I got a note in from Bryan Crum, Spokesperson at Omnilert, makers of e2Campus, the web-based mass (mobile) notification system.

They’ve hit the 100+ College/University milestone. That really is a super achievement. What’s more, they’ve also closed both Harvard and Texas A&M — totally brilliant news.

Business is good for Omnilert. They’ve just recently added (read it and weep):

Ashland University, Augustana College, Baltimore City Community College, Bryn Athyn College, Bryn Mawr College, Bucks County Community College, Cedar Crest College, Chatham University, Cochise College, College of Southwest, Dominican College, East Texas Baptist University, Eastern Virginia Medical School, Emory & Henry College, Endicott College, Flagler College, Florida Southern College, Frostburg State University, Guilford Technical Community College, Harvard University, Hendrix College of Information Technology, Illinois Institute of Technology, Immaculata University, Jefferson College of Health Sciences, Loyola College, Manhattan University, Mississippi College, Moravian College, Northern Arizona University, Oklahoma Christian University, Old Dominion University, Reading Area Community College, Roanoke College, Schreiner University, Slippery Rock University, Southwestern Community College, Springfield College, Sweet Briar College, Texas A&M University, Texas Cooperative Extension, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, Towson University, Troy University, University of Hartford, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Ursinus College, Virginia Union University, Virginia Wesleyan College, and West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

That’s some performance over the last year. I’m encouraged though. I’ve always believed that a mass notification system working via mobile was absolutely, absolutely critical for large institutions like Colleges, Universities, Schools and the like.

.. But they’re only for “training purposes”, apparently. “Maybe next month” is all the guys in the shop would say - and then mumbled something about OEM software testing and how these things took time…

chop chop Three - Your lack of 95’s is the only thing stopping me from jumping ship…

This week’s column from Mr Harvey focuses on the evil of mobile phones in schools…

- - - - - -

God, but it’s hard growing up. The golden rule of adolescence – contrary to our own parent’s views that we had it easy – is that it gets harder for each generation. Our grandparents, as teenagers, only had to worry about the occasional cave-in or gas-explosion as they spent their summer-holidays toiling down the coal-mines. Our parents, though, had to watch out for dodgy acid and hula-hoops with razor-blades sewn on the inside by Taiwanese factory-workers with strange senses of humours.

As time goes on the rate at which being a kid becomes unpleasanter speeds up – for example, if you were a child in the 1970s then you had to watch out for your parents dressing you in shite clothes. Repeat the experience in the eighties, though, and not only was your shell-suit god-awful, style-wise, but was also liable to self-combust, igniting once the nylon and polyester had built up enough of a static charge.

But why do children nowadays have it bad? Admittedly, at first view, life in 2007 looks pretty idyllic; rabies is vaguely under control, all the kiddie-fiddlers are too busy setting up profiles on MySpace to actually do any damage and, even though your dad’s busy at the office all day, Optimus Prime has made a come-back, so that’s your father-figure taken care of.

Basically, it’s all to do with school.

I’m not talking exams here – the fact that by the time a sprog leaves secondary-school they’ve had more exams and mocks than they actually have had lessons is irrelevant. I’m not even blaming the fact that head-teachers these days often spend all their budget on electronic, interactive, multi-media white-boards which they then stick in the 40 year-old portacabins that pass for classrooms these days.

I’m not even pointing my finger at the fact that so many playing-fields have been sold off that the leading cause of death for kids these days has changed, in the last ten years, from “Tripped and fell over his untied shoelaces, just like I said he would” to being “Knocked down and killed whilst on a cross-country run down the hard-shoulder”.

What has made school hell these days is the common-or-garden mobile telephone.

Communication these days is easy and instant but mostly superficial, and, let’s face it, why bitch about someone behind their back when you can do it via text? Schoolkids love three things above all else – sugar, nicotine and gossip. Sugar they can only get their hands on at the vending-machines between 9am and 3am, because at home Mummy won’t let them have anything sweet, lest they turn out as fat as Daddy. Nicotine they can only get when they leave school (God bless the traditional ice-cream-van that dishes out fags outside the gates. At mine, Mr. Sospan did a roaring trade with a cornet that had a Benson and Hedges in place of the flake).

