Intel has announced a breakthrough today that will keep our smartphones getting faster, better and smaller.  They have invented a new technology to keep Moore's law going strong and to keep shrinking chips while making them more powerful.  Intel claims that the new 3D method makes chips 37% faster and uses 50% less power.

Intel's "Ivy Bridge" 22nm chips with the new 3D technology will go into mass production later in 2012 and it is planning 14nm in 2013 and 10nm in 2015.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 Nasa mission have been in the news lately again.  They were launched in 1977 and have been flying steady for the last 33 years.   Both space crafts are working perfectly and traveling through the outer edge of our solar system some 22 billion kilometers away.  They are currently traveling in the heliosheith, which is 4.8 - 6 billion km wide and are toward and expected to break through interstellar space.  Interstellar space has no stars and the next star is 4 light years away.

Last week we were at the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing.  It was in a huge new exhibition center in Beijing near the famous Olympic bird's nest stadium and the "water cube" Olympic swimming complex.  

Figuring out how Chinese Internet and mobile consumers use the Internet has been confusing at best for anyone outside China (or even inside China).  Today a new report from McKinsey sheds some light on this.  They provide some very interesting stats for the Chinese Internet and also they make an attempt at segmenting Chinese Internet users.   Here are the stats..

The big news for Apple users last week was the revelation that the iPhone not only tracks location information (something many users were already aware of), but actually saves years of it in an unsecured database on the iPhone. The blowback was immediate; countless blogs around the internet have run headlines like “Is Your iPhone Spying on You?” and congress has even demanded an explanation from Apple.

More and more application developers are beginning to put out mobile tools to help retailers operate their businesses. These apps help with everything from creating sales reports to checking out a customer.

Though, if you take a look in the iTunes App Store or the Android Marketplace, you’ll quickly realize these apps are hard - if not impossible - to find. There’s no retail tag for either app store, and the search features for these stores leave much to be desired, as is.

 Nokia is no slouch when it comes to sheer volume of handset sales, in fact they are the largest with a market share of about 37% of global handsets.  The vast majority of these phones are lower level phones or "feature phones" however.  Basically, they have been resting on their laurels and have not been innovating in the high end smartphone arena.  This has left Nokia without a line up of attractive smartphones to compete with the likes of the iPhone, Android and RIM's Blackberry.  

 Sony Ericsson has been having a rough time lately, no one seems to want to buy their phones.  Well not "no one" but they have been on a steady decline for some time now.  We put it down to lack of innovation and poor to average usability for users of their phones.  We have tried to use several of them in the last 10 years and seldom do they last more than a month or two after frustration with their user interface and software design. 

 Consumer reports is worried that Microsoft's ad for their new social networking mobile phone for teens, the Kin, is "creepy".  They are also suggesting that the ad encourages "sexting".