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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.

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.

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

Mobile operators target global IM service Rollouts to start over the next several months News Story by John Blau

FEBRUARY 13, 2006 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - BARCELONA -- Several of the world's largest mobile phone operators have agreed to offer instant messaging across their networks as part of an initiative to make IM service globally available and interoperable.

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

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

Starhome claims key to mobile data conundrum

Starhome claims key to mobile data conundrum

Roaming specialist outlines flexible approach

By Tony Dennis: Tuesday 24 January 2006, 21:50 EXTORTIONATELY HIGH data roaming charges have effectively killed many new mobile market segments before they've even been introduced.

However, roaming services specialist, Starhome, believes it has the solutions in its portfolio which could help operators escape the current 'tariff trap'.

One of its products is differentiated billing. This ides enables operators to set different price levels depending on the type of traffic.

Currently consumers are charged on a 'per megabyte' basis for all data services. With differentiated billing they can set different charges for ringtones, pop videos and email messages.

This would overcome the ludicrous situation where it would cost around £100 to download a single iTunes track while roaming in the USA as opposed to 99 pence at home on the Internet.

The other weapon in Starhome's arsenal is its Data Charge Advisor. This would inform a roaming subscriber exactly how much it has just cost to send a picture (MMS) message back home, for example.

At present consumers are supplied with meaningless information such as how many megabytes they've consumed out of a monthly total.

Starhome's Alon Barnea, veep for business development, claims that the roaming market is huge. Only 50 per cent of travellers ever actually bother to 'roam' with their mobile phones [ie, use their mobile phones outside their home country].

He also reckons there are massive disconnects between the different departments within the typical GSM operator. The person in charge of roaming, he says, thinks purely in terms of voice services rather than data, while the person in charge of promoting content - such as music videos - doesn't consider roaming at all.

"The industry hasn't learnt at all," Barnea suggested. "The same mistakes that were made with WAP have been repeated with GPRS and are now being repeated with 3G."

In other words, mobile operators still haven't cracked how to sell data services properly

Opera to launch Mini worldwide

Opera to launch Mini worldwide

News Story by Nancy Gohring

JANUARY 24, 2006 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Opera Software ASA plans to officially launch Opera Mini on Tuesday, although this hosted mobile phone browsing service and application has already racked up about 1 million users.

As users browse, the Opera Mini application, which is designed for Java-enabled cell phones, communicates with Opera's servers that strip down the size of Web sites, allowing them to load faster and fit the small screen of the phone.

The Opera application and service are free, but mobile operators may charge users for connecting to the Internet.

In late December, Opera quietly extended Opera Mini from being available only to residents in select European countries to being available to anyone. But at the time, Opera said the service wasn't officially available yet and could be taken down at any time. So far, about 1 million customers have begun using the service, said Tor Odland, a spokesman for Opera.

Interested users can download the Opera Mini application three ways, including directly from Opera's Web site, http://mini.opera.com/ to their phones. In 30 countries, mobile users can instead send a short message to a specified number and have the application sent to them via text message. Finally, users can download the application to their computers and then transfer it to their phones.

To support the service, Opera has implemented more than 100 new servers, said Christen Krogh, vice president of engineering at Opera. He was reluctant to be more specific but said they run Linux and are massively parallel and massively redundant.

Opera is able to efficiently support the worldwide Opera Mini service by applying some of the same technologies it has developed for its browsers that are designed for small devices, Krogh said. In creating browsers for mobile phones and small devices, Opera has had to be mindful of small memory capacity and processing power. "That's something we can harvest now on the server side to prepare for the content transfer to the Opera Mini client," he said. "Since we spent so much time optimizing the Opera browser, we can now serve a lot of customers without too much computing power on the server side."

Opera also sells Opera Mobile, a browser designed for smart phones that has more features than Opera Mini and operates independently of Opera's back-end servers. By contrast, Opera Mini is a smaller application and is meant to bring browsing to low-end phones.

