Mobile network not-spots costing Britain £1.3bn

Research suggests areas with poor mobile coverage spend a total of £1.3bn less online as eBay calls on Ofcom to improve situation with new networks.

Poor mobile phone networks are depriving the UK economy of £1.3billion because consumers spend less via their phones, research commissioned by eBay suggests.

The report indicates that 16 per cent of the UK is a “not-spot” for “mobile commerce”, spending at least 20 per cent less than the national average.

Predominantly in very rural areas, such as the Outer Hebrides and Lerwick, the list also includes areas with more urban centres such as Jersey, Inverness, Galashiels and the Isle of Man.

eBay is calling on communications regulator Ofcom to make sure that new “4G” networks are set up so that such not-spots do not result again. The auction site claims that “Mobile shopping could deliver a £4.5bn boost to Britain’s economy by 2016 and a further £13bn by 2021”.

Ofcom is currently consulting on the terms of an auction of the 4G spectrum and is under pressure from MPs to make sure it covers larger areas of the country than the current 3G network.

According to eBay, “More than a third of consumers have failed to complete a purchase on their mobile due to issues with mobile broadband”. Speed, coverage and reliability of networks, along with the cost of data, were off-putting factors.

Angus McCarey, UK Retail Director for eBay UK said: “Consumers and retailers are missing out as the cost and reliability of mobile broadband prevents shoppers from spending. High quality and reliable mobile broadband coverage throughout the UK has to be our ambition”.

Mobile is the fastest growing part of eBay’s business, with global mobile sales set to double again in 2011 to over $4 billion. Britain’s most enthusiastic mobile shoppers were from Birmingham, Chester, Leeds, Romford and Halifax.

MP Rory Stewart said, “This is another fantastic example of why we must take this opportunity to expand mobile broadband coverage as far as possible."

Marzena Lipman, digital expert at Consumer Focus said, “Mobile commerce offers consumers another choice on how they shop. This broadband lottery is particularly worrying as online deals are often the cheapest around and can help customers save much needed cash. The Government must ensure reliable broadband is available to everyone regardless of location.”

Although the western area of central London is also included in the ‘not-spot’ list, this is more likely to be due to the availability of shopping areas than a lack of mobile coverage. Extremely rural areas and islands are also often forced to pay higher delivery charges by eBay sellers and their couriers, so the issue is not exclusively related to mobile coverage.

31.05.2011 - Telegraph

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United Utilities to cut extra costs after profits dive

The new chief executive of United Utilities has pledged to take £200m of costs out of the business, after the company's profits slumped by 20pc to £327m for the last year.

United Utilities is suffering the effects of tough cuts to customer bills imposed by the regulator in the latest price settlement.

Its revenue from regulated activities dropped 4pc to £1.5bn, reflecting a similar 4pc decrease in prices.

This was slightly above average analyst expectations, sending its shares up 5 to 622p yesterday.

It will have to cut customer bills by another 0.2pc this year, according to levels set by Ofwat. The regulator said the company should also find £150m of savings, but the utility giant is looking to make bigger cuts without resorting to further redundancies.

Steve Mogford, who took over at the helm earlier this year, said there were plenty of places to start with reducing costs.

These include producing more power from sewage sludge and moving animals away from water courses to reduce the need for chemical treatment of the supply.

Mr Mogford said his priority was "improving customer service" to make sure that water companies give the same level of high attention to consumers as supermarkets or energy providers.

"Another key component is retaining investor confidence," he said. "The industry has £85bn to spend over the next 20 years and the Government's going to need to make sure there's a lot of private investment."

He said the company's reservoirs serving the north-west of England were at a healthy level, despite the dry spring, so there was unlikely to be a hosepipe ban.

"Despite a year of extreme weather conditions, we have demonstrated resilience," he added.

The company also met its target on reducing leakage from its pipelines for the fifth year running.

United Utilities' final dividend will be 20p per share, to be paid on August, taking the total dividend to 30p per share.

The company has already set a future dividend policy of inflation plus 2pc.

