Harnessing what is quickly becoming one of the most-used modes of communication around the world, a text messaging for peace campaign was launched today to bring visibility to the International Day of Peace, celebrated annually on 21 September.

The digital divide is beginning to close. The flow of digital information – through mobile phones, text messaging, and the internet – is now reaching the world's masses, even in the poorest countries, bringing with it a revolution in economics, politics, and society.

Extreme poverty is almost synonymous with extreme isolation, especially rural isolation. But mobile phones and wireless internet end isolation, and will therefore prove to be the most transformative technology of economic development of our time.

It can scale mountains in a single bound and wend its way down the most wretched roads. It is the mighty cellphone signal - and the latest hope for bringing financial services to the world's masses who do not have access to banks. Grameen Solutions, an affiliate of the Grameen Bank that was created by the Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, this week teamed with Obopay, a mobile payment company based in California, to provide banking to a billion poor people using cellphones.

Africa Telcom News has released a free report, called the African Mobile Factbook, that gives all of the major numbers on subscribers, penetration rates, profitability and growth potential for every African carrier and country. As anyone who is tries to do research in this space knows, it can be difficult to get some of these mobile phone statistics for Africa, so this is a welcome source for information.

At MobileActive08 participants will explore how mobile phones are used to advance civil society work, assess the current state of knowledge in the use and effectiveness of mobile technology to advance social action, and investigate trends, needs and investment opportunities.

Location(s)

In Bangladesh, where less than 1 percent of the population has Internet access and where the rare broadband connection is prohibitively expensive, bridging the digital divide may require new approaches.

A group of Bangladeshi expatriates think they have found one that could work - a plan to bring affordable Internet access to their homeland through a blend of high-end wireless technology and social entrepreneurship.

The potential benefits of increasing access to Information, Communication Technologies (ICTs) like the Internet or telephones has been widely recognised. For example, numerous studies have pointed towards the positive relationship between phone penetration and national incomes.

But there are also simultaneous concerns that ICT benefits are only being availed by a small segment of populations within the developing world. Here we consider on-ground impacts that a specific communication technology like mobile phones can have on the lives of common people.

America's wireless policies continue to be emulated by developing nations, Ambassador David Gross, United States coordinator for international communications and information policy, said Friday at Broadband Policy Summit IV.

Therefore, the U.S. must "think domestically" but "act internationally" in wireless regulation – because many nations "monitor and dissect carefully" the telecommunications debates that now rage in Washington, Gross said in a keynote address here.

Amid a global scramble for new subscribers, telecommunications operators and investors are taking a sudden shine to a place with lots of potential customers: Africa.

The mobile industry in sub-Saharan Africa has pledged to invest some $50 billion over the next five years to extend coverage to rural areas and roll out mobile broadband services. This represents about a five-fold average increase in annual investment since the beginning of the decade.