So if you ever dreamed to see what 210 billion emails, 3 million Flickr images, 43 million gigabytes (on phones) sent on an average day really means, have a look at the image below.

Literally mindblowing…

Online Education

I though just realized today, while checking my online mobile phone bills of the last three month, that I actually managed not to overrun my monthly fee! And that’s the first time since 2006!

So where’s the trick?

I was at least expecting to have to pay my mobile operator a comfortable fee for extra calls given from abroad, as I was “sailing the seven seas” since the end of April. But I was not claimed any extra money to feed my provider with. Good news (for me)!

I then realized that, as a dyed in the whool digital native, I had not so badly prepared (digitally talking at least) my trip throughout the Atlantic ocean… as one of my first concerns was to be able to stay in touch with my family and friends at sea and while landing @ our ports of call.

When we were ridding the waves, thousand of nautics aways from any piece of ground, the only widely available communication resource for the crew was the email. One very same email adress shared by 30 people. In that case, you’d better warn your friends, and particularly those amateurs of weird stuff you can find on the Internet, about this peculiar thing! Else, you could end up doing the least entertaining chores available on board…

Since we were most of the time kept busy with hundred of things to do, the big challenge was to be as efficient and savvy as possible with the free time we were granted, while updating as much as possible our friends and family on how the odyssey was evolving. Twittermail has probably saved me from being else tied to writting dozens of emails per day to relatives, or to facing a bunch of disappointed friends kept appart from the wonderful adventure I was living.

One status update sent to my Twittermail adress was enough to keep updated my Twitter followers and Facebook contacts at once, on how things were going down here. You can see some samples of what I posted while at sea here under What happened on my twitter this week.

Land in sight!

During my 3 month sailing trip my cellphone has switched between something like 20 different mobile phone providers’ networks. Which one was the most convenient? I have no idea, as, luckily, I never had to use any of them.

Today most cities, at least in the West, are real webs of wifi networks. Internet access can be found almost anywhere and for free or for an outrageous low fee. So why should I pay for cellphone communications, when I have at the reach of hand, the possibility to call for free using softwares like Skype on my PC and Nimbuzz on my Symbian phone?

After three month of intensively using both applications I can testify that in our today’s world it is “soooo 1990″ to communicate on a cellular network and pay for it!We now have to take a maximum profit of what is made available to us FOR FREE, which is no luxury today in our economy, and get ready for the next big leap in our habits to communicate (WiMax).

Let’s just hope that mobile phone providers will accept to face that truth one day soon and become reasonable when it comes to charging their loyal customer a fee, which is still unfortunately today,  disgraceful.

***

My Facebook friends sometimes leave me wall messages that I take forever to respond to when I’m running between Paris and Vienna. Now they can call me or chat with me directly via a widget embedded on my Facebook profile page. The Nimbuzz widget detects presence and shows if I’m online. If I’m offline, Nimbuzz also includes a “Buzz” feature to alert me that people are trying to reach me.

The head spins with the potential for abuse of this well-intentioned feature, though. Calling me from overseas from a PC? Nimbuzz can help. Sending international SMS? No problem, you can use Nimbuzz. Theoretically, you could use some combination of Meebo/ebuddy/Trillian, Skype, Fring and your phone’s native IM/text messaging to do all that, but Nimbuzz packages it well and makes it simple! Simplicity comes from the unified interface across devices; I don’t have to import IM contacts into Skype and vice versa, for example.

While lots of companies are working on some combination of voice and IM features, Nimbuzz’s differentiation is its support for a wide variety of mobile handsets (currently at 1000 devices with native support for Symbian, Java and Windows Mobile) and good integration with several other social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Windows Live, Google Talk, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ and many other more.

I downloaded the Nimbuzz social networking widget here, which made it brain-dead easy to add a Facebook application to my profile page. I was then able to send messages and files from Facebook to the mobile phone Nimbuzz client installed on my Nokia.

Call quality using Skype or Nimbuzz’ online widget really went beyond my expectations (as I am a former disappointed fring user): the sound is just as clear and crispy as if I were calling from Skype on a desktop.

Nimbuzz’s last to date release features everything and the kitchen sink: It provides PC to PC/mobile calling, IM aggregation across several communities, group chat and conferencing, free voicemail, file sharing, a Facebook/LinkedIn application, a social networking and email call/chat widget, a WAP site, a Symbian/Windows mobile application as well as a desktop program. It also goes without saying that the company is working on an iPhone-specific version.

Now the mobile version of Nimbuzz convinced me, I’ll probably head for the PC version to benefit from the same “one login, one contact list, all accounts” feature.

With the growing development of social media software applications it has turned into an absolute necessity for most of us to stay “visible” to others, should they be family, friends or business partners, regarding what we’re doing or where we are (speaking the language of social media, this translates into: “keep your status up to date”!). In other words: if you’re not visible, it means else that you don’t exist/your life is too boring/you don’t care, or that you’ve never heard of social media or don’t have a computer.

Places like twitter, facebook or myspace, have quickly turned into absolute references of social networking apps, and some networking websites like LinkedIn are now even offering features derived from those newly arrived social media applications! Some existing features even allow you to update all your profiles at once and link them into a network! Could that be the beginning of an era dedicated to the convergence of social media? We cannot hope for more…

For those of us who are often “on the road” or incredibly mobile, and fear for their “on-line social death”, ShoZu has developed one clever free piece of software for mobile phones which simplifies the access to your favourite social media apps from the palm of your hand! ShoZu showcases more than 50 on-line social communities, email distribution lists, blogs, photo sites and other popular web destinations (click here to access the full list) you can now access from almost any existing mobile phone with multimedia features.

ShoZu allows you, from your mobile phone, to easily and quickly update your status and see your friends’ feeds (twitter, facebook, Seesmic, etc), upload geo-tagged pictures (flickr’) or videos (dailymotion, youtube), do some citizen journalism (reuters, CNN, BBC, etc), send emails or even post on your blog (WordPress, Blogger, Vox, Lifejournal, etc) from absolutely any location in the World!