Mobile Active informs about AudienceScapes.org (@AudienceScapes)  which is an online tool and research program providing essential media use and communication information on developing countries from a bottom-up perspective, based on in-depth analysis by the AudienceScapes research team.

From their website:

With initial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we are making InterMedia’s knowledge and experience in the field readily available to those who conceive, design, implement and evaluate development programs as well as to other stakeholders in the development process. We are also offering custom added-value analysis and reports to commercial companies in media, telecommunications and other fields in order to create a revenue stream to help support the project’s development goals.

Many development practitioners, particularly those working for locally-based agencies and NGOs, have limited access to empirical research that could help them better target and deliver communication, information and education efforts in a range of activities. These could be anything from HIV-AIDS prevention campaigns to gender equality programs to dissemination of better agricultural techniques, to supporting media development. We aim to fill this knowledge gap.

In addition, the AudienceScapes project hopes to facilitate healthier two-way communication in the development process by making the practitioners more aware of the information assets and needs of citizens and policymakers in developing countries.

The site has detailed information about Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Columbia, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Peru in the African continent and very recently has profiled Pakistan in Asia.

Introduction to AudienceScape project:

The shape of things to come by http://asmarterplanet.com/

Introduction to the video from youtube:

Over the past century but accelerating over the past couple of decades, we have seen the emergence of a kind of global data field. The planet itself – natural systems, human systems, physical objects – have always generated an enormous amount of data, but we didnt used to be able to hear it, to see it, to capture it. Now we can because all of this stuff is now instrumented. And its all interconnected, so now we can actually have access to it. So, in effect, the planet has grown a central nervous system.
Look at that complex set of relationships among all of these complex systems. If we can actually begin to see the patterns in the data, then we have a much better chance of getting our arms around this. Thats where societies become more efficient, thats where more innovation is sparked.

When we talk about a smarter planet, you can say that it has two dimensions. One is to be more efficient, be less destructive, to connect different aspects of life which do affect each other in more conscience and deliberate and intelligent ways. But the other is also to generate fundamentally new insights, new activity, new forms of social relations. So you could look at the planet as an information, creation and transmission system, and the universe was hearing its information but we werent. But increasingly now we can, early days, baby steps days, but we can actually begin to hear the planet talking to us.

Bruce Schneier on his blog on security and security technology points to this research paper "A Practical Attack to De-Anonymize Social Network Users" (pdf). The paper introduces a novel, practical de-anonymization attack that makes use of the group information in social networking sites.

Abstract >> Social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Xing have been reporting exponential growth rates. These sites have millions of registered users, and they are interesting from a security and privacy point of view because they store large amounts of sensitive personal user data.
In this paper, we introduce a novel de-anonymization attack that exploits group membership information that is available on social networking sites. More precisely, we show that information about the group memberships of a user (i.e., the groups of a social network to which a user belongs) is often sufficient to uniquely identify this user, or, at least, to significantly reduce the set of possible candidates. To determine the group membership of a user, we leverage well-known web browser history stealing attacks. Thus, whenever a social network user visits a malicious website, this website can launch our de-anonymization attack and learn the identity of its visitors.

The implications of our attack are manifold, since it requires a low effort and has the potential to affect millions of social networking users. We perform both a theoretical analysis and empirical measurements to demonstrate the feasibility of our attack against Xing, a medium-sized social network with more than eight million members that is mainly used for business relationships. Our analysis suggests that about 42% of the users that use groups can be uniquely identified, while for 90%, we can reduce the candidate set to less than 2,912 persons. Furthermore, we explored other, larger social networks and performed experiments that suggest that users of Facebook and LinkedIn are equally vulnerable (although attacks would require more resources on the side of the attacker). An analysis of an additional five social networks indicates that they are also prone to our attack.

Via @steph3n | Stephen Kline