Leading the way is the evolution of new mobile banking and payment models, tailored to local needs.

Uplifting.

“The cell phone is the single most transformative technology for development,” said Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and author of the 2005 book “The End of Poverty.”

“Poverty is almost equated with isolation in many places of the world. Poverty results from the lack of access to markets, to emergency health services, access to education, the ability to take advantage of government services and so on,” Sachs said. “What the mobile phone — and more generally IT technology — is ending is that kind of isolation in all its different varieties.”

Moreover, the profusion of payment services via cell phones puts places like Kenya and Uganda in the vanguard of mobile financial services. “You can walk in the middle of rural village in Rwanda and use a mobile phone to pay at a recharging station to recharge LED lights,” says Amanda Gardiner, acting program manager of Business Call to Action, a New York-based non-profit organization that is helping to bring more mobile phones to Africa’s rural poor.

The WSJ reports that with in-store sales growth muted, and research suggesting that there’s a higher percentage of conversions among tablet users, retailers are modifying their online storefronts, and making them tablet-friendly.

Consumers tend to spend more time on the Web after buying a tablet, and nearly half shop from the device, according to a survey of more than 2,300 consumers by Forrester.

Many retailers also report that tablet users place bigger orders—in some cases adding 10% to 20% more to the tab—on average than shoppers using PCs or smartphones.

The NYT reports on the potential environmental benefits and cost savings that could be generated, as a result of these initiatives.

Green and clean.

To the rubbish pile that the Internet is creating, alongside the road maps, newspapers and music CDs, add one more artifact of consumer life, the paper receipt.

Major retailers, including Whole Foods Market, Nordstrom, Gap Inc. (which owns Old Navy and Banana Republic), Anthropologie, Patagonia, Sears and Kmart, have begun offering electronic versions of receipts, either e-mailed or uploaded to password-protected Web sites. And more and more customers, the retailers report, are opting for paperless.

The Guardian reports on a pattern that seems to be ever more evident and replicating, across emerging markets.

A new day beckons, a day of empowerment.

In Africa, where a billion people use only 4% of the world’s electricity, many cannot afford to charge a computer, let alone buy one. This has led phone users and developers to be more resourceful, and African mobiles are being used to do things that the developed world is only now beginning to pick up on.

The most dramatic example of this is mobile banking. Four years ago, in neighbouring Kenya, the mobile network Safaricom introduced a service called M-Pesa which allows users to store money on their mobiles. If you want to pay a utilities bill or send money to a friend, you simply dispatch the amount by text and the recipient converts it into cash at their local M-Pesa office.

According to California-based mobile-banking innovator Carol Realini, executive chairman of Obopay: “Africa is the Silicon Valley of banking. The future of banking is being defined here… It’s going to change the world.”

Also, industry insiders like Eldar Murtazin have indicated that the new WP7 design guidelines do not mandate hardware buttons.

Coupled with a strong discovery aspect for apps and a novel interface, it could well be a game changer.

The Guardian reports that researchers at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, have developed an approach that aims to harness sound energy from speech, music or noise and turn it into electrical power.

For sure, this ain’t a silent revolution.

Electrical engineers have developed a new technique for turning sound into electricity, allowing a mobile to be powered up while its user holds a conversation.

The technology would also be able to harness background noise and even music to charge a phone while it is not in use.

However, there could be a downside to the innovation, if it gives people a new reason to shout into their phones as they attempt to squeeze in every extra bit of power they can.

In a move that could potentially spread panic (and rightly so) among stamp collectors, The Local reports the Swedish postal service is toying with the idea of allowing customers to pay for postage through texts, rather than stamps.

An innovative application of mobile payments, but a setback to collectors everywhere.

The system under consideration in Sweden would allow users to use codes retrieved via text message for sending letters and parcels weighing up to two kilogrammes.

The postal services in both Sweden and Denmark are convinced that people will continue to send letters, despite the rise in other forms of communication, and paying postage by mobile phone is seen as a way of making the process easier.

While  immersing ourselves in worlds where avatars and emoticons rule, there seems to be no room for intimate forms of expression. 

Can we break out of this adult dollhouse? It’s going to be tough, but not impossible.

She takes a considerably darker view, arguing that our new technologies — including e-mail messages, Facebook postings, Skype exchanges, role-playing games, Internet bulletin boards and robots — have made convenience and control a priority while diminishing the expectations we have of other human beings.

Instead of real friends, we “friend” strangers on Facebook. Instead of talking on the phone (never mind face to face), we text and tweet. Technology, she writes, “makes it easy to communicate when we wish and to disengage at will.”

Of an interview subject she calls Brad, Ms. Turkle writes: “Brad says, only half jokingly, that he worries about getting ‘confused’ between what he ‘composes’ for his online life and who he ‘really’ is. Not yet confirmed in his identity, it makes him anxious to post things about himself that he doesn’t really know are true. It burdens him that the things he says online affect how people treat him in the real.

The NYT reports that such incidences are becoming a growing hazard, so much as to prompt efforts at legislation.

The consequences of cutting ourselves off completely from the real world could have even more deeper emotional implications. Many of which we would not be able to even contemplate today.

“The big thing has been distracted driving, but now it’s moving into other ways technology can distract you, into everyday things,” said Anne Teigen, a policy specialist for the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks legislative developments.

Exercising in Central Park on Tuesday, Marie Wickham, 56, said she understood what all the fuss was about: “They’re zigging, they’re zagging, they don’t know what’s around them. It can definitely be dangerous.”

The NYT reports on the rise of mobile banking in the emerging world – aided by the increasing adoption of smartphones,  mobile banking seems poised to cross over to the mainstream.

Importantly, by reducing the role of middlemen and limiting cash transactions, it is a harbinger of social change.

In Tanzania, a hospital sends money by text message to women in remote areas so they can pay for bus fare to travel for critically needed surgery. In Afghanistan, the government pays its police officers by text message to skirt corrupt middlemen. In Pakistan, the biggest financial network is not a bank, but a unit of Telenor, the Norwegian mobile phone operator.

Since December 2008, Orange has signed up one million people for its Orange Money mobile banking service in six African countries: Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Kenya and Niger. In Kenya and Tanzania, subsidiaries of the British mobile operator Vodafone now process more international wire transfers than Western Union.