GeorgeHopkin.com

Via Jemima Kiss at the Guardian (and in turn via paidContent.org), Facebook is coming soon to a phone near you. Be afraid. Be very afraid:

Facebook is negotiating with Nokia over a mobile tool that could see the social networking site built into hundreds of thousands of phone handsets. The Finland-based mobile firm is said to be exploring ways of promoting a mobile version of Facebook through specific handsets in the same way that YouTube features on Apple’s iPhone, website paidContent said today.

Nokia is also reported to be negotiating with Facebook about buying a small stake in the company and an unnamed executive confirmed that “a partnership is in the works”. Both developments would give Facebook a healthy foothold in the mobile market.

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/21/digitalmedia.mediabusiness?gusrc=rss&feed=media

And: http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-nokia-and-facebook-working-on-mobile-deal-could-involve-investment/

Via the good old Beeb, a look at wireless standards we can expect in our phones and laptops any day now:

The wireless world is evolving into three types of networks - a Personal Area Network (Pan), which covers your immediate surroundings, a Local Area Network (Lan) for the home or hotspot and a Wide Area Network (Wan), which can cover a large geographic area.

One of the newest technologies on show at CES in the field of personal networks is Transfer Jet from Sony, a system to transfer bursts of data between devices in ultra close proximity. The system can transfer data at speeds of up to 480 Megabits per second (Mbps), which makes it faster than Bluetooth and equivalent to Wireless USB, a technology which is beginning to get wide support in the electronics industry.

More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7180135.stm

And more about personal area networks on Wikipedia.

Another step towards wifi connectivity as a ubiquitous commodity and a significant one at that:

The fast food chain McDonald’s is to introduce free high speed wireless internet access at most of its 1,200 restaurants by the end of the year in a move which will make it the UK’s biggest provider of such a service.

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/oct/06/internet