Last year, United Utilities was forced to shed jobs, lower its dividend and make changes to reduce its pension costs, after a testing five-year plan from the regulator.

27.05.2011 - Telegraph

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'Wave and pay' mobile phone spells the end for cash

Orange and Samsung have teamed-up with Barclaycard to provide mobile phone payments. Matt Warman explains why cash is doomed.

Like the abolition of the £1 note or the introduction of the £2 coin, yesterday was a historic day for British money. But that wasn’t thanks to the Royal Mint or the Bank of England. Courtesy of Barclaycard, Orange and Samsung, consumers across the UK can now pay for goods and services with nothing more than a mobile phone.

This technology, much trialled but never launched, will admittedly be used mostly for buying cups of coffee and snatched lunchtime sandwiches, but when Orange’s head of mobile payments, Jason Rees, calls it “the beginning of a new order”, he’s not wrong.

YouGov research, commissioned by digital payments provider Intelligent Environments, says 42 per cent of smartphone users want to use their phones as mobile wallets. Owners of the Apple iPhone are keenest, but significant proportions of BlackBerry and Google phone users want to take advantage of it too.

That’s not because technology built into mobile phones is the way that everything, from cameras to translators, seems to be going. It’s down to the fact that this new mobile-based method is quick, simpler and crucially, more secure than anything we’ve got available at the moment.

Barclaycard has quietly been rolling out so-called “contactless” payment systems across the UK for several years now. That means there are devices in shops up and down the country that require users, for transactions up to £15, to simply touch their specially updated credit and debit cards to complete the transaction. Although just a million or so such pain-free transactions have been made in the last twelve months, the rate is already doubling each year.

The advantages of a contactless credit card, however, are limited. You still need a card with you, and because the card itself cannot be authenticated, every five times or so it requires the standard chip-and-pin payment method. With a mobile phone’s data connection, however, all transactions can be authorised and completed instantly.

In due course, transactions over £15 will be permitted if a pin is entered on the mobile phone. That, too, is more secure than the traditional keypad. And the £15 maximum payment will rise steadily over time. This technology is cheaper for banks, shops and customers. Almost everybody’s happy.

The snag, however, is that for now only one phone, one payment provider and one network operator provides this whizzy technology. So yesterday was a milestone but not a tipping point: Orange customers, with a Barclaycard who took the trouble to buy a specially made Samsung Tocco handset can take advantage of the new systems. Even though the ‘near-field communications’ technology is built into a wide and growing number of phones already, only this one so far satisfies the complex, long-time-coming security standards.

Using an app on the mobile phone, customers can top up their wave and pay account from a connected credit or debit account by up to £100, to a total of £150. The app allows a constant, running check on transactions and provides a real, useful and sometimes painful tally of expenditure. Any losses are limited to that £150 total, but they’d be borne by BarclayCard rather than the customers anyway.

But to dwell on that disappointment is to miss the point: even if rumours that NFC payments are to be built into the forthcoming iPhone turn out to be untrue, this revolution is inevitable because O2 are already working on their ‘mobile wallet’ equivalent, which will launch in the coming months, Google is working with MasterCard and a host of other manufacturers have similar plans.

Indeed, as with almost all significant new technology, the appeal is mainly in the simplicity of NFC. More secure yet less hassle, it’s surprising mainly that this technology has been so unpopular in the UK when it has been ubiquitous in South Korea and Japan. Britain, however, is finally catching up.

21.05.2011 - Telegraph

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428 million mobile devices sold worldwide in Q1 2011

In the first quarter of 2011, 428 million mobile communication devices were sold, said market research firm Gartner, Inc. in a May 19 report on the global mobile phone market, an increase of 19 percent from Q1 2010.

Led by ferocious consumer demand, smartphones continued to outpace the rest of the mobile phone market. 

"Smartphones accounted for 23.6 percent of overall sales in the first quarter of 2011, an increase of 85 percent year-on-year," said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner. 

"This share could have been even higher, but manufacturers announced a number of high-profile devices during the first quarter of 2011 that would not ship until the second quarter of 2011. We believe some consumers delayed their purchases to wait for these models."

