Cash pours in for U.K. student with Web idea

Cash pours in for U.K. student with Web idea If you've been struggling to come up with a million-dollar idea, don't read this

News Story by Peter Graff DECEMBER 29, 2005 (REUTERS) - If you have an envious streak, you probably shouldn't read this.

Because chances are, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, is more clever than you are. And he is proving it by earning a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet.

Selling porn? Dealing prescription drugs? Nope. All he sells are pixels, the tiny dots on the screen that appear when you call up his home page.

He had the brainstorm for his million-dollar home page, called, logically enough, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, while lying in bed thinking about how he would pay for university costs.

The idea: turn his home page into a billboard made up of a million dots, and sell them for a dollar a dot to anyone who wants to put up his logo. A 10-by-10-dot square, roughly the size of a letter of type, costs $100.

Tew sold a few to his brothers and some friends, and when he had made $1,000, he issued a press release.

That was picked up by the news media and spread around the Internet, and soon enough, advertisers for everything from dating sites to casinos to real estate agents to The Times of London were putting up real cash for pixels with links to their own sites.

So far, they have bought up 911,800 pixels. Tew's home page now looks like an online Times Square, festooned with a multicolored confetti of ads.

"All the money's kind of sitting in a bank account," Tew said from his home in Wiltshire in southwest England. "I've treated myself to a car. I've only just passed my driving test, so I've bought myself a little black Mini."

The site features testimonials from advertisers, some of whom bought spots as a lark, only to discover that they were receiving actual valuable Web hits for a fraction of the cost of traditional Internet advertising.

Meanwhile, Tew has had to juggle running the site with his first term at university, where he is studying business. "It's been quite a difficulty trying to balance going to lectures and doing the site," he said.

But he may not have to study for long. Job offers have been coming in from Internet companies impressed by a young man who managed to figure out an original way to make money online.

"I didn't expect it to happen like that," Tew said. "To have the job offers and approaches from investors -- the whole thing is kind of surreal. I'm still in a state of disbelief."

Java browser makes wider Web accessible to more cell phones

Opera quietly releases Mini browser worldwide Java browser makes wider Web accessible to more cell phones

News Story by Nancy Gohring

DECEMBER 20, 2005 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Users of Java-capable cell phones anywhere may find browsing the Web easier and cheaper now that Opera Software ASA is allowing anyone to download its Opera Mini application. The official worldwide launch of Opera Mini is planned for January but Opera has quietly lifted restrictions that previously allowed only residents of some Nordic countries and Germany to download the application, a spokesman has confirmed.

Typically, full Web browsing is reserved for users of smart phones or handsets with powerful processing capabilities. Opera Mini is designed to improve on the limited Wireless Application Protocol surfing available on many phones, allowing users of Java-capable cell phone to surf the Web.

Cell phone users download the Opera Mini Java application, under 100KB in size, to their phones. The small client communicates with servers operated by Opera that strip down the size of Web pages, making them quicker to transfer to the cell phone and rendering them to fit on the small screen of the phone.

"The idea is that you shouldn't have to buy an expensive smart phone to browse the full Web," said Eskil Sivertsen, a spokesman for Opera.

Opera is hosting the back-end servers and cell phone customers can download and use the application free of charge, except for the fees related to using the mobile networks. Using Opera Mini should reduce fees that customers pay their cell phone operators, because the system compresses the size of Web sites by 70% to 80% before sending them to the handset, Sivertsen said. Most mobile data users pay based on how much data they download.

Users must have a cell phone capable of downloading a Java application. Sivertsen figures that there are 700 million phones being used today that are capable of downloading Opera Mini.

Opera is also offering Opera Mini to operators and content providers that can offer a branded and customized version to their users. The operator or content provider could host the back-end servers themselves or hire Opera to do so for them. Once users have the Opera Mini browser on their handsets, the operator or content provider can push content or special promotions to the browsers for users to see when they launch the browser. Opera is testing Opera Mini with operators and content providers around the world, Sivertsen said.

Opera Mini is meant to coexist with Opera Mobile, a full-fledged browser. Opera Mobile is designed for smart phones and can do anything a browser on a desktop computer can do, Sivertsen said. Opera Mini, in contrast, can be used on less-powerful handsets and has only limited support for advanced JavaScript and other advanced Web site tools.

Opera quietly enabled the download of Opera Mini to be able to prepare for the increased traffic on its servers before the official launch next month. The download has previously been available to cell phone users in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Germany.

The worldwide availability of Opera Mini was noticed recently by a mobile phone enthusiast who posted his find on Monday to the All About Symbian community Web site.

Reprinted with permission from

For more news from IDG visit IDG.net Story copyright 2005 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

Gmail goes mobile

Published Monday 19th December 2005 11:24 GMT

Gmail users can now access their account on the move as search giant Google launches Gmail Mobile

The small screen support for the popular e-mail account means that users can access their Gmail account from their mobile phone, using the URL http://m.gmail.com.

