Mobile web once again proves to be a safety valve when it comes to overcoming communication barriers, as in the case in Japan, recently shaken by a massive earthquake. Japan is the country with the highest number of mobile media users, over three-quarters of mobile owners using mobile media. According to comScore, after the earthquake on the 11^th of March, a rocketing increase in internet traffic, especially from mobile devices, even during periods of severe communication lines interruptions caused by the natural event.

At the beginning of this year, the conflicts in Egypt, where the oppressive government decided to cut off major communication lines, escalated through the use of mobile social media. With mobile devices, Egyptians could use social media channels to organize themselves, in order to take action against the tyrant regime and find out real-time information of what was happening throughout the country.  Similarly, the rest of the world was able to maintain communication with the swells of freedom fighters thanks to mobile communication methods.

In the case of Japan, communication lines were not interrupted by over-empowered leaders, but by a naturally driven hazard. TV-viewing and call-making were impossible to use in the first hours/days of the disaster in some parts of Japan, making mobile internet a safety tool for staying in touch with the latest news and loved ones. Again, social media has an important word to say in crisis management as there were earthquake victims that used mobile internet to send messages of help to rescuers.

Mobile data traffic is one of the pillars of future communications and a report  from shows that worldwide mobile data traffic is due to increase 26-fold to 75 exabytes annually, exceeding the figures presented by Cisco last year (when they predicted that by 2014 there would be an increase to 40 exabytes). Going deeper into the matter, it appears that the growing number of owners of mobile devices, such as laptops, tablets and smartphones will account for 66 percent of all Cisco mobile data traffic by 2015.

Unfortunately, as well prepared as Japan tried to be, the business world is still affected and will continue to be in the following months, or even longer. Japan is one of the major players in the tech industry, and some of the most important companies, such as Toshiba, Sony and Canon have already announced the closing down of some plants until the situation’s redress. This in turn will lead to major delays in raw materials that Japan provided for tech giants like Apple, Sony Ericsson and not only, adding increased prices for certain components, especially the bulging chip business, which is in the swells of the evolving mobile movement.

We should also note the CSN (Community Seismic Network), a budding network that taps into mobile devices’ accelerometers to detect earthquakes and warn affected communities and individuals.  The project is a joint effort from seismologists, engineers, computer scientists, professors, and students at Caltech that created this intelligent tool. Another key solution comes from a team of scientists from various universities in Taiwan. They created a mobile app that informs about the precise location of the user ‘trapped in earthquake rubble or buried by landslides’. The app is called Mobile Savior and can be purchased at a modest price of $2.99.