Although U.S. airlines have shunned the service, Ryanair, Europe’s largest low-cost airline, is so confident mobile phoning will prove popular that it plans to start offering it in June without even bothering with a trial.

With the Air France trial, passengers only learn about the possibility of using their phone once they are on the plane. An announcement refers them to an instruction card in the seat pocket.

They are told to switch off their phones during take-off and landing - and a special icon has been added next to the seatbelt sign to indicate when phones can be turned on.

[…]

The technology being tested by Air France links passenger phones to an onboard network connected to the ground via satellite. OnAir, the supplier, said transmission levels are low enough to avoid affecting the safety of aircraft equipment.

OnAir is an Airbus joint venture based in Geneva and one of two companies that are offering the technology, along with AeroMobile, a British joint venture with the Norwegian telephone company Telenor.

The system being tested by Air France uses an onboard base station in the plane - called a pico cell - which communicates with passengers’ own handsets. Though low power, the pico cell, located in a compartment normally used for hand luggage, creates a network encompassing the cabin of the plane.

The base station routes phone traffic to and from the plane to a satellite which beams down to mobile networks on the ground. Meanwhile the control unit on the plane ensures that mobiles do not connect to any base stations on the ground - as is technically possible when a plane is flying below 10,000 feet.

Source: International Herald Tribune

Highlighting a variety of existing technologies, Jason Raphael of geeksaresexy.net has this to say about Cell Phone Payment:

Let’s start with what’s in the works. A developing technology called NFC, or near field communication, is growing closer to our pockets by the day. NFC lets your cell talk to other receive sites – kind of like BlueTooth, but quicker. With NFC, you can wave your phone in front of a receiver and have a connection within a second. NFC also works in a shorter range – about four inches max – and uses two-way communication, so the connection’s more secure.

As you can imagine, the possibilities with this thing are endless. The hope is that NFC will eventually act as a virtual credit card, letting you simply wave your phone in front of a panel to make a purchase. It’s also being tested for public transportation – hold your phone up to send your fare and board the bus – as well as eventually for identification, storing your official documents to send to anyone in a split second. In the future, NFC could even let your phone act as your car or house key, connecting with a panel on the door to transmit your identification and let you in.

But here’s the surprise. Fring allows users to make VoIP calls over 3G or EDGE connections, which is a huge deal. With Fring, all customers need would be a data subscription with their carrier (in case of the U.S., AT&T) and begin making those free calls. According to Fring, the application will dynamically adjust audio quality depending on the type of connection it detects.

Source: Tom’s Guide

Touch Tunes and LocaModa are linking up 30,000 Jukeboxes that can be controlled via mobile phone, meaning you don’t have to drunkenly stumble through hoards of people at a bar just to get some decent tunes. The juke boxes are all linked to media servers, that have the ability to export data into social networks such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.

In addition to extending the on-location experience to social networks, the partnership between TouchTunes and LocaModa will allow patrons to use their mobile phones to interact with flat panel screens on TouchTunes jukeboxes. Applications will feature fun, engaging content such as information about the music playing on the jukebox, user generated content and even patron photos via their social network profiles. All interactions can also be displayed as data feeds on social networks. Online users will be able to view and participate in the activity at their favorite locations, for example: they can see who has “fanned” the location, who is actually there, what music is currently playing, and they can even “gift” songs to friends at that location.

Source: Yahoo via The Web Outside via Newlaunches via Gizmodo

If you have gotten used to your sleek and compact phone, imagine our grandfathers carrying a huge box which they called as a ‘Cell phone’, which weighed approximately 4 times more as compared to the newer sleek phones. Mobile phones have seen a vast amount of changes in the last few decades.

[…]

The Mobile phones have traveled right from the old green or blue background screens to the latest color widescreens which can be controlled by a mere touch on the screen. While we are getting ready to welcome the 4G generation of mobiles, the mobile phones have already started displaying mobile TV’S proudly and they even guide one through a road with the GPS maps and real time traffic information.