According to Google, the page will automatically optimise its interface for whatever phone you are using, adjusting it depending on the size of your mobile phone screen. The service also allows users to open attachments such as photos, Microsoft Word documents and PDF files.

One interesting feature is the ability to reply to e-mail by calling your contact - once you have a phone number for the sender in your Gmail contacts list. The new service should work on most mobile phones - although Gmail has a list of phones that it knows definitely support the service.

The latest moves come amid fierce rivalry between Google, Yahoo and MSN, who are all competing for users. Yahoo already offers a mobile version of its e-mail service, and upped the storage capacity of its accounts to 1GB. MSN offers 250MB of storage to its users. However, Gmail is still under test and is not offered on general availability to users. Users need to be invited by another Gmail account holder, or if they are in the US, they can use their mobile phone to get an invitation code. The company is attempting to protect the services - and its users - from spammers who could sign up for the accounts to reach Gmail customers.

Google has added a host of new services to its Gmail account since the launch, including "bottomless storage" that is continually upping the service's storage from 1GB up to the present 2.6GB (and counting!). Also announced in recent days was the addition of an auto-responder service, letting recipients know that the email account holder is away or unavailable.

IPass to acquire GoRemote

IPass to acquire GoRemote

By John Cox, NetworkWorld.com, 12/12/05

In a bid to extend its services to branch office workers and enterprise teleworkers, iPass announced this week plans to acquire GoRemote Internet Communications.

The idea behind the buyout will be to create a package of authentication, reporting, management, and device administration services for a diverse enterprise workforce: employees who are on the road constantly, such as sales people or field service technicians, and remote employees scattered through numerous branch offices or working from home.

Both companies offer an array of managed services for enterprise workers outside of a headquarters building. iPass has focused on creating secure connectivity, over any network interface, to the enterprise. GoRemote has made its mark with somewhat similar services, but mainly targeted at branch offices and employees working from home, says Ken Denman, CEO of iPass in Redwood Shores, Calif.

The deal, valued at $76.5 million, is a cash offer of $1.71 per share of GoRemote stock. The combined company will have annual revenues of over $200 million, Denman says. The transaction should be final by March 2006, pending approval by GoRemote shareholders and the relevant regulatory agencies.

This is the third acquisition for iPass in the past year. Previously, the company bought Safe3w, which made software for device authentication, and Mobile Automation, which specialized in mobile device management. The two deals were part of a plan to enhance the iPass client application to monitor, manage, and report on hundreds or thousands of mobile devices that an enterprise might have deployed outside the headquarters network.

Denman says GoRemote's Milpitas, Calif. headquarters operations will be moved about 25 miles to the main iPass facility, and some number of duplicate positions will be cut. He says he expects the merger to yield a range of savings by eliminating those positions and merging various administrative functions.

All contents copyright 1995-2005 Network World, Inc. http://www.networkworld.com

Cellphones as Change Agents

Cellphones as Change Agents
At a FORTUNE dinner, business leaders and academics discussed how technology—especially wireless communication—is changing the world.
Dec 09 2005
By David Kirkpatrick
Fortune.com

What was the only weapon that struck back at the terrorists on 9/11? Self-organized civilians, armed with cellphones.

"A bunch of people on Flight 93 were scared out of their minds," said Stewart Brand at a recent FORTUNE dinner in San Francisco. "so they formed a spontaneous network and figured out what was going on using their cellphones. Then they did something about it." Empowered with the knowledge that terrorists had crashed other planes into the World Trade Center, they fought back. Presumably that's what led Flight 93 to crash in Pennsylvania rather than hit the White House or Capitol. Meanwhile, the massed forces of the U.S. military were essentially helpless.

Brand, the near-legendary figure who founded the Whole Earth Catalog back in the 1960s, set the tone for the dinner early. FORTUNE gathered about 20 smart people from business and beyond to answer one utterly elemental question: What's new? The aim was to help determine what subjects to feature at next summer's Brainstorm 2006 conference, which FORTUNE will host along with the Aspen Institute.

Here's what this crew thinks is new: Power is flowing toward the individual thanks to technology. And these empowered individuals are changing just about every aspect of society with information acquired online. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president, spoke of the "fundamental disruptions that are occurring because we are all connected to one another. The terrorist attacks in London were not covered by the media," he noted, "but by the people in the tube. The people became the media." Many used their camera-equipped cell phones to shoot and distribute images of the damage. Schwartz went on to note that "there's a radical shift underway in who is responsible for creating knowledge and information."

