Hugms connects to your mobile phone via Bluetooth and then when you squeeze it, is sends a "hug" text message to the person of your choosing.

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After all, since more than a quarter of the people on the planet already carry cell phones, and hundreds of millions are joining them every year, why should they bring along credit and debit cards when a mobile device can make payments just as well? This is not new, in fact this is already a reality in Japan, where NTT DoCoMo Inc. says 3 million cell phone subscribers use its Mobile Wallet service to buy things at 20,000 stores and vending machines.

The new trick comes from a small technology company named C-Sam Inc. recently succeeded in launching its OneWallet cell phone platform with corporations in the United Arab Emirates, India and Japan.

In the United Arab Emirates, OneWallet is being marketed by U.A.E. Exchange as a convenience to that nation's huge work force of expatriates from India who regularly wire money home. So far, there are about 400 users.

Alphonso Francis, a Bombay native who works for U.A.E. Exchange in Dubai, sends money three times a month to his family in India.

Using OneWallet on his phone, he enters his PIN number and designates which account the funds should come from, the recipient, and whether it should go to a bank account or a Western Union-type outlet in India. The order is transmitted over the cell phone's Internet connection in seconds.

The phone would supplant not only credit and debit cards, but also checkbooks, Web sites, computer programs such as Quicken and online bill payment services such as PayPal or CheckFree.

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17-year-old boy and 19-year-old girl, both UAE nationals, were each sentenced to spend one month in jail. The teenagers were exchanging "indecent" pictures through their cellphones and sending pornographic pictures through email. The Dubai Court of First Instance heard that one of the girl's friends was jealous of the relationship she had with her male friend. This friend tipped off authorities that the two were exchanging indecent material... Be ware of jealous girls ;-)

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NASA is developing a subvocal speech system that could enable you to make a phone call while keeping your lips sealed. How do you talk to someone without opening your mouth? Psychics call it telepathy. NASA refers to it as subvocal speech. Scientists at the NASA Ames Research Center in California have developed a system of tiny sensors that read nerve signals in the throat that control speech. You may not make a sound when, say, you read silently, but your nervous system is buzzing with activity. Recently, they used the system to make the first subvocal cell phone call.

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AwareFashion are clothes that react to invisible communication technology in the surrounding and thus enable the wearer to sense their immediate digital environment. The detection device is hidden in a detachable pocket and the fiber optics sewed into the cloth. When a mobile is near, small light spots appear on the sleeve.

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Good news for mobile phone users. Emirati government licenses new telecom company with 1.08 billion dollars, breaking Etisalat�s monopoly.

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Palestinian youths do not buy mobiles just to hear them ring.

�We send SMS alerts to university students in the Gaza Strip informing them about exam and registration dates and keep them updated on the latest developments in their respective universities. All they need is just o send us their full names, their universities and their mobile numbers."

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The following article was published in Washington Post yesterday. The author made it sound as if the Gulf countries are the only people in the world using the sms's for social, political, etc... reasons. He made it sound so strange that made me wonder after I read it, SO? What is strange? I just can't understand what makes us so different from rest of the world!

Here it is in full. Read it if you like, maybe you can find something I missed:

Text Messaging Is New Tool Of Political Underground

By Steve Coll
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, March 29, 2005; Page A01

KUWAIT CITY -- Rola Dashti's cell phone buzzed on the heady evening of March 7, hours after she had helped lead the largest demonstration for women's voting rights in Kuwait's history, a clamorous protest that ended when hundreds of activists were expelled from parliament for shouting from the gallery.

She pressed her phone's text message button and read an anonymous insult circulating on hundreds of Kuwaiti phones, digital graffiti that attacked her family's Persian ancestry and disparaged her Lebanese-born mother. "Here's what voters will gain if they vote for Rola Dashti," the text message read, as she recalled it. "They will learn the Iranian accent. They will learn a Lebanese accent. And they will learn how to work with the American Embassy to get money."

In this roiling political spring of protest and debate about democracy in repressive Arab countries, cell phone text messaging has become a powerful underground channel of free and often impolite speech, especially in the oil-rich Persian Gulf monarchies, where mobile phones are common but candid public talk about politics is not.

Demonstrators use text messaging to mobilize followers, dodge authorities and swarm quickly to protest sites. Candidates organizing for the region's limited elections use text services to call supporters to the polls or slyly circulate candidate slates in countries that supposedly ban political groupings. And through it all, anonymous activists blast their adversaries with thousands of jokes, insults and political limericks.

