While the Consumer Electronics Show and other big events feature acres of tiny booths crammed one against another, Mobile World Congress features a different kind of bigness. The show is spread out over eight big buildings in a historic area of town. Every couple of buildings are set several flights of stairs up from the last one, with the final two buildings just a stone’s throw from the grand National Palace.

Connecting the buildings and lining the promenade between them are various smaller trailers and bungalows.

Unlike the cramped booths at CES, the spread-out nature of Mobile World Congress allows even moderate-size companies a good amount of space to show their wares. Even those with bungalows outside a main hall stand a good chance of attracting visitors. Companies that went with that approach included Acer and INQ Mobile, which was touting its new Android phone with quick access to Facebook and Spotify.

That said, some folks’ presence at Mobile World Congress is clearly bigger than others.

One booth that stands out is Google’s first-ever Android booth, tucked in the corner of Hall 8, just inside the entrance.

The two-story pavilion features many of Google’s partners showing Android applications, as well as a place to create one’s own Android mini-me, plus a sushi-bar-style conveyor belt featuring the many phone and tablet designs based on the Google operating system. Among the designs that scrolled by while I was standing there were well-known names such as Samsung and HTC, as well as less-familiar brands such as China’s ZTE and Alcatel, which is new to Android.

Perhaps the pièce de résistance of the booth is a slide that allows children of all chronological ages to relive their youth and glide down from the top floor back to the bottom. The most popular thing, though, was a series of collectible pins being passed out throughout Mobile World Congress by various Android partners. They were a hot commodity, and by Tuesday afternoon most booths were completely out of their supply of pins, placing green candy inside the dishes instead.

While impressive, the Android booth was not the largest by any stretch. One of the more massive setups I saw was the Ericsson booth, which occupied nearly all of Hall 6. A small Sony Ericsson booth was open to the public. Behind a security gate, though, was a massive spread for the many partners of both Ericsson and Sony Ericsson. It featured two bars and two kiosks serving various tapas.

There were meeting rooms and patio tables for more-casual interactions. On display were all kinds of Ericsson technologies ranging from its core infrastructure gear to all kinds of other products and research projects.

A few caught my eye, including a mobile payment section that featured a “Museum of Money” talking about days gone by when people used paper currency with all its flaws. Under glass were such relics as money, piggy banks and counterfeit-detection pens, while Ericsson showed off its many payment technologies.

In another corner, Ericsson was showing off a vending machine that is paid, not with cash or credit card, but via SMS message. Ericsson has a unit that serves as an intermediary between the vendor and the carrier to manage the transaction.

“If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet,” Ghonim said in an interview with CNN.

Ghonim gives credit to the young Egyptians who organized themselves on Facebook, dating back to last June when activist Khaled Said was killed. Ghonim commented on how a video posted on Facebook (where he is administrator of a page commemorating Said) would be quickly shared by 50,000 people, calling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg a personal hero.

Ghonim said he plans to write a book on the topic called “Revolution 2.0.”

Mubarak’s government had shut down much of Egyptian Internet access and SMS service for nearly a week during the protests, then made concessions to not run for another term, but protests only intensified until he finally agreed to step down today.

Bubble Motion, which is funded by Sequoia Capital and others, is now launching Bubbly in the Philippines, after releases in India, Indonesia and Japan (chosen because of their deep mobile phone penetration). Its launch partner in the Philippines is Globe Telecom.

By the midway point of this year, Bubbly will be rolled out to all major carriers in those four countries, for a total potential audience of 800 million.

Bubbly allows users to send each other voice-based status updates. People who follow a user receive an SMS each time a new status message is posted, and pay to listen to the status message with a fee added to their regular phone bill. This can be used both for communicating with friends and family and for subscribing to updates from celebrities.

Users pay either a monthly subscription fee for celebrities in India and Indonesia, or per message in the Philippines and Japan, following the carrier billing styles in each country. The average user gets one to two messages per day.

Celebrities on Bubbly often have two to three times as many followers as they have on Twitter, bragged Bubble Motion CEO Tom Clayton on a phone interview on Wednesday. And that’s despite the fact that Bubbly costs money and Twitter is free.