The dinner's discussion frequently touched upon one technology that is critical to how the world is changing and getting connected—cellphones "The world absolutely, totally, underestimates the importance of the cellphone," said Richard Newton, dean of the School of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. According to many of our dinner guests, the cellphone is the perfect recipient of online data, especially as it evolves into a $20 videophone and TV. There's no information that you get on your PC that you won't soon be able to get on your phone. The information that will flow to peoples' phones in real time—about prices, markets, risks, and what other people are doing—may alter government, media, entertainment, corporate structure, and how and with whom we conduct business transactions. It will even, several said, contribute mightily to reducing the economic divide that is still the world's greatest blight—by giving the poor inexpensive access to information.

But Gary Hamel, the author and consultant, got impatient with all this optimism. He says there's a dark side that emerges from connectedness and all the new information available to people: "In 1750 the per capita income gap between the richest and the poorest country was 3 to 1. Today it's 200 to 1. So we can sit and talk about connectivity, and yet people in poverty are just connected enough to know how bad they have it, out of which comes a tide of resentment and anger."

The conversation also turned to all the new ways that people are organizing themselves using online tools, and how that may change institutions. Diana Farrell, who heads the McKinsey Global Institute, suggested that "the next organizing units won't be governments or organizations as we know them." Hamel, among others, pointed to Wikipedia.org, the collectively-produced, open-source encyclopedia I mentioned in this column last week, "Fed Up With E-Mail? Try a Wiki," and said "we're seeing a fundamental shift in how we think about aggregating human effort." He continued: "Big companies are going to be the last to get this…How do you change the DNA of large organizations?" To which Michael Patsalos-Fox, who heads McKinsey's operations in North America, replied: "Maybe that's just an impossibility…Maybe the corporation as we know it will actually break down into networked units of some sort."

Michael Marks, CEO of Flextronics, found himself exasperated by that scenario, and jumped to defend big companies. He announced that Flextronics employs 125,000 employees in 30 countries, and is having no trouble hiring or managing them. "You cannot believe how many people in the world want to be part of a big company." Ironically, Flextronics happens to be among the world's largest cellphone manufacturers.

The two-hour conversation ranged far more widely than can be reported here. While there was some consensus on the big trends, such as connectedness, there was little certainty about where they're taking us. Hamel may have summarized it best. "Change has kind of gone hypercritical," he said, "yet we have no idea what it means for society, how it's going to change human relationships, or government, or big organizations." A bit scary perhaps, but it's all plenty of fodder for what will likely be an amazing Brainstorm conference next year.

FMA - Easy management of SIM, Phonebook, and PC

http://fma.sourceforge.net/index2.htm

FMA is a free1 powerful phone editing tool allowing users to easily manage all of the personal data stored in their phones, via a number of different connections methods. FMA allows easy management of Phonebook (both SIM and Phone memory), SMS, Profiles, and Files stored on the phone. FMA can also allow you to pickup and dial calls directly from your PC. FMA is fun and much more; whatever you want it to be, it is whatever a mobile phone should have :-) (Currently based on Sony Ericsson T610 features set).

FMA - It's Magic! Download latest FMA package and see by yourself. You could read about some user experience before doing that. Currently FMA supports officially Sony Ericsson phones only. Other manufacturers and brands will be addressed in next major version. The SourceForge.net Site Status page reflects the presence of a known issue with the accuracy of recent download statistics. Download statistics shown on this page for recent dates may be inaccurate (they will be corrected in the future); rankings based on these statistics may be skewed.

Electronic Arts to Buy Jamdat For Role in Mobile-Games Field

Electronic Arts to Buy Jamdat For Role in Mobile-Games Field

By NICK WINGFIELD
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 9, 2005

In a major endorsement for the fastest-growing portion of the videogames industry, Electronic Arts Inc. agreed to acquire Jamdat Mobile Inc., a leading publisher of games for wireless phones, for $680 million in cash.

The deal, the largest ever for EA, of Redwood City, Calif., highlights the swift growth of mobile gaming. Mobile gaming has taken off in recent years as more sophisticated handsets with color screens became commonplace and faster wireless networks gave publishers a practical way to download games.

Revenue from mobile games in the U.S. is still relatively small compared with that from PC and video consoles, EA's mainstay businesses. But growth in the market is outpacing these two categories. This year U.S. mobile-game revenues are expected to more than double, reaching about $567 million, estimates PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. About 11% of mobile-phone users in the U.S. say they regularly download games onto their mobile phones, according to a survey by Telephia, a research firm that studies the wireless market.

PHONE & GAMES

 

• Mobile Games Produce Gold Rush¹
10/11/05
 
• Cellphone Users Boost Carriers With Games²
10/11/05
 
• Jamdat Purchases Rights to Tetris³
4/21/05
 
• EA to Make Games for Mobile Phones⁴
9/30/04
 

Larry Probst, EA's chief executive, predicted mobile games will be an important contributor to EA's growth. "We like to lead in whatever business we involve ourselves in," Mr. Probst said in an interview. "We think (Jamdat) can help us grow faster in this area."