Reprinted with permission from

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

New Internet Firm Lets Users Locate Telephone Contacts

New Internet Firm Lets Users Locate Telephone Contacts By JESSE DRUCKER Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL January 23, 2006; Page B4

A group of telecommunications-industry veterans has formed a company to offer businesses an Internet-calling service that lets users keep tabs on the whereabouts and communications activities of each other.

The founders of the company, called Tello Corp., include Jeff Pulver, a longtime Internet-calling pioneer; Craig McCaw, credited with building the first national U.S. cellular network; Michael Price, a long-time telecom investment banker now at Evercore Partners; and John Sculley, former chief executive of Apple Computer Inc. and PepsiCo Inc.'s Pepsi-Cola unit.

Beginning today, closely held Tello will offer a service that will let workers see on their computers or mobile devices whether the person they are trying to reach is on an office phone or cellphone or is logged on to instant messaging. If the person is off the office phone, Tello can let others know how long ago he or she last made a call.

Mr. Pulver says Tello aims to extend the "presence" feature that users of instant messaging have come to rely on, letting them know when other users are logged on and available. "For the last three years, I've been telling people that presence is a $25 billion industry that we don't know how to describe," said Mr. Pulver, a co-founder of Vonage Holdings Corp.

Mr. Pulver has long complained that Internet calling, while increasingly popular, is mostly used as a way to make cheap calls. The technology, known as voice over Internet protocol or VOIP, also could be used to develop a wide array of features that combine the Internet and phone service, he says. "I believe when [Tello] starts to take off, it will show that voice over IP is not just about cheap calling," he says.

Tello's chief executive, Doug Renert, a former executive at Oracle Corp., said the company will join forces with Cisco Systems Inc. and Avaya Inc., which make Internet phone systems for business customers.

The service is likely to raise privacy questions, as it will provide companies with another way to easily monitor the communication activities of their workers. Employees of different companies also will be able to keep track of each other if the businesses decide to link their Tello services together.

Mr. Renert said Tello can be configured by individual users to turn off the services. "It's not a Big Brother application," he said.

Mr. Renert said the service also will let multiple users work on tasks such as spreadsheets or Power Point presentations simultaneously.

A limited version of the service for individuals will be available free of charge. Users who download it will be able to track each other's cellphone and instant-messaging activities but not their home or office phones. The enterprise version of the service will cost $30 a user per year. Initially, BlackBerrys will be the only mobile devices it will work with, but others will be added.

social networking plus reviews/reputation

Two Wrongs Make a Right ARTICLE DATE: 12.26.05 By John C. Dvorak

There are two popular online concepts-ones I never thought much of-that, when combined, may add up to one of the most powerful mechanisms on the Internet, well worth following. I'm actually amazed at how two dogs can produce a winner.

The first concept is the social network. I've written about these before and have joined a number of them, including LinkedIn, Orkut, and others. Many are set up for socializing, such as Friendster. Others, such as LinkedIn, are for making business contacts, although my experience is that these ideas sound better on paper than they do in the real world.

The second online concept I'm referring to is collected public reviews. Epinions may be the leader in grass-roots reviews, but you tend to find things like reviews of your local restaurants, where people who run the restaurants post endless commentary. Amazon probably popularized the idea of shared reviews with its public book reviews. The problem with all these reviews-including Amazon's-is that they are often written by either shills or people holding a grudge, each providing the public with BS ideas from every angle. This makes the entire process completely useless.

Enter Yelp!. Here is one of the most distinctive ideas I've seen in a while, although it is nothing more than public reviews combined with a social network. But when you combine these two concepts, you actually end up getting useful information, because the people participating are more than just anonymous reviewers from who knows where. They are real people expressing their tastes and philosophies, and their collective wisdom becomes unlike anything I've ever seen on the Internet-at least anything in the territory I'm desscribing.

