The Surface Patterns is a project by Centrifugal Forces that plans to build a huge and evolving archive of memories and revealing facts on Huddersfield (in Yorkshire) past via SMS.

Users to send a text, receive historic facts about 10 different parts of the city and get the chance to leave a message or memory about Huddersfield.

An audio line is available for people who don't want to use text.

Surface Patterns started on Thursday and will run for a year. Texts are charged at the normal rate but it is free to receive the information. The audio line is charged at the normal local rate.

From Huddersfield Daily Examiner, via Textually.
Related entry: SMS graffiti in Manchester.

Nextel is offering supervisors a new service to monitor remote employees' work time, tasks and location status.

Using GPS- and Java-enabled phones, ActSoft's Comet Tracker is a remote time clock that tracks employee work time and break time, even producing time sheets.

Task tracking turns the mobile phone into a data capture device. It allows employees to manually enter or capture (using an optional attached bar code reader) data related to a job or work order that is instantly transmitted back to the office. Dispatchers can send jobs to the nearest worker and view the progress of the jobs via status updates, without having to talk to the worker and manually enter changes.

Found on Textually. See also WirelessIQ.

Four years after Lucie Blackman was murdered, her father has launched Safetytext, a service to alert friends and family where you are if you run into trouble.

Users send an SMS with plans and a time delay of between 30 minutes and 24 hours for an alarm to be triggered automatically to alert friends or family in the event that something happens.

The service stores photographs, contact details and the names of friends and relatives, which can be released to the police in the event of the customer disappearing.

As well as the delay service, the safetytext can also be used to trigger an instant alert by just texting 'hi' if things go wrong.

From Textually and 160 Characters.

While the larger coffehouses (Starbucks, Tully's, Ladro, etc.) propose for-pay wireless services, an increasing number of Seattle's independent coffeehouses are now offering free Wi-Fi as part of their basic business model.
And althought free hotspots can be unreliable or even unsecure, many consumers are willing to assume the risks to avoid paying for WiFi.

For a guide to Seattle's free wireless coffee shops and
Details in Seattle Post Intelligence, via

In UK, over 1,000 Boots drug stores will provide printing Kodak kiosks with infrared or Bluetooth capabilities for uploading camera phone photos.

The kiosks also can accept pictures on memory cards, either from a camera phone or a digital camera.

From Reiter's Camera Phone Report.
Press Release.

Wanna share pictures with friends, but don't like/trust e-mail attachments? TIME Global Adviser provides three new alternatives:

ShareALot program sends images directly from your hard drive to your recipients'.

More sophisticated, Our Pictures lets you edit photos before sending them. You get an e-mail notification, click on a link to a website where you can view and download photos.

Photosite let you create an album, that your friends will be invited to view via an e-mail invitation. It also allow users to e-mail pictures from their camera phone directly to their photoblog.

Related article: Online photo-sharing market.