UK

Children’s GPRS Tracking Service On Sale In The UK
KidsOK, a tracking service that lets parents locate their child using a mobile phone, has gone on sale in the UK today,
Created by mTrack Services, the firm claim that they can establish the location of a mobile phone within 60 seconds.
Concerned/nosey parents can ‘ping’ their child’s mobile by sending a text message to 60777 including the child’s name (e.g. texting “ping johnny” will instruct KidsOK to identify the position of the child’s phone).
Parents will then receive a text description and map of the location where there little Johnny’s phone currently resides, accurate to within 500m in built up areas using GSM location-based technology..
Richard Jelbert, CEO and co-founder of mTrack Services, says the service will offer parents an alternative to sending “embarrassing” calls or text messages to their children while they’re out playing with their mates.
The service has been endorsed by children’s charity Kidscape and all mobile numbers are encrypted by the KidsOK servers to ensure privacy.
Parents also have to go through Home Office approved security checks during registration before they are able to use the service.
The bit that may strike fear into parents trying to foist these phones on their offspring is that fact that kids have to opt in to the KidsOK service and they can turn off the service any time they like.
Like when they want to have fun.
The KidsOK pack, retailing for £39.95 (~US$70, ~€58), will include the first year’s subscription, three handsets enabled and the first ten pings.
Parents can purchase the packs throughout the UK from outlets such as Arcadia Outfit, Comet Destination, BHS, Boots, Millets, Blacks and The Link.
Larger families can enable further handsets on payment of £4.95 p.a. per handset (~US$8.75, ~€7.25). Further ‘pings’ are purchased in bundles of 20 from KidsOK for £9.95 (~US$17.5, ~€14.5).
So far, O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone have enabled the service but presently children’s phones on Virgin and 3 cannot be located.
The service doesn’t require a PC or extra software, but parents using the service need their mobile phones to be enabled for WAP (GPRS).
mTrack Services have stated that each pack sold generates £1 towards the KidsOK Charitable Trust, providing donations to a variety of children’s charities and good causes.
KidsOK
19 July, 2005
Vodafone: Women Can Use Mobile Phones Shock
With a survey that could be described as pointless fluff at best and patronising drivel at worst, Vodafone D2 have trotted out the details of their ‘Women and Mobile Phones’ market research survey.
After interviewing 1,044 female mobile phone users aged between 14 and 49, Vodafone produced the astonishing conclusion that women are informed mobile phone users who know what they want.
Gosh! Whatever next? Women like food too?
The April 2005 survey, undertaken by GfK, apparently confirmed that women are confident mobile phone users with a “sound knowledge and overview of mobile communications when buying mobile phones, using handsets and services and in many daily mobile communication applications.”
In other words, they can use mobile phones just like everyone else.
After wading through pages of the depressing minutiae contained in the report, I can reveal that one-third of women trust their own judgment when buying a phone, with the rest asking their husband, boyfriend, or a sales assistant (lesbians don’t seem to exist in this survey).
Vodafone’s survey tells us that women – just like the other half of the human race – are price conscious, with the operator’s tariff being ranked as the most important criteria (71 percent) for purchase, followed by the handset price (66 percent)
The report claimed to be “surprised” that the ‘typical female’ criterion of colour was only accorded a priority ranking of eleven out of a total of sixteen criteria.
Predictably, the most used functions were text messages (92 percent), alarm clock function (72 percent), calendar (56 percent) and ring tones (50 percent).
Neatly half of women use the camera on their phone with 37 percent of respondents citing the provision of Bluetooth for wireless data transfer as important.
In another startlingly obvious conclusion, the survey reveals that games are used most frequently by the 14-19 years age group, and that camera, video and music functions are becoming “increasingly popular.”
Wow. I bet you didn’t know that.
The report seems almost disappointed that the ladies weren’t lining up to register their approval of pretty pink phones with sparkly bits on, with half of all respondents stating that mobile phone accessories are unnecessary ‘fashion gimmicks.’