The sale of mid-tier smartphones - devices which offer smartphone-like features such as apps, touch screens and internet connectivity at competitive prices - will drive smartphones into mass adoption and boost the overall smartphone sales in the years to come, said Gartner. 

Apple, Samsung and HTC rule the smartphone world. The forward-thinking manufacturers reported the strongest results. Samsung experienced its best first quarter ever thanks to its high-end Galaxy smartphone line, and Apple more than doubled its iPhone sales year-on-year.

Google’s Android OS was the number one smartphone operating system around the globe with 36.0 percent of the market. Nokia’s Symbian platform slipped from 44 percent of the market in 1Q2010 to just 27 percent in 1Q2011. 

Apple's iOS grew slightly year over year capturing 16.8 percent of the market, Research In Motion held 12.9 percent of the market in 2011, losing just under seven percent of its market share over the year, and Microsoft's market share dropped to just 3.6 percent in 2011 from 6.8 percent in 2011.

19.05.2011 - The Independent

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Young consumers keen to make the switch to contactless mobile phone payments

The majority of young consumers are eager to swap their wallets for a mobile phone. They are enthusiastically awaiting the time when shops across the world start to implement contactless payment systems.

According to a study conducted by Kelton Research and released by Mastercard Worldwide on May 19, 63 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds state that they are at ease using their mobile phone to make purchases. 

An even higher percentage (65 percent) of young Americans would rather be without their wallet than their mobile phone.

"Consumers are already living a mobile lifestyle so using their phones to make payments on a daily basis is a natural next step," said Mung Ki Woo, group executive, mobile at MasterCard Worldwide. "2011 is the beginning of the NFC mobile payments era, and consumers are eager to get their hands on the first commercial deployments in the U.S."

Older technology users are not quite so gung-ho about mobile payments. Sixty-three percent of people over the age of 35 said they would not be at ease using technology such as NFC (near field communication) to make mobile phone payments. 

Information privacy and financial safety are concerning factors for 62 percent of respondents who said they would need these two issues addressed before they would feel comfortable making a transaction via their mobile device. 

While privacy and safety remain a concern for all mobile users, the smartphone generation has grown so reliant on their devices that they find it hard to live without it. 

A May 2011 study on mobile internet access by Ericsson found that 35 percent of US Android and iPhone users interacted with their phone before getting out of bed in the morning. 

The electronic gadget that the smartphone generation carries around so proudly has come to define their personality. 

Fifty-two percent of respondents in Mastercard's study said that someone’s mobile phone is "more telling of their personality than their wallet."

23.05.2011 - Independent

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Energy bills likely to rise, Scottish & Southern warns

Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE) has become the second big energy supplier to hint that gas and electricity prices may go up steeply this year.

The company's pre-tax profits rose 29% in the last financial year, to £2.1bn.

However, it said its household gas business had been losing money, with a 25% rise in wholesale prices last year outstripping December's 9% price rise.

SSE warned that wholesale gas and electricity prices for the coming year had risen since then by as much as 33%.

"Forward annual wholesale prices for electricity and gas have risen by around one quarter and around one third respectively in the six months following SSE's 29 October 2010 announcement of a price increase for household gas supply," the company said.

Earlier this month Centrica, which owns British Gas, said its customers might have to pay more for their energy.

It said that "end-user prices" did not reflect the price it was having to pay in the wholesale gas market.

The Bank of England has also cited an expected rise in energy bills as one of the main reasons for its recent prediction that the inflation rate may rise even further this year.

'Grinding teeth'

Audrey Gallacher, of Consumer Focus, said: "Hard-pressed consumers will be grinding their teeth in frustration as the second of the Big Six hints at price rises while reporting increased profits."

"Customers simply don't have faith that they are being asked to pay a fair price and Ofgem has shown this lack of trust has firm foundations," she added.

In March the energy industry regulator Ofgem demanded radical changes to the industry and the dominance of the Big Six energy suppliers.

