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Friday, February 17, 2006
Cellular Service to Offer MySpace Phones
Cellular Service to Offer MySpace Phones
By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology WriterThu Feb 16, 1:07 AM ET
The social networking site MySpace, hugely successful among teenagers and twenty-somethings, is about to become more ubiquitous with the launch of a cellular service that will let users read and post to the site for free.
The service and two accompanying phones will be launched in a few months by Helio LLC, a joint venture of Internet service provider Earthlink Inc. and South Korean carrier SK Telecom Co.
On MySpace, users keep personal pages with journals, communicate with friends and play games. It's a formula that has attracted more than 54 million users and the attention of media conglomerate News Corp., which bought the site last year for $580 million.
SK Telecom owns the Korean equivalent of MySpace. Called Cyworld, it is hugely popular among young South Koreans and can be accessed from cell phones.
"We're able to leverage a lot of that experience about how to take social networking and put it on a device," said Sky Dayton, founder of Earthlink and chief executive of Helio.
"What our target really cares about, this young consumer, is being connected to their friends and being connected to their world," Dayton said, contrasting Helio's idea to that of the major carriers, who are expanding sales of music, videos and games.
Helio's two phones, dubbed "Hero" and "Kickflip" will be based on Korean designs. Made by Pantech and VK Mobile, the phones will feature large color screens and cameras, but no QWERTY keyboards.
An exact launch date was not announced. Nor were prices for the phones and plans, but Dayton said they will not be prepaid. Apart from a monthly fee, access to MySpace will be free.
Helio will be a so-called "mobile virtual network operator," meaning it won't have its own cellular network. Instead, it will buy access to Sprint Nextel Corp.'s and Verizon Wireless' high-speed networks.
Other MVNOs include Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile.
Cingular PC Card enables worldwide mobile Net access
Yeah, sure, the pricing is sure to kick off a major mobile data revolution... =============================================
News Story by Nancy Gohring
FEBRUARY 13, 2006 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Cingular Wireless LLC said on Monday that it will soon offer customers a single PC Card that can be used to wirelessly access the Internet in the U.S. as well as around the world. Typically, operators that enable global wireless data roaming require users to have multiple PC Cards that operate in different parts of the world.
Cingular will start offering the cards and two subscription plans in March. One plan will cost $110 per month and include unlimited data use in the U.S. and 100MB of downloads in Canada and Mexico. The other plan will cost users $140 and will include unlimited use in the U.S. and 100MB of downloads in 24 countries, including Australia, China, France, Germany, the U.K., Italy and Japan. Cingular said it plans to add other locations in the future.
The card will cost $100 for customers who sign up for subscription plans.
The highest-speed network the card can connect to is High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), which so far is mainly available in the U.S., but operators in Europe and elsewhere plan to introduce such networks this year. Where HSDPA networks aren't available, customers can use Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE) or General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) networks. The card is also compatible with Wi-Fi networks.
The card has a retractable antenna, which Cingular says means users won't have to remove the card when transporting their laptops.
In September, Verizon Wireless Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC started a new service that lets customers use wireless Internet in more than 50 countries, but it requires customers to use two different PC Cards. The cards do not support Wi-Fi and cost as much as $380 and $230 each.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
PVPro. It's small enough to fit into a cellphone or PDA
So you are sitting in a bar, or restaurant, or office, and you need to look at something that is way too big to see on a normal cell phone. But you have the new projector version. Pointing your phone at a nearby wall, you have a full screen view of the info (map, stocks, photos, whatever)
Kewl.
Matchbox-sized Laser Projector
[0]soupisgoodfood writes "[1]Light Blue Optics Ltd. have developed a [2]laser-based projector called the PVPro. It's small enough to fit into a cellphone or PDA. Some specs: Supports resolutions up to 2048x1280; No moving parts; Infinite focus; Green monochrome, with a colour version expected late 2006; Max consumption of 1.4W with an average of <350mW. Looks a like a good solution to the increasing problem of smaller devices trying to display more information."
Discuss this story at: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/02/15/1357258
Links: 0. http://soupisgoodfood.net/ 1. http://www.lightblueoptics.com/ 2. http://www.audioholics.com/news/editorials/laserprojectorscellphones.php
A Shopping Phone
A Shopping Phone
Toshiba mobile-phone software will offer online reviews of products by using bar codes.
By Associated Press
TOKYO (AP) -- Checking out the Internet buzz about a DVD, book or candy while on the go will become as easy as taking a snapshot of the bar code on the product.
Toshiba Corp., a Japanese electronics company that makes DVD players, laptops and nuclear power plants, has developed mobile-phone technology that searches for product reviews on up to 100 Web journals, or blogs, in 10 seconds.
Just use the phone's digital camera to snap a photo of the bar code of a product you're thinking about buying.
The technology can decipher if the blog chatter is positive or negative and tallies the count to show if a product is getting rave reviews or being trashed by consumers. That's useful if you're in a store about to buy an item.
Some of the more frequently visited blogs will also show up on the screen.
The bar-code information is sent wirelessly to a Toshiba server, which gathers data on blogs from the Internet and analyzes them, and then sends a reply back to the cell phone.
Toshiba expects to have information on thousands of products covering just about anything you might buy at a store -- from toys to electronic gadgets to food.
Toshiba plans to test the software at Japanese stores next month and hopes to offer it as a service on cell phones before April 2007, although details aren't decided.