Part of the reason is Bubbly has more reach than Twitter in the four countries it has launched in, Clayton said, given it is a mobile service and Twitter is often accessed over the Internet.

But grooming a stable of stars might not be defensible in the long term, given Twitter is ramping up its mobile efforts and celebrities may want to have a broader reach than they can achieve with local phone carriers and voice updates. Clayton said another edge his company has is the infrastructure it has built to deliver voice files–250 million of them since Bubbly was first launched–without overloading carrier networks.

Clayton said Bubble Motion, which has raised about $30 million in funding, is not profitable yet but is growing revenue with a direct correlation to its traffic, which is to say, doubling every quarter.

That program, dubbed SnapTax, is off to a quick start, having notched 350,000 downloads in less than a month.

However, CEO Brad Smith said he knows that Intuit has a huge opportunity–and challenge–in the shift from a desktop-centered world to one ruled by mobile devices.

Over the last year and a half, the company has gone from essentially no mobile presence to one with more than a dozen initiatives, including a number of iPhone and Android apps as well as an SMS-based service in India that provides small-business owners ways to easily connect with their customers via mobile phone. Intuit’s SMS products in India also allow farmers to compare the prices nearby markets are offering for their crops, a feature that the company says has enabled small farmers to get, on average, 20 percent higher prices.

On Tuesday, the company is announcing its latest move–an expansion of its Mint.com iPhone app to allow for accounts to be created and fully updated from the phone (see screenshot).

It’s part of what CEO Brad Smith said is a recognition that the company not only needs to create mobile counterparts to its desktop and Web products, but in many cases also needs to offer the younger generation a mobile-only option. On Mint, for example, half of all interactions are already happening on the phone, as opposed to via the Web.

“We never would have guessed,” Smith said. However, the company has been spending a lot of time both interviewing consumers in Mountain View and meeting them on the go at places like Starbucks. Those meetings and other conversations have led Smith to shift the company’s focus. Initially, he was focused on a world where customers needed to enter their information only once. Now he is focused on creating apps that, in some cases, means a user will never type in information. SnapTax, for example, uses a smartphone’s camera to digitize tax forms and then uses character recognition to enter the text, with a customer having only to make sure the information is accurate and then answer a few questions.

“That mobile-only world is out there,” Smith said. “We’ll have to think differently.”

The opportunity is also a challenge. After forcing out competitors like Microsoft on the desktop and then acquiring Mint.com–a top Web-based finance rival–the company now sees challenges from smaller, mobile-only rivals like Square. The key, Intuit said, is the fact that it isn’t relying on the phone to do the heavy lifting. Instead, it’s using the iPhone and other devices to tie into its vast existing Web services. That, say Smith and others, gives the company a scale that its competitors can’t match. Intuit’s QuickBooks, for example, already handles one in 12 U.S. payroll accounts.

Intuit also offers services to community banks and credit unions, which in turn enable their customers to access their accounts over any phone or carrier.

Still, Smith said the company knows it needs to gain new skills and gain them rapidly. The result is that nearly every team is working on something mobile, with many of them comparing notes on what is clicking with early users. In addition to full products like SnapTax, the company also has a number of public apps on a labs site that handle everything from tracking mileage and timesheets, to Lasso–a tool for businesses to create mobile deals and promote them using Facebook.

On the horizon is a feature that will allow small businesses using its GoPayment service to process checks by taking a picture of them with a phone–much like USAA and Chase customers are able to do with their personal accounts. In response to Square, Intuit has also been giving out free credit card readers and offering a service with no up-front or monthly fees, albeit with a slightly higher transaction charge than its service for larger-volume customers. That offer is scheduled to end this month, but is likely to be extended.

The company is also trying to make sense of the opportunity created by tablets like the iPad and devices based on Android. Last week, for example, it showed how GoPayment running on the Honeycomb version of Android can take advantage of the larger-screen real estate to allow users to do more than just process payments on mobile, turning the tablet into something akin to a visual cash register.