As well as accusing firms of bamboozling customers with over-complex tariffs, it said it had found evidence that major energy firms "have adjusted prices in response to rising costs more quickly than they reduced them when costs fell".

SSE rejected this accusation and said that Ofgem's analysis was false.

"The analytical flaw arises because energy suppliers like SSE recover some of their fixed costs (such as network costs in gas) through charges on units of energy used," it argued.

"This means that if consumption is reduced, some fixed costs are not recovered by suppliers who, as a result, have to ensure unit prices are at a level that enables them to recover fixed costs."

20.05.2011 - BBC.co.uk

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Security fears delay switch to contactless and mobile phone methods of payment

Security fears and a lack of understanding are preventing the majority of Britons from using contactless cards and mobile phones to make payments, a survey has suggested.

Around 73 per cent of people said they felt they needed more education on the technology before they started to use contactless credit and debit cards or their mobile phones for transactions, according to payment solutions group Ingenico.

Consumers are also concerned about the risks involved, with 61 per cent of people saying they needed more reassurance that these payment methods were secure before they used them, while 47 per cent said they were put off using contactless cards because they thought it would put them at risk of fraud or identity theft.

People were even more concerned about using their mobile to pay for things, with 56 per cent saying they were worried about fraud and 52 per cent were concerned about identity theft.

Contactless payment technology enables people to pay for low value items, typically of less than £10 or £15, by holding their card or mobile in front of a reader.

But take-up of the technology has been slow, with only 13 per cent of consumers ever having had a contactless credit or debit card, while just 5 per cent have made a payment using it.

Four out of 10 people said they did not know where they could use a contactless payment card or mobile phone to pay for something and 35 per cent said they did not know what one of the payment terminals looked like.

Three-quarters of people thought the payment card industry should do more to educate customers about the new technology, and 55 per cent thought retailers should help people understand their payment options.

Craig Doyle, managing director for UK and Northern Europe at Ingenico, said: 'Consumers have long demanded improved convenience and speed during their shopping experience.

'But this research reveals that they are still not sufficiently confident in using contactless technology to make the switch from traditional cash and cards.

'There can be no doubt that we remain on the cusp of a major payment revolution. However, providing shoppers with clearer information about contactless technology will be critical to improving their knowledge and ultimately increasing consumer adoption.'

18.05.2011 - DailyMail.co.uk

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Rumour mill: iPhone 5 to Get November 21 UK Release

Thanks to months of rumours, we know that the newest iphone dubbed the iPhone 5 by the media, will likely not be launched this summer, as has been the case with previous iterations of the device. While reports suggest that Apple may unveil it at WWDC, the company is said to be preparing for a fall launch and the latest rumour is that the device will launch in the UK on November 21. 

Though we know the season the new iPhone is supposedly arriving, we didn’t have anything more specific until this week. Today, a representative working for UK phone retailer Phones4u told T3 that it will be launching late in November.

The publication cites Shazna, a customer sales representative at the St. Albans branch of Phones4u, who apparently confirmed that "the iPhone 5 has been delayed until November following an issue with the handset's software" and later added that it would be released on November 21. The UK launch of the iPhone usually coincides with the U.S. launch.

T3 contacted St. Albans store a second time and was told that yes, it’s been delayed until November. The store also added that the “main difference” between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 was the software. An employee is quoted as saying it will be “pretty much the same as the iPhone 4” but with updated software.

Though the retail staff at Phones4u seem more than happy to reveal details of the new iPhone 5, the company has released an official statement on the matter and are passing it off as an "over-excited member of staff who is clearly a fan of the iPhone brand."

Previous rumours have indicated that while the new iPhone will pack a revamped version of iOS, there will be only minor design changes, such as a new antenna design and the possible inclusion of an updated camera and NFC support.

18.05.2011 - Tomsguide.com

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The Co-operative enters gas and electricity market

The Co-operative has entered the energy market with a simple, single tariff designed to be consistently fair and competitive.

