Other participants include Vodafone Orange O2 3 Motorola Nokia Siemens and Microsoft.

Shazam recently won a Mobile News Award for its innovative service that can identify snatches of song music sent via mobile against more than 1.6 million songs – and return a text message with the name of a queried track.

Mobile News and its companion consumer title What Mobile are the exclusive mobile media partners of Mobile Life and copies of What Mobile will be handed out to Mobile Life visitors.

Mobile Life is themed around a 24-hour day. The exhibition is laid out in a clock shape that will lead visitors through a world where they can experiment with the latest mobile devices related to the activities of the time of day from a morning in the office to a night at the casino tables.

Showgoers will also get a chance to race in an F1 simulator on a real Grand Prix circuit and compete for free talk-time and prizes.

Mobile Life is shaping up to be a huge event with more than 30000 people set to attend over the shows three-day run said Carphone Warehouse boss Charles Dunstone.

Tickets cost 10 in advance but are available to Mobile News readers in a two-for-one offer by visiting the mobilelifeevent.co.uk website or by calling 08000 491 008 and quoting reference MN102.

The total number of chargeable person-to-person text messages sent across the four UK GSM networks in March 2003 totalled 1.72 billion.

Marchs figure takes the daily average to 56 million double the number of text messages sent in March 2001.

Two events during March produced significant increase in daily traffic rates – Mothers Day and St Patricks Day.

St Patricks Day saw more than 65 million text messages sent throughout the UK.

Most of Britains population have used text messages to vote for their favourite pop star or celebrity in various interactive programmes on television and radio including Big Brother said the MDA.

The increases will be felt by pay-as-you go customers who will see the price of calls rise by at least 5p per minute on most calls.

Calls to landlines and Orange mobiles rise by 5p per minute from 15p to 20p per minute. Off-net calls also rise by 5p from 35p per minute to 40p per minute.

International call charges have been increased by as much as 20p per minute to some destinations.

Data services did not escape the price rises. The cost of sending text messages was raised by 2p to 12 p per message while Orange has abolished the 5p per minute weekend rate for WAP calls. These are charged at 10p per minute at all times. Orange will impose a minimum 5p call charge except for roaming calls.

Orange is also abolishing discount call rates for customers who purchase 50 top-ups on the Choose Your Own Off Peak pre-pay tariff. Instead it will offer customers an extra 5 worth of calls each time they top up their mobile accounts by 50.

On the other hand Orange is re-introducing its Care package for small business customers only. Orange is also trying to stimulate GPRS usage with a three-month free trail of GPRS to all personal and small business customers subject to a 30Mb per month fair use policy.

Businesses are also being offered an all you can use GPRS tariff for 45 per month subject to 100 Mb per month fair use.

Orange defended its pre-pay price rises claiming its minimum call charge was still lower than Vodafone and was on a par with T-Mobile and O2. It claimed its international call charges were still five per cent lower than BT overall.

A spokesperson explained: These new charges are part of a refresh of our pay-as-you-go service plans. Orange is to raise some of the prices of its plans. However from July we will be introducing free reserve calls across all our pay-as-you-go service plans as well as giving 10 per cent free talk-time on all top-ups of 50.

These changes are designed to ensure that Orange offers a pay-as-you-go portfolio that allows customers a choice of products and services to tailor their package according to how they use their phone.

Although Orange has made some changes to its pay-as-you-go portfolio it still offers good value for money for our customers claimed the spokesperson.

Henson fills the position formerly held by former MD Geoff Walters son Paul Walters who left last month. The Walters family sold the business to Avenir two-and-a-half years ago but were contracted to continue running the business during a handover period.

Avenirs new managing director former finance director Ishai Novick said he was still recruiting other senior members of staff as the company embarked on an expansion drive.

We are recruiting to strengthen the management team. My vision is to expand the UK business. There are a number of areas in which we can do that.

Our parent company owns extensive retail chains in a number of countries. We are looking at retail opportunities in the UK. We would need a critical mass of around 100 stores to be successful. We will acquire shops if the right opportunity arises and the market is right. The networks have said they intend to reduce the amount of stores they have. That will create opportunities for us.

He went on to note that Avenir in France is traditionally strong in accessories and SIM-free sales.

