We are live at Sony’s product launch event at Mobile World Congress, checking out what the Japanese giant has cooked up now that it has jettisoned the Sony Ericsson brand and gone it alone.

Rumours suggest some powerful new Android smartphones, maybe even a Windows Phone device? Read on to find out.

As Mobile World Congress prepares to open its doors in Barcelona tomorrow, Chinese manufacturer Huawei has unveiled what it claims is the world’s fastest smartphone – the Ascend D Quad.

With a K3V2 quad-core 1.2GHz/1.5GHz processor, this Android Ice Cream Sandwich-touting handset will certainly be no slouch.

In a 64mm x 8.9mm casing, it sports a 4.5-inch 720P HD display, Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound and Audience earSmart voice technology. Camera-wise, we’re looking at a pretty standard (for high-end Android devices) 8-megapixel rear camera and 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera, plus 1080p full HD video-capture and playback.

Huawei claims that the 1800mAh battery will last “for one to two days with normal usage.” Experience of brochure battery life claims leads us to believe that when we see it, although the company claims that proprietary power management technology boosts battery life by up to 30%. The Ascend D Quad will be available in black and white models.

Huawei has also announced the Ascend D quad XL, with a 2500mAh battery for a supposed “two to three days of normal usage,” and the Ascend D1, with a 1.5 GHz dual-core CPU and 1670mAh battery.

The Ascend D quad series is set to launch in China, Australia, Europe, Asia-Pacific, North and South America, and the Middle East in Q2 2012. The Ascend D1 is set to launch in these markets in April 2012.

Meanwhile, The Verge has pictures of Huawei’s MediaPad 10 HD, an Android Ice Cream Sandwich tablet with a 1080p display and an 8-megapixel camera in a super-thin 8.8mm thick casing.

Keep up with all The Next Web’s Mobile World Congress coverage here.

Huawei Ascend D Quad

While traveling in India, entrepreneur Adam Braun found a small boy begging on the streets and asked him, “What do you want most in the world?” The boy answered, “A pencil.”

Following that experience, in 2008, when he was just 24 years old, Braun started a nonprofit organization called Pencils of Promise with $25 in hopes of building one school. This year, the organization plans to build 100 schools and fund 1 million days of education for students all over the world.

Pencils of Promise operates with 10 full-time staff in New York City and 60 full time staff between the 3 countries where they currently have schools– Laos, Nicaragua and Guatemala. In just under 4 years, the organization has grown thanks to the efforts of hundreds of interns, thousands of young professional volunteers and a truly enviable social media following.

With over 124,000 Twitter followers and 150,000 fans on Facebook, PoP is one of the more socially active, emerging nonprofits out there. “We have a really savvy social media team of 19-24 year olds,” says Braun. “They use guerrilla tactics to reach out to our audience and engage with other communities but at the end of the day, social media only grows if you put in the man hours to make it happen.” Braun does admit that his friendship with pop star Justin Bieber (Braun’s brother is Bieber’s manager) has certainly helped augment the nonprofit’s following. On Bieber’s sold out “My World Tour” he donated $1 from every ticket sold to Pencils of Promise, resulting in millions of dollars to build new schools.

One other clever way Pencils of Promise has reached out to its fans is through its “PoP Stars of the Week”, which highlights the success stories of those who are creating the greatest change through the organization. “We realized that for us to grow and to have a deeply engaged community we needed to highlight one individual or group who through their own personal actions is creating good for Pencils of Promise,” says Braun.

PoP Stars of the Week turned into a competition to choose the PoP Star of the Month and then PoP Star of the Year. Last year, a hardworking intern named Maya from Virginia Beach took home the prize after donating her birthday to Pencils of Promise and making a 4ft long Pencil birthday cake to celebrate.

A “Competition of Compassion” to build 100 schools

This year, at the Summit Series Basecamp conference, Braun says “the gauntlet was thrown down” by his friend Cameron Sinclair, the founder of Architecture for Humanity, a nonprofit design firm that promises a more sustainable future through the power of professional design. Forbes caught the throw down on camera in which Sinclair challenged Braun to build 100 classrooms this year.

“The two take different approaches to building schools in areas of extreme poverty. Architecture For Humanity’s schools are higher quality, disaster resistant, using trained professionals as well as local labor and therefore cost more to build, at about $25,000 per classroom. Pencils Of Promise constructs a less expensive basic classroom at $10,000, using local labor and offers educational programs for the schools,” writes Forbes author Kym McNicholas.

“At the end of the day we acknowledged that the only thing that can come out of this is good,” says Braun. Sinclair calls the bet, that will see 200 schools built this year around the world, “competitive compassion.” The two plan to collaborate on a school together in Detroit, Michigan.