Plumbing the absolute depths of irrelevant detail, the survey found that more than half of the women said that their favourite place for making mobile calls is a comfortable sofa, with 43 percent sitting on the patio or balcony and 31 percent preferring to make calls in bed. Fascinating stuff!
There’s even a bit at the end where the report tries to link the impact of mobiles on relationships between men and women, but we’d just about lost the will to live by then.
And so the report drones on in a never-ending stream of dreary stats of little consequence to anyone – and with no comparative stats for men’s mobile phone usage, this survey is not only one of the dullest we’ve ever read (and boy, we’ve seen some corkers!), it’s completely meaningless too.
Vodafone survey
15 July, 2005
BT Resort To Soft Porn To Sell BT Communicator?
We had a report from a reader today that he’d been … ehm, carrying out tests on his content filtering service. This entailed going to sites with photos of naked bodies – purely to test that the content filter blocked his access to them you understand. One of first sites he went to was the well known UK tabloid, The Sun.
Clicking through a few pages he was somewhat taken aback to find a scantily clothed woman leaning over a computer, promoting BT Communicator, which is BT’s software-based VoIP (Voice over IP) offering. When it launched, one of our writers, Fraser Lovatt, looked at BT communicator and wondered quite why the product existed at all,
“It certainly won’t make it cheaper as BT will bill you at exactly the same rate they bill for calls from your home phone, despite giving a clear warning on their site that PC calls aren’t as good. So, I have to ask – what’s the point?”
It would appear to us that BT’s confidence in their BT Communicator product seems to have hit an all-time low today with its appearance in The Sun.
The piece in the Gizmo section of the site and paper features BT’s new model to promote BT Communicator, Michelle Marsh.
In her excitement to use the product, Michelle has fortunately remembered to don her headset, but sadly has put on her school shirt (it’s a little tight) and then forgotten to wear a skirt.
This is the wording they used in the article ..
“Marvellous Michelle Marsh has been signed up by BT to front (and let’s face it, she’s got plenty of it) a campaign for its Communicator service.
The luscious lovely is plugging the virtues of BT Communicator with Yahoo! Messenger, technology that allows you to phone, text, email and instant message from your PC.
And the stunner is doing it as only she knows how – dressed up in stockings and suspenders as a saucy secretary.”
Classy isn’t it. Lots of mentions of commercial products in there, not the sort of copy that falls out of the finger tips of a tabloid journalist. Surely BT aren’t using advertorials in The Sun to promote Communicator to the masses?
Looking at Ms Marsh’s previous work, it’s clear that she’s a busy little bunny. Her extensive career features the expected large variety of lads mag, car and bike mag shoots, but also extends to a photo shoot in Blackpool for the Tory party conference. Interestingly earlier this year she did the press launch for Bulldog Broadband – a big competitor to BT.
So is this a desperate ploy to try and promote a product that has no reason to exist? or have we go the wrong end of the stick?
The Sun – BT Communicator
14 July, 2005
SPV C550 Launched By Orange UK
It’s been a long time coming, but Orange have finally announced that their Windows Mobile-powered SPV C550 smartphone will go on sale later this month
The “Orange SPV C550 Great for Music handset” – to give its full name – is a compact mobile offering full smartphone functionality and a digital music player, sporting dedicated play, rewind and fast-forward keys.
Sporting a natty brushed aluminum finish, the phone can store up to 170 (presumably very short) music tracks on a removable 128MB mini SD memory card and comes pre-loaded with Orange Music Player, compatible with AAC+, WAV, MP3 and MPEG-4 formats.
The player integrates with the Orange World portal where Orange are hoping punters will be tempted into shelling out for some of the 300,000 music tracks available for download.
Songs downloaded through the phone’s Music Player software are DRM-protected, although the built in Fireplayer application will let punters remix their fave tunes into ringtones.
