Samsung Electronics is to unveil the first handset PR movie in the world, Anyfilm, on the Christmas Eve, announces Telecoms Korea. Anyfilm consists of three 8-minute movies and one interactive film whose story can be changed according to each viewer’s...

A Sydney man has been charged with sending SMS messages to incite violence in the days following the city's race riots, writes BBC news. The 33-year-old man - the first to be charged with such an offence - faces a...

MSA Communication, Korea’s messenger phone service provider is launching “imTEL version 2.1” that provides call forwarding service, informs Telecoms Korea. When PC is turned off, calls are forwarded to fixed line telephones or mobile phones. Also provided are selective...

The PODCASTS page on the website of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art offers an RSS feed and MP3 downloads of SFMOMA Artcasts of current exhibitions. The text explains: “Each month, we bring you closer to the voices and sounds of artists, writers, curators, musicians, and visitors as they respond to exhibitions and artworks on view at SFMOMA.” The Artcasts are archived by month. If you at attend the museum in person and present an MP3 player loaded with the Artcast of a current exhibition, you will receive a $2 discount on your admission.

Even more avant audio is the SFMOMA Artcast Invitational which accepts up to 4-minute entries if you are “a sound artist, a closet critic, or a casual observer with a keen eye for art and a flair for language . . .”

The New York Times uses google maps to organise and display reader's experiences of the transport strike...

via Robin Hamann's Cybersoc

Software has been developed which enables deaf people to have real-time text conversations using a mobile phone, writes BBC news. But The Royal National Institute for Deaf people , the charity that has created the service, says some mobile operators...

icLiverpool reports that a debt collection agency has seen a four-fold increase in responses from debtors after using text messages to contact them. Agilisys Contact Services substituted stern letters and curt phone calls to people who had fallen behind on...

I leave for the mountains today where there is no Internet connection where I will be staying. The cybercafe (at least that what they call it, looks like a regular restaurant to me) has one PC on the way to the bathroom that operates on a coin-operated timer (!!). Though I'm hopeful of capting WiFi somewhere, I will be unable to blog and check my mail every day. So please accept my apologies if I don't answer you right away. Fortunately Régine Debatty, who needs no introduction, will be taking over until January 9th. So great things are coming. I wish all of you a merry xmas and my warmest wishes for the holidays.

Time Magazine have chosen Adam Stacey's cameraphone picture as one of the Best Photos of the Year 2005 - of his experience on the london underground during the attack in London on the 7th of July 2005.

Alfie Dennen published the image for Adam on his blog for the first time, and through Creative Commons licensing, the image went around the world in minutes, becoming an iconic image relating to the event.

[via Alfie's Blog]

Research In Motion yesterday announced its quarterly results for the period ending November 26, 2005. Despite the distraction of a major legal battle with suitor NTP, RIM pulled off quite the... [Thanks to dozens of spam sites using the full text of our RSS content, the feed is now only a summary. Click through to see the full story.)

(Via On The Commons) yet another argument why supporting the commons when it comes to intellectual property and innovation is the very opposite of communism, as the Cato Institute (that place where you can pay their fellows to advocate your political views) has claimed:

Intellectual property rights are supposed to give people incentives to innovate. That’s the cherished grand narrative. But what’s actually happening on the ground? A dispatch by Steve Lohr in today’s NYT suggests that the edifice of IP law may be killing basic research in the cradle:

The legal wrangling over intellectual property rights in research projects involving universities and companies, specialists say, can take months, sometimes more than a year. This legal maneuvering, they say, is not only slowing the pace of innovation, but is also prompting some companies to seek universities research partners in other countries, where negotiations over intellectual property are less time-consuming.

It turns out that the legal apparatus to negotiate and enforce intellectual property rights is a fairly unwieldy and costly enterprise unto itself. Big transaction costs. Expensive lawyers. Time delays. The intense legal jockeying to determine who will own new scientific knowledge, paradoxically, is preventing scientists from having the freedom to collaborate and generate that knowledge in the first place! The absence of a knowledge commons means that a commercial market can’t emerge.

The good news is that four major tech companies (IBM, H-P, Intel and Cisco) have collaborated with seven major research universities and the Kauffman Foundation to forge a new set of guidelines for making open source software research freely available. The guidelines are intended to promote “collaborative innovation” in software development by bypassing the customary constraints of patent and copyright law.

For those people who equate the commons with communism, it’s worth pondering this statement by John E. Kelly III, Senior Vice President, Technology & Intellectual Property at IBM: “Open source software and standards developed among universities, government and the IT industry form the basis for genuine collaborative innovation. This collaboration will lead to greater commercialization throughout the IT industry. Because of that, it is imperative that these principles guide our efforts to collectively improve current intellectual property practices.” (emphasis added)

The new guidelines are an implicit retreat from the ethic promoted by the Bayh-Dole Act, the 1980 law that presumes that university research will be commercialized more rapidly if universities can patent their research. Tech businesses and scientists alike are discovering that the marketization of academic research has some serious downsides, especially for basic research. IP restrictions are preventing researchers from trading information, collaborating and innovating. The lack of a knowledge commons has serious functional implications.

