Informa market research estimates 380 new customers will pick up mobile or cellular phones this year, against 335 million last year. The promised slowdown still hasn't come, with the developing world going ga-ga for the devices.

Google's blog search is finally open, in beta, at http://blogsearch.google.com/ See if you're there. (Searching by name will bring both your own work and that of others who link to you.)

Qualcomm manager Nick Glassman, a New Orleans native, visited the city last weekend. His story is not for the squeamish.

The FEMA forms that allow victims to apply for disaster assistance only work with Internet Explorer 6.0.

When you elect people with contempt for government, the result is contemptible government.

If you heard me on WZNN in Asheville today, and want to know more, here is the link. Still confused? Write me.

Featuring the Song for Sonny Liston.

Mark Knopfler is the reigning poet of pain. He's brilliant. Buy it.

Mo Mowlam, praised here last week, has died, the BBC reports.

A giant for peace. We need more of her. Especially here.

At 17 I hung out with a kid named Eugene Delgaudio in a right-wing nut group called YAF. I grew up. At 50 Eugene is exactly the same jerk he was then. So some advice. Grow up. Same goes for your big brother, who I remember as being hot for 16 year old girls. Fine when you're 20. We have another name for it at our age.

Looking for wireless business models? Start here, with "Personal, Portable, Pedestrian," and leave your "yeah, buts" at home.

Microsoft has confirmed that the next version of its Windows operating system, formerly called Longhorn, will now be named VisiOn! (No, check that. It's to be called Vista. Microsoft Vista.)

Yes, that was yours truly on NPR this morning, talking skeptically about Philadelphia's WiFi plans. Thanks for asking.

Marc Canter has posted a long response to my piece about his GoingOn Network. Filled with corrections both large, and small, as well as additional insights.

Your obedient servant is featured in today's issue of G. Armour Van Horn's Quote of the Day. For those scoring at home:

The Great Race has always been between tyranny and freedom, with order as tyranny's worthy handmaiden, and crime as freedom's ugly stepsister.

Jamster, the Verisign-owned ringtone company implicated in the Crazy Frog scandal, has added RSS spam to its marketing.

BlogAds has begun running a TBS campaign, based on a podcast, forits upcoming reality show "Minding the Store." (I hope this doesn't mean the fate of BlogAds is riding on Pauly Shore.)

Bernard Ebbers drew a 25-year jail term for his role in the Worldcom scandal. It's like the line from the NBC show Law & Order, in which an aging bad guy (Ebbers is 63) gets that sentence. "I can't do 25," he says. "Do as many as you can," is the reply.

A drug spammer has been Joe Jobbing me, using my personal e-mail box as his from address. The domain is owned by a Bridget Farley with a made-up address and phone number.

In all the hoohoorah about Disney re-selling Sprint service to kids, did anyone mention its ESPN unit did the same thing just a few months ago? Or that the key terms here are Sprint and re-sale, not kids and Disney?

ImageThief reports that PR pros are badly needed in China and salaries are rising fast, quoting the China Daily. (Gong Hay Fat Choy.)

Siemens paid a Taiwanese outfit $350 million to take its money-losing mobile phone business (along with 6,000 employees) off its hands. Half those employees are in Germany.

5G Wireless Solutions of Marina Del Rey, CA announced a "cellular" WiFi system using directional arrays. It promises 2 mile radius service zones in the 2.4 GHz frequency spectrum, and backhauls via directional links in the 5.3-5.8 GHz range.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. After every item. Could one BE more lawyer-whipped?

In trying to make its $50/year archives access charge appear reasonable (coming in September), The New York Times will put its columnists inside the pay tier.

Why write a column if it can't reach the people?

Unitarian Jihad was declared last month by Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle. Enjoy.

An earlier item here called the U.S. 13th in broadband penetration. A new ITU study shows we're now down to 16th.

Rupert Murdoch told the American Society of Newspaper Editors their industry is just about dead, according to the New York Observer. People, he said, "want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it....Unless we awaken to these changes and adapt quickly, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans."

Update: Eitan Caspi sent a link to the speech from Israel. It's on the Newscorp site.