Mitch Lasky, CEO of Los Angeles-based Jamdat, will lead EA's mobile games business after the deal is completed in March.

EA's decision to acquire Jamdat, best known for cellphone versions of games like Tetris, Bejeweled and Jamdat Bowling, also underscores the challenges established publishers have had getting a big share of the mobile-games market. EA, the world's leading publisher of videogames, has a mobile-games division that publishes cellphone versions of games such as Madden football, but the group has lagged behind Jamdat and others.

Greg Ballard, CEO of Glu Mobile Inc., a Jamdat competitor, said large publishers have underestimated the complexity of the mobile-games market. Although the graphics of mobile games are often primitive compared to console and PC games, mobile publishers have to ensure the titles work on a much larger number of devices. Mr. Ballard, for one, says Glu must test games on over 200 models of phones.

EA's acquisition of Jamdat "may be a signal to everyone watching that even the world's largest games company couldn't do this on their own," he said.

Jamdat has been a beacon of sorts for the mobile-games industry. After the company filed for an initial public offering of stock in June 2004, venture capital flooded into the market. As a result, industry executives and analysts say the sector could now see a wave of consolidation.

The Jamdat deal is a large one for the games industry. Outright acquisitions of sizable publishers are rare, in part because licensing deals for popular entertainment and sports brands often can't be transferred to a new corporate owner. Jamdat's Mr. Lasky said EA will be able to assume control of "virtually all" of Jamdat's licenses, including those for two of its most popular games, Tetris and Bejeweled.

EA anticipates the acquisition will result in a charge to earnings of between 10 cents and 15 cents a share in the company's fiscal fourth quarter, which ends in March.

Write to Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com⁵

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Google to Go: Web Access On Gadgets Gets Better

Google to Go: Web Access On Gadgets Gets Better

Retooled Sites Are Faster,
Easier to See on Small Devices;
Checking eBay From Your Cell

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 7, 2005; Page D1

The nation's biggest Internet companies have begun a major push to make it easier to access the Web from cellphones, BlackBerrys and other mobile devices.

Time Warner Inc.'s America Online, Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. are rolling out small-scale versions of their familiar Web sites that are specifically designed to work effectively on mobile screens. EBay.com, Mapquest.com and CNN.com are among those that have also edited and shrunk their sites for viewing on even the tiniest display.

Last week, AOL launched a mobile Web site that allows individuals to search the Web for content from local pizza places to celebrity photos by typing in search terms from a gadget keyboard. The site also includes links to news, sports, entertainment and weather reports.

Yahoo recently introduced a mobile shopping service that allows users to comparison-shop from portable devices. Typing in the name of an item pulls up product, merchant and price information. Last month, Google, drawing on its maps feature, launched Google Local for mobile, a service that allows users to search for local business locations, locate them on a map, and even call the merchant by clicking on a link.

The improved sites are one more response to an increasingly on-demand culture. Business are struggling to adapt as consumers use the Internet to get what they want, whenever they want it, from the latest episode of a television show to a map with directions to a new restaurant.

The effort to shrink sites that were initially designed for use at desktop computers with large color monitors is akin to what television studios are doing to make episodes of TV shows such as "Lost" appear crisp and sharp when played on the video iPod.

The wave of development comes as mobile Internet use, considered for years to be sluggish and frustrating, appears to be taking off. The percentage of U.S. wireless subscribers who use their cellphones to browse Internet pages has doubled to 12% since last year, according to NPD Group, a market-research firm in Port Washington, N.Y. And Seattle-based M:Metrics Inc., a market researcher, estimates that more than 24 million U.S. subscribers over the age of 13 accessed the Internet from a mobile device in October.

Most cellphones are wired to access the Internet (95% of new cellphones sold in July, August, and September were Web-enabled, according to NPD Group, up from 81% the year before). To do so, users launch their Internet browsers from an icon on their screens and start browsing by typing a Web address into a search field. Alternatively, they can scroll through a list of menus to access popular sites and services already preloaded on the phone, such as mobile versions of ESPN or the Weather Channel.

But to start browsing, consumers usually have to sign up for a separate data service, of which there are many types. Consumers who want to add Internet browsing to their existing voice plans can buy data plans for $19.99 a month or less depending on the provider. (Plans may run as high as $90 if they include access to corporate email.) For those who expect to do less Web browsing, lower usage plans also are available. Cingular Wireless, for instance, charges $4.99 for one megabyte of data, the equivalent of viewing roughly 100 news headlines.