Intuit’s employees also have been doing a lot of mobile stuff in their spare time. Intuit, much like Google, allows workers to spend a fraction of their time on pet projects. Some are potential new businesses, while a bunch are internal tools, including one notable app that calculates the cost of a meeting by adding up the salaries of all the people scheduled to attend.

But despite its progress, Smith and team aren’t satisfied.

“We’ve scratched the surface,” says CTO Tayloe Stansbury. “We’ve got a long journey in front of us.”

Indeed. Smith said that if he were grading the company on the progress it has made based on where it started, he said it might merit a 7 on a scale of one to 10. But that, he said, is not the scale he is using.

“If I score us where we need to be, I’d give us a three,” he said.

As the country braced for huge antigovernment protests on the traditional day of prayer, the government appeared to have unplugged most means of communication—including social network Facebook and Twitter—that activists had been using to coordinate action across the country. Landline calls placed from outside the country, however, were connecting.

Government-owned Telecom Egypt runs the country’s fixed-line network. Attempts to connect to the websites of several Egyptian ISPs, including EgyptWeb, TeData and Purenet all failed.

U.K.-headquartered Vodafone Group PLC said in a statement that all mobile operators in Egypt had been “instructed to suspend services in parts of Egypt. Under Egyptian legislation, the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it.” It said the Egyptian authorities will be clarifying the situation in due course.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

MNP actually first reached the Indian consumers last November. But that was just for users in the Haryana area – now the service is available to the over 600 million mobile phone users across the country.

Switching from one network to another (while keeping the same number) is pretty straightforward: All customers have to do is send an SMS with their mobile number to 1900 (SMS PORT 1900) to get their unique porting code. After this, the process is essentially the same as getting a new connection.

Network providers are eager to lure customers from rival companies but also fearful of losing their own.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Mobile messaging is also big, though in most parts of the world young women are far more likely than young men to send text and picture messages. There were some exceptions, such as India, where men were twice as likely as women to send texts and four times more likely to send pictures.

The Nielsen research was conducted in 19 countries, though the report broke out results only for the U.S., UK, India, Italy, Brazil, China, Spain, Russia and Germany. In most countries Nielsen surveyed 5,000 young people, though in the U.S. it surveyed 75,000 youths. In some countries the research was done face-to-face and in others the survey was done online.

In most countries across the globe, young men are more likely than women to have smartphones, though the U.S. is an exception with young women making up 55 percent of smartphone owners between 15 and 24. The adoption of smartphones versus feature phones also varies widely. In India, for example, feature phones outnumber smartphones 9 to 1 among young people, while in Italy smartphone adoption is nearing 50 percent among the younger set.

Advanced data usage was highest in the U.S and China, where about 17 in 20 young people did more than just make calls and send text and picture messages. That type of data use was least common in India, where only 13 percent did so, However, another 51 percent of Indian youths used their phones for text and/or picture messages.

The Nielsen study also looked at other patterns including use of more than one SIM card and whether phones are prepaid or postpaid, although those trends seemed to have more to do with how the country’s cell phone industry is set up as opposed to indicative of trends among youth.

SMS GupShup (a Hindi word that translates to “chitchat” in English) is a 200-person start-up that has created a host of SMS-based services that, all told, account for more than 1.5 billion text messages a month.

The company’s biggest service is a text-message-based social network that lets individuals or companies send text messages to large groups of followers that want the updates. The service has taken off with 100 of the most popular feeds topping 100,000 subscribers to things like jokes, religious messages, sports scores and other information. Smaller groups might have as few as 10 or 20 followers. The service is somewhat similar to GroupMe, a U.S.-based group messaging service.

One tribe based in Northeast India uses the service to allow its 65,000 members–some of whom live far away from the area–to keep tabs on tribal goings-on.

“If someone has a child, someone gets married, someone dies, it all goes up there,” said CEO Beerud Sheth, who recently moved to Bombay after spending many years in Silicon Valley. His past work includes launching Elance, a company that matches freelance talent from around the world with people who need to hire for projects.

