Vodafone was forced to shutdown old network by the new Egyptian government

• Activists seek protocols to curb use for propaganda

• Bahrain, Malaysia and China cited as risky states

Vodafone was ordered to cut the signal in certain areas of Egypt in January. Photograph Chris Ison/PA Archive/PA Photos

Vodafone Group is to meet human rights campaigners to discuss how it can prevent its networks being hijacked by repressive regimes after it was forced to send out pro-government messages and shut down its network by the Egyptian government during the uprising at the start of the year.

At Vodafone's annual meeting in London on Tuesday, Brett Solomon, director of lobby group Access, asked: "How prepared are you for OLYMPUS LI-12B Battery the future crises that are sure to happen in the 70-odd countries in which you operate?
"Will you ensure that you are both able to protect your staff and the integrity of the network, but not in the position of having to once again shut down the internet or send pro-regime messages to your customers?"

Access named Bahrain, China and Malaysia as areas where telecoms companies should prioritise drawing up clear protocols. Bahrain has seen civil unrest this year and has a history of shutting down mobile services.

Last year SIM canon powershot g6 battery card users were forced to register their details. More than 400,000 of those who did not were cut off. Zain, Vodafone's partner in Bahrain, complied with the restrictions.

Along with two other mobile operators, France Telecom and Etisalat, Vodafone was ordered to cut the signal in certain areas motorola gp340 battery of Egypt in January. It claims to have been the first to restore its service, doing so after 24 hours, but access to the internet remained blocked for five days.

Pro-government messages were sent to Vodafone customers during the early days of February, including the following OLYMPUS LI-50B charger call: "To every mother-father-sister-brother, to every honest citizen preserve this country as the nation is forever."
Outgoing Vodafone chairman Sir John Bond told the annual meeting that Vodafone only holds licences directly with governments in 26 countries, adding: "We have no discretion to negotiate variations. In every CANON PowerShot SD1000 battery case … network operators are subject to similar legal provisions to those used in Egypt earlier this year. Any process to elaborate a new approach to human rights and communications must involve governments as well as industry and NGOs."
Promising the company would meet Access, Bond added: "Respect for human rights forms part of our OLYMPUS IR-500 battery assessment of any market into which we move our operations."
Access wants telecoms companies to agree crisis protocols with governments. These should ensure users can make emergency calls at all times, that calls and emails are not hacked, that motorola p1225 battery networks are shut down for minutes or hours rather than days and that carriers cannot be used to disseminate propaganda.
Phone and internet companies are frequently forced to choose between protecting freedom of expression and commercial interests. Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, faces a ban in India for refusing to dell latitude D830 battery  provide access to customers' emails. Google exited China after its servers were attacked to extract confidential information about activists and Pakistan blocked Facebook and YouTube last year.
Gerard Kleisterlee, the former Dell Studio 1555 battery chief executive of German electronics firm Philips, was elected to succeed Bond as chairman. His arrival marks the first time Vodafone's two most senior leaders have been drawn from outside the UK – chief executive Vittorio Colao HP Pavilion dv8000 ac adapter is Italian.
Colao continued to tread softly on the issue of Vodafone's 45% stake in the US group NIKON EN-EL3 battery Verizon Wireless. Some investors are keen for Vodafone to take over the entire company or sell its stake. Verizon has promised to start paying a dividend from 2012, and the two companies are cooperating on joint purchasing and on servicing multinational clients.
"What I see are the tangible CANON EOS-20D battery benefits of cooperation, working well together," said Colao.
Bond added: "One of the board's major roles is to unlock the value of the investment but that is going to have to be done very, very carefully."
Verizon chief Dell Inspiron 1720 battery operating officer Lowell McAdam takes over as chief executive next week, and has been working with Colao for the last 18 months to increase joint working. He told analysts last week there Dell latitude d610 battery were no immediate merger plans.
"We can leverage each other's scale, but I would not send any kind of messages here that something like that's immediately on the horizon."

Gmail Lite Will Bring You Powerful Founction And Service

I’ve seen the future of messaging — it looks a lot like Facebook Messages. More specifically, it looks like the new version of Facebook Messages that the company began rolling out two weeks ago. But I’m not CANON EOS-10D battery sure that the future is Facebook Messages. At least not for me. Because that’s simply not how I have used Facebook and it’s too hard to switch my patterns now. And that’s why Gmail has a huge opportunity. We need a Gmail Lite.