Some users of newer cellphones may find their phones already active for Web browsing. In those cases they'll typically be charged several cents each time they access a site. While some companies charge small subscription fees for premium content that users must download an application to receive, such as customized sports scores, most of the sites and services themselves are free. But they may not be free of advertising for long. Some content providers are looking at ways to use advertising on the miniature Web pages, seeing it as a way to reach targeted audiences. For now, however, most companies are keeping their mobile-optimized sites ad-free while they work on attracting users.

Richard Lichtenstein, a 23-year-old associate consultant at Bain & Co. in New York is an avid user of his Web browser on his T-Mobile BlackBerry. The browser has helped him resolve friendly debates, find the Web site of a band before a concert and locate pictures of movie stars. But at around $40 a month, without voice service, he says if Bain weren't paying for the perks, he probably wouldn't either.

The overall move to Web pages designed for small screens is still in the early stages. In many cases, when you access any Web site from a mobile device, you may see the text and graphics of the normal page awkwardly condensed. But such distorted layouts are becoming less common, as companies take advantage of faster wireless networks and more powerful mobile devices.

Sites tailored for mobile -- the availability of which varies depending on the device and carrier -- typically have only a few links listed on the home page and few or no graphics clogging the screen. The URLs of these sites may be identical to their parent sites or may require adding "mobile" or "wireless" somewhere in the address.

Internet giants Yahoo, Google, MSN and AOL are leading the mobile Web push, but other sites are gaining popularity as well. Among them are mobile versions of ESPN, Mapquest, sites that list movie show times, such as Hollywood.com, and a range of travel sites.

John Ludwig, a founder of Ignition Partners, a venture-capital fund in Seattle, says when his favorite sports teams are playing, he will check scores on his BlackBerry using ESPN around 40 times during each game. While a fan of the mobile Internet, Mr. Ludwig, 45 years old, doesn't like common hassles associated with it: the slowness of the network and the number of necessary clicks. Waiting for a screen to refresh can take anywhere from three to 10 seconds, a seeming eternity for those used to broadband service.

Marc Karimi, a 22-year-old student at Stanford Graduate School of Business in Stanford, Calif., says accessing Web content on a cellphone isn't worth the time. After he bought a new Audiovox cellphone, he went on a browsing frenzy using the little keys to check things like movie times, directions and restaurant phone numbers. The data costs only came to an additional $5 on his $65 cell phone bill. But after two months of heavy use, he says he was bothered by the slow speeds and now keeps it only in case of an emergency.

But problems such as Mr. Karimi's may slowly start to disappear. Content and service providers say they expect service speeds to improve as wireless networks get faster. And some are already taking steps to reduce browsing time.

Last month Cingular Wireless, a joint venture of San Antonio-based SBC Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. of Atlanta, revamped its Internet service to cut the average time it takes to look up a listing on the Web by more than half, a company representative says.

Designed-for-mobile advertising, perhaps a tiny banner ad that appears on the top of a screen, could take off within the next year, predicts Heidi Lehmann, chairman of the advertising standards committee of the Mobile Marketing Association, a Boulder, Colo., trade association.

Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com¹

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New mobile-phone roaming services are on the way

New mobile-phone roaming services are on the way

Services from Roamware help operators spur greater user interest over and above offering them cheaper fees

By John Blau, IDG News Service December 05, 2005

Ask some corporate globetrotters what they think about mobile-phone roaming and they'll most likely say they love the service, but hate the pricing and miss some comfort functions. Then ask teenagers using prepaid mobile-phone calling cards and don't be surprised to hear that many of them have never heard of it.

All of this could change soon thanks to some new technology and growing competition among operators.

"Roaming is going to become simpler and cheaper," said Mohan Gyani, chief executive officer (CEO) of Roamware Inc., in San Jose, California. "Market forces are driving this."

Today, only about 15 percent of the millions of GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) phone customers in the world use roaming, largely because of high prices with little transparency and the fact that the service isn't available to many prepaid customers, who represent 75 percent of all GSM mobile-phone users, according to Gyani.

Now many mobile-phone companies, especially those operating in saturated markets, hope to generate additional revenue from roaming by offering lower prices and new services and by targeting prepaid users, Gyani said. He pointed to Vodafone (Profile, Products, Articles) Group PLC as one of several big operators now pushing roaming service.

Roamware has developed a few new services to help operators spur greater user interest in roaming over and above offering them cheaper fees. One of them is what Gyani called the virtual home-environment service, which allows customers traveling outside their home networks to continue using many familiar functions, such as pressing and holding a key to retrieve voice mail.

Another is traffic redirection. This service allows operators to direct roaming customers to preferred partner networks abroad, for pricing or quality of service reasons, according to Gyani. "Take customers who want not only voice roaming but also data roaming," he said. "With this service, operators can put them on the network that offers both."

Today, about 30 percent of the existing global roaming customer base is prepaid. There are some technology reasons for this low level of usage, including limited operator compliance with the CAMEL (Customized Application for Mobile network Enhanced Logic) standard required to provide intelligent roaming services and real-time billing.

