor quality of India’s response to the terror attacks, intelligence failure and inadequate counter-terrorist training and equipment added to India’s misery.

NEW DELHI: Closing ranks with leaders opposing pub culture in the aftermath of the Mangalore incident, Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss
on Friday said it was against Indian ethos and asserted that the proposed National Alcohol Policy would help curb it.

"We definitely condemn the incident where women were attacked, but the pub culture must stop. It is because of this that youth in the country have taken to drinking in a big way," Ramadoss said at a press conference here.

Linking youngsters visiting pubs to increased rates of accidents due to drunken driving, he said, "In India, 40 per cent of road accidents are alcohol-related."

These young people not only jeopardise their lives but are also a danger to others on the roads.

"It is not our culture. If it goes this way I don't think India will progress," Ramadoss said adding, most of the people losing their lives due to such road accidents and alcoholism were in their early twenties, which are the most productive years.

Unfortunately over the recent years, there has been a huge percentage of people taking to alcohol.

There is also a study which says that in the last five to six years there is an increase of 60 per cent among the youth who have taken to drinking, he said.

The minister, who was briefing the media after a meeting of the Central Council of Health and Family Welfare, said the alcohol policy would be brought in within the next 3-6 months.

"Though we have not envisaged the details of the policy, it would entail a time limit for the opening of alcohol shops, fixing the number of days on which they would be open and being more strict with the age of drinking," he said.

Asked whether the National Alcohol Policy would help curb pub culture, he said "we are directed it at youngsters who visit pubs".

A lot of awareness campaigns have to be launched and people have to be educated about the perils of alcoholism.

MUMBAI: A 20-year-old woman, deserted by her husband, delivered a baby girl on the platform at Bhayander after she was refused admission by local
maternity
hospitals on Thursday night. The mother and the newborn were later taken to Bhagwati Hospital in Borivli (W) where they are doing fine.

Aariya Khan, who sells hair clips on trains and lives near the tracks in Mira Road, said the maternity centres must have looked at her appearance and refused her admission. Khan, who earns about Rs 100 a day, had saved Rs 200 for the delivery but said she never imagined that the hospitals would turn her away because of her appearance and would not bother about her condition.

Khan started having labour pains on Thursday morning and by evening, when it worsened, she went out looking for a maternity home in Bhayander. However, most of the nursing homes
near the station reportedly turned her away.

So she returned to Bhayander station and was waiting for a train on platform 4 to get back to Mira Road around 7.30 pm when Khan went into labour. The other women on the platform swung into action and asked the men to move away. They then circled around Khan and helped her deliver the baby.

Zonal Railway Users' Consultative Committee member Shailendra Goyal happened to be on the platform at that time. "I called for the GRP and the station-master but, by the time they arrived, the woman had already delivered,'' Goyal said.

Later, a woman police constable took her to Bhagwati Hospital in Borivli.

Her husband, Khan said, deserted her after her two previous pregnancies failed.