Here is what happens at Yelp: Say you are looking for a restaurant nearby. You can ask for a vicinity search based on a ZIP code. All the reviews for local restaurants appear and you select a few that sound interesting. Youcan then click on any given person's network of friends and get his or her reviews. It's easy to get a clue about where any particular person is coming from based on the reviews. What you get is the gestalt, if you will. If it turns out that a person likes Denny's and hates Le Bec-Fin in Philadelphia, then that person is probably not someone who would be great at suggesting fabulous French restaurants, but he might be good at finding a coffee shop.

The way Yelp works is very much like the various computer-generated suggestion systems designed to determine that if you like A, B, and C then you'll probably like D, E, and F, since everyone else who liked A, B, and C liked D, E, and F. The information on Yelp could easily be used for this sort of automated, computer-aided analysis, but it's actually more fun just to do your own searches manually. By doing them manually, you kind of get to know people and gain some feeling for their tastes. The combination of computerized social networking and online opinions is powerful and useful. The combination also must be promising for people in the dating scene. When stepping back to consider the Yelp system as it now exists, there are a few points to note. First, the entire network seems to be populated by mostly Gen-Y yuppies, along with a lot of weird slackers, metalheads, and a few odd politicos. There are also quite a few tattoo mavens in the mix. It's actually fascinating for anyone over 35 to roam around the database. Marketing folks would have a field day!

Given the age of most people on Yelp, I'm surprised by how many of them call themselves "foodies." Although the site seems to lean towards restaurant reviews, many of the women, in particular, seem to be reviewing everything from the service at the local post offices to every imaginable spa and manicurist in the area. I ran into one poster who must have reviewed 20 high-end restaurants and 50 spas. It was as if she'd get taken out to dinner and then need two or three treatments in between. The other thing that kind of amazed me was the overall verbosity of this crowd. They write lengthy essays about just about anything from the neighborhood grocery store to the sausage selections at a ballpark. It's quite stunning.

One interesting use of sites like this is for avoidance behavior. This is a variation on an old trick you pull with wine waiters in restaurants. Ask them casually about wines you have already tasted and know well to see if they know what they're talking about. If not, send them away. This concept also works with Yelp. For example, on Yelp there is a review of Restaurant Gary Danko-probably the highest-rated restaurant in San Francisco at the moment, with universal 5-star reviews. Some punker vegan chick (for want of a better description) gave Gary Danko's one star, and her review was a 1970s-style rant against foie gras and veal. She went on and on about cruelty to animals, and I was wondering exactly why she went to an expensive French restaurant like this in the first place. Just to complain? Seemed odd.

Considering her idealism and attitude, I could look at all her other selections and discover all the places I want to avoid. People of this ilk tend to be boorish and offensive in more ways than one. When you live in Northern California you run into too many of them, and it's unpleasant. Now, accidental encounters can be minimized, thanks to Yelp. I'm not sure whether Yelp will ever scale enough to handle thousands of reviews of any single restaurant, or whether the mechanism can ever work forever, but right now it does.

All this said, I did join the Yelp group, posted a funny picture of myself, and within 24 hours I got my first message. You'll love what it was. In my Yelp e-mail box was a Nigerian Scam letter! I guess there are still a few bugs in the system.

Craigslist: 'Seeking human connection'

Craigslist: 'Seeking human connection'

By Matt Wells In New York

For a man with no plan, who describes himself as just another "line worker", Craig Newmark is doing alright.

Meeting the international media in Manhattan this week, the 53-year-old stood in his uniform of black jeans and grey shirt, trying to convince sceptical reporters that his eponymous Craigslist is not out to destroy the newspaper business.

Craig Newmark refuses to be pigeon-holed

The geeky former systems engineer for IBM has come a long way in the last 11 years.

The listserv, or electronic mailing list, he began for like-minded friends in the San Francisco Bay area now has "well over three billion page views" per month he says, which makes it the seventh biggest presence on the internet.

He may be breathing down the necks of Google and eBay, and he believes they share the same "moral compass", but like something from the plot of Revenge of the Nerds, his almost anti-profit business employs just 19 people, and is still based in a San Francisco living room.

