Carphone’s pre-tax profits have crashed ten per cent to £123.1million, with the company’s financial buttocks feeling the lash of their £80.5million free broadband launch.
The launch just wasn’t just painful for Carphone, with punters galore feeling the weals of a truly rubbish service, being forced to wait months on end while the company struggled hopelessly to catch up with demand.
Continue reading Carphone Profits Hit By Free Broadband Launch
China Mobile has launched its own IM service, Fetion. It offers PC and mobile phone messaging at zero charge, even from mobiles, with just the GPRS data charges being paid for. Users will be able to IM between mobiles running the service; PC to PC and PC to mobile. Currently there’s no monthly charge, although they haven’t ruled out of possibility of it.
China has a self-declared battle against porn going on at the moment and on the back of that Liu Yunshan, head of the Communist Party of China Central Committee’s Publicity Department – a big cheese – has put forward the idea of “building a Web culture with Chinese characteristics.”
Continue reading China Wants To ‘Building A Web Culture With Chinese Characteristics’
The month of May saw a month-long crackdown on Internet porn in China. The combined forces of 10 ministries lead the closing of 300 domestic porn and ‘salacious’ sites being closed down.
Li Baozhong, head of the official press watchdog and deputy director of the national anti-porn and anti-piracy office also reported that they’d blocked 4,000 links to porn sites and filtered out more than 10,000 ‘online porn games’ – we’ve no idea what these porn games could be.
There was a large assemblage of HTC bigwigs in town for the global launch of their new Touch smartphone.
A sleek little fella sporting GSM/GPRS/EDGE, Tri-band radio (900, 1800 & &900), Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0, the Touch launches in two flavours: “elegant soft black” and the truly daft sounding, “alluring wasabi green.”
The big news about the phone – hyperbolically described as, “a watershed as important as the introduction of the mouse” – is HTC’s new TouchFLO system, which lets users navigate screens by sweeping their finger across the phone.
Continue reading HTC Smartphone Launch, London
The DSL Forum today announced that the total number of DSL connections worldwide has exceeded 200 million at the World Broadband Forum in Beijing.
It’s estimated that this significant milestone was passed in April this year (2007), less than a year since the announcement of the passing of the 150m level.
Continue reading 200m DSL Customers Worldwide: China Broadband Numbers Huge
An astonishing 855,000 handsets are flushed away every year in the UK, totting up to an annual £342 million’s worth of phones flying around the u-bend.
The rather startling figure comes from the price comparison and switching service, SimplySwitch, who claim that 4.5m handsets are lost or damaged every year, with many enjoying a rather bizarre demise.
It seems that phones are particularly prone to falling down the loo as a result of falling out of pockets or being knocked off the toilet roll holder (or, we expect, slipping out of the hands of drunk blokes feebly failing to multitask after a skinful of Super-lager).
Continue reading Mobile Users Drop £342m Of Phones Down The Pan
Online stats firm comScore have been busy with their rulers, clicky counters and tape measures to bring us curious folks ‘the first comprehensive review of European Internet activity.’
Their cool-sounding ‘comScore World Metrix’ study reveals that Europeans *heart* the Internet, with an average of 122 million Europeans aged 15 or older being online during an average day in April 2007, compared to 114 million in the U.S.
Continue reading Study: U.K. Most Active Internet Users In Europe
Tonight sees the first BBC TV programme broadcast in Second Life – The Money Programme.
Not surprisingly, the subject will be virtual worlds with two sections being covered – free to enter worlds like Second Life and pay for services, or Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMORPG), like World of Warcraft.
Continue reading First BBC Show Broadcasting In Second Life Tonight
UK music service last.fm has been sold to US media giant CBS, whose empire covers TV, radio and Web.
Last.fm is the darling of the ‘new’ Internet kids, as it is based on buzzword-tastic technology. While that’s true, it doesn’t take away from the fact that it is really rather good, using the listen preferences of everyone else on the service to automatically pick the tracks that probably match the music that you like.
Its major strength is that it throws in tracks that you may well have never found under your own volition – vital in a world where personal playlists can kill variety.
At £140m ($280m) the BBC are calling it the “largest-ever UK Web 2.0 acquisition.” Quite how that’s defined is anyone guess, but it is a lot of lolly, so trebles all round.
One of the founders, Martin Stiksel told the BBC that “this move will really support us to get every track ever recorded and every music video ever made onto Last.fm,” quite an ambition, but as he added, “with a strong partner like CBS, this is now within our reach.”
It’s planned that the site and company will continue to operate separately under it’s own branding.
Stiksel also bigged up the UK’s capital city, by saying “being in London has helped us; it’s the best place to do things with music full stop. It’s the place that leads the world.” Hurrah!
(Via)