A late Pew Internet study tells us how much and how teens text.… ‘Texting on a cellphone’ examines the tools teens use to communicate, with a particular focus on mobile devices, and then places the use of those tools in the broader context of how teens choose to communicate with people in their lives. Texting volume is up while the frequency of voice calling is down. About one in four teens say they own smartphones. Read the full report by Amanda Lenhart on Pew Internet.

Texting is the dominant daily mode of communication between teens and all those with whom they communicate. The volume of texting among teens has risen from 50 texts a day in 2009 to 60 texts for the median teen text user.

Overall, 16% of all teens have used a tablet computer to go online in the last 30 days and smartphone owners are also the most likely to be tablet users. Some 30% of smartphone users have used tablets to go online in the past month, while 13% of regular phone users and 9% of those without cell phones have done the same. Fewer smartphone users have used the internet on a desktop or laptop computer in the last month than regular phone users (85% vs. 93%.)

John K. Mullen started in The HBR Blog Network a series about The New Rules for Getting a Job. Mullen warns digital natives to be aware that the internet may have partially rewired their brain in such a way that when they meet people face to face, they’re less capable of figuring out what others are thinking.

Research indicates that because there’s only so much time in the day, face-to-face interaction time drops by nearly 30 minutes for every hour a person spends on a computer. With more time devoted to computers and less to in-person interactions, young people may be understimulating and underdeveloping the neural pathways necessary for honing social skills.

Are digital natives lacking the interpersonal skills necessary for certain types of jobs? Mentioned are some points to consider for digital natives looking for a position in a field that requires human interaction.

A new mobile world order will emerge, with leaders being created by entrepreneurs and disruptors. Three trends are shaping these opportunities.

“The key to the mobile era is that it’s all about delighting and empowering the end user. The end user interacts with technology the way he/she interacts with the world around them“.

BYOD, Bring Your Own Device: With the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets, individual employees are literally taking the power in their hands, bringing the devices to work that they are the most productive on. These devices create complex problems for companies involving data security, personalization, provisioning, and more.

Appification: Users today are trained and expect to do one thing with each product or service they use.

Cloudification: The mobile experience really gets powerful when it leverages back-end cloud-based services, combining mobile device capabilities like touch, location and personalization with cloud-based capabilities like streaming, social networking, push notifications, updates, scalable data storage and computing.

Read on Forbes Navin Chaddha s full article about the mobile revolution

In order to thrive online as individuals — and for the health of the online commons — we need to understand literacies of attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration, and network awareness. Howard Rheingold believes that the critical uncertainty about the future value of the Web depends on whether a sufficient proportion of the population learns these skills. So he has written a book that he wants to be well-received by the knowledgeable and given as a gift to the less knowledgeable. Slated for Spring 2012 publication by MIT Press, Howard Rheingold launches Net Smart today at SXSWi. SX scheduled a book signing session. (table of contents, pdf)

In Net Smart Howard Rheingold shows us how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully. (book description)

Questions Answered

1. Is the Web making us stupid, or do we need to learn how to use it effectively?
2. How do we balance multitasking and focus?
3. How do people assess the accuracy of information online?
4. What are the key collaboration skills necessary online today?
5. What do people need to know about networks & social networks to thrive online?

Also notice this recorded session about Net Smart on YouTube and read at Mediashift this interview Roland Legrand had with Howard about Net Smart.

The New York Times : “Getting a decent data connection at SXSW can be a challenge, given that it attracts what may be the most data-hungry crowd in the world. With a project called Homeless Hotspots, a marketing company is helping out with this, while helping the homeless and promoting itself. Homeless people have been enlisted to roam the streets wearing T-shirts that say “I am a 4G hotspot.” Passersby can pay what they wish to get online via the 4G-to-Wi-Fi device that the person is carrying. It is a neat idea on a practical level, but also a little dystopian. When the infrastructure fails us… we turn human beings into infrastructure? — David Gallagher”

also check out: BBH Labs Saneel Radia

Wired’s backstory Behind “Homeless Hotspots” at SXSWi

Check out on Paper.li the SXSW daily news curated of 640 news spotters on Twitter. On Scoop.it you find more curated SXSW News 2012 including the updates of the South By South West, NL Report. This is a Groupblog on Posterous initiated by @erwblo with the contribution of the entire delegation of 35 prominent dutch bloggers.