The Pioneer tariff, named after the Rochdale pioneers who founded the first co-operative in 1844, has a variable rate and no penalties for switching to a different provider. Co-operative Energy also promises that new customers will not receive preferential treatment over existing customers with cheaper price offers.

The company describes the multi-tariff offerings of other energy providers as "baffling and bewildering", and says it will challenge the big profits made by the other companies by including a twice-yearly profit-sharing deal for all its customers, who will own the business.

Electricity will be sourced from low-carbon generators, including from renewable energy sources such as wind and hydro, and the Co-op's aim is for the carbon content of its electricity to be less than half the national average by April 2012.

Co-operative Energy's Nigel Mason said: "It is time this industry had a radical shake up. Customers have been bamboozled by complicated tariffs and confused by changing prices and unfair contracts, and it has to stop.

"We are determined to provide a fair and transparent service for Co-operative Energy customers and to let them share in the profits. We are campaigning for long-overdue reform in the energy industry."

The Co-op says the big six providers rely on customers not knowing how much they are paying for their energy. According to research carried out by Consumer Focus in 2010, 57% of electricity and 59% of gas users do not know how much they pay per unit. The Co-operative Energy website has a price comparison tool so customers can compare their current energy costs with those of the Co-op.

Joe Malinowski, founder of energy comparison website TheEnergyShop.com, welcomed the Co-op's entrance into the market, particularly as it is offering its own products rather than white labelled versions of the big six providers. "On price it is not the cheapest – and it is not likely to get much business via the comparison websites – but it is a sensible long-term price for those who are unlikely to keep an eye on how much they are paying."

An average user buying gas and electricity from the Co-op on a monthly direct debit basis will pay £1,023 based on today's prices, compared to an average of £1,041 across all variable rate tariffs, according to TheEnergyShop.

Malinowski particularly liked the deal's single unit price: "There's a serious risk that people might actually understand what they are paying for their energy."

The Co-op's move follows the scrapping of the market's cheapest variable rate deal, WebSaver 11 by British Gas, while npower withdrew the cheapest fixed-rate deal, Go Fix 5, and replaced it with one 4.2% more expensive, according to Energyhelpline.com. 

It predicted that prices could rise by 15% by the autumn and Mark Todd, director of the website, said: "The cheaper deals are being pulled so quickly it is difficult to keep up.

"Over the past month there has been a bonfire of some of the best deals on the market. The outlook is very bleak and consumers need to act quickly if they want to snap up the cheapest deals or opt for a fixed-rate tariff which will protect them from further price rises."

10.05.2011 - Guardian.co.uk

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The future is foldable: The smartphone screen that folds in half... and keeps a seamless display

For years mobile phone makers have battled to make smaller devices and, at the same, increase the screen display.

But the option of making a phone that folds in half was always thwarted by apparent impossibility of creating a creaseless screen.

Now researchers at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in South Korea have overcome that problem and have built a prototype of a seamless foldable display that opens up to look like that of a regular smartphone.

The display consists of two active matrix organic-light-emitting-diode (AMOLED) panels covered by a silicone window that prevents scratches and can serve as a touchscreen. 

When folded down, they are separated by a gap of just 1mm. But when the screen is opened one panel lies almost completely on top of the other and appears seamless.

Determined to compete with innovative design such as the iPad, a number of major manufacturers are determined to expand research and develop innovative new products with folding screens

The researchers tested the foldable display’s durability by performing 100,000 folding-unfolding cycles.

Researchers said the key to success was controlling the optical properties of the materials.

‘All the materials in a foldable window unit (glasses and silicone rubber) must have almost the same optical properties and attach to each other strongly without any optical property change,’ Samsung’s HongShik Shim told PhysOrg.com.

During the course of found that the relative brightness at the junction decreased by just 6 per cent. 

Since this difference is hardly recognisable to most people, the deterioration is considered negligible.

This new type of technology has not so far taken off because of the high manufacturing costs.

However, determined to compete with innovative design such as the iPad, a number of major manufacturers are determined to expand research and develop innovative new products with folding screens.

Samsung hopes that its large-screen devices will soon be available with AMOLED technology.