At first, I was underwhelmed by the new Facebook Messages. But that’s just because I really hadn’t Dell xps m1330 battery been using Facebook Messages before. I would get a message every now and then, but mostly I would ignore the area. But in the past couple of weeks, probably as the feature gets turned on for more users, I’ve started to get more messages coming to me this way. And as that has happened, I’m seeing the absolute beauty of the system. Namely, I’m seeing the beauty in its speed.
I’m not even talking about loading times or anything HP Compaq 6710b battery necessarily related to the technology behind Facebook Messages. What I’m talking about is the feature that allows you to respond to a message simply by typing in the tiny box below it and hitting return to send. Some people hate this idea because they want the return button to insert a carriage return like the old days — and that’s fine, that’s still an Motorola gp2000 Battery option right next to the box you’re typing in — but I love this quick-send ability. Love. Love. Love it.
The famous cliche is that every second counts. But it’s a cliche because it’s true. Every second does count. At first, you might think it’s ridiculous that I’m jumping for joy because Facebook Messages is saving me one or two seconds by not having to use Acer Aspire 3021WLMi battery the send button. But those seconds really do add up. I wonder how many times over the years I’ve hit that send button? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?
100,000 seconds is almost 28 hours. In other words,Motorola gp1200 Battery I’ve probably wasted a day of my life hitting that stupid button.
And yes, I know there are keyboard shortcuts. But the percentage of people who use those is Dell inspiron 1525 battery likely pretty small. Plus, on Gmail, the keyboard shortcut to send something involves hitting two keys: tab then enter. If you could cut out the tab part, you’d still be saving about a half second. Again, per message. It adds up.
But that’s just one part of it. Let’s talk more specifically about Gmail.
The product I’m envisioning would be an opt-in version of the service which would replace the standard Gmail that motorola hnn9049a battery we all know and love (when it’s not unbearably slow these days) with a modified version. This new version would work much like Facebook Messages in that when you load a message thread, you’d have a small box under it: the reply area. To reply, you’d simply type a message and hit return, and off it would go.

There would be no options to change the fonts of the email. No subject line. No CC field, no BCC field. No left-align, right-align, quotes, bullet lists, etc. None of the crap that you don’t use 99 percent of the time. It would just be a tiny input box that you could Canon PowerShot SD40 charger type a message into, or paste a URL into. Ideally, you’d be able to drag a photo or document in this box too, to attach it to the message (like you now can with regular Gmail). And then you send it. Again, just like Facebook Messages.
If for some reason you needed to add any of the above mentioned clutter to your message, there would be a button to make that stuff appear. But by default, it would all be Sony vgp-bps13a/b battery off. It would just be a small input box.
But the real key to this Gmail Lite that I envision would be a restriction. Message length.
Currently, a huge amount of time with email is wasted trying to fit it into some lame formal style.

Dear so and so,
Thank you so much for the such and such. It was great to so and so. Hopefully we can such and such again.
Oh and blah blah blah.Acer Aspire 7003WSMi battery Wasn’t that blah?

Sincerely,
The person whose time was just wasted
P.S. Writing this sentence just wasted another 20 seconds of my time.

If you want to be formal with someone, send them a letter. 99 percent of messages online should be brief.

Message: Drinks tonight?
Response: Yes

That’s it. If anyone wonders why SMS has been exploding in usage over the past decade (in spite of rip-off costs), this is it. There’s no reason email shouldn’t work like that as well.
And while email may be getting less formal with time, I would bet that the length of the emails actually isn’t going down. That’s why we need a new restriction in place in this Gmail Lite to enforce that. Back in September, my colleague Jon wrote about the awesome movement to send three sentence emails. It’s a wonderful idea, but it’s just not catching on in the way that it needs to in order to fix the problem.
We need a built-in solution.
Gmail Lite should borrow the character restriction from Twitter and enforce it. 140 characters. But maybe bump it up to 160 characters, the actual SMS limit, as usernames wouldn’t be needed with this system. This way, messages could also be sent via SMS (again, like Facebook Messages). More importantly, messages would have to be brief. Even more brief than three sentences. It would be so beautiful.