A Partnership with Playbutton to fund 1 million days of education

To fund 1 million days of education, Pencils of Promise has teamed up with Playbutton, a New York based company that makes wearable buttons that play music. Playbutton’s founder Adam Tichauer is a good friend of Braun’s and sits on the PoP board.

Playbutton started out as a record label, finding bands and then distributing their music on the Playbutton (pictured above). It’s essentially a piece of art that adds tangibility to digital music. Tichauer hooked bands early like Florence and the Machine and The xx and his company grew into a successful marketing platform.

The two Adams (pictured below) went to Brown University together and became friends while living in New York City. “One day, Adam [Braun] came into my apartment and said, ‘Hey, do you want to build a school?’ At the time he was a consultant and I was in finance. I said, ‘That’s crazy,’ and he said, ‘No seriously, I want to do this.’ You could tell it was something he wanted to do whether I was going to help or not,” says Tichauer.

Tichauer has been involved in PoP since day one, helping Braun out with fundraising events on a volunteer basis. Their next mission is to connect Playbutton with Pencils of Promise to fund 1 million days of education for students at Pencils of Promises schools worldwide.

Tichauer explains that Playbutton is a “For Purpose Organization”, which sits at the intersection of the for profit and nonprofit world. While they are officially a for profit, a percentage of their profits goes through a non profit organization. In this case, that organization is Pencils of Promise. Both Adams believe strongly that this collaborative model is the way of the future.

In 2012, for every Playbutton that’s purchased, the company will donate 1 day of education to a child through Pencils of Promise. “As a company it’s inherent that we create good with everything we do,” says Tichauer.

Each Playbutton retails for $20 and can be purchased at the Playbutton online store as well as at The New Museum and Opening Ceremony in New York City. A portion of each button will go to Pencils of Promise to sustain one child per day. To educate a child for an entire year, it costs just $25.

This week, Braun is heading to Laos and will be breaking ground on Pencils of Promise’s 55th school, the 20th of 100 schools to be built this year. 2012 promises to be quite the energetic year for the adventurous nonprofit.

➤ Want to get involved? Visit Pencils of Promise to take action.

Launched in January during CES, Liquipel is now expanding to Australia, Brazil and China, the American company announced today, ahead of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

As you may remember, Liquipel’s ambition is to make your iPhone and other electronics waterproof thanks to liquid-repellent nano-coating.

According to the startup, its material is both extra-thin and protects against water damage. Thanks to this innovation, Liquipel became one of the Edison Awards’ finalists earlier this year.

The company is now taking things one step further and launching in three new countries. While it opening local offices in Brazil and China with local partners, it also signed a licensing agreement for Australia with the local mobile and electronics retailer Vita Group.

Besides its global expansion, the company also announced six new board members and advisors, including Kingston Technology’s former CFO Henri Tchen and Mobile Entertainment Forum – Americas’ founder Ralph Simon.

In case you’re still wondering, these appointments come as the confirmation that Liquipel isn’t science-fiction. While it remains to be seen if it entirely lives up to its claims, it is very much real, and it could soon come to your country.

➤ Liquipel

While Britney Spears has set a blazing trail on Google+, as the first personal account to reach first 1 million, and then 2 million followers, when it comes to official Google+ pages, that accolade has just gone to British alternative rock band, Coldplay.

When it comes to Google+ pages, the figure is slightly skewed as it includes the number of people who have +1′d the page as well. But according to ZoomSphere, a social media statistics site, Coldplay was the first page to cross the 1 million follower mark.

Since the end of January, the page has almost doubled in followers with a huge growth spurt in just this past month.

Elsewhere in social media, Coldplay has 5.8 million followers on Twitter, a far cry from the top 10 with Lady Gaga leading with over 19 million followers. On Facebook, the official Coldplay page has 18 million followers, which also trails far behind the top 10 list.

Next in line on Google+’s top 10 most followed pages is yet another band. The official Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Google+ page has over 700,000 followers, followed by Pearl Jam, 106 and Park, Team Coco, ESPN, Sugarland, FC Barcelona, Train and Chelsea Football Club.

It’s interesting that out of the top 10 Google+ pages, four of them are mainstream bands, all of which fit into the alternative rock band genre, with not a single official Google-related page, or anything remotely geeky in sight for that matter. Google’s own official page has just over 170,000 followers, while the official Google+ page has just over 140,000.

Introduced in November, Google+ pages have been growing at an impressive rate, outpacing Twitter’s official brand accounts by about four times, but still lagging in comparison to Facebook.

US President Obama’s official Google+ page has recently been flooded with comments, but they’re not coming from where you’d expect. It’s not US citizens that are flooding the president’s page with comments of encouragement, criticism, or otherwise. In fact, a vast majority of the comments are being made in Chinese.

