The SMS Awards French version


n/e/tsurf's SMS Awards are attributed to the top 5 in the following categories :

SMS News Stories

SMS Services

Random Surveys

SMS Bad News

Random Stats

SMS Erotica


With individual awards for:

BEST COVERAGE OF SMS

BEST LOGO

MOST INNOVATIVE USE OF SMS

MOST ORIGINAL RINGTONE

BEST SMS PR EVENT

BEST PROMOTION OF A RINGTONE


Top 5 SMS News Stories:
Mobiles kill ghosts : According to Tony Cornell of the Society for Psychical Research in the UK, reports of ghost sightings started to decline 15 years ago when mobile phones were introduced.

Gentleman Robber : A purse thief returned a woman's driving papers after she left a message on her mobile phone asking for them back.

Nokia Bird : According to Danish ornithologists, birds are imitating cell phone ringtones, chirping away the widely spread Nokia tune.

Buried with his mobile phone : Dead people in Slovakia are being buried with their mobile phones and it is not unusual, that while a priest performs the funeral rites, ring tones will echo around the church from within a casket. Slovakians have been buried with an object of value for generations.

SMS lends an ear : Text messaging connects the hearing-impaired to the hearing world, changing their lives for the better.


Best coverage of SMS:
Ananova : Ananova gave the most entertaining daily coverage of text-messaging. Most all of the stories and events mentioned here come from Ananova.



Top 5 SMS Services:

MTV artist ringtones : MTV UK's ringtones service featuring tunes by artists listed in the MTV charts

French Baccalauréat exam results by SMS : French students were able to sign up to TF1's special website MobiliBac and receive the results of their baccalauréat exam by SMS.

The Bible bySMS : A teenager, Anna Williams, from Milton Keynes in the UK plans to translate passage of the Bible into short messages and to publish a series of pocket-sized booklets called Txt Messages From God.

Bridjet Jones Diary by SMS : Coinciding with the launch of the blockbuster film «Bridget Jones Diary», fans could sign up at Riot Entertainement for daily diary updates, personality tests, dieting techniques, dating strategy, self-help theories ...

Track a runner by SMS : During the Chicago Marathon, last October 7, subscribers were able to sign up for alerts by SMS, e-mail or pager on the time and performance of the runner of their choice.


Best Logo:
Red Nose Logo : Australian telecommunications giant Telstra offered it's clients a downloadable «Red Nose logo» for US$0.95 as part of a nation wide awareness campaign about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).





Surveys 2001

Monkey Business : Anthropologists at the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) in Oxford, UK, say chatting on the phone is the human equivalent of social grooming among chimpanzees and gorillas. They claim it helps build relationships, solve conflicts, teach social skills and make friends. BBC

Backstreet mobiles : A large number of mobile users have an extra, secret device for handling shady liaisons. Wap.com

Losing your phone can cause impotence: According to a study, depriving owners of their mobile phones can result in sexual problems. Really. Ananova

Too Loud : German scientists are warning that mobile phone games could harm childrens' hearing. Some games are louder when held to the ear than if the person was standing next to a jet plane's engines. Ananova

Phone Thefts : Recent crime statistics show that in half of all street robberies in London a mobile phone is stolen and fourteen to 17-year-olds are the age group most likely to be victims.


Most innovative use of SMS:
Hello Mr. President : An interactive installation from
swissinfo made it possible for people to send a message to Davos for the duration of the World Economic Forum's annual conference last January. A laser projector beamed messages onto the mountain side overlooking Davos, so that it could be seen by the hundreds of journalists and thousands of politicians and business leaders attending the conference.


SMS Bad News:
Bullying and harrassment by SMS : There were stories throughout the year with regard to SMS bullying and harrassment; from children in school, disgruntled office workers and scorned lovers, some even ending in suicide.

Cheating on tests by SMS : Several stories were reported on students cheating during their exams using SMS, In the UK, Scandinavia and Japan.

Image of Bin Laden created on mobile phone :
A mobile phone graphic was seen in Amman, Jordania featuring the face of Osama Bn Laden.

Rude cell phoners : A pianist stormed off stage at the Edinburgh Festival because he was fed up of mobile phones interrupting his performance.

Text Messaging May Be Bad for Your Health : Children sending text messages on mobile phones could be damaging their health, according to an interim report by the British Medical Association's board of science.


Most original ringtone:
Wildlife ringtones : Following the whackiest SMS story of the year, that birds are starting to imitate ringtones, Finnish company Mobile Avenue turned around and offered bird ringtones. The finch tune came in first as the most popular download with the nightingale tune coming in a close second.


Stats' 2001
Game-playing on their phone : About 21.6 million people -- one in six cell phone users -- are expected to play a game on a mobile phone this year, according to technology analyst firm Datamonitor. Unwired News

How Many SMS sent ? : Worldwide, more than 12 billion messages are sent each month via PCs, cell phones and personal digital assistants. Cell phones alone are responsible for 750 million messages each day, says the GSM Association, an industry trade group. SignonSanDiego

SMS European Behaviour Study : According to an enlightening Magic4 survey last Spring:

— 24 percent of Europeans admitted to having indulged in “text sex”

— 55 percent of UK mobile users have chatted people up via SMS and 80 percent of Germans have done so.

— 20 percent of Finnish females have sent steamy messages to their lovers from the sauna.

— 33 percent of Italian males have helped sustain long distance love affairs through text messaging.

— 60 percent of Irish males swap stories of their sexual exploits via text messages. Wap.com

Only 7 percent of text messages sent out are work related. Wap.com

Several industry insiders estimated that up to 65 percent of all ring-tone companies aren't properly licensed. News.com


Best SMS PR event:
Ringing in unison : For the launch of its new ringtones and graphics service, Virgin Mobile organised an event where over 250 people helped set a world record by allowing their mobile phones to ring in unison. Tourists, shoppers and workers enjoying their lunch break in London's Leicester Square joined together to play the distinctive Pearl & Dean tune. Noisy.


SMS Erotica:
SMS Orgasm : Quartez launched a very personal text messaging service in association with Cosmopolitan and Esquire magazines. They offered mobile phone users a daily tip for four weeks on how to have the best orgasm ever - sent directly to their handset.

Texticles : Uproar's new text messaging trivia game called Texticles. It's really only listed here because of it's catchy name.

Erotic logos: Most, if not all websites which offer downloadable logos for mobile phones have an «erotic» category: breasts, nude women and couples are quite popular amongst the12 year old crowd.

Hard Porn: Hard porn logos are fortunately not featured on the popular logo websites targeted to kids, however, they can be found on various hacker sites. I stumbled on one such site once, so I thought I would pass that information along.

Kama Sutra: The most popular SMS service on Lycos Mobile, according to their own chart, is the Kama Sutra SMS service with 470 subscribers.


Best promotion of a ringtone
Ringing in concert : Finnish group Nylon Beat's single «Not Guilty» was released as a ringtone before the CD hit the stores and when the group performs in concert, the audience of young people all raise their mobiles and turn on their ringtones to play their phones with the group.




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