Part of the problem with email coming in is that when one comes in, you know in the back of your mind that you’ll have to type a bunch of words and hit send to respond to it. It will take time. So you put it off. If there was just this input box that forced you to be as brief as possible, I bet that a lot of people would respond more immediately. And the response rate in general would be higher.
How do I know? I see it in my new Facebook Messages inbox and my Twitter Direct Message area.
Obviously, this idea will have some people screaming bloddy murder. But remember, Gmail Lite would just be an opt-in option for users. And if you needed to send a long email, you could hop back into regular Gmail Classic with the click of a button.
But I would bet that a huge percentage of Gmail users would opt-in to using Gmail Lite as their primary email solution. And it would come with some sort of built-in notifier in the mail itself (either at the bottom or in the metadata) to let people know that you were responding with Gmail Lite, and that’s why your response was so shot (like what three.sentenc.es does). It might be weird at first, but eventually, everyone would get used to it.
So what’s stopping a motorola hnn9049a battery startup from doing this? Why does it have to be Facebook or Google? Because, sadly, this is probably only going to work with a messaging system that has hundreds of millions of people already using it. (And of those, Gmail is in my mind still definitely the best.) Twitter has come the closest to doing this from the outside, but that service is used differently — it’s public messaging versus private messaging. And private Direct Messages are severely limited by the follow factor (someone has to be following you for you to DM them).
Gmail’s Priority Inbox is great. But it really just dances around the true inbox problem. It helps you determine what email to ignore. It doesn’t solve the fundamental issue that we’re all seeing more and more as inboxes grow: the lame legacy formalities of the system. And the outdated ideas such as the subject line and even the send button.
We need to kill all that stuff off. And we need a current email system to help do it, so it HP Pavilion dv9700 ac adapter will actually catch on. Facebook Message may well be the future of this type of online communication for the younger generations, but Gmail has a chance to mimic the idea and get the rest of us involved right now.
Gmail Lite. If you build it Google, we will come.

Shortage for Service office in Beijing is most for the recent 20-years

Vacancies in Beijing's Grade A office market fell to a 20-year low and rents neared a record high in the second quarter, lifted by strong business demand, industry analysts said on Tuesday. 

According to Savills PLC, Beijing's Grade A office vacancy rate in the second quarter fell by 2 percentage points quarter-on-quarter to 5.9 percent.

The overall vacancy rate declined 2.6 percentage points quarter-on-quarter to 8.3 percent,Dell Vostro 1500 battery with the Central Business District experiencing the largest decline, according to international real estate service provider Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL).
"The expansion of multinational companies' operations and Dell XPS M1210 ac adapter domestic firms' leasing of multiple floors were the key drivers of demand," said Qin Xiaomei, chief researcher at JLL Beijing.
Demand for HP EliteBook 2530p ac adapter self-use space, which is owned by the tenant rather than renting, has remained strong. It accounted for motorola ht1000 battery nearly 40 percent of all net absorption in the first half of 2011, particularly from domestic firms and increasingly from multinational corporations dell inspiron 11z battery.
JLL's findings were confirmed by another major real estate service provider. According to Savills PLC, Beijing's Grade A office  CANON POWERSHOT S40 battery vacancy rate in the second quarter fell by 2 percentage points quarter-on-quarter to 5.9 percent, while rents increased 12.6 percent to an average of 241 yuan ($37.20) hp nx7400 battery a square meter.
Shortages of space available for rent are expected to enhance landlords' bargaining power Nikon EN-EL5 charger in the coming quarters, resulting in further rent hikes, Savills said in a report.
According to Julien Zhang, managing director of HP NX6110 battery JLL Beijing, the capital's overall rents are on pace to surpass those of Shanghai within four years.
"We are seeing companies CASIO Exilim EX-S100 charger taking a serious look at pre-leasing significant blocks of space for the first time in Beijing," said Zhang.
Driven by sony cyber-shot dsc-tx1 battery charger soaring rents of Grade A office space and the expansion of domestic and multinational companies, the purchase of prime office buildings, either for self-use or as a long-term investment, has been a primary strategy of cash-rich State-owned enterprises.
Major transactions in the second quarter include PICC Insurance Group's acquisition of one tower dell inspiron 11z battery of Chaoyang Plaza and Bank of China Co Ltd's purchase of Xidanhui Plaza.
Foreign institutional investors are targeting offices in first-tier cities and commercial properties in second-tier cities. SONY NP-FP50 battery
"Most capital (for property investment) now is circulating within the Asia-Pacific area, and China remains number one in terms of the source of the capital and the target Motorola pmnn4046 Battery for property investment," Steve Williams, global advisor of Real Capital Analytics Inc, said earlier this month at a Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors forum in Beijing.
Cross-border acquisitions of offices, hotels and retail properties rose by 30 percent to $4.8 billion in the first quarter, according to Real Capital Analytics. Among the top 25 real HP Compaq Business Notebook NX6110 ac adapter estate deals by value in the Asia-Pacific region, 15 were conducted in China.
According to David Hand, China investment head at JLL, average market yields may fall slightly or remain stable at best, as strong rental growth translates into even stronger capital value increases.
"We see no letup in this trend for the foreseeable future, thus making Beijing a truly compelling investment market," said Hand.

I'm leaving email off

It started as an idea. Well, a Tweet, really. What if I just stopped responding to email?

