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Text Messaging In England...

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Guardian Unlimited | Online | Textual gratification Text messaging took a while to take off, but now it's a natural part of life, writes Victor Keegan... Thursday November 28, 2002 Can you remember where you were when the first text message was sent in the UK? I'll give you a clue - it was 10 years ago next Tuesday. You can't? I'm not surprised. Nor can anyone else. In 1992 mobile phones, as mass market consumer products, were on no one's radar screen, let alone text messages. It is worth reminding ourselves that in 1991 a completely unknown company was facing bankruptcy and was on the verge of being taken over by Ericsson of Sweden. The company somehow pulled itself together and now manufactures 36% of the world's mobile phones. Its name is Nokia.

As I take more advantage of public transportation I find myself using my phone much more for things other than voice conversations. An instant message to a friend, browsing news headlines. The phone enables me to be connected when in places where a laptop would not be practical....

Real World Advertising Creeps Into The Sims...

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Big Mac Is Virtual, but Critics Are Real The inclusion of McDonald's within the Sims environment reflects an emerging trend in video games. The game's publisher, Electronic Arts, signed contracts under which it will receive more than $2 million to include McDonald's and Intel logos inside the game - contracts that industry analysts have said may be the most lucrative ever for video-game product placement. An interesting play on this is that those opposed to corporate intrusion into the online version of The Sims are encouraging people to protest as characters in the game....

Another article on metatags...

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Death of a Meta TagTraffick.com's Andrew Goodman wrote recently in an essay about meta tags, "If somebody would just declare the end of the metatag era, full stop, it would make it easier on everyone."I'm happy to oblige, at least in the case of the meta keywords tag. Now supported by only one major crawler-based search engine, Inktomi, the value of adding meta keywords tags to pages seems little worth the time. In my opinion, the meta keywords tag is dead, dead, dead. Like Andrew, I say good riddance!

Another article on the death of metatags as a tool for search engine placement....

Wireless Commuter Cards...

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London: RFID Tags for Underground Passes
The plastic cards integrate an antenna coil and a chip that eliminates the need for commuters to insert the cards in a slot. Instead, they can wave it at a range of up to 10 centimeters over a card reader positioned at the top of a gate or bus entry point. The contactless card then "beeps the gates, checks them in and completes the transaction within 100 milliseconds," said Thomas Riener, marketing manager of chip cards at Philips Semiconductors.

The rollout of London's smart card project began this month when the contactless cards were distributed to the staff of London's public transportation systems. Riener called the project "the first volume showcase in Europe" featuring Philips' contactless smart card technology, called MiFare. The technology is already used in volume in the public transportation systems of Moscow, Warsaw, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Ankara and elsewhere, he said.

Philips has already shipped 250 million MiFare chips worldwide, and has shipped "a couple of million devices" to SchlumbergerSema and Giesecke & Devirient, the two companies that received the contract to supply smart cards for London's public transportation system, Riener said... [Smart Mobs]

Bluefish Wireless....

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Last year at NECC, Bluefish Wireless provided conference schedules and daily conference updates for Palm OS handhelds. Anyone with a Palm OS handheld could easily download the information from one of many Bluefish Access Points. This past week at the NSBA Technology and Learning conference in Dallas, Bluefish was in the Palm booth demonstrating their technology.