Media playback times for the C550 weren’t announced, but Orange’s own figures put it at 4 hours of talk time and up to 6 days of standby time.
The device, codenamed Amadeus, is a tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 MHz affair that’s big on connectivity, offering GPRS Class 10, USB, Bluetooth and Infrared.
There’s an integrated 1.3 Megapixel camera wedged into its diminutive 108 x 46 x 16 mm case, and the whole caboodle weighs in at a pocket-unruffling 107g.
With the smartphone being built around Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 2003 platform, it’s easy to blast off emails on the move and synchronise contacts, diary and calendar information with your desktop PC.
Matthew Kirk, Director of Devices at Orange was ready and willing to spin out the PR schmooze: “Since the launch of the first SPV handset three years ago, Orange has led the development of smartphones and provided its customers with a choice of the latest and most powerful devices. The Orange SPV C500 was the world’s smallest smartphone and today its successor provides the first realistic alternative to carrying around a separate MP3 player, phone and PDA.”
The SPV C550 joins Orange’s growing SPV range of Windows Mobile-based devices, which includes the SPV C500 phone, SPV M2000 PDA and the recently-launched SPV M500 mini PDA.
Pricing details are yet to be announced, but will, as ever, be dependant on contract.
Orange
Orange SPV C550
14 July, 2005
London Bomb Survivor Reunited Online
Two users of the same online bulletin board were in the same carriage of a London Tube train that was involved with the blast last week.
Doesn’t sound that remarkable until you discover how they found each other.
Badger Kitten (BK), the pseudonym used by a young female on the urban75 discussion board, posted a long, emotional rendition of the days event. Among the 600 readers that saw the story was Markm, who had also been on an exploding train. Whilst reading the story markm realised that he must have been on the same carriage as BK.
Markm posted a comment on the story.
BK came to realise that the not only had Markm been in the same carriage as her, but that he had passed valuable, possibly life saving, information to her about escaping from the train, relayed from the driver.
Mark and I have talked and worked out that we were in the same front carriage and feet away from each other and he was the man who got the message to me from the driver that we could escape out of the front and walk to Russell Square and to keep off the tracks.
This was the message I passed down and several people behind me were thus able to follow Mark’s instructions from the driver and get out.
So, well done Mark and hooray that you were there and able to stay calm. We all helped each other. We are going to meet up later. The Internet is great, isn’t it? And urban 75 has proved invaluable.
Urban75, founded in 1995, has been providing valuable information on a vast range of subjects since then – all commercial free. We chatted to its editor about this most recent of uses, he told us, “it makes me humbled and honoured to run the site. It’s a good example of how the Internet can reach out and connect people.”
Without the discussion boards on urban75 or the Internet, the likelihood of two people caught up in the explosions meeting again, is highly unlikely.
In a further example of Digital-Lifestyles, BBC News found BK’s original posting and approached her for its inclusion on the BBC News Website – after they cleaned it up a little for public consumption.
Another example of an esteemed news source getting content from online bulletin boards/blogs.
Urban75
London Attacks
BK postings
markm postings
BK diary on BBC News
13 July, 2005
EU Seeks To Regulate Internet TV
‘The Man’ in the form of the EC wants to introduce regulation to the Internet by bringing in controversial rules to cover television online, according to a report in the Times.
Well, actually it’s ‘The Woman’, as Viviane Reding, the European Information Commissioner is hatching plans in Brussels to regulate areas such as taste and decency, accuracy and impartiality for Internet broadcasters.
Or good old ‘censorship’, as some may like to put it.
The consultation documents also looks set to relax regulations covering the amount of advertising that a TV channel can show, with the current limit of 12 minutes an hour likely to be scrapped. More adverts. Whoppee.
One of five “issue papers” to be released by Reding discusses the impact of technological change and concludes that “non-linear audio-visual content” (‘TV downloads’ in human-speak) need to be subjected to regulation.