Roamware has developed a service that overcomes many of these technological challenges. Prepaid customers using the service receive a text message via SMS (short message service) when they cross the border asking if they want a local number. If they say yes, their prepaid minutes are transferred to that number. The service also allows calls made to customers' home numbers to follow them outside the country.

Roamware is currently working on several new services, including one that will allow roaming customers to avoid paying an international fee for retrieving voice mail messages stored on the server in their home network, according to Gyani.

Another service under development is what the CEO calls the "voice SMS." Customers receive a text message when someone has left a message. They can press a button to be connected directly to that message instead of having to call up their voice-mail box and listen to all the options and other recorded messages.

But perhaps one of the biggest areas of growth for roaming services is not voice but data, according to Gyani. "Moving forward, we will need to deal with issues of how data services, whether mobile or wireless, follow roaming customers," he said. "There is huge potential in data-roaming services."

Some people will increasingly make VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) calls over Wi-Fi and WiMax networks or use devices supporting multiple technologies, such as dual-mode phones, which offer access to mobile and Wi-Fi networks, according to Gyani.

"Some people have been projecting an end to roaming," Gyani said. "They couldn't be more wrong. We're going to see huge demand for roaming services as prices fall and technologies converge."

Fed Up With E-Mail? Try a Wiki

Fed Up With E-Mail? Try a Wiki Using the same technology behind the popular Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, Socialtext and other companies are giving businesses innovative alternatives to group spam. Dec 02 2005 By David Kirkpatrick Fortune.com

As far as Ross Mayfield is concerned, e-mail in the workplace is a disaster: “It’s being used for more than it was intended for. With cc’s, we’ve stretched a point-to-point medium into a broadcast medium.” Of course, he would think so. As CEO of Socialtext, a three-year-old software company, he has an alternative. Mayfield met with me recently for lunch in San Francisco to talk about how Socialtext’s wiki applications give businesses a new way for their employees to communicate.

You probably know something about wikis because of Wikipedia, the astonishingly successful open-source encyclopedia, which is rapidly becoming its own alternate Internet. If you aren’t acquainted with it, go right now to Wikipedia.org, look up anything you care about, and prepare to be amazed. “Why will we ever again need any other form of reference?” you may wonder. Wikipedia is created by readers. Anyone, even you, can alter any entry. Despite that, it is a reliable, accurate source on almost everything. If someone contributes erroneous information— intentionally or unintentionally, a devoted group of volunteers monitor and correct it—usually in minutes.

Socialtext is one of several companies bringing the same concept to corporate communications. Its software gives employees tools to create shared conversations and collective dialogues without using e-mail. One of Socialtext’s rivals includes another cool company, Jotspot, founded by Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, who were among the creators of Excite, the breakthrough search engine launched in the mid-90s.

Plenty of other products aim to facilitate group communication, notably Microsoft’s SharePoint, which is working to add blogs and wikis. Because of Microsoft’s formidable market share in corporate software, Mayfield sees SharePoint as Socialtext’s main competitor. Other players in related businesses include IBM’s Lotus Notes, Microsoft’s recently-acquired Groove, and Intuit’s QuickBase. At this point, commercial wikis, such as Socialtext’s and Jotspot’s, have a tiny fraction of the corporate market compared to more established players, but I believe the simplicity of the wiki could ultimately prevail.

“We’re doing social computing,” says Mayfield. “It’s something that Microsoft Office was never meant to do. Office is all about creating a finished product—a brilliant PowerPoint or another document that someone does in isolation. Meanwhile, enterprise software chains people to top-down processes with rigid business rules. And the glue that’s been holding it all together has been e-mail.”

Mayfield, now 35, and three co-founders launched Socialtext in 2002 with $5,000. Working from home for the first year, they hosted the company’s entire business on a used $400 eMachines PC. This year the company grew up, bringing its total capitalization to $4.6 million. In August, it opened its first office in Palo Alto, Calif., but 16 of its 20 employees still work from home. (They communicate using wikis and blogs, of course.) Investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a white-hot Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, enterprise software giant SAP, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Joi Ito, a Japanese venture capitalist. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, joined the board in October.

Socialtext claims that 10 FORTUNE 500 companies are among its 50 customers, which include the BBC, Nokia, and the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. At Dresdner a good portion of the company’s entire Intranet—for about 7,000 employees—is now being turned into wiki format. Employees can even alter information posted on a wiki by the human resources department. Mayfield, a passionate believer in the bottom-up ethic of the Internet, says that Socialtext won’t restrict the ability to edit wikis to certain employees, even though that would be easy to do. He wants to stay true to the wiki spirit of collaboration and trust. So far, at least, it’s been working. “In three years we haven’t seen one single case of someone deliberately damaging corporate a wiki,” he brags.

