Post: The Refugee as a User Segment: Ideas for Mobile Services, by Rachel Hinman. Adaptive Path Blog, 1 June 2008.

Intriguing, particularly the bit about “products and services designed for emergency situations have proven boons for innovation because they approach the problem from a non-market-centric mindset.” Mobile connectivity is slowly but surely changing everything.

Related (and fascinating in its own right): Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase’s TED presentation, Our cell phones, ourselves.

Article: China has 15 million underage smokers: govt. Agence France-Presse, 2 June 2008.

Does this surprise anyone? After years of seeing the number of smokers decline in the US, coming to China was quite a shock. The prevalence of smoking here is still surprising — seldom can you go to a restaurant and not be seated next to a smoker (something of which, after my wife became pregnant, I became more and more acutely aware). According to this CBC story, lung cancer rates have risen 30 percent over the last five years (likely more a result of better medical services increasing detection rates) and there’s no end in sight. Given the well-known link between smoking in parents and children, it comes as little shock that in a country of adult smokers there are lots of adolescent smokers as well.