At first glance, it looks like the official Google+ page is being spammed, but taking a look at some of the comments left in English, you’ll realise that it’s Chinese citizens who have taken to the social network to decry their government’s appalling human rights track record.

One of the comments in English reads:

Dear President Obama，I’m sorry to write some irrelevant comments under your post. Due to my appreciation and trust to your country’s consistent respect to human right, I left this message, to implore the government of your country to call for the freedom of the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng in international community , thank you!

The latest post plugging the new bumper stickers for the 2012 Obama-Biden campaign, and many of those preceding it, have been over-run with hundreds of comments about human rights issues, green cards, requests to pressure the Chinese government to release imprisoned activists, and more.

While Google+ has been blocked in China since its launch, it would appear that due to a glitch in the system, Chinese residents have suddenly found that they can access the social network on their mobile phones, and are using this time to leave comments on Obama’s page.

As AFP reports, it can’t be verified if all of these comments are in fact coming from China, but the comments left in Chinese are written in simplified Chinese characters, the dialect used in mainland China.

Google+ isn’t the only social network that appears to have been affected by the glitch with Twitter, Facebook and YouTube reportedly all available in China, although Obama’s Facebook page and Twitter account do not appear to have been inundated by Chinese replies or comments.

We’ve gotten pretty used to the standard landing page for any new app. Hand holding a flashy iPhone displaying the app? Check. A list of all the ways this app is going to change your life forever? Check.

At first glance, Yutuzo might look like a real app, but don’t be fooled. Take a closer look, and you’ll realise that it’s available on the “crApp store”, is great for scaring off ghosts, while also being hipster-optimised, and saves pandas. It also takes a swipe or two at social networking and the vintage filter-filled iPhoneography craze.

Yutuzo is the handy work of a UK-based designer, who goes by the name Visual Idiot, and while hilarious, also actually takes the chance to plug a good cause. Clicking on the app store button takes you to the donation page of the anti animal cruelty charity, the RSPCA. (Yes, we clicked).

➤ Yutuzo | Check out the rest of Visual Idiot’s work over at Dribbble.

Updated: It appears as if someone pulled the trigger on this release too soon, as it was originally intended to be released tomorrow at midnight. Adobe has now removed the app from the App Store and it should show up again Monday morning.

Nearly a year after showing off a demo of the App, Adobe has finally released Photoshop Touch for the iPad. According to 9to5Mac, it’s presently available in the Australia and New Zealand app stores, and should hit the US version sometime in the next few hours with a $9.99 price tag.

Of course, for those of you who might own a Android tablet, this is old news. Photoshop Touch has been available on Android for quite some time. It has always struck me as strange that Adobe would release on Android first, given Apple’s dominance in the design sphere, but fact is fact.

“People will be amazed with what they can create on the iPad using Photoshop Touch,” said David Wadhwani of Adobe. “Photoshop Touch combines the magic of Photoshop and its core features with the convenience of a tablet, bringing image-editing power to the fingertips of millions of people.”

Photoshop Touch gives users the ability to combine multiple photos into layered images, make essential edits and apply professional effects to create beautiful artwork, touch up photos, paint, lay out ideas, and much more. The Scribble Selection Tool allows users to easily extract objects in an image by simply scribbling on what to keep and, then, what to remove. With Refine Edge technology from Photoshop, even hard-to-select areas with soft edges are easily captured when making selections. Photoshop Touch helps users quickly find images and share creations through integration with Facebook and Google Image Search

The company released a total of 6 tablet apps only a few months ago, including Photoshop Touch, but they were all for Android only. Now, at least for some of the apps, iOS owners get some love too.

Photoshop Touch, via the App Store

Coming to SuperConf in Miami Beach is like coming home for Jason Baptiste of Onswipe, a company that TNW’s Coutney Boyd Myers called “the future of publishing“. He’s a Florida native, who moved with his team to New York City in order to be part of the illustrious TechStars program.

The topic of much debate after raising $1 million during the program, Onswipe has gone on to power the tablet version of some of the world’s hottest websites such as The WIRED store, open a self-service platform and inked a partnership for WordPress.com sites.

Now, Baptiste is back in his old stomping grounds, with a talk that he has said is “2 years in the making”. ”Da art of storytellin‘” is Baptiste’s explanation for what he does as the CEO of a white-hot startup. He relays the history of being dead broke with $3,006 in the bank, bootstrapping Onswipe at IncubateMiami and how the company has now raised $6 million, has 24 employees and continues to move forward. He does this because, as he puts it, his role as the CEO is to be a storyteller.

“I am a 2012 equivalent of Dr. Seuss. I tell the stories. The Press, investors and employees are my audience.”

So how do you get the story? Baptiste breaks it down to tips that are applicable to just about every company, no matter how large or small.

