BARCELONA, Spain (AFP) – Not content with offering calls, texts and Internet access, the mobile phone industry is convinced it can help save lives and offer health services to millions worldwide.
The idea of a phone serving as a “doctor in your pocket” has gained traction at the industry’s biggest trade show, the Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona.
Among a slew of possible applications in poor countries, insiders stressed the potential for the mobile phone to remind people to get vaccinations, take medicine, or undergo HIV tests.
Doctors and nurses working at distance …

BARCELONA (Reuters) – Copying a few pages from the playbook of Apple Inc’s iPhone strategy, which brings many of the powers of the Internet to mobile phones, is no way to beat the computer interloper at its game.
But that’s exactly what many of the world’s biggest handsets makers are trying to do with new copycat phones and services that ape key features of the iPhone.
At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the world’s biggest annual trade show for the wireless industry, Apple is everywhere and nowhere. The company avoids such events, …

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – After more than a decade of hype about the Internet being the next great stage for mass entertainment, it remains dominated by amateurs with most Hollywood stars watching from the wings.
Even as talent agencies like William Morris and television networks such as NBC push for more celebrities on websites and better quality programs, many actors and producers balk at Internet projects, saying they have meager revenue potential compared with TV and movies.
The future of Web entertainment is front and center in fractious labor contract talks between …