SMS GupShup has become a significant player in the text message market in India, accounting for roughly 5 to 10 percent of all SMS traffic, Sheth said.

But, while there is money to be made in text messages, SMS GupShup is not exactly raking it in. Some standard industry metrics on how much a company could make off text messages would suggest that the company is on pace to bring in about $10 million a year in revenue.

“That’s in the right range,” Sheth said.

Nor is the company yet profitable, but Sheth said the company hopes to turn the corner sometime in the first half of next year. Among the company’s costs is buying the bandwidth needed for all of the text messages sent by its users. Although it pays anywhere from a quarter to a tenth of what consumers pay for text messages, that still adds up. Fortunately, India is one of the cheapest places in the world to send text messages, with consumers typically paying anywhere from half a cent to a penny per message and bulk users paying far less.

To help recoup the costs, the company limits message length so that the last little bit of space can be used for sponsorship or advertising.

While SMS GupShup is the largest purely SMS-based service in India, Sheth said he does find himself competing with Facebook and Twitter in India and elsewhere, but said the strength of his service is that it is built around SMS, rather than using text messages only as a basic option for status updates.

“For them, SMS is sort of a stepchild experience,” he said.

Sheth said the company isn’t limiting itself to the social networking service. Among its other products are bulk SMS services for businesses. Companies can use the service for everything from messaging to customers to managing inventory. A text-message-based CRM application is in the works as well.

The company is also working directly with carriers in several countries to create a “reply all” feature that would allow people not only to send bulk text messages, but also to reply to a group of anywhere from 7 to 10 people, depending on the country. That’s particularly useful in small groups that may want to schedule events or do other tasks via text message, Sheth said.

“One way to think about text messaging is it is the Internet in the developing world,” Sheth said. “In this part of the world, that is a big part of how people communicate.”

ReplyBuy’s angle is the simplicity of its transactions. Users tell ReplyBuy what kind of stuff they are interested in purchasing (right now inventory is somewhat limited but it includes half-off DVD sets, toys and other presents for the holidays) and set up their payment information online. Then they receive a text message about a new limited-time deal once per day. Should they wish to purchase, they reply with their pin number.

The idea, obviously, is to reach potential shoppers on the go without requiring them to use a smartphone. And while SMS transactions and alerts are already a feature of other shopping sites, ReplyBuy hopes to build on the success of the new crop of deals sites like Groupon and Gilt.

ReplyBuy has offices in San Francisco and Phoenix and is funded with an angel round of an undisclosed amount from investors including three former YouTube employees: Christina Brodbeck, Dwipal Desai and Cuong Do. ReplyBuy founder Josh Manley was not a YouTuber himself, but was previously president of e-commerce storefront provider Cartfly.

In large part, that’s because if Facebook Messages were evaluated as an email system, it would look terrible. There’s no incorporation of IMAP so you can access your mail from other clients, there’s no way to save drafts, there’s no way to cc people, there are no folders.

Even more jarring, there are no subject lines or time stamps, and you only ever have one continuous conversation with a contact. Instead, like instant messaging, when you type a message and press enter, it gets set loose to your contact.

But maybe Facebook has a point, and we don’t need all that cc, bcc gobbledygook for personal communications. Maybe we just want to more casually correspond with each other. And some of these email conventions have probably outlived their usefulness. Facebook says prior to the change its top three subject lines were blank, “Hi!” and “Yo.”–if that tells you anything.

The problem is, the way Facebook Messages works is a bit complicated and unfamiliar. You can see why the company is rolling it out very, very slowly–it’s the kind of new experience that aggravates people and makes them whiny.

Facebook Messages treats the correspondence between you and another person as a single conversation, whether it’s by IM, within the Facebook Messages interface, received as an email or as a Facebook-delivered SMS. Often those channels overlap. Messages that are not from Facebook members, and those from entities other than individuals, get shunted to a second-tier inbox.

Yesterday I was playing with the new Messages, first within the Messages interface on the Facebook Web site, then on IM on the Web site, and then via text message when I closed my computer. A few things confused me–for instance, chat is disabled and disappears when you go into Messages. I guess it’s redundant to have the same conversation in two places. But as someone who felt like I was in an IM chat, it was super weird.

