Staff Reporter

A report MobileYouth 2004 by market research company MobileYouth says 20 per cent of primary school children already own a mobile phone equivalent to 700000 mobile phone owners aged between five and nine.

The company interviewed a sample of 1053 children.

MobileYouth predicts that in two years more than a million primary school children will own a mobile.

Fifty-nine per cent of school kids said they would have fewer friends without a mobile phone.

Children with phones were less likely to do regular exerise but were more likely to maintain regular contact with their friends.

Children between five and nine spent 32 per cent of their pocket money on their mobile phones.

Mobile uptake is being driven by playground pressure and parents risk not only socially excluding them now but preventing them from developing key communication skills for later life Wyndham Lewis an analyst at MobileYouth said.

Customers who sign to Orange on a two-year contract available from July 1 get 10 per cent off their line rental.

Orange is offering dealers connection bonuses between 31 and 93 depending on the tarrif. Your Plan 60 has the lowest bonus while Your Plan 400 has the highest. The bonuses come on top of Oranges regular commission package which currently pays dealers between 76 and 338 for signing customers to a 12-month tariff.

Orange told us about it but were not interested said Mark Whitaker of Findaphone in Accrington.

If a customer signed up to that they would regret it in a year he predicted. Were not going to push it because it would mean losing a customer for a whole year.

He went on: Things change so quickly in this industry both in terms of handsets and tariffs. 3 will be offering something better in a years time no matter what Orange comes up with now. It wouldnt make a difference if Orange offered 50 per cent off line rental for two years it still doesnt benefit the customer.

The two-year contract stipulates that customers cannot upgrade in the first year. In the second year they can upgrade if they sign up to a new two-year contract but will be charged for the new handset.

Ellis Dunning of Talksense in Borehamwood said:

Its not going to take off. People get bored quickly with handsets. They want to upgrade twice a year. Its not going to work if upgrades arent made easy.

Orange could do better than a 10 per cent reduction in line rental. If Orange increased it to 20 per cent the second year and offered free upgrades then it could work.

But there are no benefits to the customer in signing up to it. Theres still a lot of competition with 3 and that wont let up in a years time.

Bob Sweetlove business manager at Hugh Symons said:

It makes sense for a network to lock in customers instead of risk them switching networks after 12 months. But whether it makesfinancial sense for the dealer remains to be seen.

The dealer has to evaluate whether he will make more off the commissions offered for the two-year contract and keeping his Orange customers tied or sign them up again after 12 months and take the bigger commission but risk losing some of them.

Oranges tariff guide for July says customers can migrate between two-year tariffs but cant migrate to a one-year contract without paying off the remainder of their two-year contract.

The site is aimed at 15- to 17-year-olds said to be vulnerable to the theft of mobile phones. MICAF executive secretary Jack Wraith said: The industry works very closely with the Government and police. This project is another important and positive step in raising awareness among young people enabling them to avoid becoming victims of crime.

Virgin Mobile launched BITES last week. It offers users the chance to fill spare moments with its Bite-sized boredom busters such as a picture game called How Bizarre! in which customers guess the original gender of transsexuals.

Virgin Mobile says its BITES portal which replaces its Virgin Mobile Extras service is a gossip magazine-style entertainment service and is better focused on consumer demands than any of its competitors portals.

Tim King founder and managing director of 2sms.com is so confident his new SMS product called Team Data will become thestandard way of collecting informal information within an organisation he reckons he could sell his company for 1000 times its earnings giving it a value of 100 million.

Weve already had a number of approaches this year said King.

I have told each of them that I want 1000 times earnings. I have said: Come and see me in a years time and I could sell at a tenth of your present bid or I could sell at 10 times. Im an entrepreneur and Im going to take that risk. Thats what I do.

2sms.coms main service is called 2sms. It allows business customers to send SMS messages from their office to staff mobile phones via a web-based account. Customers can track messages and management can monitor traffic and data.

The company last week launched a second product Team Data designed to cut down on inter-office paperwork. Instead of sending out bulk e-mails to staff questions are posed to staff on the Team Data website. Respondents are notified of the questionnaire and its deadline by text message

2sms.com became profitable for the first time last year It has 1500 clients in aerospace finance government healthcare IT retail telecoms and transport. The 2sms service is distributed by BT Openworld and by O2 as O2 businesstxt and is resold by various IT services companies.

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Other sponsors include a number of City Councils and development agencies.

As part of the three-year sponsorship agreement T-Mobile will become mobile supplier to the Tour of Britain. It will provide WiFi access in press rooms and there will be T-Mobile hotspots along the route.

Specific areas of the route such as the start line and the 1-kilometre-to-go banner will also be decked out in T-Mobile corporate colours.

The 16 teams involved include 12 commercially sponsored international teams and four UK teams.

The race starts in Greater Manchester and Lancashire followed by stages in Yorkshire the East Midlands Newport and South east Wales. It climaxes on September 5 in Londons Westminster.

The deal gives Vodafone access to Beckhams personal image rights in forthcoming advertising campaigns and highlights of his matches with Spanish club Real Madrid.