"It means I'm making them nervous," Dashti said of the lambasting she received. "I'm on their list," she said, referring to Kuwait's conservative Islamic activists, "and I'd better get used to it so I'm not shocked when it happens during the election." Dashti hopes to run for office if the long campaign for women's suffrage in Kuwait succeeds, as many participants expect it will when the elected National Assembly formally considers the issue, perhaps as soon as April.

At about 40 cents per missive, text messaging can be an expensive way to mobilize the masses, but the Gulf countries are lightly populated and afloat on record oil revenue. With political debate at a fever pitch this year, many of the region's well-heeled activists find it hard to resist the chance to compose their own uncensored statements and deliver their political wisdom to targeted audiences.

"My bill is going sky high," said Abduljalil Singace, foreign affairs director of Bahrain's Al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, the island emirate's largest opposition grouping, a Shiite Muslim movement that is noisily boycotting the country's three-year-old, limited parliament.

Singace was fired as an associate professor and department chair at Bahrain University in mid-March after he traveled twice to Washington to lobby against his country's royal government, a close U.S. ally. He said Bahrain's security services also told him to stop sending dissident text messages. The Bahrain government says Singace was discharged for neglecting his duties at the university.

"They warned me against text messaging on demonstrations," Singace said. Before the warning, he said, "I was not sure they were reading my text messages. Now I'm telling everyone."

Still, he remains proud of some of his compositions. When American management consultants issued a report recently about how Bahrain's government could accelerate reform of its free-trading economy, Singace whipped off a reply and paid a commercial service to distribute his message throughout the island.

"Economic reform without political reform is like a bird with only one wing," he wrote. "How can it fly?"

Text messaging is only the latest in a wave of border-hopping communication technologies to rewire patterns of Arab dissent during the past 15 years. Saudi exiles and Islamic activists waged an underground war of faxed pamphlets during the early and mid-1990s. Satellite television channels transformed the images and ideas available to Arab viewers during the same period. More recently, CDs, DVDs and the World Wide Web have dominated underground political publishing in the Gulf.

As each new technology has spread, the region's authoritarian governments have tried to fight back. They have sent censors to license fax machines and block dissident Web sites, and they have pushed government-friendly investors to buy and manage satellite channels. But the Gulf's monarchies have not yet figured out whether or how to control text message channels.

If they do, they will sorely disappoint the region's profit-engorged cell phone companies, whose stock prices have soared as phone and messaging use has exploded. About 55 percent of Kuwaitis and a third of Saudis now own cell phones, according to mobile service providers, and growth rates show no sign of slacking.

The Gulf's huge youth population stands at the center of the boom. As young people come of age in societies that discourage unsupervised contact with the opposite sex, text messaging offers a way to duck parents and defy gender segregation. In one of Riyadh's gleaming shopping malls on a recent Thursday night, veiled teenage girls in black-robed flocks giggled as they messaged boys across the food court. Teenagers send messages to flirt, plan social events and even set up clandestine dates, Saudi parents and teenagers said.

Less innocent slander and pornography also flow through text channels. When a Saudi mobile phone provider announced new photo and video messaging services this month, it issued an unusual press release to encourage socially responsible use of mobile phones and to argue that innovative technology should not be blamed because a few people abuse it.

In Gulf politics, too, text messaging "allows people to send messages that they would not say in public," said Fawzi A. Guleid, program officer with the National Democratic Institute in Bahrain. "It is alarming to me the messages that come."

Activists have learned how to blast thousands of attack messages while hiding their own identities. "People who use those messages are denouncing, insulting opposition figures, members of parliament and the government," Guleid said, suggesting that the new technology encourages unrestrained personal invective as new democratic cultures are formed.

Many of the insults and comments would sound tame to an American politician.

The technology also helps democratic organizers who are often badly overmatched by the Gulf's authoritarian governments. In a region where formal political parties are banned but loose political societies are often tolerated, text messaging allows organizers to build unofficial membership lists, spread news about detained activists, encourage voter turnout, schedule meetings and rallies, and develop new issue campaigns -- all while avoiding government-censored newspapers, television stations and Web sites.

The Gulf's network of Muslim Brotherhood chapters has been especially aggressive in adopting such tactics, several of its leaders and campaign managers said in interviews. The Brotherhood is a global network of conservative Islamic political activists, often drawn from elite professions, who seek to establish religious governments and societies, usually by peaceful means. Its members control student and professional unions across the region and have won seats in several of the Gulf's limited parliaments.

Before text messaging went commercial, black marketers sold CDs containing lists of cell phone numbers smuggled out of government ministries or phone companies, said Mohammed Dallal, a lawyer and Brotherhood campaign manager in Kuwait City. Now "the mobile companies are giving the services," he said. "You give them the message, they'll send it to 40,000 people" for a fee.

