Skype offers low cost cellular calls
Skype, has just come up with a great wheeze to encourage people to sign up to its Skype Pro service. Low cost cellular calls with Skype to Go. The hook is simple. Calling somebody overseas from a cellular phone usually costs a small fortune. However, you can nominate the phone number of one friend or family member who lives abroad as your Skype to Go number. Then – in 13 countries – you will be assigned a local number to call. With any luck, that local number will be covered by the inclusive minutes in your mobile tariff. So the first leg of the call would then effectively be free. Next, depending on the type of number you want to call, the last leg of the call gets charged at the usual Skype Out rate. Which can be as low as 1.2 pence per minute. So it might prove to be a very low cost method of calling the cell phone of a mate who lives abroad. Where's the catch? Well, apart from the fact that you only seem to be able to nominate one phone number as your Skype to Go number, you also have to sign up for the Skype Pro package. Over here in Blighty, the minimum you can get away with paying for a Pro subscription is £9.20 [£8.00 plus VAT]. That gives you five months' worth of Pro plus £2.50 towards your Skype Out bill. After that you pay £1.50 per month but can cancel at any time. It's not a bad offer but it will almost certainly get people hooked on Skype Pro.

Political Spending to Bring Record $2 Billion to TV
Wall Street analysts are saying that TV stations could see a record $2 billion to $3 billion from the 2008 election cycle, up from $1.6 billion in 2006 and just $900 million in 2004, Reuters writes. Radio broadcasters, too, are looking to see billions more in advertising dollars. In June, J.P. Morgan estimated that more than 2 percent of CBS's estimated revenue for 2008 would come from political advertising - more than twice what it earned in the last presidential election. The bulk of money that candidates spend will be on broadcast television, but political experts say they will also spend heavily on cable and online. CBS Corp., Hearst-Argyle Television Inc., and Meredith Corp. are all expected to benefit, with Hearst-Argyle and Meredith will particularly benefit in early voting states. Some specifics in campaign advertising so far:
* Republican Mitt Romney has spent more than $1.8 million during the first half of 2007 on broadcast media.
* Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has not yet run TV ads but has run radio spots in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina to coincide with his visits there.
* Democratic hopeful John Edwards has run few broadcast ads so far, but that will change as it gets closer to the 2008 primaries.
* Clinton launched TV ads two week's ago across Iowa.
* Democratic candidate Sen. Joe Biden debut television ads in Iowa last week.

End of the runway for paper plane tickets
Global airlines body the International Air Transport Association (Iata) said it has placed its last order for paper tickets, clearing the way for air travel to be based entirely on electronic ticketing from 1 June, 2008. Giovanni Bisignani, director general of Iata, said: "In just 278 more days, the paper ticket will become a collector's item." The changeover from paper would not only cut airlines' costs by $9 for every traveller but would also mean the industry - criticised by environmentalists for its part in global warming - would save 50,000 mature trees per year, he said. Bisignani did not say whether the $9 in cost savings would or should be passed on to passengers. Based in Geneva, Iata represents more than 240 airlines that operate 94 per cent of scheduled international flights. Non-Iata airlines, mainly low-cost carriers such as Easyjet and Ryanair, already have a paper-free ticket system where travellers are registered in computers and present only an identity document at check-in. Iata launched its drive for so called 'e-ticketing' just over three years ago and now 84 per cent of travellers on Iata carriers fly without paper tickets. The airlines body says China, one of the fastest-growing markets for air travel and host to next year's Olympic Games, is heading to be the first country in the world to operate an entirely paper-free ticketing system by the end of this year.

Micropayments arrive on the Web
The idea of micropayments - charging Web users tiny amounts of money for single pieces of online content - was essentially put to sleep toward the end of the dot-com boom. Many micropayments companies have shut down, been acquired or changed their business models over the years. Among them: DigiCash, CyberCash, First Virtual Holdings and Peppercoin. They used various systems, but in general users paid into accounts with their credit cards and then drew from those accounts. The economic and technical challenges were enormous. Consumers were reluctant to pay even a tenth of a cent for something they believed should be free. Consumers "expect to pay for music and movies, but not so much for the printed word. For most merchants, purchases of less than $1.50 aren't worth it. One solution is to aggregate purchases, or group purchases over a period of time, and then process the payments in a single transaction. That's how iTunes works. But credit card networks like Visa and MasterCard, which charge fees for transactions, because it means less money for them. Visa and MasterCard have recently promoted their efforts to serve the "small payments" market - encouraging consumers to use cards for parking meters, for example. But so far, they have stopped short of widely supporting aggregated-payment systems. Visa is evaluating such systems, she added. Merchants can aggregate payments through another company, but that adds to costs and "implementation has been tough. Programs like AdSense from Google, which allows even the smallest Web publishers to have relevant ads placed on their sites, make micropayments unnecessary. The program pays Web publishers what are often very small amounts each time a reader clicks on an ad.

