ReadWriteWeb

Yesterday's groundbreaking proposal by IBM for a new and open-source asynchronous protocol for machine-to-machine (M2M) Internet communication, called MQTT, cites a projected 1000x (put another way, 100,000%) increase in broadband device-generated traffic by the year 2020, and the need for a formal protocol for managing it all. Now, a study from the University of California San Diego's Global Information Industry Center (GIIC) projects, using data supplied by numerous sources including the FCC and network systems leader Cisco, suggests that bandwidth of that magnitude doesn't just simply fall out of the sky.

Excitement ran high for tablets today in wake of the iPad 2 announcement. Meanwhile, interest in smartphones is as high as ever. The post-PC era is upon us. We've made the case that these mobile devices are just part of a larger whole: the mobile cloud. Companies like Google and HP want to sell cloud services to mobile users.

But there's a big problem with that vision, and that's the mobile bandwidth bottleneck.

The much-awaited day has finally come: Google Goggles is Now Available on the iPhone.

Search for "Google Mobile App" in the iTunes app store and if you've got a 3GS or iOS4, you'll be able to use this incredible visual search technology. Take a picture of a landmark, a book, a bottle of wine or much more and you'll instantly receive Google search results about the subject of your photo. The availability of Goggles on iPhone was just announced minutes ago. See the demo video below. If you'll excuse me, I need to go run around and take pictures of things now, while jumping up and down and clapping.

You may have heard about the do-it-yourself structured data extraction and management service called Needlebase, which Google will acquire along with its parent company ITA Software if regulators aprove the merger. ITA will power travel search results for Google, and I'm sure that will be great, but Needlebase is a much more interesting technology to me.

Needlebase is a point and click tool for scraping data from web pages, turning that data into a database, normalizing it, de-duplicating it, and reconciling data similarities. It requires absolutely no technical knowledge - but with a little imagination it can do incredible things. ReadWriteWeb is excited to offer 100 invites to the closed beta of Needlebase today. Read on for screenshots and info about how to get an account.

Human-powered search site Mahalo, created by notable entrepreneur, investor and blogger Jason Calacanis, may soon be involved in a class-action lawsuit, the result of a change to its Terms and Conditions that may have affected the pay of its contractors and employees.

Meanwhile, as Mahalo's legal troubles begin, CEO Calacanis is preparing to launch a new project, itself called "Launch," which aims to be a direct challenger to TechCrunch.

One exabyte is a billion gigabytes. It's one quintillion bytes. And yes, "quintillion" is a number so large, it almost seems made-up. But that's how much online video will be consumed by 2017, according to new reports from U.K.-based research firm Coda. Actually, to be precise, they're claiming that mobile broadband users accessing the net via laptops and netbooks will consume 1.8 exabytes of video. Per month.

Today, Comcast announced that it will amend its Acceptable Use Policy and add a clause to it that will establish a "monthly data use threshold" of 250 GB per month. This effectively puts a cap on the amount a Comcast user can download per month and codifies an informal policy Comcast was already enforcing. While 250GB is a large amount of data right now, it won't be once a large number users start watching HD streams which can easily take up numerous GB per hours.