Sure, at first it was said in half-jest after a few drinks. It was me channeling my inner Peter Gibbons — “I’m just gonna stop going” — while I’m sitting here in Washington D.C. completely buried in email after not getting to it all day. But the motivation behind the Tweet and the idea is very real. Email is the absolute devil. And the only way to not be corrupted is to… run away. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
For the rest of this month, I’m not going to respond to any emails. None.
Yes, this sounds sort of like a pampered problem and perhaps somewhat of a dick move — I should be so lucky to get so many emails,Canon mv850i battery right? But the reality remains: email is an absolute nightmare in my life. I dread it in the morning, I dread it more right before I go to bed. It’s always in the back of my mind, lingering.
Following my initial Tweets, Colleen Taylor of GigaOm sent me a link to this old post in Emily Magazine that pretty much sums it up:

When people at parties ask me what I do I think I am just going to start saying that I’m an “emailer.”

The famous cliche is that every second counts. But it’s a cliche because it’s true. Every second does count. At first, you might think it’s ridiculous that I’m jumping for joy because Facebook Messages is saving me one or two seconds by not having to use the send button. But those seconds really do add up. I wonder how many times over Dell Inspiron Mini 1011 battery the years I’ve hit that send button? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?
100,000 seconds is almost 28 hours. In other words, I’ve probably wasted a day of my life hitting that stupid button.
It’s both sad and true.
And I’m hardly alone. The tweets I sent out on the topic tonight were met with near Dell Inspiron 640m ac adapter unanimous agreement (I’ll paste a some of them below). It seems that most everyone I know wants to quit email. They’re just afraid.
The truth is that I’m afraid too. What happens if I just stop responding? To be honest, I’m not really sure. I think it’s one motorola mts2000 battery of those things where if I thought of all of the potential ramifications, I wouldn’t do it. So I’m not going to worry about it. I’m just going to do it.
If nothing else, it will be an interesting experiment. We all talk about our hatred for email — and we have for years Dell Inspiron 1420 ac adapter — but few people actually quit. Some try half-heartedly.Others are sure a solution is always just right around the corner. But I’m done waiting and making excuses. I’m just going to do it.
Will I have CANON POWERSHOT G5 battery to cheat? I sure hope not. That would be pretty disappointing. But I really don’t think I’ll have to.When people at parties ask me what I do I think I am just going to start saying that I’m an “emailer.”
My plan is to still check my inbox from time to time just Motorola ntn7143 battery to make sure that there isn’t some emergency. And I’ll forward things along as need be (without typing anything beyond an email address). But for everything else, I’ll simply set up Dell Vostro 1510 battery an auto-responder along the lines of “No longer responding to email, if you need me, you’ll figure out a way.” (Kudos to Shervin Pishevar who wanted to test a similar idea earlier this year, but I chickened out.)

I’ve seen the future of messaging — it looks a lot like Facebook Messages. More specifically motorola p1225 battery, it looks like the new version of Facebook Messages that the company began rolling out two weeks ago. But I’m not sure that the future is Facebook Messages. At least not for me. Because canon nb-4l charger that’s simply not how I have used Facebook and it’s too hard to switch my patterns now. And that’s why Gmail has a huge opportunity. We need a Gmail Lite.

That’s the key to all of this. It’s not that I really want to blow people off. It’s that email blows Canon 5d MK2 battery.There has to be a better way. And I think there is! If people really need to get ahold of me, they’ll know how. There are many options. And all of them are better than email in its current state (come on Gmail Lite, come on!).

And yes, I know there are keyboard shortcuts. But the percentage of people who use those is likely pretty small. Plus, on Gmail, the Dell Vostro 1400 battery keyboard shortcut to send something involves hitting two keys: tab then enter. If you could cut out the tab part, you’d still be saving about a half second. Again, per message. It adds up.

That doesn’t mean I’ll respond to all of these alternative communications either — I suspect they’ll build up quickly too. But at least it will be a nice big barrier to entry that will help to alleviate my inbox overload. And the great thing  nikon coolpix 5200 battery about some of the other messaging platforms out there is that many of them follow the “stream” idea. That is: when you send a message, maybe there will be a response, maybe there won’t. With email, a huge problem is that people expect a response every time. With tweets, people don’t.
I don’t know about you, but I’m excited. I have absolutely no idea what will happen next. I’ll respond to some of the emails I currently have in my inbox, but then it’s lights out for the rest of July. Will the world end? Will TechCrunch implode? I suspect not. I think that the ultimate result of this experiment will be much less shocking: fewer emails will be sent.

I’m not even talking about loading times or anything necessarily related to the technology behind Facebook Messages. What I’m talking about is the feature that allows you to respond to a message simply by typing in the tiny box below it and hitting return to send. Some people hate this idea because they want the return button to insert a carriage return like the old days — and that’s fine, that’s still an option right next to the box you’re typing in — but I love this quick-send ability. Love. Love. Love it.