Gossip, though, is now a 24 hour-a-day trade, enabled, powered and encouraged by mobiles.

Allow me to elaborate – in ye olden days (nostalgia isn’t what it used to be), a rumour could go round the school just as fast as you can whisper it. These days - this terrible, terrible future - you can irrecoverable libel a fellow pupil as being a PE-teacher-bonking deviant to the entire school with a few tiny jolts of your thumb.

Mobiles have rapidly grown (perhaps “festered” is a better word…) from being an irritant to teachers into being a weapon with which to oppress them. In the last two or three years the handsets that sprogs take to school, the hand-me-downs from elder siblings, have obviously started to feature cameras and video features. In an environment like school, where the merest taint of individuality or difference is instantly latched upon and exploited most ruthlessly the ability to document and share these infractions is - for the vicious little squits - priceless

Well, actually, it’s not priceless, because it’s perfectly easy to assign a price to it - 8 pence a time…

I do a lot of work with Virtual Learning Environments and as such often have the opportunity to talk to teachers about this. Their reactions can be grouped in three distinct camps:

1. White-lipped, fulminating rage. Teachers used to have authority in the classroom - now it’s the other way around. When you’ve got 30 pocket-sized CCTV sets pointing at you, you sort of have to watch your step.

2. Amazement. The sort of teacher that wasn’t quite aware of what sort of technological heat their little darlings were packing is also the unwitting star of a hundred different YouTube postings detailing in forensic detail their dandruff, or their morning-registration delirium-tremens, or the disgusting tufts of cat-hair that bedeck their cardigans like the driven snow. Or in the case of Geography teachers, all of the above.

3. Laughter. This is usually from clued-up ITC teachers who’ve bought mobile-phone jammers off some Russian e-bay and thus are as shielded as the star-trek crews they so worship.

But - if mobiles are so damaging to the social development of our youth (which they are) and are so destructive to the careers of our teachers (which they are) and so very expensive that the pay-as-you-go charges take money out of the pockets of those poor, honest, hard-working, cigarette-selling ice-cream men (which they do) then why don’t we ban them from educational establishments altogether?

Because this is Britain, and that means that the finest lesson any kid can learn is to take a beating. And these days, that means having a photo of you getting wedgied broadcast through MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and the entire school intranet all at the same time.

As a wise man once said - the sound of children laughing is the sweetest thing an adult ear can hear…just so long as you can’t hear exactly what it is that the little bastards are laughing about…

Link: Advertising Age - MediaWorks - Who Still Reads Magazines? Just About Everybody

In an era when new forms of media and technology seem to sprout up almost weekly, you would think that much of it would be embraced by younger consumers. And you would also think the younger digerati would begin to shun some of the more traditional media venues. Turns out that’s not entirely so.

AdAge reckons we all still read paper magazines. What’s your viewpoint?

Me? I bought a copy of WIRED magazine the other day and was rather unimpressed to find out it was £4.30. It, somehow, didn’t feel worth it.

I wonder if I should be buying more ‘paper’.

I’ve bought a mobile industry magazine once. Should I be supporting the industry?

I was effing and blinding like a trooper on Tuesday evening.

Big time.

I was going absolutely NUTS.

I was in Hartlepool working. My colleague Thomas popped his head through the office door at about 6pm and asked if I wanted a lift back to the hotel. I weighed the options and decided that I should exit the office — it’s a good mental thing to do after a full day, I reckon — but that I would continue work on the internet later on.

I’d already eaten so Thomas dropped me off at the Grand Hotel in Hartlepool — distinguished by the fact it is not very. Not very grand, that is. How the website can refer to it as Hartlepool’s premier hotel, I don’t know. Still, it’s been taken over by new management so perhaps they’ll do something with it.

Suffice to say that it has no internet.

Nope.

Not a jiffy. Not a byte of internet connectivity.

So I went and sat in the bar and obtained a bottle of Becks together with a mineral water.

I then proceeded to try and connect my laptop to the internet via my Nokia N95. Screw it. I don’t know WHAT the hell is going on. I just can’t get a bluetooth internet connection. Not with any of the FOUR devices I had on me.