Blog searches and bar codes that link to Web pages are already available on personal computers and portable devices, but Toshiba officials say their technology is convenient for shopping because it's for cell phones and carries out real-time blog searches from bar-codes.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
First there was Flickr, then del.icio.us. Now there's TagWorld
http://www.tagworld.com/-/Main.aspx
First there was Flickr, then del.icio.us. Now there's TagWorld.
Flickr built an online community of photo sharers-a Web environment where not only friends, family, and colleagues, but the Web at large could see your digital images. By encouraging users to tag their photos-and even more, by turning tagging into a kind of online religion-the service created a worldwide photo database that anyone could browse and search by keyword.
Following in Flickr's footsteps, del.icio.us did much the same with bookmarks. TagWorld has gone one step further, letting you tag and share photos and bookmarks, files-even blogs. All from a single Web-based interface.
Famously, Flickr offers a Tags page where you can browse the site's most popular keywords. Click on "Japan," for example, and you can instantly jump from one photo with a tag of "Japan" to another. With TagWorld, though, when you click on a keyword, you can browse not only photos, but bookmarks, blogs, and all sorts of other uploaded content. TagWorld is an apt name.
Joining the community-which has, according to the site, 65,000 users-is wonderfully easy: Simply key in a username and password, and a wizard helps you build a public user profile and Web site, upload your first photos and bookmarks, and post your first blog entry. Once you're done, all this data is accessible from your own URL (on the TagWorld domain).
You can add photos and bookmarks at your leisure, upload files of any kind, and post videos (though, according to the company, copyrighted content will be removed). You can also link your site to those of friends, family, and colleagues.
Editing your site is as easy as dragging and dropping predefined multimedia modules from one place to another. If you'd like to add a video, for instance, you simply drag Tagworld's media player module onto your site and upload the appropriate file. You get up to 1GB of space free. (The service is supported by ads.) Soon you'll be able to purchase additional space, but prices haven't been finalized.
You can browse anyone's site, and anyone can browse yours. You can search for specific content by typing a keyword or two, or you can browse keywords at random via the Tags page. In its continuing effort to build a community, the service keeps a running tab of who visits your site (prominently displaying their photos), and other users are told when you visit their sites.
The site's search capabilities are particularly powerful. After entering a keyword query, you can sort your results in real time using slider controls. If you're looking for other users, for instance, you can limit your search to those of particular ages simply by moving an age slider back and forth.
You do have the option of browsing anonymously so others can't see that you've visited their sites, and you can control who has access to each piece of content you post to your own site. But at the moment, there's no way of controlling access to your entire site. The company says this sort of privacy control is on the way.
If you like, you can subscribe to particular user sites-each time someone posts a new picture, bookmark, file, or blog entry, you'll receive a note. You can't subscribe to individual tags, though-something we'd like to see.
Whether you're fascinated or confused by the new world of Web tagging, it's one you ignore at your own peril. Experts believe it's the future of the Web, and sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us, and now TagWorld are leading the charge. We recommend you check them out.
Sharpcast
Sharpcast (http://www.sharpcast.com/): Think Flickr meets moblogs meets cellphones meets the desktop meets Web sharing meets Picasa. Really cool photo library and sharing system. Supports editing, tagging, captioning, slide shows.
With Sharpcast Photos, it's never been easier to:
* Access your photos on your phone and the web * Back up your precious memories * Get your pictures from your phone to your computer * See your whole photo collection right on your phone * Recover lost photo albums
Learn More About Sharpcast PhotosFast. Simple. Intuitive. Sharpcast Photos brings your computer, your mobile phone and the web into perfect harmony so you can see and manage your entire photo collection from anywhere, at any time with the rich, intuitive view you're used to on the desktop. Full of one-of-a-kind features like instantaneous backup of mobile phone pictures, speedy catalog recovery and other completely worry-free photo features that only Sharpcast delivers, Sharpcast Photos equals simplicity.
Mobile operators target global IM service
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Fifteen operators, including China Mobile Communications Corp., Vodafone Group PLC, Orange SA, Telefónica Móviles SA and T-Mobile International AG, have joined forces to help kickstart the mobile phone IM initiative, which is being spearheaded by the GSM Association, the group said Monday at a press conference during the 3GSM World Congress.
The group also hopes to cooperate with Internet-based IM service providers, such as Microsoft Corp., America Online Inc. and Yahoo Inc., according to Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin. "We want to extend this service and make it a bigger experience for users," he said.
Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL already provide wireless access to their IM services, but this initiative's goal is to extend the availability and interoperability of wireless IM globally. MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger don't interoperate, although Yahoo and Microsoft are working to build links between their services.
In the first phase, the mobile operators intend to extend IM -- a widely popular service among PC users in the fixed-line telecommunications market -- to their combined customer base of 700 million users. Over the coming months, they expect other GSM operators to join the initiative, representing a potential global market of more than 2.2 billion people.
On the Internet, more than 300 million people around the world use IM, and about 12 billion messages are sent every day, according to the GSMA.
Unlike the free IM service available on fixed-line networks, however, the IM service planned by the GSM community will cost money, with the calling party picking up the tab.
Vodafone views IM as an opportunity to "add value" and create a new revenue stream, Sarin said.
The CEOs of six network operators attending the press conference declined to discuss pricing details.
A key requirement for providing an IM service to mobile phone users is interoperability to ensure that messages can be sent across networks around the world, said Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO of Orange. Operators within the GSM community have agreed to IM interoperability standards, he said.
Most high-end smart phones and many low-end phones are already IM-enabled, according to Ahuja. He expects IM to become a standard feature of GSM phones moving ahead.
The operators expect to begin rolling out IM services over the next several months.
Reprinted with permission from 
Story copyright 2005 International Data Group. All rights reserved.
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