Before this year's municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, the first in the kingdom in decades, Dallal spoke to prospective candidates and campaign managers in three Saudi cities. "I try to convince them to use the technology," he said.

In Bahrain, Shiite opposition organizers who frequently stage unauthorized or illegal demonstrations said they used services originally meant for commercial advertisements to keep protests on track even as the government tries to shut them down.

Kuwaiti women organizing protests for voting rights said they had been more effective during their 2005 campaign than during their last serious effort five years ago because text messaging had allowed them to call younger protesters out of schools and into the streets.

For all of these appealing practical benefits, text messaging also appears to be popular because it has captured Arab pop literary imaginations. In Gulf societies, where rhetorical speech is celebrated and poetry is prominent, the short, quipping format of a text message offers a new twist on tradition. Activists deliberate over their compositions and memorize their favorite zingers, passing them from phone to phone.

For Dashti, the women's suffrage activist insulted for being of less than pure Kuwaiti ancestry, the sting was salved by the message her own group blasted out that same night of the historic demonstration about the speaker of the Kuwaiti parliament, Jassem Kharafi, who had shut down their rally. The activists accused him of being more interested in making money from business contracts than in helping Kuwait advance democratic reforms.

"If you want Kharafi to vote for women's political rights," an anonymous member of the suffrage movement wrote, "just issue the right as a tender contract."

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Imagine this. You're driving around in your HOV (highly ostentatious vehicle), and you follow your normal route home.

The next day, you are notified by your insurance company: "Under the terms of Court Order 34/FKC/34 paragraph 12 subsection iii, your auto insurance is void."

It turns out that you drove within a mile of the house belonging to your ex-spouse, which violates the terms of a court order. As a result, your auto insurance, which was offered under advantageous terms on the grounds that you had a clean record, no longer applies.

Well, yes, it could happen. Actually, I can't see how it could fail to happen. All insurance is offered on an "utmost good faith" basis, whereby failing to disclose any factor that might invalidate it will indeed invalidate it?even if, had you asked, they'd have decided it didn't count. It's the failure to disclose that is the problem.

And who, in a nutshell, disclosed?

Well, under the terms of your insurance, you got even better terms by agreeing to avoid high-risk areas. Because most of your mileage is done on turnpikes and you keep the vehicle in a garage in a low-crime suburb, your premiums are very low compared with the driver who parks by the curb in a high-crime neighborhood.

And they know you're doing this because you agreed to a monitor?a location-based device that uses GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications)/GPS (Global Positioning System) wireless. In return for avoiding known high-risk areas, your premiums are cut.

The device is, quite simply, a mobile phone that tracks where you drive and phones home to tell your insurance company. It will know whether you exceeded the speed limit, won't it? Yes, it will. It will know not only how long it takes to get from point A to point B, but which streets you drove on, which red lights you stopped at (and for how long) and, indeed, how fast you traveled.

Of course, it is all "voluntary" at the moment. The insurance company piloting this only disclosed the project under strict anonymity conditions, and I don't have any reason to believe that they are insincere. On the other hand, where the carrot doesn't tempt, the stick will drive us onward. I'll wager quite a lot that within two years of this pilot becoming accepted practice, the penalty for refusing it will be high.

A wireless, electronic marvel, magic technology?and a trap for the unwary. You think you're playing with physics, and suddenly you find you're toying with social engineering ...

Source: eWeek

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Mobile phone use has taken off in Nigeria in recent years Nigerian mobile phone users have been anxiously checking who is calling them before answering them in recent days.

A rumour has spread rapidly in the commercial capital, Lagos, that if one answers calls from certain "killer numbers" then one will die immediately.

A BBC reporter says experts and mobile phone operators have been reassuring the public via the media that death cannot result from receiving a call.

He says that in such a superstitious country unfounded rumours are common.

A list of alleged killer numbers has been circulated but no-one is reported to have died from answering the phone.

The BBC's reporter in Lagos, Sola Odunfa, says that the current scare story is reminiscent of a rumour that spread a few years ago that a handshake could cause sexual organs to disappear.

That rumour turned to tragedy as mobs rounded on people accused of making organs disappear.

Despite the massive public interest, no-one was found to have lost their organs.