Mounting frustration caused me to exit the hotel bar and take a walk down the road to the Yates.

If you’re an international reader, Yates is a bar chain in the UK synonymous with annoying cackling women wearing ridiculous and highly unsuitable clothing. (Sure, wear a crop top, but not with your four stomachs hanging out please.) Worse are the male inhabitants of Yates. Think Cool Water aftershave, knock-off French Connection sweatshirts and black faux leather shoes that — I KID YE NOT — are done up with velcro straps rather than laces.

However, I remembered that Yates has a itbox. Itboxes have a built in The Cloud wifi connection you see. I’ve written about The Cloud quite often. I have a tenner-a-month unlimited account with them which lets me access any The Cloud hotspot across the UK. Wickedly useful for stations and the like.

Last time I went into this Yates place, The Cloud connection was non operational. The SSID was available but you couldn’t connect. I phoned The Cloud support and the chap on the end of the phone asked me to get the ‘venue operator’ to restart the itbox. I did. It restarted. The connection was still class-F.

It was thus with a degree of trepidation that I approached the Yates. Hartlepool town centre post 5pm is like the set of 28 Days Later. It’s a fully featured town centre but, typically completely deserted.

I walked fast, with purpose and I clasped by Apple laptop and the rest of my gizmos close to my chest as I did so.

Outside Yates I wasn’t going to be tricked into walking in, unless I established if there was a working wifi connection. There is something rather depressing about walking into a ‘high concept’ bar such as Yates and finding your feet sticking to the floor. You’d think they’d clean the floors, eh?

I flipped out the N95 and tried to connect to the hotspot standing in the doorway.

Screw it.

It didn’t work.

Tried the E61i. Same problem. The SSID is broadcast but it wasn’t accepting any connections.

What is it with Hartlepool and public wifi?

My next GENIUS idea was to locate the Wetherspoons pub. Generally the domain of dribbling old menu busy sucking on a cheap pint, I also know that Wetherspoons have itboxes and thus, by extension, wifi connections.

I arrived at the Wetherspoons and was DELIGHTED to see the sign ‘Free 30 minutes wifi access with a purchase in association with The Cloud’ sticker on the door. GET IN.

I wandered inside. There were a few folk at the bar. I slipped out my N95 and did a wifi search.

Nothing.

You what?

I casually shifted over to the itbox and tried my E61i’s network detector. Nothing?

NOTHING?

Screw it.

Screw it with BELLS on.

I walked straight out and decided to opt for the last ditch attempt at obtaining internet access in Hartlepool (apart from either buying a house and installing broadband or going back to the office).

The plan? McDonalds!

Every McDonalds in the country has a BT Openworld wifi service you see. It’s really useful if you absolutely, positively need to get online. There’s always a McDonalds around, right?

Exhibit A:

The McDonalds is a bit out of the town centre so I began the trek. The above photo is intended to demonstrate just how dead the town centre is. This same photo taken at midday would be filled with cars and human traffic. Note my lonely shadow.

My hopes were momentarily raised when I passed a ‘Sports Bar’. Oooh, I thought, they might have internet!

One lasting glance and I established they did not:

I didn’t even bother checking on my handset. The uber fat girl sat in the doorway persuaded me.

You know there’s no internet when the patrons of an establishment can’t even be arsed to stand up when they have to go out to smoke a cigarette.

Eventually I reached the golden arches:

With no small amount of anticipation I began to plan my work schedule. I anticipated spending maybe 1.5-2 hours online. I cued up tasks in my head. I ordered a mineral water and sat down, flipped out the laptop and waited for it to detected the BT Openzone SSID.

Er.

Yeah.

You guessed it.

F-all.

No signal?

I could be heard uttering all manner of commentary under my breath, I tell you.

Butter me in jelly and call me Terry. What the hell is going on with Hartlepool’s public wifi?

Both The Cloud hotspots NON FUNCTIONAL?

The McDonalds hotspot screwed? Not even a damn SSID?

Screw it.

Screw it with BELLS ON.

I thought about getting a taxi back to the office.

I abandoned the idea.