Phone Companies Grabbed Most of New Broadband Subscribers
According to a new study by Leichtman Research Group, the nineteen largest cable and telephone providers in the US, representing about 94% of the market acquired over 1.7 million net additional high-speed Internet subscribers in the second quarter of 2007. The top broadband providers now account for nearly 58 million subscribers, with cable companies having 31.5 million, and telephone companies over 26.4 million.

Additional key findings for the quarter include:
* Total broadband additions were the fewest since the second quarter of 2004, and about 400,000 less than in the second quarter of last year
* Charter was the only major broadband provider to record significantly more net broadband additions in the second quarter than a year ago
* The top telephone companies added about 925,000 subscribers, representing 54% of the net broadband additions for the quarter
* The top cable broadband providers have a 54% share of the broadband market, with about a 5.1 million subscriber advantage over the telephone companies

25% of mobile phones sold in 2011 will be low-cost
More than a dozen handset vendors will be shipping sub-$50 models by 2008. The ultra low cost handset marketplace is currently dominated by Motorola and Nokia, but Samsung, LG, and Sony Ericsson are showing increasing interest and other smaller vendors including ZTE, Kyocera, Huawei, Haier, Sagem, Ningbo Bird, Philips, and Rose Telecom are also beginning to address the market .By 2011, almost one out of every four handsets shipped globally will be an ultra low cost handset. The research shows that India will be the biggest market in the next five years, growing from a little over 9 mln handsets in 2006 to more than 116 mln handsets in 2011.

Mobile ads ‘irritating’ users
New study has indicated that users may find mobile advertising irritating in its current state. The study polled 9,500 people with a mobile phone and an internet connection in 21 countries. It found that ads on mobile internet and TV services are "irritating" for consumers, but branded content and opt-in Bluetooth downloads are more appealing. The study indicated that consumers in the developing world were the most receptive to ads, particularly Mexico, China and Thailand, while the US, France and the UK were the least receptive markets. On a mobile phone, the best forms of advertising were opt-in Bluetooth formats that provide information or vouchers direct to the mobile, popular with 72% of the global sample, and sponsored search results. Adverts on mobile internet pages and TV adverts on mobiles were rejected by 61% of respondents. The UK was ahead of the US in uptake of new portable technology and services. In the US voice calls still account for 65% of mobile phone usage and data only 20%, while in the UK 50% of all phone usage is for data - particularly text messaging - and only 40% for voice. Japan had the highest usage of data services, with voice calls accounting for only 24% of mobile phone usage. Consumers were most likely to pay for music, movies and games, and least likely to pay for user-generated content and podcasts, with just 21% of UK respondents were accessing podcast content.

Legal threats halt iPhone crack
A British firm's plan to sell software that could open the iPhone to non-US networks has been put on hold following legal threats. Last week, Belfast-based UniquePhones joined several others in claiming it had cracked the code which locked iPhone into AT&T's network. But a middle-of-the-night phone call from AT&T's lawyers have forced the firm to rethink its plans. It will now take legal advice to assess the ramifications, the firm said. According to UniquePhones, it received a 3am call from a lawyer claiming to represent AT&T and warning it that selling unlocking software could constitute copyright infringement and illegal software dissemination. "A substantial delay caused by any legal action would render the unlocking software a less valuable commodity as well as creating unforeseen security issues for the company," UniquePhones said in a statement. Interest in the iPhone, Apple's first foray into the mobile world, has been intense since it was launched in the US in June.

MyHeritage Takes 180 Million People Profiles
MyHeritage was a bit of a sleeping giant. MyHeritage has been around since 2005. MyHeritage unveiled a number of fundamental architectural changes to their service. They’ve taken the best features of other sites and married them to the stuff at My Heritage that has worked over the past couple of years. Users can now upload data (name, email, born/died dates, photos, etc.) directly on the MyHeritage website in addition to the client, choosing from17 different languages. The user interface is in Flash, shows a couple of different views to quickly move around a family tree. Over 100 million photos have been uploaded to the site, and users can tag faces with names an attach them to user profiles. That isn’t all MyHeritage is up to, though. If both sides agree, the trees can be merged at appropriate places. MyHeritage hopes, to one day have much of the world’s genealogy mapped online. Given that 1 billion people are online today, MyHeritage’s 180 million people profiles is a good starts towards reaching that goal. They eventually hope to have 3 billion profiles, including people who’ve passed away. And at that point the family relationship between any two people in the world is just a mouse click away. It’s a grand vision, but one that is likely to be achieved someday by MyHeritage or one of their competitors. As an aside, MyHeritage also has a robust (and free) genealogy metasearch engine that taps into 1200 genealogy databases around the world.

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