BBC World Service Trust is attempting to harness the power and pervasiveness of mobile phones to provide English language lessons for the 50+ million mobile users in Bangladesh.

SCVNGR’s services power mobile gaming experiences, as well as iPhone and Android apps that allow users to build similar location-based games with their friends.

DoCoMo’s prototype headphones use eye movements to activate different device functions such as play, pause, volume up/down and track forwarding.

ZipCar announced that it was releasing an iPhone App back in July and it’s finally available.

Japanese mobile phone monolith Docomo has developed a mobile phone called the “Touch Wood” built from the excess wood collected during forest thinning.

Using social networking tools, Filipino citizens were able to band together to help victims of a recent flood.

Taking mobile phone security to the next level, BioWallet Beta uses iris scanning and signature recognition as the keys to access devices.

The Samsung Freecycle concept envisions a mobile/social system where bikes are connected to each other and riders wirelessly.

The problem with online shopping is that its, well, online. Until we have photorealistic 3D avatars of ourselves, it will always be better to try things on IRL. But the truth is, we dress for other people, and we often need outside opinions when deciding what to buy. So we shop with friends or, more often, end up returning half of our purchases. Though perhaps you have snapped a photo of an item with your cellphone and sent it to a friend. This is what Brooke Moreland and Joe Weisenthal noticed people doing, which gave them an idea: “Wouldn’t it be cool if you got a personalized review about how something looked on you “in real life”, before you made the purchase?”

Using the mobile financial service provider Obopay, Nokia is poised to revolutionize the world of banking through its new service Nokia Money.

In cities across the world, the food cart has classically been a source for authentic, reasonably priced culinary discoveries for the mobile masses curious enough to take the plunge.
While blogs such as Midtown Lunch (based in NYC) and Food Carts Portland delve deeper into the cart culture of their respective cities, VendrTV is a web series that takes you across America and looks at the most interesting and delicious portable fare.
Each episode runs a 7-10 minutes, and is hosted by the curious and exuberant Daniel Delaney, a Philadelphia-based entrepreneur who clearly has a passion for mobile eats – he conceptualized [...]

We wrote last week about Apple’s efforts to preserve the sanctity of the album through artwork and extras, a move that attempts to synthesize the digital format’s emerging dominance with the holistic listening experience of the past. But what is the future of the album exactly? Is it merely an outmoded concept that speaks more to the artist’s craft than what the audience actually wants to hear (i.e. hit singles divorced of any context that can be easily inserted into personalized playlists)?

Furniture company Wintercheck Factory offers designs they hope will appeal to customers who are seeking “a unique product that is sturdily made, intelligently designed and moderately priced.” Their pieces are modern to a tee; sharp, clean, minimal, and bright. What differentiates Wintercheck Factory from any other number of furniture companies that proffer high quality modern products is the effort they are exerting to reach their customers. Although their prices put them far beyond Ikea territory, they endeavor to offer both beautiful design that is reasonably economical (reasonable, that is, for a small, design-conscious furniture company) by skipping traditional retail altogether, [...]

Engineers at Duke University are developing a new way to enter information into mobile devices. Rather than typing on a keyboard, they have created a way to “air-write” short notes. Using a phone’s  built-in accelerometer, their application registers a user’s mid-air writing and translates the gestures into text on screen. There are still details to be worked out so that the application functions smoothly, and it’s questionable how useful it may be,  but it’s at the very least an interesting concept.
[via Switched]

SPRXmobile has created what they claim is the world’s first augmented reality browser for mobile phones, named Layar. The program, which will only be available for Android phones at the moment, displays real-time digital information on top of the real-world locations it sees through a mobile device’s camera. Layar does not work by using any kind of image or object recognition, but rather through a combination of camera, compass and GPS.
SPRXmobile explains:
Layar is derived from location based services and works on mobile phones that include a camera, GPS and a compass. Layar is first avaliable for handsets with the Android [...]