Another thing that’s odd is that those life-time conversation threads only really work for one-to-one relationships. Group messages seem like a little bit of an afterthought; for instance, group threads show a split-screen image of two of the participants’ profile pics, no matter how many people participate. The system is prejudiced against people who email you from outside Facebook (say, your mother emails your @Facebook.com address from an @Yahoo.com address), until you explicitly say you want to see them in your main Facebook inbox. If a person sends you messages from two email addresses, Facebook doesn’t allow you to help it understand that they are the same person.

While I will probably acclimate to the Messages experience over the next few weeks, one thing that’s going to continue to be very annoying, and accentuated by Messages, is redundant Facebook notifications. Already a problem for those of us who use Facebook on multiple platforms like the Web and a phone app, redundant notifications run rampant in Facebook Messages. Say someone sends you a message from the Web site and checks the box to send it to your phone. Without changing any defaults, you could get a text message from Facebook, an email message from Facebook, a new IM on the Web site and a flag that you have a new message in the Facebook nav bar.

I spoke to Messages product manager Dan Hsiao yesterday, and he said the team had thought carefully about trimming down notifications but decided it would be worse if users weren’t alerted to the fact that they had a message.

Hsiao said that his mantra in building the product was to make it “email compatible but not email complete.”

I think there will be two main outcomes from the new Facebook Messages:

• Other Web mail outfits will (and should) better integrate their email and instant messaging conversations, based on Facebook’s example. Folks like Gmail can go one better, and incorporate additional forms of communication like voice messages. Facebook is right–there’s no reason this shouldn’t all be condensed and scannable.
• Provided the Facebook Messages product doesn’t have major usability issues, it will continue to supplant email, especially for young people. There will be a bigger distinction between formal, especially corporate, correspondence via email and personal messages. If you think about it, we all already make a distinction between messages from people and messages from mailing lists, and Facebook is right to say the ones from people are more important.

The thing is, Facebook Messages splits out a part of the communication experience that is, for most, a part of other tools and services.

Facebook Messages won’t replace email for people who use email for professional purposes, people who prefer desktop mail clients or people who firmly associate themselves and their archive of emails with an existing address.

Rather than killing Gmail (and its much larger competitors Hotmail and Yahoo), Facebook Messages will probably have the biggest impact on usage of IM services like AIM and GChat. The only thing the new product will fully replace is the previous version of Facebook Messages–which, by the way, has 350 million active users, and four billion messages sent per day.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

After analyzing your address book, emails (only Gmail and Google Apps for now), calendar and other information you give it, Aro compiles a linked library of topics and people that are relevant to you. Then it uses that information to help you complete actions that usually are tedious on a smartphone because they require users to open all sorts of different apps.

Say you’re using the Aro mail client: Any name that’s mentioned in an email will be highlighted in a bubble that you can click on to see all the people by that name in your address book and call one directly. You can also search through all your correspondence with that person over time, through various email addresses and phone numbers.

Or if someone schedules an appointment with you and you view it in Aro, you can add it to your calendar from within email, look up more information and get directions to the location right there.

Aro synchs all this information back to the original hosts of your email and calendar, though you don’t ever have to open the old apps on your phone.

I’ve been trying Aro for the last couple of days and I can start to see the potential. However, it’s pretty awkward to have the Aro parallel experience layered on top of everything I’m used to doing. My existing phone, email, SMS, address book, calendar and mobile browser apps are now all redundant with Aro versions. The simple action of making a phone call on my setup now requires clicking through an Aro dialog, then a Google Voice dialog–it’s a little too much.

These tools would be much more awesome if they were more tightly integrated into the operating system itself rather than as a whole bunch of apps. Aro CEO Jon Lazarus says he’s working to strike deals with carriers and handset partners to release phones with tighter Aro integration, which would help a lot.