Wikis can either be permanent or set up for a short project. Content can be posted to a wiki in several ways, including by e-mail. A wiki can also generate e-mail, but only if you ask it to. You can set up the wiki to alert you, for example, if your boss posts something new, so you won't have to receive every last announcement about a lost notebooks in your e-mail inbox. “E-mail is pushed to you,” says Mayfield. “You have no control over what goes into it. But a wiki uses a ‘pull’ model of attention management.”

“If you let go of a little bit of control you get back participation and innovation,” Mayfield insists. And, of course, his example is Wikipedia. It was originally called Nupedia, a for-profit attempt to develop an online encyclopedia written by experts. Only when Wales and his team gave full control over to readers did it begin to flourish and grow rapidly. At the end of October, there were Wikipedia versions in well over 100 different languages with a total of 2.5 million articles. The English language edition alone includes 825,000 articles.

Businesses can also use free wikis. More than two million copies of open-source wikis (which generally have fewer features than Socialtext’s software) have been downloaded from the open-source website SourceForge.net. Mayfield himself intends to make a full-featured, free open-source version of Socialtext’s wiki available by April. Once companies decide the service is essential, he hopes Socialtext can charge them for hosting it.

Given how overtaxed we all feel at work, it’s inevitable we will need new, more efficient ways to work together and collaborate. E-mail won’t go away, but tools like the ones Socialtext offers prove that there are other—sometimes more efficient—ways to get work done. (And if you disagree, I’m sure you won’t hesitate to e-mail me about it.)

Questions? Comments? E-mail them to me at dkirkpatrick@fortunemail.com.

The CueCat Is Back - mobile phone scanning/recognition

The CueCat Is Back By Elizabeth Biddlecombe Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,69668,00.html

02:00 AM Nov. 28, 2005 PT

The adage that cats have nine lives applies to electronic cats, too. The ill-fated CueCat bar-code reader has been reincarnated as a cell-phone application that recognizes corporate logos.

In 2000, the CueCat scanner became a symbol of tech-industry cluelessness. Distributed to millions of magazine subscribers, the scanner redirected readers to advertisers' web pages after they scanned a bar code printed in the magazine.

But few people used it, and the CueCat became the target of almost universal derision.

Now it's back -- in German mobile phones.

The German branch of Coca-Cola is promoting its CokeFridge portal by encouraging readers of teen magazines Yam!, Starflash and Mäedchen, to take pictures of a special logo with their camera phones.

After e-mailing the picture to the Coke portal, a mobile game and the CokeFridge java application is dispatched to the sender's phone.

The CokeFridge promotion offers chances to win tickets to the FIFA World Cup, as well as download music, ringtones and games.

The technology behind the campaign was developed by California-based Neven Vision.

"We hyperlink the visual world," said Harmut Neven, the company's CEO. "Users should come to expect that every billboard is not just a billboard -- it's a big shining link to mobile content."

Neven Vision's object-recognition technology was developed by Neven as part of his academic work developing sight for robots.

It has a variety of uses, from translating restaurant menus into foreign languages, to helping the Los Angeles Police Department spot gang members.

"You can't reach teenagers just with a TV spot," said Julia Haselmayr, brand PR manager at Coca-Cola in Germany. "We stress mobile marketing very much here in Germany. The mobile phone is very important for teenagers, our target group."

96,900 high-speed 3G users in S'pore

96,900 high-speed 3G users in S'pore

By ANGELA TAN

EVEN before StarHub launched i-mode, Singapore's high-speed 3G subscriber base had more than doubled since July to hit 96,900 in October, according to figures from the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA).

The take-up figures compare to 66,200 in September, 47,700 in August and 37,500 in July.

While the IDA statistics do not show the breakdown among the three mobile operators - Singapore Telecom, StarHub and MobileOne (M1) - it is believed that SingTel and StarHub continue to enjoy the lion's share of the 3G market.

In September, SingTel was reported to have enticed more than 30,000 3G users into its camp, with its promotional offer which priced video calls at the same rate as voice calls. StarHub had around 23,000 3G users while M1 had signed up 12,500.

StarHub only went on the aggressive in November when it launched its i-mode services with its 100 local and foreign content sites, shortly after SingTel launched 16 live 'mobile TV' channels for cellphones in an effort to boost sluggish local uptake of 3G technology.

At the i-mode launch, StarHub said it was targeting 50,000 i-mode users by the end of the first year of launch. i-mode is a mobile-Internet platform developed by Japan's NTT DoCoMo which allows users to access the Internet with just one click of a hot button.

IDA said total mobile penetration rate in Singapore continued to inch higher, reaching 96.6 per cent in October, compared to 96.2 per cent the previous month.