It is with no small amount of geeky disgust and muchos annoyance that I just went back to my hotel and sat and stared at the wall.

I couldn’t even be bothered to phone The Cloud or BT Openzone to complain.

According to telecom expense management consultant Aurora Kendrick James, the taxman might be about to reclassify some mobile phones as a computer, in a move that may affect over 3 million business phone users in the UK.

HM Revenue and Customs has already reclassified Personal Digital Assistants stating that “technology has developed to such an extent that PDAs and Blackberrys now have additional functions more typically associated with a computer and so can no longer be considered primarily as a mobile phone.”

Now, according to AKJ’s MD, Matt Atkinson, the iPhone could be an unwitting catalyst of change when the taxman considers the business mobile phone market.

“As things stand, fully expensed mobile phones provided to staff for business use are free of income tax liability and not seen as a benefit in kind. However in a technology driven market, mobile phones are becoming increasingly like a personal computer which is treated very differently for tax purposes.

“With HMRC already bracketing PDAs and Blackberrys alongside PCs, the iPhone could be about to herald a further re-think of the tax situation,” he warns.

“If there is significant personal usage of the iPhone - and its music heritage and consumer features are all driven towards leisure usage – it would be very hard to argue that it should not be treated as a benefit in kind and subject to income tax.”

Link: Virgin pulls the plug on mobile video | The Register

Virgin Mobile have announced plans to pull the plug on their mobile TV service early next year. The service, in partnership with BT Movio, was launched in a blaze of publicity featuring ex-Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson. Since then, apparently only 10,000 Lobster 700TV handsets have been sold by January 2007 - which put the future of the service into doubt even then.

Virgin Mobile and BT Movio’s service used DMB technology, which in turn relied on bandwidth on GCap Media’s national DAB digital radio multiplex. Although BT’s contract with GCap runs until 9th June 2008, Virgin have advised that they’ll be canning the service shortly after the end of January 2008.

The news comes just weeks after the European Union chose DVB-H (an adaptation of the existing DVB-T terrestrial digital TV technology) as the standard for mobile TV in its member countries. However this is still a broadcast-based one to many solution - and does not, like the Virgin/BT service, provide video on demand services.

Commenting on the news, Bruce Renny from streaming mobile TV experts ROK TV said: “Expectations for the commercial uptake of full-length broadcast TV on mobiles as subscription services are over-optimistic and the demise of Virgin’s mobile TV service reflects that. After all, why pay a subscription fee to receive the same TV content on your mobile that you already get at home? Particularly when people don’t watch TV on mobiles for more than a few minutes at a time.”

“Most mobile TV viewing is for just a few minutes. To be commercially successful, you have to provide a combination of live news, sports updates and video-on-demand made-for-mobile content which is instantly engaging. Simply broadcasting linear TV to mobiles is not the answer.”

I’m in the pub with James Whatley’s Facebook-based ‘Mobile Geeks of London’ group at the moment.

plenty to blog on later, including my first iPhone experience!

Light scanning technology specialists Microvision have announced a deal with Motorola to develop pico projector display solutions for mobile applications. In English? You could have your very own projector on your phone.

“Motorola is committed to driving technology innovation that will enable the next generation of great consumer experiences,” said Rob Shaddock, CTO, Motorola Mobile Devices business. “Working together with Microvision, we are pursuing ways that projection technology can redefine how mobile consumers view and interact with the media they take with them.”

“With its slim form factor and low power requirements, Microvision’s PicoP projector is optimized for the mobile environment,” stated Alexander Tokman, President and CEO of Microvision. “We believe that our unique display technology, combined with Motorola’s focus on delivering cool experiences, would allow mobile users to enhance their viewing of information and entertainment.”

Could be useful for unplanned powerpoint presentations, or (assuming the quality and battery is up to it), watching movies with your mates.

Link: Yahoo to start optimising for mobile | The Register

The Register is reporting that Yahoo are planning to use mobile optimization technology from Novarra to help serve up mobile-friendly search results.

The service, which will hopefully work unlike Vodafone’s efforts last month, will be used to serve up pages linked from search results in Yahoo’s oneSearch mobile portal, and should carry out the conversion automatically based on make and model of handset.