Source: BBC

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Airplane 3G mobile phone test successful

American Airlines and Qualcomm have completed a test flight of a new system to allow airplane passengers to use their mobile phones while in the air. The 3G "picocell" network used on the 2 hour proof-of-concept flight out of Dallas allowed passengers to place calls, send text messages, and access the Internet from their phones without difficulty and without interfering with sensitive airplane equipment. A small in-cabin CDMA cellular base station on the plane, that uses standard CDMA communications, was connected to the worldwide terrestrial phone network by an air-to-ground Globalstar satellite link. Passengers on the test flight included members of the media and government regulators. Although the flight was successful, American Airlines expects commercial availability of in-cabin mobile phone service to be at least 24 months away.

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A Chinese author is bringing out a novel that will only be available as a sequence of text messages.

BBC Online, quoting China's official Xinhau news agency, says Qian Fuchang has reduced his novel Outside the Fortress Besieged into 60 chapters of 70 characters each.

And pundits insists the novel, described as a steamy tale of adulterous love, will not be a gimmick.

Xie Wangxin, vice chairman of the Guangdong Literary Academy in southern China, said it will be 'a real literary work'.

Xinhua claims China sent more than 220bn text message last year - over half the global total.

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Microsoft wins patent to exploit network potential of skin. Fact or fiction - carrying a keyboard on your arm.

Call it the ultimate wireless network. From the ends of your fingers to the tips of your toes, the human body is a moving, throbbing collection of tubes and tunnels, filled with salty water and all capable of transmitting the lifeblood of the 21st century: information.
In what may seem a move too far to some, the computer software giant Microsoft has been granted exclusive rights to this ability of the body to act as a computer network. Two weeks ago the company was awarded US Patent 6,754,472, which bears the title: Method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body.

Microsoft envisages using the human skin's conductive properties to link a host of electronic devices around the body, from pagers and personal data assistants (PDA) to mobile phones and microphones, although the company is uncharacteristically coy about exactly what it may have in mind.

In a statement it said: "Microsoft hasn't recently held discussions about this patent, and it does not currently map to any particular Microsoft product that is either shipping or in development. That said, one of the objectives of the intellectual property licensing policy Microsoft adopted in December 2003 is to provide other parties with access to the fruits of Microsoft's nearly $7bn annual investment in R&D - especially to innovations that do not end up manifesting as Microsoft products."

According to the patent, the technology could usher in a new class of portable and wearable electronic gizmos such as earrings that deliver sounds sent from a phone worn on the belt, and special spectacles with screens that flash up accompanying images and video footage.

Linking electronic devices raises other possibilities. Gadget lovers could use a single keypad to operate their phone, PDA and MP3 music player, or combine the output of their watch, pager and radio into a single speaker. At its most far-reaching, the technology could combine with chips and sensors fitted around our bodies and clothes to sense and react to the changing circumstances of our everyday lives.

Source: The Guardian

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The Queen Mary 2, the World's Largest Floating IT Ship.

In this long article, CIO Magazine looks at how IT supports the Queen Mary 2, the most technologically advanced vessel on the ocean. The magazine describes the challenges and the technical aspects of the design and the implementation of IT onboard. But it also makes a good weekend reading. Imagine a day on this floating city. "A guest embarking on the Queen Mary 2 -- the world's newest, biggest and most expensive ocean liner -- pulls out her smart card and hands it to a smiling security officer in a crisp, white uniform, who scans her through. After settling into her cabin, she flicks on the digital interactive TV and fires off a couple of e-mails. A few clicks away she browses the evening's dinner menu, then orders a bottle of pinot noir, which will be on her table when she arrives at the restaurant. Following some after-dinner entertainment in the theater, she heads back to her cabin, pipes in some Mozart from the TV system's vast music library, orders room service for breakfast and falls asleep."

Here are some selected excerpts from the CIO Magazine article.

These smart cards really deserve their names, as the following paragraph shows you.

You're certainly curious to know what's powering this system: three data centers do the whole job.

The IT team also designed an original system to maintain the ship in perfect state.

They also are using wireless technology.

After four years of hard work and laborious planning, the QM2 has been now sailing for five months without a single IT-related incident.

Source: CIO Magazine

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A Belgian couple are to get married by SMS because text messaging has played such a big part in their relationship.

Ronald Bollen, 39, and Ingrid Peeters, 43, will exchange vows by SMS but then sign the registry in the traditional way to make sure the wedding is legal.

Mr Bollen told Het Laatste Nieuws: "SMS messages are very crucial to us, since I tour Europe six months a year with a bus full of American and Japanese tourists. While I'm on the road sometimes we send ten messages a day."

Miss Peeters added: "Even the marriage proposal was done by SMS. One day while Ronny was touring in Italy I sent him the message: "Will you marry me?"

Source: Ananova

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