Features added to pay phones Down Under
Published 9:00 pm Saturday, March 26, 2005
SYDNEY, Australia – Coming to Australia: New pay phones with color touch screens and high-speed Internet connections for sending text, photo and video messages.
Australia’s telecommunications giant Telstra, facing increased competition from mobile phones, is outfitting 10 interactive public telephones, at nearly $8,000 each, for a 10-week trial in Sydney’s central business district.
E-mail and other Internet access will cost about $1.60 for 20 minutes, text messages are 23 cents each and video messages cost $1.20. Local calls are the same as those at conventional pay phones, 32 cents.
Pay-phone use has declined over the past decade as more people carry mobile phones. About 88 percent of Australians have them, Telstra said.
The company currently owns about half of Australia’s 65,000 pay phones, from which about 1 million calls are made each day.
A boost for the creative types: A new Web site backed by some of the Internet’s leading thinkers promises to make it easier – and cheaper – for artists, scholars and other creative people to share their digital works.
Ourmedia.org seeks to become a central repository for such items.
“They are (now) all kind of scattered, a lot on people’s computers (or) hidden away on the Web in faraway crevices,” said J.D. Lasica, a veteran journalist who co-founded the project. “We thought it was important to gather a lot of this stuff under one roof.”
The site also addresses a chief obstacle to posting video and other large files to the Internet: The more popular an item gets, the more its owner has to pay for Web hosting services.
Ourmedia will offer hosting services for free, and the site pledges to retain home movies, photos, cartoons, software and any other digital work forever. The only exceptions are porn and items under someone else’s copyright. More than a dozen volunteers worldwide will monitor.
For each file posted to Ourmedia, the owner must specify what people can do with it, choosing from among a half dozen or so licensing packages. Owners can claim full copyright protections if they want, though the project encourages sharing, Lasica said.
Peer-to-peer systems falling out of favor: Use of peer-to-peer systems such as Kazaa for sharing music and other files online has dropped as more Americans who use the Internet turn to such alternative methods as downloading files from a friend’s iPod, a new study finds.
Though the percentage of Internet users who share files online has changed little over the past year, remaining at about 24 percent, fewer are using P2P systems. Twenty-one percent of current music downloaders say they still use P2P systems, compared with 31 percent in February 2004, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
The study was released ahead of Tuesday’s Supreme Court hearing on whether operators of such systems can be held liable for what users do with the software.
Usage of paid services like iTunes has increased to 34 percent of current music downloaders, compared with 17 percent last year.
Overall, about half of the current music or video downloaders say they have used sources other than P2P or paid services. E-mail and instant messages were popular, as was taking files from someone else’s iPod or other MP3 player.
I want my DVR: Six percent of Americans own a TiVo or other digital video recorder and another 6 percent plan to buy one in the next year, a study finds.
The overwhelming majority of reccorder owners – 81 percent – say they “love” or “like” them, according to the joint study from Arbitron Inc. and Edison Media Research. More than half say the digital video recorders have had a “big impact” on their lives.
Among all recorders of television shows, including VCR owners, 29 percent cite the ability to skip ads as the primary reason for recording shows, while 52 percent want to watch shows at a more convenient time.
Those who don’t record shows are evenly split between who say it’s too difficult or time consuming and those who cite an unwillingness to decide ahead of time what they want to watch.
The study also finds that a quarter of Americans have watched video on the Internet and a similar number have used pay-per-view or other on-demand services offered by their cable or satellite provider.
Utah enacts law to block smut: Internet service providers that operate in Utah must offer customers a way to block porn sites under a law signed this week.
ISPs complained that the law adds nothing to the fight against pornography, and said a legal challenge is likely.
“The market has already responded to this issue,” said Pete Ashdown, president of Salt Lake-based XMission. “We have for many years provided an optional filter for our customers that they can turn on in Internet browsers.”
The law requires ISPs to offer customers free software for blocking porn sites on a list maintained by the attorney general.
Republican state Rep. John Dougall said the measure he sponsored should help parents overwhelmed by advancing technology.
“Kids are much more savvy about what’s going on than their parents,” Dougall said.
An earlier version of the bill would have required ISPs to block sites based on numeric Internet addresses, but ISPs argued that approach would block benign sites as well because they often share addresses. A federal court has struck down a 2003 Pennsylvania law that took that approach.
Herald news services