Playing around with Aro makes me think about the potential for a smarter mobile phone that combines Aro-integrated apps with something like Siri’s voice-activated commands. Siri, which launched at D7 and was bought by Apple, is a virtual personal assistant iPhone app that helps users tie into a whole bunch of Web services to do things like make reservations at nearby restaurants. You can start to imagine how a phone would understand a lot more about its owner, and actually help get things done.

Seattle-based Aro, whose parent company is called Kiha, has raised more than $20 million over the past three years from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (the company was originally developing for Windows Mobile, actually, but it switched to Android last year). Aro came out of stealth only a few weeks ago in the run-up to Web 2.0. Here’s a (somewhat cheesy, yes) demo video of how it works:

At the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg says young people say email is too slow. They prefer Facebook or SMS.

Zuck: IM or SMS are much simpler, and people want lighter-weight things that they can use all over the place. So we need…a modern messaging system.

350 million people actively use messaging on Facebook, in part because it’s really simple. Four billion messages are sent per day. This is “private, private sharing.”

Next-generation messaging would be: seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short. (Those are a lot of synonyms, no?)

“This is not email. Email is one way that people will use this system, but it’s not even the primary way we think they will use it.”

Now a three-panel slide is up showing the key topics of the announcement–”seamless messaging,” “conversation history” and “social inbox.” Zuckerberg promises, “We can do some really good filtering for you to make sure you only see messages you really care about.”

Zuck brings on Andrew Bosworth to demo the product.

So this is actually a relaunch of the “Messages” tool. Not email-specific. Takes all correspondence between two friends and puts them in one place.

Everyone gets an @facebook.com email address with their username. “As much as we’re providing an email address, the system’s not email,” says Boz–more like instant messaging.

Boz uses convo about dinner plans as an example, with messaging across different platforms, including IM on Facebook, email, iPhone notifications, etc. The example restaurant is Piccino in San Francisco, where, fun fact, I was for a short time the Foursquare mayor. No longer though.

Integrates with Jabber, IMAP and one more I missed. (Sorry, first time liveblogging with this tool!)

Boz shows the history of Facebook messages with his girlfriend of the last four years. But doesn’t include their instant messages and other communication. Individual messages may not be profound, but collectively they provide a narrative about someone I care about, says Boz.

Facebook rebuilt infrastructure for this project, because it’s especially important that messages don’t get lost.

Instead of Cassandra (which FB created for email search and then open sourced), the company chose something new: HBase. They also used Haystack, Thrift, ZooKeeper and memcache.

This is the biggest engineering team Facebook has ever put together for a launch–15 people, Boz says.

Users have three categories: 1) Messages: Conversations with actual people. 2) Other: Email lists and the like. And 3) Junk.

The big idea is “picking up where you left off” no matter what device or medium.

This project has been in the works for the last 15 months.

Zuck: “This is not an email killer. This is a messaging system that includes email as a part of it. We don’t expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say, I’m going to shut down my Yahoo account or my Gmail account and switch to Facebook.”

(Read: You silly press, we’re not competing with Gmail, we’re bigger than Gmail!)

Rolling out slowly over the next few months, starting with an invite system (ha! how Gmail!).

Oh, about IMAP: No support yet, so users can’t synch with other email systems. But Facebook wants to add later.

Interesting: Facebook messages won’t have subject lines. You just have a single messaging history with each person.

If you have been interacting with someone through email, then we’ll send replies back to email. You can indicate that you want a message to go directly to their phone. If you’re online, you get a message as an IM.

Boz: This is the end of “BRB” or “GTG.” Follows you wherever you go. (Sounds ominous when you say it like that.)

Question from audience: Will you add voice or video?

Zuck: For now only SMS, IM, email and FB messages–all are text. “We think this is a pretty big step by itself, and one we just wanted to take before we get started on the next set of things.”

Question from audience: Will you have contextual ads?

Zuck: Yes, ads work the same as on the rest of Facebook, but not targeted specific to content in a message.

Zuck on Gmail competition: “They have a great product. Email is still really important to a lot of people. If we build a great product that people want to use, then people will use it.”

Question from audience: Can users go off the record like in Gmail?

Boz: Users can delete any message.