Meanwhile, AMOLED screens will be used in the forthcoming Nokia E7 and and Sony's Cyber-shot digital camera TX100v.

13.05.2011 - DailyMail.co.uk

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Train firm offers phone-based ticketing across UK

Chiltern Railways leads the avalanche to a ticketless future.

Train passengers can now buy a ticket for any UK train journey from a mobile phone, without paying any additional commission and with the ticket displayed as an on-screen bar code.

The service was developed by ticketing specialists Masabi, and has been available for about a year from TheTrainLine.com which provides an easy booking service for a small additional fee. But Chiltern Railways has deployed the same technology with no fee, and put readers into (a handful of) ticketing gates at London Marylebone and elsewhere to make using a mobile phone ticket as simple as an Oyster card.

The application is available for all the popular phone platforms, with the notable exception of Android which is promised real soon. A J2ME version ensures that all but the most basic handsets are supported. Customers can buy a ticket on the phone, for any UK train journey, then wave the 2D bar code in front of a gate-mounted or guard-wielded reader, the guard can also check tickets without a reader through the reference number.

The readers, which we saw demonstrated at Mobile World Congress, really do work fast and accurately. Masabi has tried using normal bar-code readers but found mobile-phone screens to be too reflective, so is using slightly-more-expensive 2D readers which appear to work just as fast as any other proximity system such as NFC.

Travel outside the Chiltern Railways region and you'll need a paper version, which can be picked up from any ticket machine though that rather defeats the object of the whole thing. The point of the project is to reduce the number of ticket machines, and windows, and thus save money.

Chiltern does make commission on tickets sold for travel on rival networks, but until those networks start accepting the tickets electronically there's little reason for customers to bother.

If, and how quickly, those networks adopt the system will depend on how much money Chiltern saves, which is in turn dependent on how many people make use of the system. It's no coincidence that Chiltern is owned by Deutsche Bahn AG, the German national train operator whose Touch&Travel (NFC-based) system is currently being integrated with local operations to create an integrated, proximity based, ticketing network.

The new deployment has addressed a couple of issues - receipts are sent to a registered e-mail address, for those claiming expenses, and you can only buy a ticket up to ten minutes before the train leaves, so no frantically tapping on the phone as the inspector makes their way down the carriage towards you.

12.05.2011 - Theregister.co.uk

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Cheap mobile phone deals disappear

The cheapest monthly mobile phone contracts on the market have nearly doubled in price in the past few months after a ruling by the EU banned the sale of longer but cheaper contracts.

Research from comparison site uSwitch showed that the cheapest contracts available now cost £9 a month, compared with £5 a month in February.

“As a general rule, the longer the contract, the lower the monthly fee, so it’s possible that average contract costs will now rise,” said Ernest Doku of uSwitch. “Providers may compensate by stopping to offer the latest handsets for free on shorter contracts, potentially bad news for those who can’t afford the initial cost of a shiny new phone.”

Since May 1, mobile phone providers have not been allowed to sell 36-month contracts, and must always offer a 12-month contract option. The move has led to an explosion in the number of shorter deals available, giving consumers more choice and freedom to move around. In February there were just 279 12-month deals on the market, but the figure has now risen to 4,765.

Mr Doku suggested that customers shop around and consider buying their phone separately to help to get a cheap deal. “People need to consider what they want from their phone, how they will use it and ultimately what they can afford. Paying for the handset upfront could be the best way to get a cheap deal, but only for those who can afford it.

“If low monthly bills are more important than getting a new phone or tariff every year, it may be worth considering the commitment of a 24-month contract. Thanks to the ruling, now is also a great time to shop around for one of the new 12-month deals, as there is plenty of fresh competition in the market.”

10.05.2011 - Telegraph.co.uk

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Gas and electricity bills set to rise further after 25% increase in cost of delivery

Gas and electricity bills are set to rise after the UK's biggest supplier revealed a further squeeze on its margins.

Centrica, owner of British Gas, said the wholesale price of gas and power for delivery next winter is around 25 per cent higher than last year.