We are also looking to expand in those areas he said. We are talking to handset manufacturers and hope to work with them. We cant afford to stand still.

A recent study by the firm into operators that have deployed its DateTrak application has shown they enjoy ARPU increases of up to 80 per cent as a result of the large numbers of subscribers texting potential love matches.

The application which allows users to anonymously search for and text compatible partners across mobile networks has already been deployed across the world by several operators.

Users over the age of 30 generate up to four times more revenue than 15- to 20-year-olds said Landmat director of strategic relations Eythor Arnalds.

Most data services are traditionally targeted at the youth market so this study is a perfect example of how with the right application revenue from data can be found across all age groups.

Britannia Airwaves was the retail arm of the Cityphone/Britannia group and purchased its stock from Pointgold. Another group company Britannia Telecom owned the Talk4All shops. Talk4All staff were employed by Britannia Retail.

The liquidators said Britannia Group started in early 2000 but by March 2002 had been loss-making.

The company aimed to expand to a critical mass of 100 stores. Funding for the expansion came from Pointgold (Cityphone) and One 2 One. The companys financial position was improving but was dependent on One 2 Ones support of Pointgold.

Regrettably however the support was withdrawn in September (2002) and as a result Pointgold went into administrative receivership on 23 September 2002. The group of companies could no longer continue and all three companies ceased trading immediately the report said.

Neither Donaghey nor his partner Paul Williams was available for comment. T-Mobile declined to comment saying: It is not our policy to comment on individual businesses the management and direction of which being outside our remit.

Arculuss appointment comes at the same time as current chairman David Varney steps down to a part-time roll. Varneys move was agreed when O2 separated from BT Cellnet.

Arculus is currently a non-executive director of Barclays and of the Earls Court and Olympia exhibition venues. He is also chairman of water services company Severn Trent.

UK chief marketing and data officer Kent Thexton has also been promoted to the mmO2 board as has O2 MD David McGlade

Last July I asked a key industry figure with board level insight into all four networks for his opinion of T-Mobiles UK management style. Busy fools he replied.

I found this remark significant but not surprising. Our relationship with T-Mobile was on the rocks following the management change from One 2 One.

An aggressive group of Campbell-esque PR suits made it clear they expected Mobile News to only report sanitised announcements.

We were advised to look at the bigger picture rather than run stories about T-Mobile of relevance to the dealer channel which the network regarded as irrelevant and inaccurate. They demanded to know what right we had to decide what news people should read about T-Mobile.

Dealers who criticised T-Mobile to us were apparently not well-informed and were invariably mistaken. Why were we not publishing the glowing accounts of thousands of dealers who were happy with T-Mobile?

Consequences

Should we not play ball the consequences were made clear starting with an overt threat that we would lose T-Mobiles advertising.

We declined to comply and quickly became persona non grata. Overnight access to T-Mobile executives was withdrawn. Routine enquiries were met with obfuscation. Of course the advertising was pulled.

I assumed this bizarre conduct was confined to a small cabal of lower-echelon empire-builders. Surely T-Mobiles leaders guided the business with wisdom concern for shareholder value and professional courtesy?

Not quite.

It seems the culture of aggression and alienation ran from the top down. Anyone who fell from favour would be treated accordingly as was indicated by Mr Justice Cookes explosive 54-page judgement of T-Mobiles failed case against Virgin and its joint venture business Virgin Mobile and his later comments in a separate hearing in which he ordered T-Mobile to pay all of Virgins and Virgin Mobiles costs.

The judges comments show T-Mobiles mindset of confrontation was pervasive as revealed in the way it tried to extricate itself from the joint venture with Virgin another legacy from One 2 One.

Having decided to divest itself of Virgin Mobile you would expect T-Mobile to have negotiated a mutually-agreeable exit route. Surely this is what joint venture partners do all the time?

Instead when T-Mobile found its desired exit route barred managing director Harris Jones and his advisers activated an obscure legal formula to reduce the Marketing Support Contribution (MSC) T-Mobile would pay to Virgin Mobile.

Put simply T-Mobile knew it was gambling with loaded dice but never believed it would be exposed as a cheat.