Fresh from the country that knows a few things about mobile technology and social networks, Sogo Shosha ITOCHU Corporation and Excite Japan Co Ltd have announced the UK release of mobikade - a highly successful ad-funded mobile social networking service from Japan.

mobikade provides personal mobile space to keep track of what’s new in your life, by posting updates on “What’s up now?”. By typing in a few words you and your friends can keep track of where you are and what you are doing. Users can also download a wide variety of cool games, mainly puzzle games such as Sudoku and enjoy them – all for free (except data charges to the mobile carrier). Currently, mobikade provides 20 games and plans to add 3 to 5 games monthly.

In addition to the above mentioned features, for every action on mobikade, users are rewarded with points. These points can be used to send free text messages to friends, or redeemed for a chance to win fantastic prizes every month. mobikade aims at acquiring around 200,000 users by March 2008.

Atul Sasane, Head of new business at GNS Europe, says “My aim is to successfully introduce Japanese mobile strategies to the UK and Europe. mobikade is so cool it will change the lives of mobile users in the UK. GNS Europe pleased to have been associated with sourcing the technology and capability to deliver the mobikade launch as a successful project – on time and within budget. We will use this experience to bring in more innovative businesses from Japan to Europe.”

Yuki Wada, VP, international business at Excite Japan says “mobikade has changed my life to the point where I’m actually going to live in London. This project is important for Excite Japan to build inroads into the European mobile market. We are also planning to release this service in Italy and Germany”.

Link: BBC NEWS | Health | Phone mast allergy ‘in the mind’

The BBC are reporting some interesting results from a recent study into so called ‘phone mast allergy’.

Mobile phone masts are not responsible for the symptoms of ill health some blame them for, a major UK study says. Dozens of people who believed the masts trigger symptoms such as anxiety, nausea and tiredness could not detect if signals were on or off in trials.

But when they thought the signal was on they reported more distress, suggesting the problem has a psychological basis.

Of course this doesn’t mean sticking your head next to a mobile phone antenna all day won’t give you a cracking headache, but it’s interesting news all the same.

Mobile phones | Talk talk | Economist.com

The Economist has got some interesting stats on mobile phone penetration in the 30 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), which includes most of Europe, North America and parts of Asia-Pacific.

THE number of mobile-phone subscribers in the 30 countries of the OECD reached nearly 933m in 2005, equivalent to around 80 for every 100 people. Tiny Luxembourg has the highest penetration rate, with 157.3 subscribers for every 100 people. Indeed, it is one of 14 countries in which there are more subscribers than people. This is partly because users increasingly have several SIM cards for use with the same phone. The rapid growth in pre-pay accounts—from 4% of total subscriptions in 1997 to 42% in 2005—is also a factor, as such accounts often lie inactive. South Korea and Japan are the only countries with more third-generation (3G) phone subscribers than 2G ones.

From today The Eden Project in Cornwall, UK, will become even greener as it launches a mobile ticketing service - which it claims is the first-ever paperless ticketing system that uses mobile phones from start to finish. 

The organisation says that previously mobile ticketing involved a phone call or a visit to a website to make payment - however thanks to a three-way partnership between the project itself, Swiftpass and LUUP, the whole process can be carried out using just a mobile.

Jeff Berry, Managing Director at Swiftpass, welcomed the development as “an exciting step forward in ticketing technology”.  He said: “This is the first large scale implementation of mobile ticketing that incorporates payment and fulfilment through the handset in a very simple way. We have known there has been a missing link for some time, but that gap has now been filled thanks to the partnership with LUUP.”

Jon Curry, Eden’s Head of ICT, said: “This development builds on the good work on ticket fulfilment we did last summer with Swiftpass. Now using the LUUP payment system for the first time we are able to offer our customers, including those who are on holiday and probably have no access to our ticket website, a fully automated, paperless advanced ticketing system using nothing but their mobile phone.”  

“As environmental issues continue to shift the public’s focus to living a less wasteful lifestyle, LUUP is proud to be part of this innovative partnership with The Eden Project and Swiftpass to make mobile ticketing easy, convenient and for the first-time truly mobile from start to finish,” said Christopher Lovold, UK Director for LUUP.

