Car and Driver tested the dangers of writing and sending sms text messages while driving in comparison to just driving, driving drunk or while reading email. The tests show that texting is by far the most dangerous activity while driving – it adds an extra 70 ft travel distance at 70 miles per hour. In comparison reading only adds half of that.
Veage Blog
June 26, 2009
June 25, 2009
1 in 5 teens has send sms or emails with sexual explicit content
USA Today reports a new survey on kids in cyberspace. According to the survey one in five teens have “sexted” — sent or received sexually suggestive, nude or nearly nude photos through cellphone sms text messages or e-mail.
Most teens who sexted sent the photos to girlfriends or boyfriends, but 11% sent them to strangers, according to the study made public today by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and Cox Communications. Of teens who sext, 80% are under 18, the survey found.
June 24, 2009
Want a trial to send free sms texts?
We’re currently evaluating to give out a free trial period to new users for our flat-rate sms offer and let them test our service for some time before they get billed.
As you probably know we’re charging £3 / week using sms premium billing – we’re sending each user a text message each week which costs 3 pounds to receive. Instead, we could for example give each new user a trial period of for example a week or a month in which he’s not billed – and has the possiblity to stop the service at any time following the usual steps.
That would give each new user the possiblity to send texts for free for a limited time – and to see if all the features work as promised – like our automatic sms reminders. We’re uncertain if it’s worth the hassle and at this time, we’re definitely not sure how such a trial would look like.
What do you think – would a week be enough? Or would you need 14 days, a month? Let us know by sending an email to info@veage.com
12th Code of Practice in the making
UK phone-paid services regulator PhonepayPlus today revealed it has started to work on the 12th edition of it’s code of practice taking into consideration recommendations made by Ofcom in its recent PRS Scope Review. PhonepayPlus is aiming to reduce step-by-step guidance and instead defines desirable outcomes to allow businesses more freedom. On the other hand it aims to increase customer confidence.
We can’t help to wonder why they don’t target obvious problematic areas – such as network operators never issuing refunds while putting the burden on service providers who only get half the money but have to pay full. That’s something most service providers would consider unfair treatment.
Or think of mobile network operators effectively forestalling micro payment. As a service provider, you’ll roughly get 50% of what the end user has been charged – the rest stays with the network operator. Imagine what price we could offer you for your sms flat rate if network operators would change to a pay out scheme like credit card companies offer.
Don’t get us wrong – consumer protection is a good thing – we’re consumers ourselves at the end. We still think that most of the problems in the industry are largely due to ignorance on the network side of things (we’re getting unrequested sms from mobile networks on all new phones, and we never agreed to get them in the first place) – and it would certainly benefit consumers to take a closer look at that.
Students send 3 SMS text per class
A recently conducted poll finds that students in average send 3 sms text message per class and a total of 440 texts per week. At average cost of 12p per message that’s text sms worth £150 per month – assuming each of them has a 500 free sms messages plan! Now that makes us look good 
The study also found that parents mostly don’t think their children would use the phone within school at all, while almost 65% of all students admitted to use the phone regularly within school hours. Some also use the phone for cheating – and only half of all the students polled believe this phone cheating to be a “serious offense.”
June 23, 2009
Two faces of text messages
We’ve spoken about breaking up using SMS the other day. Today we’d like to point you to two further articles. The boston channel reports that text messages helped locate the victim of a kidnapping. And timesunion has a letter from a reader in
which she speaks about being uninvited from a wedding by her sister using SMS. This illustrates two entirely separate faces of SMS text messages: they can be incredible helpful and they can carry the worst news one could possibly expect!
June 22, 2009
Truphone introduces SMS – at high rates
June 21, 2009
Australia makes racist SMS an offence
Gaea News reports 
that Australia is trying to make racist SMS an offence. Alarmed by the damage done to the country’s reputation after a series of attacks on Indian students, the Australian government is mulling a change in law that would make sending an SMS inciting racial attacks an offense. The government was examining the possibility of amending an existing law of inciting violence against people for their race, religion or ethnicity to include “inciting violence against an individual on the basis of that individual’s race, religion, ethnicity or nationality”.
June 19, 2009
Breaking up over SMS
Something funny on Friday: intomobile.com published a funny cartoon dealing with a popular problem – breaking up over SMS is way more easy, but generally considered bad behavior. We wonder how many people really make use of the possibility to break up over SMS – can’t be that many any more? Doing a quick google search however finds tons and tons of pages. So I guess a lot of people at least think about the possibility – quite understandably. If you’re in bad need of some help on how to best break up using sms, have a look at this funny list.
June 18, 2009
UK Government working on Underground Mobile Coverage
As moconews and zdnet pointed out today, the UK government wants to improve on Underground mobile coverage for the 2012 Olympics. ZDNet reports that this is the second attempt in a short period of time to increase mobile coverage within tubes – the first was dropped quietly after lack of interest from suppliers.