Timeline How 160 characters changed the way we communicate 19 years ago … by Mark O’Neill

It’s hard to believe but it has been just over 19 years since the first text message was sent from a computer to a mobile phone, and 18 years since the first phones were produced that allowed people to send text messages to one another. These days, text messaging is so common and widespread (especially among the younger generation) that it is hard to think of a time when it did not exist.

A story about how we design and manufacture in a non-linear world, using agile software development, modular design, and rapid prototyping, the WikiSpeed car development team, developing a 100 MGP car for the Automotive X-Prize, has achieved an extraordinary compression of development time.

My argument is that better much better does not necessarily cost the earth.

Its is about a new literacy and logic in how we make stuff. This is a key part of the No Straight Lines Story.

Some interesting key points highlighted over at the p2p Foundation

1. Designed and manufactured a 4-passenger street-legal car that gets 100 mpg
2. The car was constructed using off-the-shelf parts
3. The car is entirely modular in design
4. They innovated a new process for carbon-fiber body construction that costs 1/360th the traditional process
5. You can pre-order cars now for less than $29,000
6. This is not just a one-off prototype. Currently they are manufacturing one car per week (yes, that’s the low volume manufacturing retail price). They are targeting a future price of under $20,000.
7. With no capital investment
8. Though accept donations
9. Everything is done through volunteers

Also read:

• The No Straight Lines challenge: be realistic imagine the impossible
• 6 challenges for a non-linear world
• The NEXT Silicon Valley is not a place it’s a platform
• LEGO CUUSOO – the WHAT’S NEXT for business in a non-linear world
• Patients Know Best: a new literacy for healthcare

Marc Halpern, Vice President of Gartner Manufacturing Industry Advisory Service, recently suggested that crowdsourcing could fix manufacturing by leaning on crowds for some aspects of product design and development.

Beyond improving the exchange of ideas, crowdsourcing can also be useful for keeping companies “in touch with the tenor of the market,” says Halpern.

Software Advice Analyst Derek Singleton caught up with Halpern to learn how crowdsourcing might work in the manufacturing industry, and what needs to happen before it can gain widespread acceptance.

[Read Derek Singletons full article here]

Halpern explained, there are three obstacles that need to be overcome before crowdsourcing can become mainstream: fear of change, intellectual property issues, and a lack of design sharing technologies. Halpern shared three strategies for overcoming these obstacles.

1.Ease into crowdsourcing for idea creation. Historically, many manufacturers have taken the attitude that if it wasn’t invented within the “four walls,” an idea didn’t merit consideration. This can be a tough change management issue to tackle. One piece of advice Halpern offered is to start using crowdsourcing with a fringe product that isn’t core to the business. “These products can be used as a training ground for managers to get used to the approach,” explains Halpern. After a few successes, they might get bolder about introducing more products through crowdsourcing.
2.Divide projects to protect intellectual property (IP). IP theft is a big concern in the manufacturing industry. What’s to stop an outside party that collaborates with Proctor & Gamble from taking those ideas and collaborating with Clorox? Compartmentalizing roles in the project can help limit the problem of information sharing. For instance, a manufacturer may want to crowdsource just the fuel cell for a car but keep the rest of the car design proprietary. To protect the IP of the car design, manufacturers can limit information by narrowly defining crowdsourced project roles and information access.
3.Create a single file sharing system for design files. There is a broad ecosystem of computer-aided design (CAD) software out there, with each system running its own flavor of XML code. This makes it difficult to share design files with collaborators. While creating a universal standard for CAD programs is beyond the reach of any one manufacturer, the industry as a group could push for format standardization. In Halpern’s view, creating a standard format and standard environment that everyone could use would go a long way toward enabling more crowdsourcing projects in manufacturing.