Mobile Service use swells worldwide

A new report by British media and telecommunications watchdog Ofcom reveals the use of mobile service like text messages and pictures messages are increasing fast worldwide.

China is tops for text messaging and India is the mobile leader according to the report, but Britain has the highest take-up of digital television.

Mobile phone users in China (where ROK Comics is fast developing its partnership with China Mobile) sent 429 billion text messages in 2006 (an equivalent of 967 per user, more than any other country), while India added more mobile subscribers in the year than Britain had in total, as the two countries joined Brazil and Russia in driving growth in the sector.

The report also found that accessing the internet from a mobile phone is growing in popularity. In Japan, where over half of mobile phones use a 3G network, mobile users are three times more likely to send an email from their mobiles as they are a text message. However, Europeans send more text messages with 75 per cent of mobile phone users in the UK, France, Germany and Italy sending SMS messages regularly.

The number of mobile-only households has also risen. In Italy, 38 per cent of households are mobile only, compared to around 13 per cent in the UK and 10 per cent in Germany. By the end of 2006 there were, for the first time in the UK, more households with a mobile connection than a landline.

James Thickett, Ofcom's Director of Research, discusses the International Communications Report in the video below and explains how the UK is digitally connected.

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ROK Comics Creator Profiled

The Bangor (Maine) Daily News has profiled cartoonist and ROK Comics creator Josh Alves, whose Araknid Kid is among the entries in this month’s Zuda Comics competition (www.zudacomics.com).

The Araknid Kid, who communicates in picto-speak, battles evildoers with his web-shooting trapeze bar and his ability to stick to walls. The Kid was a minor character in Alves’ old series Zeek and Dent and 25-earold Alves, who publishes Out to Lunch on Rok Comics, has been preparing Araknid Kid since DC first announced Zuda, a user-generated Web site.

The winner of each monthly competition earns a contract to produce 52 more weekly installments of their Web-comic.

Alves, who works at the Bangor Daily News as a graphic arts technician, is running seventh in the early voting.

He realizes that such a national platform can help him in terms of exposure."It means a lot," Alves told the paper. "I hope to continue the series whether I win or not. I might approach other publishers if I don’t win. I’m likening this to American Idol. You don’t need to win to benefit from it."

ROK buys ROCK

ROK Entertainment Group, the UK-based mobile technologies, applications and entertainment development company and owners of ROK Comics, has announced it has acquired a 51% controlling interest in Warwick-based company Rock, a performance notebook manufacturer (and subsidiary of Eikon Group Limited).

Under the terms of the agreement, ROK and Rock will share expertise in IPTV, place shifting, mobile internet and mobile entertainment platforms. This will take advantage of the synergies between the mobile phone and PC oriented technologies respectively as well as the increasing convergence between the phone and notebook market, with recent market research conducted by Intel finding that every owner of a mobile phone will eventually own a notebook.

This acquisition forms part of ROK’s strategy to expand in all mobile communications markets and will provide a further platform for the delivery of user-generated content, which constitutes a key strength of the Company’s product offering.

"Full-scale convergence of the notebook and mobile technologies - and how we use them both - has already begun," Laurence Alexander, CEO of ROK explained. "Three years ago, virtually no-one browsed the web on their mobile or received and sent emails. In three years time, people will be using their mobile in very similar ways to how they are using their laptops at present. It's all about technological convergence of the mobile with the internet to deliver ‘constant connectivity’.”

Rock are world-leaders in notebook technology innovation, such as being first to launch the world’s fastest graphics for the notebook platform, 8800M GTX by NVIDIA. Earlier this year, they made their first steps into Europe by offering three years pan-European warranty on all notebook products with a long term plan to hit the US by 2010, where ROK already operates.

“Rock’s customer base consists largely of early adopters, and make the ideal target for ROK’s products and services," commented Nick Boardman, CEO of Rock. "We will work extremely closely to bring some exciting technology to the market”.