We are a small independant software company interested in the effects of bullying and harassment through text messaging on the youth culture.

The purpose of this survey is two fold - to find out how undesirable messaging is perceived in society and to understand if technology is able to help mitigate some of the issues we suspect are out there.

The questions in the first section will be shared with the general public in an aggregated summary format to help the New Zealand community understand how text harassment is affecting society. The remainder of the information including any personal information will not be shared with anyone and will be used to help us understand whether technology is an appropriate way to deal with this issue.

Novatel Wireless Reports Record Results Driven by Strong Sales Across Multi-Pronged 3G Product Portfolio
First Quarter Revenue Increases 174% Year Over Year and 43% Sequentially

“Our first quarter performance was the best in Company history, with record sales, strong gross margins and impressive operating leverage,” commented Brad Weinert, Novatel Wireless’ acting Chief Executive Officer. “Sales were even higher than forecasted in our revised guidance due to strong end-of-the-quarter momentum for newly introduced ExpressCards and Ovation USB devices. During the quarter, shipments of the Company’s ExpressCards – the most successful new product introduction in our history – grew to almost $50 million in sales.

Drawn from the best players in the Xbox 360 regions of Australia/New Zealand, Asia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Europe and the United States, nine finalists will advance to the finals based upon the highest Xbox LIVE Arcade leaderboard scores and be flown to New York City for the finals on June 5.

The government proposes to offer all citizens [...] free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009, through the state-owned telecom service.

The idea is to boost economic activity in general. The government of India plans to achieve free broadband connectivity at a speed of 2 Mb per second across the country, [with a similar goal]. Senior government officials expect to be able to achieve this goal spending only a portion of the corpus of the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF).

All telecom operators contribute 5% of their revenues every year to USOF. It is estimated that the unutilised sum from the USOF has touched Rs 9,194.12 crore by March, 2007-end.

The department of telecom (DoT) will be taking a series of steps to make its plans for free broadband a reality. These include, using the USOF to set an extensive optic cable network across the country, opening up the long-distance sectors to further competition, allowing free and fair access to cable landing stations, permitting the resale of bandwidth, setting up web hosting facilities within the country and asking all internet service providers to connect to the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI).

With international bandwidth rates in India being between two-to-five times higher than the global standards, the DoT will also go all out to break the monopoly of existing national and international distance players in a bid to induce cut throat competition in this sector. “India has only a handful of NLD/ILD operators while small countries such as Singapore and Taiwan have over 30 and 60 long distance operators respectively.

Cary Police Chief Ron Delelio said the charge was appropriate even though the essay was not published or posted for public viewing.

Disorderly conduct, which carries a penalty of 30 days in jail and a $1,500 fine, is filed for pranks such as pulling a fire alarm or dialing 911. But it can also apply when someone's writings can disturb an individual, Delelio said.

"The teacher was alarmed and disturbed by the content," he said.

But a civil rights advocate said the teacher's reaction to an essay shouldn't make it a crime.

"One of the elements is that some sort of disorder or disruption is created," said Ed Yohnka, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. "When something is done in private—when a paper is handed in to a teacher—there isn't a disruption."

Simmie Baer, an attorney with the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University, called the Cary incident an example of zero-tolerance policies gone awry. Children, she said, are not as sophisticated as adults and often show emotion through writing or pictures, which is what teachers should want because it is a safe outlet.

... a world record-setting event for television telephone voting for AMERICAN IDOL’s ‘Idol Gives Back’ two-night special charity telecast on FOX April 24th and 25th. The April 24th performance telecast included more than 70 million toll-free and AT&T SMS votes cast for the six remaining ‘Idol’ performers.

On Wednesday night, for the two-hour results show spectacular, more than 13,000 live call-center agents, across 31 separate call centers, were involved in ‘Idol Gives Back’ and a mass scale online donation system was set in place for the event.

More than 30 million viewers tune in to AMERICAN IDOL each week to vote for their favorite contestants by dialing into the toll-free telephone numbers or texting in on their AT&T phones.

Ellen DeGeneres hosted the show's live companion event via satellite from downtown Los Angeles' Walt Disney Concert Hall. The star-studded evening saw appearances and performances from stars ranging from Earth Wind & Fire and Il Divo to Kellie Clarkson, Celine Dion, Rascall Flats, Annie Lennox, Seal and Bono.

The more than 70 million calls and text messages that came in for ‘Idol Gives Back’ will be added to next Tuesday's tallies, said host Ryan Seacrest. Melinda Doolittle, LaKisha Jones, Blake Lewis, Chris Richardson, Jordin Sparks and Phil Stacey all return for the May 2nd telecast.

... is a voluntary install designed to automate the voting process in Idol:

"Sanjaya War Dialer uses your computers modem to automatically dial the American Idol voting number over and over and over again until you tell it to stop. Automatically cast hundreds or even thousands of votes for Sanjaya with the click of a button. Make Sanjaya win and help us ruin American Idol."

The Sanjaya War Dialer has its own MySpace page where users report on their votes — 600 a hour, for some. The show’s producers are aware of this, and have been lopping off blocks of votes if they seem to be coming from power dialers, as they call them, for several weeks.