Zuck: Off the record like in IM doesn’t make sense because users may be receiving messages in a different way than you send them. If someone gets something in email instead of IM it would be unnatural to have it off the record.

Question: How will this treat communication with people who are not on Facebook?

Boz: You can communicate with whoever you want to, and will have access to all that history of the conversation.

Zuck: If you’re not a part of the FB system and outside the social graph, your emails to FB users will go into “Other” folder to start off with, rather than the main. Once the recipient says you’re an important person, you’ll go into the main folder.

Question: What about silly joke emails from your mom? Can you filter those?

Zuck: There’s only one thread with every person.

Question: What about Facebook employee email addresses?

Zuck: “After a long discussion, the Farm Bureau has agreed to give us fb.com. And in the terms of that we have agreed not to sell farm subsidies.”

Facebook hasn’t mentioned this, but Microsoft just emailed to make sure people know they’re involved.

“As part of Facebook’s new messaging system: http://apps.facebook.com/facebooklive/ –Microsoft is integrating the Office experience. Over the coming months, customers will be able to access and share Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents as attachments to their Facebook messages. Sharing new ideas, key points of inspiration and important information just got easier–even when the need to access or share that content strikes in the middle of your latest status update.”

Question: Can you fill in the blanks of associating email addresses with Facebook friends?

Boz: Not yet, but it’s imaginable.

(Uh-oh–how is this going to work when people have multiple contacts for themselves?)

Question: Storage?

“If you’re a good user, you have no concern. For people who try to find limits, they will find them.” Another ominous comment from Boz.

Okay, they’re cutting us off.

Here’s the Facebook blog post on the announcement.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

So it shouldn’t come as much surprise that a survey by research group comScore’s MobiLens service finds that the Japanese are the “most connected” mobile-phone users in the world. Three of every four Japanese use their phones to either browse the Web, access applications or download content to their handsets. This compares to 44 percent in the United States and 39 percent in Europe.

Dig into the survey and some interesting trends emerge. Only 40 percent of Japanese send text messages, while two-thirds of Americans and 82 percent of Europeans engage in short message service, or SMS. Why is this?

Read the rest of this post on the original site

You didn’t think Facebook would integrate with Google (GOOG) Voice, did you?

Actually, according to sources close to the situation, Facebook and Skype are poised to announce a significant and wide-ranging partnership that will include integration of SMS, voice chat and Facebook Connect.

The move by the pair–which have tested small contact importer integrations before–is a natural one for the social networking giant, which is aiming to be the central communications and messaging platform for its users, across a range of media.

Facebook’s goal, according to sources: To mesh communications and community more tightly together and add more tools to allow users to do so.

Since it was not going to create an Internet telephony service of its own–kind of like not creating a mobile operating system–Facebook has apparently turned to the Web’s Internet telephony leader.

Interestingly, Facebook has previously tested a video chat product.

Skype had 124 million people using it at least once a month and 560 million registered users, which will be bolstered by the 500 million Facebook users who will now be able to use it more seamlessly within Skype.

That will include allowing users to SMS and call Facebook friends from Skype, which will now deploy Facebook Connect.

And also do video chat using Facebook in Skype, which you can see below, in a very odd screenshot sent to me by a source–Walt Mossberg’s code name is not Daniel Matthews and I am not Allison Brown. (Click on the image to make it larger.)

This all will be available in Skype’s newest version, 5.0, which emerges from beta in a few weeks.

This is a big win for the Luxembourg-based Skype, which is currently readying a public offering.

While it now dominates the online calling space, it needs to be present where users are now moving, such as Facebook.

And for Facebook, this is also helpful to its international push, making it more appealing globally since Skype is much more popular outside the U.S.

It will be interesting to see if both cross-integrate into their popular mobile apps too.

Facebook has been doing a lot of integrations with other communications services, such as a massive upcoming one with Yahoo (YHOO) and also one with Microsoft (MSFT).

Skype is also increasing its partnerships. Today, for example, it will announce a deal with Avaya, which makes office phones and related software aimed at businesses.

The pair called it a “strategic unified communications and collaboration partnership,” and is centered on business and personal videoconferencing.