But the price paid by households has yet to reflect this higher price. Last year the company pushed up bills by seven per cent following the coldest winter in 100 years.

The Japan earthquake and Middle East revolts will send energy bills soaring, tightening the squeeze on family budgets, suppliers warned today.

Centrica said increased profits from its exploration and production business were expected to more than offset lower profits from customers. 

But Chancellor George Osborne's decision to increase the supplementary tax on oil and gas production from  20 per cent to 32 per cent would outweigh this benefit.

Thanks to the warmer weather, gas consumption is down 19 per cent on the same period last year and electricity is down four per cent.

The British Gas warning came days after rival Scottish Power reported a big slump in profits and admitted that it was 'highly probable' that suppliers would have to raise bills 'in the next few weeks or months'.

Energy experts said that average bills could rise by as much as £200 to almost £1,500.

Higher taxes, reduced benefits, higher than expected inflation and modest pay rises are already contributing to the deepest falls in peacetime living standards in living memory.

Consumer groups urged energy companies to hold back on price rises to see if the recent fallback in the oil price is sustained.

Ann Robinson, director of consumer policy at uSwitch.com, urged suppliers not to rush into another round of price hikes.

'Clearly they are preparing the ground for a second round of price increases and consumers should definitely see this as a warning shot across the bows.

'That said, I would urge suppliers to hold fire for as long as they can.

'The price of oil has now fallen and the pressure suppliers are feeling could yet ease - given this I would urge them to keep a steady finger on the trigger and to protect consumers for as long as possible.

'It would be a shame for households to feel the pain of another round of price hikes if it later turns out to have been unnecessary.'

Joe Malinowski, founder of energy price comparison website TheEnergyShop.com, said: “A rapid rise in wholesale gas prices driven by events in the Middle East and Japan means that it is now very likely that we will see further increases in energy prices that will take energy bills to record levels.”

A spokesman for Centrica said the company had yet to take a decision on tariff increases.

British Gas, which has 16 million customers, made record profits of £742 million last year when it put up domestic bills by seven per cent. Demand for gas and power soared during the coldest winter for 100 years. 

However, gas consumption in the first four months of this year is down by 19 per cent, partly because of the warm spring but also because of more energy-efficient homes and thermostats being turned down to save money.

10.05.2011 - DailyMail.co.uk

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Catching a thief? There's an app for that

Arndale centre shopper directed police to her stolen iPhone using location tracker

A thief who stole an iPhone was caught after a massive police operation – thanks to satellite technology and a free software ‘app’.

The thief grabbed the phone from the handbag of a shopper as she was having lunch at Manchester’s Arndale Centre.

The victim used another line to call her husband, who was able to track his wife’s phone from his home computer in Stalybridge.

He was able to tell police that the phone was heading northwards along Rochdale Road out of the city centre.

The force helicopter, India 99, was then scrambled from its base in Irlam and it pin-pointed the suspected thief’s car thanks to the second-by-second updates from the husband.

Officers in patrol cars homed in on the vehicle as it headed north along the M61 near Bolton.

A brief chase ensued before the car was stopped just off the M61 – less than an hour after the phone had been stolen and nearly 30 miles away from the scene of the crime.

The iPhone was seized from the car, along with other suspected stolen property.

The driver was arrested on suspicion of theft and released on bail pending further police enquires.

In March, the M.E.N. reported how Manchester student James Bird caught a thief who stole his phone after tracking him through the city centre.

In both incidents, the owners had downloaded a free application, called ‘Find My iPhone’ which enables the phone to be tracked via GPS. Other phones can be set up in a similar way.

Following the latest incident on Monday afternoon, Supt Vanessa Jardine urged people with so-called ‘smartphones’ to download the app to help police solve more crime.

She said: "This app is absolutely fantastic, not just from the police perspective but also for general members of the public if they mislay their phone.

"I would encourage everybody to look at it. It’s not just for iPhones, it’s for BlackBerries. I will certainly be downloading it."

05.05.2011 - Menmedia.co.uk

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