Mad Box liquidators Hacker Young & Partners held a creditors meeting last Friday.

The collapse of Mad Box casts doubt over the deal between Euro Cellulars UK distribution business M-Fusion and MTV to supply MTV-branded content which was announced late last year.

Mad Box Media had plans to produce MTV-branded polyphonic ringtones screen logos and games on branded MTV 2Go cards through 20000 retailers by the end of the year. M-Fusion sales director Chris Savva had hailed the deal as one of the biggest content deals in the industry. This was followed by the launch of a multi-million pound advertising campaign for the products.

Win Donaldson was unavailable for comment at the time of going to press.

Clearly the mobile retail sector has been going through a difficult period in the past 12 months and as the leading event for the sector Mobilexpo could not expect to remain immune from these pressures.

We hope to be in a position to announce our plans for future editions said Reeds group exhibition director Tim Porter.

Mobilexpo was due to be held at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham on May 22-23.

Around 40 companies had contracted to attend Mobilexpo but the major handset manufacturers were not in a position to commit themselves to being exhibitors this year.

Mobilexpo was established by

Trident Exhibitions in consultation with Mobile News in 1995 and was sold to Reed Exhibitions in 1998.

It is the second trade show to be cancelled in a year. Last September Mobileworldexpo was axed.

This decision has been made as part of our commitment to customer service and to ensure that we can meet our 14 days repairs promise.

We will continue to work with Nokia to provide solutions a Carphone Warehouse statement said.

Mark Squires Nokias senior manager of communications said:

The statement from Carphone Warehouse is essentially correct in that together we found that we had a component issue affecting screen performance with some of its stock of Nokia 8210 mobile phones.

The Carphone Warehouse and Nokia agreed together to temporarily suspend sales of this product while we identify if there are any further affected units currently in its possession.

The good news is that this recently identified issue has been resolved and we are confident that this temporary situation will be rectified very shortly.

In the meantime we have offered customers who are affected in the UK an additional one years guarantee on any screen repair which might be necessary as a result of one of these units slipping through the net.

The Nokia 8210 and 8850 phones with faulty displays were shipped between October 2001 and January 2002. The company blamed the problem on an unnamed supplier saying it had rectified the problem and that the supplier will be bearing the cost.

Nokias reliability problem has been noted by industry analysts.

Per Lindberg an analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein estimated reliability problems could cost Nokia up to $150 million ( 92 million) per quarter.

Dealer Nick East of North East Comms recently highlighted the 8210s screen fading problems in a long letter itemising the reliability problems he had found with various models of Nokia handsets (see Mobile News April 15).

Person-to-person texts sent across the four UK GSM network operators last month were more than three times up on the 372 million sent during the same period last year.

March marks the end of the first quarter for the year which shows steady growth in texting across UK airwaves with a record 3.9 billion texts.

This monumental figure nearly quadruples the total for 2000 Q1 which was only 1.05 billion and shows an increase of 33 per cent on 2001 Q1 when 2.6 billion texts were sent.

More than 75 billion text messages were sent worldwide in the first quarter this year up more than 50 per cent on the same period of 2001.

The MDAs total forecast for 2002 is now put at 360 billion messages up from the 250 billion reached during 2002.

The campaign draws on a research study which demonstrates that if you drive and use a mobile phone you are four times more likely to have an accident.

The campaigns contains the strapline: Think! Switch it off before you drive.

Radio ads posters and a TV ad cleverly convey how difficult it is to concentrate on two things at the same time.

Road Safety minister David Jamieson said:

More and more people own mobile phones and research has shown that using them while driving greatly increases the risk of an accident. Even the most careful of drivers will be distracted by a phone call or text message and that will affect their concentration and anticipation.

O2 said it welcomed the DTLRs driving safety initiative and confirmed it too would help by issuing a safety leaflet to all its employees customers and through its retail outlets across the country explaining the safety issues around using phones in cars.

IBM will design build and manage an IT systems infrastructure to support O2s development of voice text and mobile internet markets over the next decade.

IBM Global Services says it is the worlds largest information technology services provider with approximately 150000 staff serving customers in 160 countries and $35 billion in annual revenue.

The Philips 820 will be available on both pre-pay ( 200) and contract ( 130). The GPRS and Bluetooth-enabled phone has imaging software which allows the user to download images on their handset that have been sent by email

This follows the decision by group managing director Adrian Fawcett to merge the accessories business Dextra with 20:20 Solutions which distributes pre-pay top-up voucher and calling card business.

Dextra recently lost the contract to supply Dixons with accessories to Kondor.

We are merging the two businesses because they share a common customer base. It is logical that customers want to talk about telecoms as a category and deal with one unified representation to the company said Fawcett.

Around 160 people have been affected by the merger of Dextra and 20:20 Solutions. Most will be redeployed in the new organisation or elsewhere in the Caudwell Group. Five people have left including account manager Jo Knight.

Fawcett is ex-group managing director of Bass Breweries. He is now in in charge of Dextra and 20:20 the chain of Discovery Stores 4U Corporate 4U human resources legal matters and 20:20 distribution.

Fawcett repudiated the claims of some ex-Caudwell Group employees that his role is to slash overheads in the wake of the general collapse in the handset and pre-pay sectors.

Top-up business however was hugely important to the Caudwell Group because it contributed much of the turnover and helped funded the expansion of Phones 4U said an ex-senior manager of the Caudwell Group who spoke on conditions of anonymity.

There are now channel managers who are trying to keep the voucher business going because the handset business has retrenched he added.

Auto Trader has the UKs largest database of photographs of vehicles for sale said Jim Murray-Jones head of digital channels at Auto Trader. Users can instantly see what the car they are interested in looks like. Extending that valued asset to the mobile phone user is very attractive to us.

Wallers replacement due to be announced this week will take on an increased role as Sagem strengthens its UK operation by running it as a stand-alone subsidiary.

This follows a restructuring of Sagems other European operations in a drive to increase sales. The UK head office will now take care of all sales marketing and PR for the UK under the guidance of Sagems HQ in France.

A Sagem spokesperson confirmed:

Romain Waller is leaving the UK managing directors role. His replacement will be announced next week. There has been a restructure of the business.

Before Sagem only had a sales team in the different countries. These will become subsidiary operations. looking after marketing as well as sales.

The changes came about because Sagem bought the Philips fax business unit. We have reorganised the sales structure to fit in with the sales structure of the fax business because it is very strong and well organised.