Mobile Industry Review

Hungary’s TV2 television station runs a show called "Naplo" whose host, Andras Svaby regularly borrows the mobile phones of colleagues only to send out random funny messages.  Fascinating.  Heh.  Only, someone has got their own back… www.Pestiside.hu has the story here:

Montreal, Quebec (PRWEB) January 25, 2006 — New text messaging software from Mopal Inc. will allow users to send and receive mobile text messages from their computer without using a web browser or a cell phone. The MBC Pro SMS Messaging Center allows you to send and receive Short Message Service (SMS) messages very much [...]

Yesterday’s USA Today carried a side bar on Safe Texting. Here’s one of their recommendations: Any message longer than 160 characters is considered an e-mail Interesting point. It could also be considered two text messages.  Anyway, there’s a few more: Here

DNA India reports that Chinese mobile phone users are expected to send around 12 billion SMS text messages during the week-long Spring festival holiday.  That’s an awful lot of text messages and an awful lot of cash if you’re working on the basis of 10p a text! Link: Here

Ah wicked to see an announcement that Indian Railway officials are apparently looking to see how you can buy your rail ticket by SMS — so they might offer the service.  I hoped for a moment that they’d cracked a working system but it’s just a proposed system at the moment.  Maybe this is good [...]

We’ve worked on many television programmes with an SMS text feature — whether it’s a vote, survey, game or straight forward text-to-screen.  Always, always, we would read or hear about the audience figures for that programme and wonder how if 10 million people were supposed to be watching, how come the service only received 400 [...]

Planet Rugby has this story clearly demonstrating that text isn’t always the best medium for talking with colleagues.  A phone call might have been a little more useful in this context… Link: Here

Location-based technology via mobile isn’t that good in the UK yet. It’s nowhere near as accurate as GPS yet.  However, it’s still reasonably good if you want to keep tabs on your ex-lover.  Which is exactly what The Sunday Mail reports Kevin Smith did.  I don’t think the piece is too accurate — I’m reasonably [...]

Mark de la Vina at Sun Herald Mercury News (www.sunherald.com) has written a wicked piece about the changing nature of the modern courtship ritual. A doctoral student in neuropsychology at San Jose State University, [Michelle] Fontana used to give her phone number to an interested suitor. Now she prefers exchanging e-mails to establish communication. If [...]

Newsweek magazine, via msn.com, takes a look at texting as a medium for dismissal. Late last year the human-resources director of a French radio station sent a "texto" message to several staff members over the weekend telling them not to bother coming to work on Monday: they were fired. The boss, of course, didn’t have [...]

The Akron Beacon Journal (www.ohio.com), carries a super overview by Mary Ethridge of how text messaging is being used.  I find these pieces very enlightening as they often mention text competitions and uses of the medium that don’t always get international exposure.  For example in the above linked piece: In October, Vanity customers were given [...]