Moves by cellular companies to introduce a rating and filtering system for all product they proves these companies will never offer Internet services. Such controls can only be mandatory on closed networks.

The bidding for MCI hit nearly $10 billion, although no one is yet asking what Verizon or Qwest are buying.

A start-up backed by Earthlink has launched its first wide-area WiFi service under the name MetroFi in Silicon Valley.

Adobe will buy Macromedia for $3.4 billion, further consolidating the PC applications space. The Linux applications space, by contrast, is filled with start-ups. Hmmmmm.......

If I have to guess, here's my guess.

Intel will pay $10,000 for a pristine copy of the original Electronics Magazine where Gordon Moore's ground-breaking article appeared. Librarians say copies are being stolen off shelves as a result.

Bridgend, Wales and a WiFi provider called The Cloud are about to turn on a network within the city that can be accessed from customers of 20 different ISPs, using their current accounts.

The CIA's investment arm has made an investment in WiSpry, which makes tiny radio chips (called RF-MEMs) used in Always On sensor networks.

Donald Wallace has launched a new blog about what I call Always On, dubbed Industrial M2M for Machine-to-Machine. We're adding it to our blogroll.

ICANN approved two new top-level domains, .jobs and .travel, and authorized AfriNIC in Mauritius to oversea distribution of IP numbers on that continent.

The University of Texas sued 18 major tech companies, claiming one of its professors patented Predictive Text in 1985. Click here for details.

The IEEE 802.11n working group approved TGn Sync as its proposed standard. That could bring 100 Mbps wireless networks to market in 2006.

Nokia cut the price of its NGage to $99 (with a phone contract) , days after giving it 3MOG capabilities.

Intel is pushing a version of its MMX2 technology for mobile phones. Not a big story because Intel is not a big factor in the cell chip market. (Now if they turned that into a platform story...)

Samsung offered CeBIT visitors a mobile phone with a 7 Mbit camera. That's more resolution than in many stand-alone cameras.

T-Mobile has shut down the Sidekick data services that were the subject of the Paris Hilton hack, according to Weblogsinc.

Internet Catptal Group, one of the main avatars of the Internet boom in the late 1990s, has won back its listing on the NASDAQ.

43% of all text messages sent in the U.S. are now spam, according to Wireless Services Corp., a wireless data carrier. Via Testbed.

Spanish scientists report that the active ingredient in marijuana may stall the development of Alzheimer's Disease.

Better "Dave's not here man" to "who's Dave," y'know?

Sony has officially dropped the Clie and other Palm-related devices from its line. Its PDAs will now be based on its PlayStation Portable game machine and Sony-Ericsson mobile phones.

A Hong Kong survey shows that 25% of its mobile phone users are 13 or younger. About 86% of people there have mobiles.

Physicists have launched Einstein @ Home, a distributed computing application aiming to prove whether gravitational waves exist. Order it now and be the first on your block to have it once it's released.

A ringtone called "Crazy Frog," which also features a cartoon dancing like one of the original Village People (the policeman), will be released as a single in the UK.

For the second time in less than a week I received a spam trackback to this blog today. The people who know how to blacklist and erase comments on Movable Type also know how to block bogus trackbacks. Be warned and don't waste our time.

The beta version of Google Maps is online. The main service is still serving maps from Yahoo and Mapquest. The maps are pretty, the interface clean, and the images are by Navteq.

BT re-seller Freedom2Surf has put BT's OpenZone hotspots "on sale" for 5 pounds a day, half what BT itself charges. The new price is still what U.S. phone giants SBC and T-Mobile charge their customers.

Per our story yesterday on the musical potential of cellular automata, Mooreslore reader Lindon Parker pointed us to Chaosynth, a synthesizer design from Eduardo Reck Miranda designed around them.

Alan Reiter reports that Nokia will put cameras of at least 1 megapixel in fully half the phones it ships this year.

Earthlink is teaming with SK Telecom of Korea to offer mobile phone service using the Verizon and Sprint networks.

Two new Symbian (Nokia etc.) phone viruses, Gavno.a and b, masquerade as patches and render phones completely useless. Meanwhile an IM virus, Bropia.a, downloads a Trojan to infected Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger clients, which includes a keylogger and a IM spam (or SPIM) program.

