User:Marcozennaro/M-science

Mobile Science (or “m-Science”, or “mScience” in short) is defined as the term that comprises sensing, computing and dissemination of scientific knowledge by the use of mobile devices. The aim is to engage the scientific community, engineers and scholars worldwide in the design, development and deployment of the newest mobile applications.

For example, mobile technological are being used to collect basic information in the health, world climate, geophysics, ecology, and other sectors to exchange information, and to access scientific computing among many services.

Today, the majority of new generation phones can also access the web in some way. There is evidence that mobile web access is also growing fast in developing countries. According to the ITU- International Telecommunications Union, there are billions of mobile phone subscribers around the world outpacing fixed-line Internet users, with more than 1,000 new users added every minute. More than 59% of them live in developing countries, making mobile phones the first telecommunications technology in history to have more users there than in the developed world. Mobile phone shipments grew to 930 million units in the past year. Cell phone usage in Africa is growing almost twice as fast as any other region and jumped from 63 million users two years ago to 152 million in 2009 (see, http://eprom.mit.edu/whyafrica.html). On the other hand, the possibility of connecting with a low-cost notebook (like Netbooks) to the Internet via broadband UMTS networks at low subscription prices is growing world-wide. While this is a proxy for actual mobile usage, it is nonetheless an indicator that mobile access is also rapidly increasing in the scientific environment.