Arab Mobile Communication Studies

By Jonathan Fildes BBC News science and technology reporter in Edinburgh

There are millions of mobile phone users worldwide

The rush to seize part of the burgeoning mobile internet market has started with the launch of a new domain name specifically for mobile devices.

The .mobi domain is aimed specifically at websites designed to be viewed on mobile phones.

The name was approved by internet regulatory body Icann last year but businesses have not been able to buy one until this week.

Companies like Yahoo and Microsoft have already purchased .mobi names.

However, the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, does not back the scheme.

"I wrote publicly [that] I thought the .mobi domain was a bad idea. I still do," he told a news conference at the WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh.

Although a supporter of the mobile web, he believes that efforts should focus on making existing content smart enough to be able to recognise what kind of device it is being viewed on, large or small.

Creating sites specifically for the small screen risks fragmenting the web, he argues.

"What's very important from my point of view and from the World Wide Web consortium's point of view is that there is just one web," he said.

Web to go

Backers of .mobi, like Daniel Appelquist, a senior technology strategist at Vodafone, believes both parties have the same goal in mind.

Today's mobiles have the processing power of yesterday's PCs Sir David Brown, Motorola

"This is not about creating a separate mobile web," he told the BBC News website. "It is about making the web mobile."

At present there are more than two billion mobile phones in use around the world and this number is forecast to rise to 2.8 billion by the end of 2006.

"We have all of these phones but so far they have only really been used for text messaging and voice," said Ronan Cremin from mTLD, the registry for .mobi.

"That really underestimates the capabilities of the device."

Initial attempts to provide web services for phones, such as Wap, have failed to attract a large audience.

This has been partly due to a lack of agreed standards for how Wap pages should look or what domain names they should use.

In addition, when Wap was launched, most phones only had monochrome displays and did not support pictures, so could not recreate the look, feel or content of the web.

However that situation has now changed.

"Today's mobiles have the processing power of yesterday's PCs" Sir David Brown, chairman of mobile phone maker Motorola told the Edinburgh conference.

The great advantage of these devices "formerly known as the mobile phone," he said, was that they are the one device people carry around with them.

Mobile explosion

As prices tumble to below $15 for a handset, sales are expected to top the almost 100,000 phones already sold every hour worldwide.

As more people get connected around the world the rise in demand for mobile web services is expected to follow.

Last year research company Ipsos found that more than a quarter of users browsed the internet on their mobile phones, and this number is expected to grow.

The new domain name is an attempt to make the mobile web experience more user-friendly before this explosion.

The .mobi group has been working with W3C, the organisation responsible for developing standards for web pages, of which Sir Tim is director.

This move does not signal a reverse of opinion from Sir Tim, but rather that if the domain is going ahead, he feels it is better to be involved in the process.

"We've agreed to differ" said Sir Tim.

Different presentation

The use of .mobi will indicate that a website will work on a mobile phone.

Companies that build a mobile site will be required to follow certain technical guidelines and recommended to follow others that have been developed by a W3C mobile web initiative over the last year.

".mobi is a trust mark," said Mr Cremin. "If a user sees a .mobi address, they know that it will work on their phone."

The resulting web pages will be noticeably different from those that are accessed on a PC, with reduced graphics and fewer choices.

"If you're on a phone, you are not sitting in front of a 19-inch monitor with a high speed connection," said Mr Cremin. "You don't want to see all of the options that a normal website has."

Supporters of the new domain are keen to stress that whether you view a website on a PC or a mobile device the experience will be "thematically consistent".

"You are essentially interacting with the same article, even though it may be a slightly different version or maybe a slightly different presentation," said Vodafone's Mr Appelquist, who also chaired the W3C working group that drew up the .mobi guidelines.

"This is the cornerstone of the idea."

This week saw the start of the first round of registration for companies like mobile phone operators to get their hands on a .mobi site.

From mid-June, trademark holders will be given the chance to register before the market is opened up in August to anyone who wants to create mobile site.

# posted by Unknown : Friday, May 26, 2006

Mr Mashhadani objected to Ms Saadi's chamber protest

A bodyguard of an Iraqi Shia MP has been hit by security staff of the Iraqi parliament's Sunni speaker in a row sparked by a mobile phone.

MP Ghofran al-Saadi said her bodyguard was attacked when the phone played a well-known Shia religious tune while the speaker was being filmed.

The speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, later stormed out of the assembly when Ms Saadi demanded an apology.

The episode came amid ongoing tensions between Iraq's Shia and Sunni factions.