The last pigeon messaging station in the world, in Cuttack, Orissa, India, is closing, a victim of cell phones and e-mail.

Mobiledia reports Siemens will announce the closure of its mobile phone unit on January 27 if it doesn't find a buyer by then.

UCLA scientists have linked rat muscle cells to silicon chips creating self-powered robots.

A Gallup survey of fliers shows 68% want the ban on cell phone use in the air to stay, despite the lack of valid safety concerns.

Count me among them.

STB announced the MPB 4000, a rechargeable battery for mobiles phones with a display showing how much power it has.

The latest airport fad is the mobile phone parking lot, where those picking up passengers can hang out, free, and wait for a call so they don't loiter close to the gates.

Thanks to The Common Scold (aka Monica Bay) for the heads-up.

Security problems have been found with versions of all Mozilla products, including the Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client.

The problems to not affect the latest builds of any of these products, so users are advised to update.

Industry Brains has begun selling ads inside RSS feeds of publishers stories, starting with CMP Media. The Business Software Association is among the early buyers.

Om Malik reports that Six Apart, which owns Movable Type, will buy LiveJournal later this month, giving Six Apart 6.5 million users.

Some 26 companies have joined to begin the process of bringing a faster successor to coming 3G mobile networks to market. The new network would have "true" broadband speeds.

Ringtones are becoming a major source of controversy in Australia, with some employers requiring phones be set to "vibrate mode" at work, and others banning them altogether.

Turn your Bluetooth off! Source code for the Cabir mobile phone virus, which is passed through open Bluetooth connections on Symbian-based phones like Nokia's, was posted online, The Register reports.

China now has 329 mobile phone subscribers, according to AP from Textually.org, and expects 402 million by the end of 2005. That would still give just one in three Chinese a phone.

Korea now has to deal with more spam sent to mobile phones than via e-mail, according to the Korea Information Security Agency (KISA). Their hockey stick chart is worth a look, too.

Great piece on Leapfrogging, less-developed countries going straight to technologies just getting started in more-advanced competitors. From Worldchanging.

The 2006 Volkswagon Passat will feature Bluetooth. Get into the car with a Bluetooth phone and continue your conversation, hands-free. For starters.

The story about having to opt-out of a mobile phone directory by a specific date was a hoax. It's all opt-in, and telemarketers won't get access to it.

Mobile phone accounts now total 1.5 billion. That's one phone for every four people, worldwide.

Thunderbird, the Mozilla replacement for Outlook Express, is now available. Get it now.

If a Colby Nolan applies for a job at your firm claiming an MBA from Trinity Southern University, set it aside. Colby is a six year old cat, owned by a deputy attorney general in Pennsylvania, which alleges that Trinity Southern is a spam-spouting diploma mill.

Nolan could not be reached for comment.

In my ongoing novel "The Chinese Century" the backdrop issue is the falling dollar. The story is not fiction. I have also approached the angle of Softbank investing in mobile technology. Turns out that wasn't fiction, either.

Will you newspeople leave me a little something I can make up, please?

Xcelis launched its "cellular Skype" service with a free 7-day trial to Cingular/AT&T and T-Mobile customers.

The company will charge $9.99/month. You call Xcelis, get a second dial tone, then call the party you want over VOIP.

A new version of the Skulls mobile phone virus, Skulls B, is apparently capable of infecting phones through open Bluetooth connections. This mimics the behavior of real viruses, which also travel through proximity. (Gesundheit.)

What's in my spam folder these days?

Offers of phony Vicodin and fake Rolex watches. Oh, and phony lotteries. And lots more of all of it.

Bluetooth security will be upgraded (longer passwords, better encryption) following reports hackers are stealing phone owners' data, writes TechTarget.

ESPN will offer its own brand of cellular service next year, under the name ESPN Wireless, re-selling capacity from Sprint PCS, according to Weblogsinc.

Cingular Wireless said it will have 3G broadband wireless available in "most major markets," by the end of 2006, citing spectrum it acquired with AT&T Wireless.