Vodafone in deal to access MySpace via mobiles
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British mobile phone company Vodafone  Group Plc unveiled a deal with News Corp's MySpace on Wednesday  that will allow its customers to access the popular web-based  social network using cell phones.
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Cingular Wireless has made a connection with social-networking kingpin MySpace to allow MySpace users to update their online profiles through compatible Cingular phones.
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Italian broadband company Fastweb   and the Italian unit of mobile phone giant Vodafone   on Friday will announce a commercial agreement, sources  familiar with the deal told Reuters.
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Vodafone customers will be able to access and update MySpace pages from their mobile phone, the firms say.
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The Motley Fool - News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS - News) MySpace, the wildly popular social networking site, is reportedly lining up yet another big deal. The deal is expected to put MySpace on Cingular's mobile phones, thus allowing the millions of MySpace users to access the site wirelessly. While users can currently access MySpace via Helios, a joint venture of Earthlink (Nasdaq: ELNK - News) and SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM - News), this deal has the potential to be a game-changer.
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(InfoWorld) - In the third content deal in as many days, Vodafone Group announced a service that will allow its mobile customers to view and upload videos to YouTube. The announcement follows others this week from Vodafone withÂ MySpace.comÂ and eBay. The deals point to a growing interest from online content providers to offer their services to mobile customers as well as continued efforts by operators to drive usage of their wireless data networks. The mobile YouTube service will launch initially in the U.K. where customers will be able to view select videos, forward links of videos and upload and search for videos. Vodafone plans to launch the service in other European markets as well. YouTube has a similar offering in the U.S. where customers of Cingular Wireless, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile USA, and Verizon Wireless can all upload videos from their phones. On Thursday, Vodafone said it will be the first to launch a new mobile service from eBay in Europe outside of the U.K. Vodafone Italy customers will be the first to be able to download a free application in order to search for and buy items on eBay. The application will come loaded on phones in the future and Vodafone expects to launch the service across its European markets later this year. EBay has experimented with different mobile offerings. In Germany, it launched a customized version of the Opera Mini browser that lets users buy, sell and track bids. EBay also allows any U.K. mobile user to bid for and buy items on their phones. Also this week, Vodafone announced that its customers, starting in the U.K., will be able to download an application to their phones that will allow them to edit their MySpace profiles, upload photos and blog entries and send and receive MySpace messages. It's the first mobile offering for MySpace in Europe, Vodafone said. All three services will be available within Vodafone Live, the operator's mobile portal.
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News Corp's MySpace, the world's largest online social network, said on Wednesday it will allow outside developers further access to its service to counter the growth of smaller rival Facebook.
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C'mere you Vodafone is to be the first operator to make use of Facebook's new Mobile Operators Platform, and has also signed a deal with dating site Match.com.â¦
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SingTel Optus Ltd. and Vodafone Australia will share a high-speed wireless phone network, matching a similar alliance between their main rivals.
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(InfoWorld) - Mobile developers around the world are in an uproar over a change Vodafone has made in the U.K. that dramatically decreases the quality of their products and that they fear could prevent new and innovative mobile services from reaching the market. Wireless Ink, a New York-based company operating a service called Winksite that lets anyone develop their own mobile Web page, is one company impacted by the change. Winksite has a Web site that visitors can access from their PCs to sign up for a service that lets them build mobile Web pages. When users visit the Winksite page from their mobile phones, they see a totally different Web site that lets them view and discover sites developed by other Winksite users, said David Harper, the founder of Winksite. But since the change at Vodafone, U.K. mobile Winksite users instead see a reformatted version of the PC Web site. That's because Vodafone recently implemented new technology from Novarra that is designed to reformat Web sites that were created only for PC users for better display on mobile phones. But mobile service developers say that when Vodafone installed the new technology, it also began stripping out the user agent string when mobile phones access Web sites. The user agent allows a Web site that is designed for mobile phones to detect the type and capabilities of the phone visiting the site, much like the way that Web sites detect which type of browser a visitor has. The user agent string allows a mobile site publisher to deliver a view of the Web site that is optimized for the particular phone. In addition, companies that sell ring tones or graphics rely on the user agent to determine which content to send to the user that will work on their phone, Harper noted. Companies that are on Vodafone's "white list," which is a group of Vodafone-approved services, were notified of the change and the operator is passing the user agent correctly for those services, developers say. Some developers complain that it's difficult to find out how to get on the white list, it can take several months to get added, and that Vodafone requires white list companies to make certain changes to the way the included sites operate. If all operators had a similar process, service providers like Harper would have to get on the approved list for every operator around the world. That's comparable to asking any Web service to be approved by every ISP in the world in order to operate. "If this were to spread from carrier to carrier, it would be horrible," Harper said. About 10 percent of his traffic comes from the U.K. He worries that small mobile companies that are solely targeting the U.K. will be even harder hit. Winksite users include individuals as well as companies like Warner Music, which uses the service to build Web sites for music artists. It's unclear if Vodafone removed the user agent capability for "diabolical" reasons, such as to maintain firm control over the content that users can access, or if it was a legitimate mistake, Harper said. On a developers forum hosted by Vodafone, one poster who appears to work for Vodafone has defended the move and said that most customer feedback has been positive. He also said that many other European operators are in the process of implementing similar technologies. Vodafone was not available for comment after its regular business hours. Lucca Passani, a mobile services developer who has blogged extensively about the problem, worries that if Vodafone hasn't gotten user complaints, there's a simple reason. "The great majority of consumers won't realize that they have been deprived of a service and will not complain," he wrote. Harper and other developers don't take issue with the technology that can translate sites designed for PCs but they say that Vodafone doesn't need to block the user agent string for mobile sites in order to support that capability. "The bottom line is, they've done something a bit evil and they need to fix it," Harper said.
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Cingular Wireless LLC, the nation's largest cell phone provider, has made a deal with MySpace.com that will allow MySpace users to access their profiles through Cingular phones.
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U.S. wireless operator Sprint Nextel  Corp will make it easier for its cell phone customers to link  to a free version of online social network MySpace.
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Repurposed not to work any more Vodafone UK has launched a mobile optimising technology which reformats web pages to fit onto a mobile phone screen.â¦
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One network to rule them all Orange and Vodafone are to combine their radio access networks, effectively allowing customers of each to roam between the networks in the UK.â¦
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News Corp's MySpace, the world's  largest online social network, said on Wednesday it will allow  outside developers further access to its service to counter the  growth of smaller rival Facebook.
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British mobile phone giant Vodafone said it planned to launch a high-speed broadband Internet service for its millions of customers in Britain.
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British telecom company Vodafone said it would provide Google Maps services for its mobile phone customers with the assistance of the US Internet search giant.