Everything about Craig and the company he incorporated, almost reluctantly in 1999, makes no sense in business terms. But that is its genius, and the reason why its users love it, and swear by it.

His mantras, which he articulated again from the podium of the New York Foreign Press Center, are that it is a real and reciprocal online community that is "just trying to give people a break" across the 190 cities it serves.

He admits that they are going to have to hire some more people if they are going to expand on the current simple formula of exclusively English language-based zero-graphics design.

'No plan'

The site's only income derives from job listings in three US cities, though discussion is under way for charging a fee for accommodation postings - mainly thanks to huge traffic on the New York property pages.

It may occur to you that we don't have much of a business-plan, and you'd be right Craig Newmark

Everywhere else in the world it is free to every user, and although Craigslist still nets around $20m a year, it could be generating much more profit.

Ever since the first offer came along from Microsoft in 1997, Craig has been saying no to advertisers and buyout deals, and now "they've stopped bothering us" he said.

However, eBay did manage to buy 25% of the company in 2004, when a former employee unilaterally decided to sell his shares. Craig says the unexpected relationship has been beneficial so far.

"It may occur to you that we don't have much of a business plan, and you'd be right," he said. Few company founders could get away with that kind of pronouncement, but Craig Newmark is arguably unique.

"One of the reasons I'm not in management is because I am really really bad at hiring," he said. He introduced himself to the assembled reporters - from countries as diverse as Estonia, China, Mexico and Canada - as simply part of the five-person customer service team.

TV hero

There is one clear advantage to the self-deprecation however. When it comes to questions of his own pay and hard company figures, he can be convincingly vague: "We know we're doing okay. That we continue to do okay, that works for me."

Craigslist nets around $20m a year

If he looks and sounds like the antithesis of every business school model, it is clear that Craig's honesty and acumen when it comes to giving people what they want is highly effective.

Many in the media are beginning to dub him the assassin of classified advertising - the life-blood of the newspaper business. He rejects that charge, arguing that the internet itself is the real culprit. Newsprint is simply passe.

When he reached the podium, he gleefully compared his position to that of the fictitious president's press secretary in the US political drama, The West Wing.

As his current hero seems to be the cable TV satirist Jon Stewart, it is tempting to portray Craig Newmark as a liberal subversive - or an idealistic, digital age social worker - who is using his business to undermine conventional politics and morality.

But he refuses to be pigeon-holed: "We try to be driven by the values of the people who use us," he said.

"People have made assumptions about... my politics personally, and actually no-one knows what my politics happen to be... I haven't even articulated my politics to myself."

Human connection

One label that does stick, is that Craig is an indefatigable optimist. He is convinced that however large the list of cities gets, it will always be fed by a common desire for urban dwellers to help each other.

He spends much of his time these days weeding out the minority of "bad guys" who lie and scam their way through Craigslist, but the whole ethos is about self-policing and communal values.

With a portion of each site given over to dating, "erotic services" and "casual encounters", it is not hard to see for example, why only Istanbul has joined the Craigslist ranks from the Islamic world.

"The theoretical part of me thinks that the bigger we get, the less human connection people have," said Craig. "It doesn't work that way."

"People are still getting that sense of personal connection. Somehow we're maintaining that, by just trying really hard every day to do the right thing. It's a mystery."

Email Plugs Into Social Networking

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Email Plugs Into Social Networking | | from the faster-inbox-happier-rob dept. | | posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday January 03, @10:51 (Communications)| | http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/03/1451245 | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft Research recently released [0]SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder. It works in the Outlook email client to prioritize and sort emails based on the relationship to the sender and other characteristics of incoming email messages. [1]Trusted Reviews wonders if 2006 is the year of ordering information and reports on [2]ClearContext, which does similar prioritization of emails as well as some email driven task management."

Discuss this story at: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/01/03/1451245

Links: 0. http://research.microsoft.com/community/snarf/ 1. http://trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=2307 2. http://www.clearcontext.com/

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.'