Speak in soundbites – The “awesome round” was no accident, says Baptiste. He knew very well that he was speaking in bits that could easily be tweeted and shared.

Have a sexy product – CSS and HTML can be sexy, to the right audience. Find your audience and tailor your talk to what will be intersting to them.

Can you make grandma understand it? – It’s so easy to get lost in the technical jargon. Make sure that, no matter what you do, your grandmother could understand it. Even if it’s highly complex, you can probably break down your idea to something that’s easy to digest.

How will it be worth $1,000,000,000? – This gets you into the mindset of not just meeting, but surpassing, your goals. Consider what you can do to move beyond the next point, even before you reach it. For Baptiste and Onswipe, that billion dollar goal was what drove them to leave the sunny shores in Miami and head to NYC, where their audience of advertisers resides.

Arrington loves a headline – No surprise here, we at TNW love headlines too. It’s really hard to write things that are boring. When you’re pitching your product, yourself or your company, make sure that you’re speaking in terms that are interesting to the audience. If you want to increase your chances of getting written about, help feed us a story that’s worth the headline.

Get others to believe in and tell your story – I’ve hounded on this one over and again, and I’m glad to see Baptiste bring it up. Your product will only matter when other people believe in it and then use it. When they believe in it, they will tell your story. It’s that word of mouth that we heard about earlier today and there’s simply nobody better to tell your story than a customer who believes in what you’re doing.

Demos Rule Everything Around Me – When Baptiste was pitching Onswipe, he says that he never had a pitch deck. Instead, the company had a demo of its product and that was the pitch.

Be on a mission bigger than yourself – Inside the company, outside of the company and everywhere, there’s no better way to drive your team than to have a vision that is greater than the present sum of its parts.

“Startups are incredibly difficult. I can tell you 10 reasons why Onswipe might not work, but I’m going to tell you the 10 reasons why it will. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.”

Stop pitching, start storytelling – There’s a truth to this that is simply beyond the comprehension of most people. Nobody likes to be sold to, but people love a good story. If your pitch sounds like a pitch, it’s easy to lose people. If your pitch is an engaging, relatable story, you’ll have an audience forever.

So there you have it, from a startup that went from bootstrapped to successful in under 2 years, 9 actionable tips toward telling your own stories.

If you have ever dreamed of playing a zombie in the US cult series The Walking Dead, we have bad news; there are far fewer extras on the set that you may think.

This is only one of the dirty little secrets revealed in a video posted on Vimeo by the visual effects house Stargate Studios. Here’s a surprising behind-the-scenes look at how one of our favorite shows is made:

Walking Dead Season 2 VFX Reel from Stargate Studios on Vimeo.

Chinese Internet giant Tencent is reportedly set for a significant boost from Microsoft, with a deal to include its services in the Chinese version of the latest Windows Phone 7 operating system said to be agreed.

Last week we revealed more claims that Windows Phone 7.6 — aka ‘Tango’ — devices will debut in March, with phones from four operators, one of which is thought to be Nokia’s Lumia 800. The localized version of Tango will support services and features from China’s unique Internet space, and Tencent is said to be the main benefactor.

A Shanghai Daily report [subscription], via Eastday, cites an “industry source” as revealing that Tencent’s QQ Game Hall gaming platform — which recently passed a whopping 200 million registered users — will replace the regular Xbox integration, as games consoles are banned from sale in China.

If the speculation is true, the choice of Game Hall — which is already available across Symbian, Java, Android, iOS and via HTML5 — will gain it further reach in the country’s smartphone space.

The integration is said to “allow users to log in through their QQ accounts and find their QQ friends immediately”. Such ease of access would encourage new signs-ups and increase the activity of existing ones using the yet-to-be-revealed Tango phones from HTC, LG, ZTE and, of course, Nokia.

In addition, rumor has it that Tencent Weibo — its Chinese microblog service with 300 million registered users — is Microsoft’s selection as the social media service central to the Tango operating system in China.

Our report last week included a screenshot that appeared to show a Tango user linking to an account on rival microblogging service Sina Weibo. The latest rumors make no mention of exclusivity for Tencent Weibo, and we’d expect both microblog services to supported. Microsoft would be wise to cater to Sina Weibo’s 250 million users, and other Chinese social networks too.

The launch is shrouded in leaks and speculation, another of which says Microsoft inked its first distributor contract with a deal with retailer Suning. The move is likely to be one of many as Microsoft looks to secure strong reach for its devices in the world’s largest smartphone market.

Little is known of Tango as yet — with video calling a rumored inclusion — but we are unlikely to have to wait much longer for official confirmation of the new operating system from Microsoft. Tango, and its first devices, are likely to be introduced at next week’s Mobile World Congress event.

We will have full details of all the significant news that is announced at the show as it breaks in Barcelona.