When coupled with your Cell Phone, this technology has the power to be your next personal tour guide.

How does it work? If you see something interesting while out walking for instance, you take a photograph with your mobile phone, select the item of interest with the cursor and in real time preprocessed information on the object selected is sent to your mobile phone.

“It could be a building, a mountain, a tree, plant or a special event such as a local festival,” explain Pechtl. “The amount of information you receive depends on you, if you want to know more you just click the ‘more button’ and you trigger a more detailed search responding to your profile of interest. Applications include tourism, education, remote healthcare, security, science, etc.”

Here are a couple of excerpts:

Managed VoIP: With managed VoIP services, a third-party provider offers all of the equipment, software, operations facilities and technical expertise needed for a company to reap the benefits of an IP-enabled phone system without the costs, risks and headaches of an on-premise VoIP solution. Packages typically include the design, integration and deployment of IP telephony equipment and software, along with the management and maintenance of existing telephony solutions and the new VoIP network. To get the most out of a managed VoIP partnership, however, companies must establish a strict service-level agreement with a VoIP provider that guarantees a certain percentage of network uptime.

and

SIP (Session Initiated Protocol): A protocol for Internet telephony, SIP is a service that allows businesses that have a PBX system installed to use real-time communication technologies — including VoIP. By connecting a SIP trunk to a traditional PSTN (public switched telephone network), companies can not only communicate over IP within the enterprise, but also outside the business. What’s more, companies can replace traditional, fixed PSTN lines with PSTN connectivity via a SIP-trunking service, thereby creating a single conduit pipeline for multimedia components, including voice, video and data. As a result, a SIP-trunking service typically delivers greater cost savings and increased reliability as guaranteed by today’s SIP-trunk providers.

The upcoming iPhone 2.0 software is just around the corner and we all may be surprised how Apple’s unified communication solution could merge mobile communication with VoIP, PCs, Macs, iPhones and even Apple TVs. We took a hard, long look at the information that is available right now from reports as well as patent filings to give you an outlook what Apple might be up to, why we are quite certain that VoIP and videoconferencing will be the iPhone’s new killer applications.

Although the 3G iPhone has yet to be confirmed by Apple, we are receiving more information about iPhone 2.0 software update on an everyday basis. When Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone software road map on March 6, he also announced that, by the end of June, all existing iPhone users will get a major software update that will greatly enhance the iPhone’s capabilities.

What everyone seems to hope for at this time is some kind of VoIP solution, such as Skype, that will enable iPhone users to place free phone calls over Wi-Fi network. The prospects for a VoIP iPhone app looked grim when we learned that the iPhone SDK doesn’t allow third party applications to run in the background: The SDK also specifically prohibits developers from accessing the iPod portion of an iPhone, leading many to believe that Apple created the same barrier for VoIP capabilities.

Read the rest of the article at TG Daily

According to a March 2008 Nielsen Company study, Nielsen’s Mobile Advertising Report, 58 million mobile phone users have been exposed to advertising on their phones in the past 30 days. That’s 23% of all United States mobile subscribers. Over half, or 28 million of these subscribers have responded to the mobile ad they were exposed to.

[…]

Mobile Ad Acceptance

• 51% of those who received mobile ads responded.
  • 26% responded by sending an SMS text-message
  • 9% responded by using “click-to-call”
• 32% of mobile phone users would be open to mobile advertising if it would lower their monthly cell phone bill.
• 14% say they care currently open to mobile advertising so long as the ads are relevant to their interests.
• 23% say they expect to see more mobile ads in the future.
• Only 10% of mobile phone users said mobile ads are acceptable, although an increasing number of individuals seem to be understanding the value proposition that will soon be associated with mobile advertising.

Some of the stats are a little surprising, but the overall message is that mobile advertising is becoming more and more acceptable in the marketplace, as long as the ads relevant or provide a tangible benefit to the recipient.