Jeff LaPorte, co-founder and chief architect at EQO Communications, has come-up with an IM Map of the world using his company’s IM interconnect capability, showing each country seems to have a preference for a different IM network.

For instance, 77.18 percent of Argentineans love MSN, followed by 9.99 percent who love GTalk. Mexicans (83.72 percent), Brazilians (77.18 percent) Dutch (65.41 percent), French (68.01 percent), Italians (60.45 percent) the Turks (75.6 percent) are all big MSN users. In many parts of Asia, Yahoo is big.

In Germany, however, they heart ICQ, while in the United States AIM (35 percent) still rules with Yahoo (25 percent) and MSN (23.93 percent) getting the silver and the bronze. GTalk has just over 12 percent share in the United States — a surprisingly large number. Another surprising fact about the numbers is how marginal AIM is outside of the States.

My only quibble with this data: Why no Skype, which is a very popular IM client/service across the world? If I remember correctly, EQO started off by offering mobile access to Skype, but later changed its game after being ignored by Skype.

The Olympics is a boon to translators. Much of the reporting, interpretation and documentation for the massively international event is handled by humans, but human translators with the right skills can be scarce. “Between some pairs of languages, there are very few people who are experts in both,” said Sanford Cohen, founder of message translation firm SpeakLike. But it’s not just the languages needed, either. New forms of communication like IM, email, voicemail and the web demand different approaches, and computers can help with both challenges.

Machine translation is nothing new: Systran, founded in 1968 to help translate Cold War communications, powered the 1997 launch of the Babelfish service that popularized online translation, and until recently, it was behind Google’s translation systems. Humorous results aside, machine translation works well when software has access to sample text or past translations. “There has been a significant improvement in translation quality because of computing power,” Dimitris Sabatakakis, Systran’s CEO, said.

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Google has released a Google Talk client for the iPhone that allows instant messaging as long as the application is open. I’d like to think of this as a nifty way around rising texting costs, but that’s unlikely, given how much time my phone spends in my pocket. If this type of mobile app takes off, it will raise a usability question for the high-end phone and MID apps developers. So much of our PC lives revolve around multiple applications staying open — and around the user focusing on the machine — but that isn’t how people use their mobile devices. So how do you build a phone that allows for multiple programs to be open, and how do you alert users to changes in the app’s status without going through carriers?