The new guidelines have not yet been posted on IBM’s or the Kauffman Foundation’s website, so it’s hard to tell how broad and effective a solution they are; the market ethic fostered by Bayh-Dole has penetrated deeply into academia, altering its institutional priorities and identity in many instances. Still, it’s encouraging that major tech companies are taking practical steps to reinvigorate the knowledge commons as an indispensable foundation of their commercial fortunes.

This article says "China's national library will cooperate with Google.com to release digital data resources to readers for free,People’s Daily reported today.The free resources include 25,000 ancient stone rubbings,100,000 Dunhuang writings, 5,000 ancient books in the Xixia Kingdom (Western Xia Dynasty 1038-1227) and 6 million magazines in the Republic of China period."

National library,Google to offer free data

"An 18-year-old passenger who caused a fatal crash by pulling on the steering wheel pleaded guilty to DUI manslaughter after prosecutors discovered a confession on his online blog",this article says.

Teen pleads guilty after blog confession

"In the next 10 years,China is expected to build more than 70 million new homes in what observers are calling an unprecedented housing boom in the country",govtech.net reports."This year alone,Shanghai will build towers with more living and working space than there is in all the towers in New York City.Expecting that many of these new homes and offices will want to incorporate the latest technologies,Holley Metering Ltd.,China's largest meter manufacturer,is now rolling out a new wireless automated meter reading (AMR) system for the country's public utilities.Based on Ember Corporation's ZigBee technology,the new AMR system will potentially save China's utility providers millions of Yuan and improve service delivery by eliminating the need to manually read meters at homeowners' premises.Instead, utility companies will achieve greater efficiency with fewer errors by remotely monitoring a residence's electric,gas and water usage."

ZigBee Joins Wi-Fi as AMR Alternative

The Guardian says "it is not talked about much these days because it has already become an unexceptional part of daily life,but the popularity of text messaging just goes on and on.Last month in the UK alone the number of messages sent reached 2.8bn,according to figures released yesterday by the Mobile Data Association,with person-to-person texting rising by 23%.On average we send 93m messages a day which,after excluding the very young and the very old,amounts to more than two a day on average for everyone.The SMS revolution has opened up an entirely new layer of communication between people with its own codes,language and conventions.It is one of the fastest-growing consumer products ever and all the more remarkable because it was never intended to happen.Mobile phone owners discovered they could utilise a part of the phone reserved for engineers to communicate with each other.The rest is history."

In praise of ... texting

"A man has been charged with forwarding inciting text messages in the days following the Cronulla race riots,"news reports."The 33-year-old Matraville man was arrested at 9.30pm (AEDT) yesterday and charged with using a carriage service to menace,harass or cause offence,police said.He also faces one count of print,publish to incite or urge the commission of a crime.The man allegedly repeatedly forwarded two text messages calling for people to meet at two Sydney beaches on Sunday,December 18."

First charges over SMS 'incitement'

This eFinland reports says "Nordic Information Society Statistics 2005 gives a broad and comprehensive picture of the Nordic Information Societies and their latest development."From p16 of the 163 page report which is co-financed by the Nordic Council of Ministers."In all of the Nordic countries the outgoing traffic in mobile networks has grown rapidly,especially in 2003 and 2004.From 2000 to 2004 outgoing traffic in mobile networks almost doubled in Denmark.Similarly,growth rates apply to Finland and Norway.The increasing use of mobile communication and thereby mobile equipment also brings in new ways of communicating. SMS (short messaging service) and MMS (multimedia messaging service) has grown in importance together with the increasing use of mobile communication as shown in table 1.1 below.As can be seen from the table,SMS is most popular in Denmark with over 6.5 billion messages in 2004.On the contrary,MMS has the highest popularity in Norway,with approximately 72 millions of messages."

Nordic Information Society Statistics 2005 (PDF)

The December 20 issue of The Wall Street Journal reports about a talk with Randall De Lorenzo, director of professional services at Traq Wireless Inc., about the most common mistakes companies make in their strategy or lack of one for wireless services.

The reason companies need a wireless strategy is that wireless came in through the back door. That is no secret. It started out on expense reports, and then usually a controller or someone else in the finance organization runs a report some day and says, "Look at what we're spending on wireless."

Most companies fail to treat wireless as a true technology. Every other thing in a company what do you have to go through to get a laptop? What do you have to go through to get any other as set? They don't recognize wireless until it's very difficult to manage. It's almost a hands-off technology.

You need to find out what's going on. We have a fair number of companies [as clients], particularly since 9/11, that want security type of phones in case something goes wrong. Those are perfectly explainable. We have a Fortune 50 company that we work with that had 1,200 devices that hadn't been used in six months. And they were scared to even take them to the lowest rate plan because they couldn't tell you who was using the devices. You want to manage every device, you want to know every user, every phone number, you want to know who's using it, what department they belong to. And ideally you'd like to know when their commitment is up.

In another affiliate buyout deal, Sprint Nextel will buy the remaining shares of Nextel Partners for $6.5 billion. Nextel Partners provides Nextel branded service in rural areas. After the Sprint... [Thanks to dozens of spam sites using the full text of our RSS content, the feed is now only a summary. Click through to see the full story.)

According to documents posted by the FCC (IHDT56FX1), Sprint Nextel appears to be gearing up for a launch of the Motorola C290. While the C290 is a very basic entry-level handset, the news is notable... [Thanks to dozens of spam sites using the full text of our RSS content, the feed is now only a summary. Click through to see the full story.)