Cell Bytes

Spotted on LaughingSquid, Windows 7 Phone Ad. Great!

British cell-phone maker INQ is developing phones that make it easy for owners to use Spotify, an online music service that’s amassed millions of users in Europe. Business Week reports.

INQ’s phones are currently available in seven countries. Two of INQ’s planned smartphones will become available through AT&T in the U.S. mid-next year, three people told Bloomberg in September. The phones, which will land on store shelves in Europe next spring, will make it easier to access services from social network Facebook, as well as several other Web sites, one of the people said.

Read full article.

Here’s an area where we haven’t seen text messaging playing a role before: Foster care.

According to PRFire, The amount of people showing interest in foster care in the UK has risen by 40% this year – according to leading independent fostering agency, Fostering Solutions – following a national advertising campaign using SMS to provide instant leads and to measure campaign results.

In May 2010 Clock Creative began work with txtlocal.co.uk to coincide with a new national advertising campaign that encourages people to text the word CARE to 60777 for further information.

The slogan of the advert, Who Cares? invites a response, and texting allows people who are affected by such an emotive campaign to get in touch simply, and instantly. They are then called back by the team at Fostering Solutions who can then provide more information and advice.

Press release.

The social network will try to match numbers it gets against any and everyone. And its Graph API means random peoples’ numbers are visible too.

[via The Guardian]

Fascinating from Wired’s Danger Room, on cellphones and justice in Afganistan.

Afghanistan researcher Antonio Giustozzi recently found that the insurgents run an entire “separate judiciary,” outpacing the corrupt Karzai administration at resolving Afghans’ legal disputes. But a group of American lawyers thinks it’s possible to roll back the Taliban’s legal advances — all from Afghan cell phones.

Those lawyers have launched something called the Internet Silk Road Initiative, an effort to use urban Afghans’ heavy cell phone usage to bolster the country’s shaky rule of law. The big idea: a conference call.

The lawyers behind the Silk Road project, known as the Internet Bar Organization, want to pair traditional structures for adjudicating disputes that Afghans consider legitimate and match them with formal legal institutions.

The effort is just taking shape and there are a lot of obstacles to it. But the basic idea is simple. “People would dial in their disputes, a jirga would gather, the disputes would be resolved,” Jeff Aresty, the Internet Bar Organization’s president, tells Danger Room at STAR-TIDES, a demonstration of next-gen tools for nation building and disaster recovery. His central question: “How can we add some justice structure to the communications that people are already using?”

Aresty calls the idea the M-Jirga, for Mobile Jirga. It’ll be composed of “informal” leaders — local or provincial bigwigs, for instance — linked on the calls to government agencies who’ll enforce the decisions. He’s working with Afghan lawyers and the Justice Ministry to design the project and gauge interest in it. He’s also talking with a partner organization, FrontlineSMS:Legal, to design an SMS program where Afghans could text their grievances to the M-Jirga down the road.

Read full article.

Link: FrontLineSMS – What We do… Really

Who’s suing who in the mobile business.

Image by The Guardian and The New York Times via Andreas Constantinou

New data released from Nielsen confirm that Android phones are now among the best-selling smartphones in the United States.

[via Bits]

Fast Company on how text messaging is igniting flare-ups in some of the Africa’s most combustible conflicts.

War, war, war. Stand up … and defend yourselves. Kill before they kill you. Slaughter before they slaughter you. Dump them in a pit before they dump you.” —SMS message sent in Jos, Nigeria, during Jan. 2010 riots that left 326 dead.

Read full article.

Actor Tony Curtis loved his iPhone so much that he was buried with it in Las Vegas of all places. Along with other possessions — a Stetson hat, an Armani scarf, driving gloves and a copy of his favorite novel, “Anthony Adverse.”

[MSNBC via Gizmodo]

More on handsets being taken to the grave:

– The first cases of people asking to be buried with their phone originated in Cape Town – Some people’s belief in witchcraft meant they feared that “they could fall under a spell, be put to sleep and actually be buried.

– The “Phone Angel” – The “Phone Angel,” a long-life battery powered cell phone device, allows those in mourning to have contact with the deceased.

– Japan’s camera phone craze spreads to funerals – Japanese mourners at funerals now using the devices to capture a final picture of the deceased.

– The cellphone gravestone – A cell phone shapped gravestone.

– Dead Ringer – John Jacobs’ $55 Verizon bill gets paid every month and his cell number is even etched into his gravestone under the words “Rest in Peace.”

– Bury me with my cell phone – Anecdotal evidence suggests being buried with a favorite tech device is on the upswing.

– An iPhone coffin – An iPhone themed casket.

– Nokia brand coffins – One of the stranger accessories for cell phones on the Ghana market.

A new study shows that 68% of the most popular free iPhone applications are transmitting data that uniquely identifies the phone being used, and some applications even send information such as the user’s name.

[via WSJ Digits Blog]