
Students in the social computing informatics track will build and evaluate social software applications and study the influences of these systems on society.
Of the countries tracked, Indonesia and New Zealand have some of the lowest mobile Internet penetration rates—just 1 out of 100 Indonesian subscribers uses the mobile Internet each month, and just 1.6% of New Zealand’s mobile subscribers do so.
In the U.S., mobile Internet has become a mass medium. As of May 2008, there were 40 million active users of the mobile Internet in the U.S., based on past 30-day usage. And this is just a subset of the 95 million U.S. mobile users who subscribed to the service but do not necessarily use it. To break it down:
The audience using mobile Internet in the U.S. is demographically diverse enough to present marketing opportunities for all types of products and services.
Bring on the keyboard!
According to a new research by Nielsen, the average mobile subscriber in the US sent and received more SMS text messages than mobile telephone calls during Q2 2008. This was the second consecutive quarter in which the average number of text messages was significantly higher than the average number of phone calls.
Although the research is an indicator of rising mobile data use, the two types of mobile communication are not directly comparable. Users typically convey far more information in a voice call than in a text, so text "conversations" can require multiple messages.
It was clear until now that sms messaging was popular among younger mobile users but nowdays the tendency is towards global adoption. Features like click to map, click to call or click to video embedded in messages open an era of new possibilities and services.