Total mobile user base was 4.19 million users, compared to 4.18 million in September. Total post-paid user base slipped marginally to 2.61 million in October, from about 2.64 million the previous month. Total prepaid users also slipped slightly to 1.48 million. The total number of SMS messages rose to 748.39 million in October, up from 720.44 million.

Cellphone data services popular

Cellphone data services popular

Mobinet 2005 results in line with Singapore trends, with GPRS and MMS traffic growing 50-80% yearly, reports AMIT ROY CHOUDHURY

A GLOBAL study shows mobile phone users are increasingly comfortable with mobile data services and that 56 per cent of them access the Internet at least once a month and 33 per cent download music on their phones.

Asia-Pacific countries such as China, Korea, Japan and Australia continue to lead the world in terms of penetration of mobile phones, according to the latest Mobinet study of how 4,000 mobile phone users in 21 countries use their handsets.

The study has been conducted eight times since 2000 by management consulting firm AT Kearney and Judge Business School, Cambridge University.

In Singapore, even though the third-generation (3G) mobile telephony user base is still fairly small, data services in the form of GPRS (general packet relay service) and MMS (multimedia messaging service) are growing substantially, according to AT Kearney.

'The results of the Mobinet 2005 study are very much in line with trends in Singapore,' said Chua Soon Ghee, a senior manager with AT Kearney's communications and high-tech practice in Singapore.

'Although the 3G user base in Singapore has been fairly modest so far, we are seeing GPRS and MMS traffic growth of 50-80 per cent,' he said. 'In addition, operators are rushing to offer the latest mobile entertainment service - mobile TV - in anticipation that there will be users willing to pay for it.'

Mr Chua said the study suggests that news and sports programmes are likely to do better than entertainment shows, 'unless operators are targeting the under-25 market for 3G services'.

The study found that more than 50 per cent of handsets worldwide are less than one year old and have robust multimedia capabilities that are increasingly understood by their users.

Fifty-six per cent of multimedia mobile phone users said they use their phones to access the Internet or check e-mail at least once a month - a significant jump from the 36 per cent in last year's Mobinet study.

Almost two-thirds of users said new services and functions are easy to understand and enjoyable to use. And even among older mobile phone users, less than half complained that new functions are difficult to use.

'The increase in multimedia phone penetration is especially rapid in places such as Australia and New Zealand, where growth has been more than 70 per cent over the past year . . . This bodes well for mobile data adoption in Asia-Pacific,' said Mark Page, AT Kearney vice-president and leader of the Mobinet study.

'The growing penetration of new multimedia phones is the catalyst for mobile data adoption and there is a clear relationship between average revenue per user and the age of the phone the customer uses.'

People who have recently replaced their handsets are more likely to be heavier users of data services, Mr Page said. 'Placing new handsets in the palms of the best customers offers the best chances of success (for the telcos).'

The growth of music downloads on phones has been explosive. One-third of multimedia phone users have downloaded music at least once a month on their phone, up from 21 per cent a year ago.

In the Asia-Pacific region, Japan leads the pack with 52 per cent, with China and South Korea behind, on 42 per cent.

Two-thirds of multimedia phone users expressed a desire for time-sensitive TV content such as news and sports rather than entertainment shows, although there is a stronger desire for music TV, movies and soaps/reality shows among users under the age of 25.

The study indicates that mobile operators still face challenges in bringing the price and quality of data services in line with consumer expectations.

'One-third of mobile phone users are concerned about the cost of mobile data, and about half say they are not willing to pay more than $5 per month for it . . . Thirty-five per cent of consumers cited poor content as the reason they don't access multimedia services, a considerable increase from just 8 per cent in 2004,' Mr Page said.

Simon Bell, a professor at Judge Business School, said: 'This is unsettling for operators that have been investing heavily in proprietary portals and content.' Perhaps it suggests they should seek more partnerships with established online portal brands and media companies, he said.

The study recommends that operators shift their marketing focus to encourage repeat use and service loyalty, using pricing along with improved content and customer interfaces. To win new customers, AT Kearney expects operators to do more extensive market testing, implement easier-to-use, content-rich services, and offer low-price alternative packages.

'Indeed, 70 per cent of mobile phone users say price remains the primary factor in choosing an operator,' Mr Page said.

According to AT Kearney's Mr Chua: 'The study suggests that local operators such as StarHub and SingTel will find significant receptivity among users for their commercial i-mode and 3G TV services, which has a strong combination of rich content and easy-to-use interfaces incorporating one-step access to the Internet and mobile TV content.

'The trick, however, is to encourage repeat usage and service continuity after the initial rush of experimentation, he added.

'This will require operators to offer compelling pricing, and content that is continually refreshed. Assuming that operators continue the current 3G services launch momentum and follow through with affordable pricing, we expect 3G uptake and usage to rise significantly in the coming year after a modest start.'