Watch Mars Curiosity Rover's 7 Minutes Of Terror

Telefonica’s revenue comes half from Europe and half from Latin America. But it has 100 million customers in Europe and 200 million in Latin America, where there is just 13 percent smartphone penetration. Carlos Domingo and Michael Hecker “It’s kind of like two different businesses,” said Carlos Domingo, director of product development and innovation for Telefonica Digital, speaking at our D:Dive Into Mobile conference in April. Whereas in Europe, Telefonica is looking towards opportunities in business-to-business and cloud computing, in Latin America most of its customers don’t have bank accounts. Domingo is a forward-thinking kind of guy, leading his company’s work on things like Firefox OS and partnerships with and acquisitions of with companies like Everything.me and Tokbox. But he also knows his team is playing catch-up. Of WhatsApp, the immensely popular global text messaging app, Domingo said, “The’ve done something we should have done — we’ve been sitting on SMS without changing it very much.” But carriers continue to have valuable assets, chief among them their relationships with millions of customers. Michael Hecker, vice president of strategy, M&A and corporate development for Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), which has more than 70 million customers in Russia, noted that Russia is a sort of hybrid emerging/emerged market in and of itself. “We don’t have a problem being a dumb pipe as long as the dumb pipe delivers us the investment funds for going into other businesses,” he said, mentioning cloud computing and financial services. To that end, MTS is opening bank outlets in Russia, given its billing relationship with customers is often their only banking and credit relationship. The carrier uses its mobile customers’ payment history as an in-house credit score. Both Domingo and Hecker expressed strong interest in breaking away from Apple and Google’s control of the mobile market, noting their support for Mozilla and Microsoft, respectively. Check out the full interview with AllThingsD‘s Ina Fried here: [ See post to watch video ]

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You might think that a costly sunblock would be better at blocking UVA and UVB rays than a store brand at, say, Walgreens. However, according to Consumer Reports’ annual sun survey, that’s wrong. In tests of 12 sunscreen lotions and sprays to gauge their effectiveness    

Smartphones never cease to amaze me. I’m still impressed by how productive I’m able to be on my Android device no matter where I am (often to the chagrin of my wife), and I’m still surprised every time I see someone pull out a Square when it comes time to pay (like happened last night at Fat Choy in Las Vegas, a way-off-strip place you should totally check out if you’re in town). But neither of those situations really compare with busting out a phone in order to detect the levels of toxins in the air. Yet that’s exactly what a group of researchers at the University of Illinois have created — a cradle that wraps around an iPhone and turns it into a biosensor that can detect, according to a university press release, “toxins, proteins, bacteria, viruses and other molecules.” Inside that cradle are about $200 worth of mirrors, lenses and a photonic crystal that the researchers claim can identify these substances as accurately as a $50,000 spectrophotometer in the lab. The cradle is essentially there for support, though, while the phone’s camera and processor do the real work. With everything firmly aligned in front of the camera, a scientist would simply snaps a photo and the CPU processes the result. What it’s processing is the difference in wavelength that the photonic crystal, primed to react to a specific molecule, reflects. The team demonstrates the device and app in the video embedded below. And if you’re into this type of mobile data collection, another group of University of Illinois researchers actually created a smartphone-powered water-pollution device called MoboSens Like all things mobile or sensor, though — from SkinScan (now SkinVision) to health care apps like Ginger.io — the biggest value might come from data that has nothing to do with what the app is primarily measuring. Rather, when data about a certain condition, air quality or what have you is tagged with time and geodata, for example, it becomes the basis for mapping how situations are spreading or where there might be safe haven. Imagine a team of scientists with iPhones dispersed throughout a city after a disaster, painting a real-time picture of what areas are most affected by a particular toxin (or maybe radiation). Taking a longer term approach, researchers could track how situations are evolving over time. Throw in even more data that smartphones are capable of detecting — temperature, ambient noise, vibration, etc. — and we might unlock entirely new ways to think about how diseases spread through the air or what conditions tend to favor the spread of foodborne bacteria. In some ways, though, this is more than another cool thing you can do with a smartphone. It’s the furtherance of something we’ll discussing in depth at our Structure conference next month, which is how we rethink IT when computation and data are no longer bound within a single server or even the corporate network somewhere. The biological data this app will collect isn’t much use locked inside the phone; it needs a way to reliably and securely connect with other datasets and other services, likely distributed across the country or even the world. That’s where the real opportunity lies. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Connected world: the consumer technology revolution12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future    

The Justice Department, state governments and Apple met in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday before U.S. District Denise Cote to make arrangements for an upcoming trial in which Apple is accused of colluding with big publishers to fix the price of ebooks. The purpose of the hearing was to set schedules, review witness lists and go over last-minute evidence objections ahead of the trial. Cote proposed that each side should be given 22 hours over a four day period plus a final day for closing arguments; the federal government said it would need at least 30 hours to make its case, and Apple requested the same, meaning the total trial would last 12 days. Cote said she will decide in the near future. The parties also reviewed the witness list, who include prominent publishing CEOs like Macmillan’s John Sargent and Apple executive Eddy Cue. Today’s hearing also raised the possibility that News Corp CEO James Murdoch, who exchanged a series of emails with Apple’s Steve Jobs, could take the stand for cross-examination; the federal government will decide in coming days, on the basis of an evidence issue, whether this will be necessary. Much of the trial, however, is unlikely to feature dramatic CEO testimony. Instead, the core of the trial is likely to slog through recondite economic arguments and civil evidence issues; part of today’s hearing focused on expert witness opinion about the competitive effects of agency pricing and whether it coincided with Apple’s economic self-interest. Today’s hearing also focused on an ongoing dispute in which Apple is attempting to force its competitors, especially Amazon, to unseal evidence they have submitted as part of the proceedings. At the outset of the hearing, in a courtroom that rises 15 stories above lower Manhattan with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, Cote stressed that the case represented an enormous amount or work, and told the parties to call her “day or night” if they decided to settle. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.