According to reports, Mr Mashhadani was being interviewed in the lobby of the parliament when Ms Saadi's bodyguard's mobile phone rang twice.

Mr Mashhadani's bodyguards turned on the man and accosted him. One of the guards hit the man with a pistol, a journalist was quoted by Reuters news agency as saying.

Ms Saadi told Reuters the phone had played a Shia religious chant.

The MP, a member of the Shia United Iraq Alliance, protested about the beating to Mr Mashhadani during a session of the assembly.

But Mr Mashhadani said the assembly was not the place to make such a complaint and switched off Ms Saadi's microphone and television cameras, before storming out.

Afterwards, Ms Saadi told reporters she wanted an inquiry into the attack on her guard.

"I want an immediate investigation, " she was quoted by AFP news agency as saying.

# posted by Unknown : Thursday, May 11, 2006

A complex network has developed shipping the phones out of British ports and to West Africa.

But once they arrive in the country - and in particularly the capital Accra - they are often re-stolen a number of times as a phone-centred crime wave sweeps the city.

"We identified that mobile phones which had been reported as stolen by customers in the UK - and were therefore blocked by the networks - were being exported throughout the world for resale and use in other countries, and this obviously included Ghana," Superintendent Eddie Thompson, of the world's only dedicated mobile phone crime unit, based in London, told BBC World Service's Global Perspective programme.

One ongoing inquiry is of an individual exporting through ports, and group exporting the phones through a freight terminal, exporting "quite high volumes of phones, stolen in the UK, out to Ghana."

Moto snatches

Many of the stolen phones end up in Accra's Tiptoe Lane, known for its second-hand markets and traders of goods of questionable origin.

Ademan, one of the traders, explained that he receives supplies from Finland, and brand new phones from Dubai. On a good day he will sell four phones, on a bad day none.

The phones end up in the markets of West Africa, where they are sold on

He said, however, that he does not accept phones to sell unless they are accompanied by a matching charger.

But another trader, Alasan, said that he simply sells phones he is given by his brother, who says they come from Italy.

"I can't know whether they are stolen - I can't know that," he admitted.

But the story of the stolen phone does not end there.

The surge in mobile phone ownership in the country in recent years - some of which has been driven by the availability of stolen European phones - has led to a wave of crime focused solely on snatching the phones from their owners.

Gangs of young boys, usually aged 14-16, ride around the city on "motos" - small motorcycles - targeting people who have handsets in plain sight.

They are often able to snatch them swiftly, and at force, before driving off.

"The bike comes, they go behind the car - the driver didn't even see they were coming - and then they got to the passenger side and snatched the phone with some force," explained one victim.

"Then they sped off, and they were gone.

It came to a level where the police needed to act - and we have acted Deputy director of police public affairs Kwesi Ofori

"It happens a lot - they just snatch your phone, and they are gone."

A former gang leader, Razak, told Global Perspective how easy he had found it to steal the phones.

And if the handset was not clearly visible, they would simply target people's bags which they would usually keep the phone in.

"I was always looking for phones, every time I stepped outside," he said..

"Phones are easier than wallets - and often wallets don't have anything in anyway."

He explained that the reason his gang had stolen was because "we didn't have any education, and our family had no money - nothing."

"But I saw it was a bad life," he added.

This relatively new crime has been working its way up the police priority list in the country.

"It came to a level where the police needed to act - and we have acted," said Accra's deputy director of police public affairs, Kwesi Ofori.

"We have put a lot of resources in. In 2004, there were 209 reported cases - in 2005, 417.

"Our anti-armed robbery unit has taken it very seriously, and has arrested a lot of violent gang members for phone snatching.

"We have reduced phone robbery to a level which is encouraging."

Changing attitudes

Philip Boyfi, one of Ghana's biggest mobile phone retailers, explained that until recently many Ghanaians were not at all careful about concealing their phones.

"They always want to show off the mobile phone they have got," he said.

"All my customers want to be able to scream at the top of their voice that they are on cellphones."

However, following a massive push by the police to educate people of the dangers of using their phone in the street, attitudes are changing.

"You hear of people being threatened at gunpoint for their phone, hit, stabbed with knives," said Fiona Entman, one Accra citizen who lives not far from Tiptoe Lane.

"Now, it is a bit on the low side. Some months ago it was terrible and everyone was scared - some people did not even take their phones to the office, they just left it at home.

"There was a lot of publication on safety with your mobile phone. People are now more alert, and even the people who commit such crimes are more alert, because the police are around."

# posted by Unknown : Sunday, May 07, 2006