GMTV boss quits over phone-in scandal - Times Online

The managing director of ITV’s breakfast broadcaster, GMTV, is to resign, it was announced today, as the station unveiled a package of measures aimed at restoring viewer confidence in its daily prize competitions.

Paul Corley will leave the station as soon as the new initiatives, which include offering refunds to entrants who were wrongly excluded, and a £250,000 charitable donation, have been implemented, GMTV said.

Mobile entertainment company ROK have just unveiled their brand new ‘iPod killer’ mobile music service - ROK Media Store.

The service is a free web-based application which lets you upload your music collection to your PC and transfer - or ’sideload’ it - to your mobile phones memory card. In addition, you can also purchase music and video content online from a shop on the website.

“More than 100 million iPods have been sold worldwide in the past five years, which clearly shows the enormous demand for music on the move” said Laurence Alexander, CEO of ROK . “Mobile entertainment is a proven market which stretches back more than 25 years from the days of the Sony Walkman, but when you look at the far bigger scale of the mobile phone market, with  3 billion handsets in use, being upgraded at the rate of 1 billion new handsets every year, ROK Media Store is designed to allow millions more people the opportunity, right now, to upload, manage and listen to music on their mobiles, in the same way those with an iPod have been able to do.”
 
“Most handsets are now sold with a removable memory card and while the cost of memory cards has fallen considerable in the past year or so, their capacity is increasing all the time” added Alexander “so we see people building a library of memory cards containing their favourite music, managed via Media Store.”
 
ROK believes Media Store is an “iPod killer” not because it competes with the iPod as another device like Microsoft’s Zune, but because it offers a real and viable alternative designed for a device you already own - your mobile phone.
 
“We’re not aiming to kill the iPod by simply offering yet another iPod-type device” said Alexander “we’re offering an easy-to-use and free-to-use, mass-market alternative to having to buy an iPod.”
 
ROK intend to monetise Media Store through a combination of online advertising and through offering people the chance to purchase additional content via the website for side-loading to their mobile phones, in a similar manner as iTunes.

Link: Vodafone’s rebel investor suffers heavy defeat - Telegraph

Vodafone shareholders have overwhelmingly rejected proposals by rebel investor John Mayo at the company AGM.

Mayo, the head of Efficient Capital Structures (and former Marconi finance director) had been pushing for some changes to the group, including getting rid of their 45% share in US mobile operator Verizon.

In a rather strange twist, Mayo didn’t even turn up to the AGM to answer questions on his proposals. Whether this affected the vote will probably never be known, but with only 4.6% of shareholders voting for the Verizon proposal and 3.15% for a £34bn bond issue proposal, it’s pretty clear that his plans are now in tatters.

According to the Telegraph, the most successful proposal was that to restrict Vodafone’s ability to make acquisitions without shareholder approval, which gained 6.02%. Rather ironic, considering that ECS had effectively pulled the resolution weeks ago.

Picture 12
Originally uploaded by smstextnews.

I just signed up for the taptu.com mobile beta.

Just in case you’re wondering…

Taptu is a new search and share service for your mobile phone. We’re all about making it easier and faster to find useful stuff on your mobile, starting with music, Wikipedia and mobile Web sites.

I’m looking forward to checking it out!

This is pretty neat. I got a note in from Voxpops.com to tell me that they’ve just recently launched a video research library facility on their site. The library features 750+ videos of consumer research on topics ranging from the environment to health and covering all demographics. The key area of interest to me of course is ‘mobile’.

They’ve got a whole section dedicated to mobile including topics like What mobile phone tariff are you on? What do you look for in a mobile provider? and What functions are important to you on your mobile.

You can listen to the audio for free and read the transcript (e.g. see this link for an example), but if you’d like the video you have to pay. Fair enough. £95 a pop. Brilliant if you’re trying to get a point across in a presentation and would like to show off a voxpop video highlighting or supporting your point.

I love this stuff. I do actually go about asking people about their mobile phones. It’s just fascinating to see what consumers thing of the technology and the medium. I’m going to see if I can get a demo mobile video from Voxpops to publish here.