Although some of the suggested changes – like the extension of rules governing the protection of children – are unlikely to ruffle any feathers, demands that Internet broadcasters provide a statutory right of reply look set to get the fur flying.
Ofcom’s already in a strop about the proposals, with Tim Suter, Ofcom’s partner for content and standards, snarling: “Whatever happens, it is not appropriate to take the set of rules that apply to television and apply them to other media. Where possible, we should be looking at self-regulation or co-regulation, because that is something that can deliver the goods.”
Internet-delivered TV is currently unregulated in the UK, so there is no compulsion for Web broadcasters to respect rules governing accuracy and impartiality or taste and decency that apply to all other analogue and digital channels.
The current big boys of UK Internet TV broadcasting, Home Choice, have formed their own self-regulatory body which mirror most of the existing rules, and Ofcom believes that this approach is sufficient for responsible broadcasters.
Ofcom argues that dodgy operators would be likely to operate offshore and thus be completely unhindered by any jurisdictions that the European Union dreams up.
The new rules will be based on the 1989 European directive, Television Without Frontiers, which set the benchmark for television regulation.
The proposals in the issues papers are not firm conclusions and broadcasters will have until 5 September to respond in writing, with a draft directive following by the end of this year.
The Times
Europe’s Information Society
13 July, 2005
Camera Phones Used For London Bombing Coverage
The growth of photo and video-capable phones has resulted in news agencies sourcing more and more content from members of the public who have used their mobiles to record disaster scenes.
As the story of yesterday’s terrible bomb outrages in London unfurled, news agencies told their reporters on the scene to ask witnesses if they’d taken any images with their camera phones, with the main UK TV networks also running notices instructing viewers to send in any videos they had taken.
Elsewhere, Websites, bulletin boards and blogs also formed a valuable source for news agencies hungry for stories, with Sky tracking down and then interviewing a tube blast victim whose photo had been posted up on a Web site.
Mobile video footage also played a major part in news bulletins, with shaky mobile video footage taken from inside a blackened tube train leading some news updates.
Footage of the destroyed bus was also shown extensively on TV with Sandy MacIntyre, director of news for Associated Press Television News, paying US$250 (~£144~€209) for the amateur video clip.
Mobile-sourced footage was used by several US networks with some TV executives commenting that it was the first time that video taken from a mobile phone had been used during the coverage of a major story.
Jonathan Klein, CNN’s U.S. chief believes this “citizen journalism” will become a more important part of coverage in major news events. “No question about it,” he said. “There’s been a lot of talk in terms of the increased democratization of the news media relating to blogs and the like. This is another example of the citizen journalist.”
Still images taken by mobiles were also extensively reproduced in newspapers all over the world, with a photo by commuter Alexander Chadwick appearing on the front pages of both The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as other international and domestic publications.
News organisations are increasingly relying on amateur photography and video to help tell major stories, with NBC News President Neal Shapiro describing yesterday’s coverage as “a portent of things to come.”
Jonathan Klein, CNN’s U.S. chief, also predicted that mobile phone footage will play a more important part in major news events coverage, bringing about what he describes as an “increased democratisation of the news media relating to blogs and the like.”
AP News
AP story
11 July, 2005
Legal UK Music Downloads Top Ten Million, Up 743%
The UK record industry trade association the BPI has revealed that download sales in 2005 have raced past the ten-million mark – almost twice the amount for the whole of 2004.
Sales are racing ahead of last year’s 5.7 million legal download total, with 5,562,638 single track downloads registered between April-June 2005 compared to just 659,377 for the same period last year – up a thumping great 743.6% for the quarter.
Purring wildly, BPI Chairman Peter Jamieson said: “The record industry has enthusiastically embraced the new legal download services since their emergence in the mainstream little more than a year ago and now we’re beginning to reap the rewards.”
