FortySouth

An interesting post from Matt Cutts, a Search Quality Manager at Google, explaining (quite well) why Google is not exactly intent on removing pages from their index that may offend you, or perhaps malign your name in one way or another.

So what if a Google search of your name brings up negative results, not portraying you in the most positive light – true or otherwise? You need to be the one defining your identity on the Web – your best defense is a good offense.

Here are a couple of precious tips and tricks from Lifehacker that I think are quite useful.

The interest in mobile banking in developing countries has seen an exponential increase in recent years.

Why? Because, especially among African nations, it represents perhaps the perfect business opportunity – the confluence of the ubiquity of mobile phone subscribers and the fact that many yet do not own bank accounts. That notwithstanding, there’s the increasing need for financial transactions to occur in a secure, real-time and low-cost fashion.

To this end, the GSM Association and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are working together under the Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) Program to “fund regulatory and market research to help overcome some of the barriers of providing these services and demonstrate the business case for serving this market”.

I think once such a business case is made to banking regulators, the process of approval for mobile service providers to provide these services may be hastened because they won’t feel like they’re groping in the dark in this new policy area.

Once the regulatory hurdles are surmounted, the onus will be on mobile network operators to provide value-added services and focus on service delivery.

Twitter as a microblogging platform has in the last 2 1/2 years grown rather rapidly from simply a “What are you doing now?” update repository, to an important news outlet as was in the case of the AA Flight 1549 Hudson landing, and in socio-political activism as was the case in the Prop 8 debate.

Pew Internet conducted a study on Twitter users – the demographics and their propensities. Of note is that, although most Twitter users are “overwhelmingly young” the median age is 31 (contrast that to Facebook’s – 26, LinkedIn’s – 40 and MySpace’s – 27).

Also, 76% of Twitter users connect to the internet wirelessly, more likely with their mobile phones, and their use of technology “reveals their affinity for mobile, untethered and social opportunities for interaction”.

Read Twitter and Status Updating [via Pew].