The new sponsorship deal will run for a year and expands on the Beckham-themed content that was available through Vodafone live! under the previous deal. Vodafones original sponsorship deal with Beckham lasted two years.

Vodafone claims that neither press speculation over Beckhams personal life nor the criticism he received following his performances at Euro 2004 have detracted from his value as a marketing asset.

He didnt get great press during Euro 2004 but there is much more to David Beckham than what the media write about him said a Vodafone spokesperson.

Davids appeal for us is that he is much more than just a high-profile footballer. He is a global icon with enormous appeal in the Far East. It is quite unusual for someone of another nationality to be the centrepiece of a very successful advertising campaign there.

Vodafone is spread around the world and Beckhams appeal reflects that.

Vodafone has also given away thousands of 3G handsets and offered a money-off deal to test its 3G Vodafone live! portal pending full commercial roll-out later this year.

The trial which takes place in London Manchester Birmingham and Glasgow is said to be the largest in Vodafones history.

Initial trial handsets are the Sony Ericsson Z1010 and the Samsung Z105 which Vodafone says is exclusive to its portfolio.

Weve done very small scale trials in the past but they have consisted of only a few hundred users said a Vodafone spokesman.

This is the biggest by some measure. It will be the last thing we do before the full commercial launch of consumer 3G services he added.

It involves rigorously testing products and services so that we have a good idea of what customers like and dislike before the launch and can change things accordingly. It is to make sure that what we think we are doing right we are in fact doing right.

Vodafone says that triallists will consist of some Vodafone staff and some existing live! customers taken from a cross-section of the companys customer database.

Triallists have received a free handset for the duration of the test and will get money back on their phone bill at the end of each month.

Vodafone will cover all customers extra usage so they are not left out of pocket. The trial will continue over an extended period of time until Vodafone is satisfied with the services.

Vodafone has not yet received any feedback because the trial is still in its very early stages.

Jansen joins from global business and consumer telecoms firm MCI and will take control of direct indirect and wholesale sales channels.

Jansens role will be to bring TTGs fixed-line business in the Netherlands closer to its Dutch mobile business.

Our fixed-line business doesnt sell mobile services to fixed-line customers. We want to leverage both those businesses so that we are selling mobile services to our fixed line customers in Holland said Andy Smith group director of mobile distribution at TTG Europe.

Jansen began his career with oil company Q8. He has worked with MCI as direct sales manager and senior manager for Benelux.

The mobile industry is touting MMS as the solution for moving photos around the networks said Simon East chief executive of Cognima a firm that develops value-added applications for mobile phones.

However he revealed that test images sent over Vodafone Orange O2 and T-Mobile were reduced in quality from 1152×864 pixels to just 160×120 pixels.

Easts comments should be seen in the context that it wants to promote Cognimas Snap a service that enables megapixel images to be uploaded from camera phones to online photo albums without loss of quality.

Until consumers can send high-quality images MMS wont fulfil its revenue-generating potential he claimed. Unless you have Bluetooth and understand how to use it there is no point in having a megapixel camera phone.

He went on to criticise Bluetooth as being complicated and claimed that operators dont make any money out of it.

The industry has raised consumer expectations with camera phones and MMS as it did with WAP but the user experience isnt there yet he said.

Reduction in picture quality can be minimised if the default MMS photo setting is changed. But even after switching to the large MMS setting on the phone megapixel images are reduced by a factor of four to 576×432 pixels.

Rob Bamforth mobile analyst at Bloor Research commented:

Photos sent via MMS are sub-standard in quality even in large mode.

For users who have bought a megapixel camera phone it will be extremely disappointing.

Everyone is talking about MMS in terms of revenue he went on.

The infrastructure might be there but its not that easy to use because the functionality is compressed into a very small space and hidden – both at the front end in the handset and at the back end with the networks.

He went on to claim that while MMS was not dead there are problems with it that need to be looked at.

It is a mechanism. Not an application he said. The user doesnt care about mechanisms. The industry has lost sight of that. The customer wants applications and will pay for them. MMS is always going to be fighting against the next bigger pixel size. It meets a need but sending pictures between phones is not a huge need.

Its not a terribly interesting use of a camera. Just one in 10 photos are actually sent between users.

It is the second content deal that Orange has struck with a Premiership football club following its partnership with Chelsea FC (Mobile News August 9).

Content includes MMS club alerts live match commentary interviews with club representatives match highlights competitions text voting post-match reviews and travel and ticket information.

The Orange brand will also appear on hoardings and match-day brochures at the City of Manchester Stadium the teams home ground. Man City shops will sell Orange phones and airtime as well as value-added services for fans.

Mark Hird vice-president of Orange multimedia operations said: We provide services for all our different supporters anyway but were now looking to team up with Premiership sides to provide fans with exclusive content.

He went on: Weve been speaking to a lot of Premiership teams and putting across our vision about services and the way that mobile is going. We have no target number in mind. The final number of clubs will be determined by whether or not they share our vision.

Orange has said that it had no intention of sponsoring football shirts however.