Illegal music downloads remain a thorn in the side of the industry, but the growth in legal downloads now outstrips the growth in dodgy file sharing with Jamieson adding, “The battle against illegal files-haring will continue, but we are delighted to have hit this milestone so soon”.
Big gains in DVD single sales have compensated for the continuing decline in CD single sales (down 23% to 5,721,873) with an overall 52.4% improvement in single sales being recorded (including downloads).
Once again, the death of trusty old vinyl has been exaggerated, with quarterly sales for seven inch vinyl up by 87.3% on last year, although figures are comparatively small (288,780 between April-June 2005 against 154,216 for the same period last year).
Data compiled by the BPI shows annual sales of seven-inch vinyl singles climbing up to 1.4 million units, representing a huge 64% improvement year-on-year – the best 12 months for the format since 1998.
The resurgence of vinyl has been attributed to British indie and rock acts love affair with their near ancient format, with bands like Iron Maiden’s, Libertines, Babyshambles, Kaiser Chiefs and Franz Ferdinand all releasing songs on vinyl.
BPI Chairman Peter Jamieson added: “Despite the incredible growth in download sales, there is still a huge demand for the collectible physical formats. It would be wrong to write-off physical formats just yet. Record companies are committed to meeting consumer demand in whatever format people want their music”.
BPI report
11 July, 2005
Yahoo WAP Mobile Price Check Service Launched
Yahoo! UK and Ireland have launched a handy new mobile search service which allows consumers to check the prices of goods via Yahoo! WAP services when they’re out and about.
The service, accessible on all WAP enabled phones at standard browsing rates, serves up instant price and product information from the Yahoo-owned comparison service Kelkoo.
Yahoo! said it will not charge for the service which promises to cover 3 million product offers and more than 5000 UK retailers.
Mobile users accessing the WAP site at http://wap.yahoo.co.uk, can type in their desired product into the search box and click on the “Products” button.
A result screen then displays images, pricing and product information, providing users with the low down about the cheapest prices around.
Dorothea Arndt, director of search and distribution at Kelkoo enthused: “Mobile price comparison is a major step towards aligning the on and offline shopping experience and brings us significantly closer to achieving our mission of making shopping simple for everyone.”
It all sounds great, but we found the service a little flaky.
At the first two attempts, we got a screen of results serving up nothing more than the price and the name of the shop with no location, address, phone number or Weblink. A fat lot of good, then.
However, if you persevere and click through to the next results page, a ‘compare’ link should magically appear under some products and this will let you access its full details.
Once the service is fully ironed out, shopkeepers around the UK can prepare to brace themselves for a stream of tech-savvy bargain hunters waving their WAP phones around the counter and demanding price matching.
Yahoo!
8 July, 2005
London Explosions Lead To Jammed Mobile Phone Networks
Mobile phone networks in London were overwhelmed for several hours following a series of terrorist blasts across central London.
As news of the attack spread, networks were running at near capacity as concerned Londoners reached for their phones to check up on friends and family.
The huge surge in the number of calls caused problems over mobile networks with many people unable to connect the first time, if at all.
Vodafone said it had reserved some network capacity for the emergency service workers dealing with the disaster, with a spokesperson adding, “because all our switches are at capacity, we need to ensure police and emergency services can communicate.
It would be a section of the network across London, so people can still make calls but it will be more difficult to make a call.”
SMS text messages were, however, still getting through due to its simple store-and-forward mechanism.
As with 9/11, many people turned to the Web for news and updates, resulting in major news sites struggling with the enormous surge in traffic.
News sites like the BBC and Sky both suffered slowdowns or brief periods of unavailability.
Bloggers were also quick to report the news, with the blog tracking service Technorati stating that there were more than 1,300 posts about the explosions by 1015 GMT.
When we looked for updates, we found that Technorati’s Web site had also gone down at 1300GMT.
BBC News report
Technorati
NewsNow
7 July, 2005