To use the judges words their exit strategy was designed to place the maximum pressure on Virgin. For if these payments fell below a critical level a no-fault termination clause would be activated leading to the destruction of Virgin Mobile under its current ownership. All to the commercial advantage of T-Mobile.

So armed T-Mobile ambushed Virgin with a skewed revenue formula that omitted text message revenue.

This significantly reduced the MSC and triggered the clause that would wind-up the joint venture.

Virgin resisted and the battle commenced. After a hearing in the Royal Courts of Justice Mr Justice Cooke dismissed T-Mobiles claim saying:

It (i.e. the calculation) was not only flawed it was deliberately skewed to achieve the lowest possible result. Mr Justice Cooke added: There is no possible basis on any view of inbound interconnection revenue to exclude text revenue and to work solely on the basis of voice calls.

This is however what T-Mobile did. These defects in themselves render the calculation non-contractual … the inference is clear that T-Mobile made a calculated decision to use the termination provision of the Joint Venture Agreement in an attempt to secure commercial advantages to itself at the expense of Virgin Mobile and Virgin.

Surprisingly neither Harris Jones nor joint venture board director Julia Chain gave evidence. Nor were they in court to hear Justice Cooke refer to the unanswerable criticisms of their calculations.

Skewed

Ironically T-Mobiles fight against Virgin did not inhibit it from exploiting Virgin Mobiles success. Keen to haul T-Mobile out from fourth place Jones added Virgin Mobiles 2.3 million subscribers to its UK customer numbers to persuade journalists and analysts that T-Mobile was now bigger than O2.

Key questions now emerge.

How could T-Mobile possibly think its skewed revenue formula could withstand the scrutiny of a High Court judge?

How could Harris Jones and T-Mobiles lawyers mount a case they knew to be based on a skewed engineering of the no-fault termination?

Did Jones and the other conspirators in Virgin Mobiles demise forget that Virgin under Sir Richard Branson had a track record in seeing off assaults from corporate giants?

Had they forgotten Bransons battle against British Airways and its notorious dirty tricks campaign which humbled even the great and good BA chairman Lord King in court.

Joness fellow American the great showman PT Barnum once said you cant fool all of the people all of the time. Jones should have remembered that.

Deutsche Telekom shareholders already smarting from their company losing billions must have been mortified to see T-Mobile wasting millions on a doomed court case against a joint venture partner based on a flawed formula.

Brutal

We will probably never know if the edict to sue Virgin in such a brutal way was Joness own plan or those of his masters at Deutsche Telekom. Nor are we likely to find out if his subsequent resignation was as a protest to any orders he may have been given or if he had a premonition that his conduct would be questioned by one of the highest authorities in the land.

Whatever Jones will soon leave the building – no doubt with the grateful thanks of enriched lawyers ringing in his ears.

Meanwhile we hope that the departure of Jones results in a less combative culture at T-Mobile. We know there are people within T-Mobile perplexed at the change in attitude since the One 2 One days.

Perhaps with a new managing director soon taking the hot seat the previous climate of co-operation will return.

Finally let us remind ourselves of the contents of one of T-Mobiles recent press releases to announce its provision of virtual network facilities to BT.

T-Mobile UK believes in the importance of strong and effective partnerships.

We wonder what Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Mobile head Tom Alexander would have to say about that.

The network took charge of the Swindon-based service provider three weeks ago.

Two weeks ago Vodafone director of customer management Joe McLoone assured dealers that there would be no immediate changes to the commission payments (Mobile News March 24).

McLoone even hinted that some of Cellular Operations most successful packages might last beyond the planned May review.

It was thought the comments were aimed at easing dealers fears that the popular and lucrative bespoke tariffs would be dismantled.

McLoone had said: We dont want to tamper with something that has been very successful. We arent going to make immediate changes before we have a look at the business in detail.

But Vodafone last week slashed the commission payments on the bespoke tariffs by 80 with a further 40 coming off the majority of the other tariffs.

A spokesperson said:

Vodafone felt it was important to immediately bring in the same subsidy reductions that have been introduced elsewhere in the marketplace as a result of the Competition Commission findings.

It is still close to the acquisition and we are still understanding the business and its dealer activity.

Cellular Operations sales director Chris Jones quit last week (see story P4).

Cellular Operations won Best Service Provider at the Mobile News Awards on March 27 for the second year running.

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