Darla published this video on her site from the Healthy Computing Volunteer Group. Useful advice

It’s a wicked marketing campaign, it really is. Here’s another:

Concerned? Find out more at www.jealouscomputers.com/.

I’ve been playing around with Springdoo for quite a while. The first version I remember using was an audio email service — you record your message and then Springdoo emails the audio to your choice of recipient. It was flawless and phenomenally well implemented.

Springdoo are back though — with an all new line up of wicked services. The principle one I’m interested in is their SpringCast service that enables you to call up their video shortcode, record a video and have it published on your blog or site right-away.

It is genius. It’s brilliantly implemented and a piece of joy to use.

Here’s the text from today’s release announcement:

Springdoo, a leading provider of audio and video communication tools for social networks, has pioneered a technology which allows 3G mobile users to instantly broadcast videos created on their mobile phone to their friends and family across the web via the 3G short code 88388.

Unlike other solutions on the market which require the downloading of additional software, SpringMobile allows users to simply make a video call to 88388 from a 3G mobile phone, record for up to 5 minutes and hang up. The video then instantly appears within the users’ Springdoo account.

Users are then able to email the video clip or create a video blog using Springdoo’s SpringBlog tool. If the user has embedded Springdoo’s SpringCast Widget on their favourite social networks or blogging sites, then any videos recorded via the SpringMobile service can also be instantly updated to the widget as well, wherever it is posted on the internet.

Wanna see some examples? First off, I create a post via my Apple laptop using it’s integrated iSight camera. All I had to do was create a Springdoo account and then login and press ‘record’. It really was THAT easy.

You too, can Springdoo

And then, here is my video that I recorded via my N95:

You too, can Springdoo

Springdoo is a piece of genius. I’m going to have a big play with this.

Got five minutes? Get yourself an account and give it a go!

Courtesy of cellular-news.com, we’ve got a little bit more on the story that we bought you over the weekend about the flood-affected Vodafone HQ.

According to the article, it all started going wrong when the nearby Lambourn river burst its banks - which then flooded an ornamental lake in the centre of the complex. Rather ironically, authorities had recently announced plans to upgrade sewers in the area to improve drainage.

The picture on the right is apparently of a stream that runs between two of the buildings on the site - and obviously was taken on a slightly more normal day. Offices in the HQ are reportedly not expected to be useable until later this week.

David Murphy of Mobile Marketing Magazine has done an interesting interview featuring Andrew Bud of mBlox discussing mobile data. Andrew firmly believes that the mobile operators haven’t quite got the right strategy with their all-you-can-eat data plans at 5 or 10 pounds per month.

I think they’ve got it right from a consumer perspective. I like it. But I certainly see Andrew’s perspective.

Link: Mobile Marketing Magazine: Food for Thought about All You Can Eat

On the PC Internet, ISPs saw broadband – all you can eat data by any other name - as the answer to their problems, so mobile operators are going down the same route. But as Bud explained in great detail, the mobile Internet is not the PC Internet. 

Check out David’s piece at the link above for more.

Link: Nokia to buy photo-sharing site Twango | Technology | Internet | Reuters

Nokia have been splashing the cash, this time on little-known photo sharing social networking site Twango.

The deal, for an undisclosed sum, is part of a plan by Nokia to strengthen its presence in the fast growing mobile multimedia arena.

“The Twango acquisition is a concrete step towards our Internet services vision of providing seamless access to information, entertainment, and social networks,” Anssi Vanjoki, head of Nokia’s multimedia unit said in a statement.

“We have the most complete suite of connected multimedia experiences including music, navigation, games, and - with the Twango acquisition - photos, videos, and a variety of document types,” he said.

Although Twango was founded in 2004, stats from Hitwise, Quancast and Alexa show it gets hardly any traffic compared to sites like YouTube, PhotoBucket or Flickr. What Nokia will do with their acquisition is anyones guess - but the logical money is on tight integration with their multimedia-compatible handsets.

There’s a really hot announcement in the field of mobile music brewing. It’s so hot, in fact, it’s got potential to completely kill off a certain device that we all know and love, and totally change the whole entertainment arena.

I should be able to spill the beans tomorrow - in the meantime keep watching this space..