The free DriveSafe service, launched today, allows Vodafone customers to set up the automatic reply to all text messages they receive while behind the wheel, removing the pressure to check and reply to messages on the road.

The DriveSafe service, which has the backing of the AA and the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA), is activated by texting “drive on” to 760, and is switched off by texting “drive off” to the same number.

People who text a user who has enabled the service will automatically receive the reply: “I’m driving right now. I’ll read your TXT as soon as it is safe to do so. Vodafone DriveSafe.”

The service has been road-tested by Vodafone and Toll New Zealand sales staff, with nearly all of Toll’s 40 trial users saying the service removed the urge to respond to text messages immediately.

Driver distraction campaigner Russell Keating, who lost a brother and sister-in-law to a crash caused by a texting driver, said the service had come too late.

“It’s a bit of a surprise that it’s taking this long for them to get something like this out, because it’s a wee while now since they’ve banned it.”

He doubted whether people with commonsense had a need for the service.

“Can’t they just do it themselves? Surely they don’t have to more or less get a machine to stop them,” he said.

“When they first brought the ban out, you’d see a lot of people pulled into the side of the road. But it’s tended to fall off, and now whether this will help or not, I wouldn’t know.”

Mr Keating said while he was an advocate for banning cellphones in cars, there were also other distractions drivers needed to be aware of.

Texting and driving has been illegal for more than two years but remains a pressing issue, topping the AA’s list of the top 10 driver distractions, released last week.

A recent Otago University study found 54 per cent of drivers on a restricted licence admitted to texting while driving occasionally or more often.

NZTA chief executive Geoff Dangerfield said texting while driving remained a significant and unwelcome cause of too many crashes, despite the ban.

“Nobody is perfect and it is easy to get distracted when driving, so this innovation will help people stay safe,” he said.

He encouraged all Vodafone subscribers to use it, and urged other mobile providers to launch similar initiatives.

“Telecommunications has a huge base of customers who use texting to stay in touch. Expanding an innovation similar to DriveSafe can only have a positive impact on safer journeys for all of us.”

AA motoring affairs general manager Mike Noon said he welcomed the service as a simple tool that could help drivers leave their phones alone.

“One of the worst things about texting and driving is that drivers know they shouldn’t do it but many cases just can’t seem to stop themselves when they hear a message arrive,” he said.

“The driver can relax knowing the person who texted them has been sent a reply and, as a bonus, it is spreading the message that texting and driving are a potentially lethal mix.”

Mr Noon said any distraction while driving was dangerous, but texting was especially bad because people concentrating on messages had their eyes off the road and at least one hand off the wheel.

Vodafone sales director Grant Hopkins said the service was aimed at helping people use their mobiles safely.

“DriveSafe is designed to take the pressure off when you’re driving and you get a text message. It lets the sender know that you can’t reply immediately, without you needing to take your eye off the road.

“We’re pleased to be able to bring innovations like this to New Zealand and hope it will help drivers think carefully about their actions to reduce the road toll.” By Matthew Backhouse, NZ Herald

Net profit for the quarter was 4 trillion won ($3.6bn; £2.3bn), up from 3.42tn won in the same period the previous year, Samsung said.

However, for the whole of 2011 net income was down 15% compared with 2010.

Samsung’s parent group is planning $42bn (£26.8bn) in capital investment this year.

‘Solid earnings’

Samsung said that its Galaxy line of mobile devices drove up revenue for the year by almost 40% compared with the previous year.

Despite tough competition from the likes of Apple in the smartphone market, Samsung said that shipments of it smartphones rose by about 30% in the fourth quarter on an annual basis.

“Our telecommunications business continued to post solid earnings with an enhanced line-up of high-end smartphones, resulting in [a] higher average selling price,” said Robert Yi, senior vice president and head of investor relations, in the earnings statement.

James Rooney, Market Force: “Samsung is a very strong and diversified player”

Looking ahead to this year, Samsung is forecasting increased demand for entry-level smartphones and tablet PCs, as well as consistent demand for feature phones.

Panel problems

The company said it will spend 25tn won in capital expenditure this year on its chip and panel businesses, according to the statement.

However, that panel display business, which makes flat panels for TVs and computer monitors, did not perform as well in 2011.

Samsung said it had an operating loss of 220bn won, compared with an operating profit of 100bn won a year earlier.

Despite that Samsung announced its latest line of TVs, which are controlled by voice commands and hand gestures, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month. BBC News

The net loss in the year ending in March may be $838 million, compared with an earlier forecast for a loss of $258 million, the company said.

President Satoru Iwata, who cut 3DS prices by as much as 40 percent last year, said he expects full-year sales of 14 million units for the device that shows images in 3-D, down from an earlier forecast of 16 million. The creator of “Super Mario Bros.” games is predicting its first annual loss in at least three decades because of a surging yen and a consumer preference for gaming on the iPhone and iPad that helped Apple more than double profit in the quarter.

“The company faces a structural problem that people are opting for their smart phones and tablet PCs to kill their time,” said Mitsushige Akino, who oversees about $600 million at Ichiyoshi Investment Management Co. in Tokyo. “I can’t see Nintendo’s next strategy. There will probably be a discussion about how much worse it can get.”

“It took time for us to revive sales momentum” after the 3DS price cuts because the company was “a little bit late” in introducing titles featuring the Mario character, Iwata told reporters in Osaka.

“Nintendo’s profitability may get lower in the long term because people are starting to stay away from video game consoles,” said Tomoaki Kawasaki, a senior analyst at Cosmo Securities Co. in Tokyo. “The yen’s gain is a burden for Nintendo, as it hasn’t taken sufficient measures to deal with the impact of the strong currency.”

Nintendo generates about 80 percent of its revenue outside Japan, and a stronger yen reduces the repatriated value of overseas assets. The yen has gained 5.6 percent against the dollar and 10 percent versus the euro in the past 12 months, the best performer among 11 Asian currencies tracked by Bloomberg.

The console maker hasn’t reported a full-year net loss since 1981, when it began releasing consolidated earnings, according to its website.

Nintendo cut the price of the 3DS, which allows users to see 3-D images without wearing special glasses, in the United States to $170 from $250.

Nintendo sold 11.4 million units of the 3DS handheld player, released in February, in the nine months ended Dec. 31. By Naoko Fujimura,Masatsugu Horie, San Francisco Chronicle

The two co-CEOs of the Canadian company resigned Sunday. The new CEO is Thorsten Heins, who was the company’s chief operating officer.

Even though the company is in deep trouble and has seen its stock price fall 89 percent from the all-time high it hit in 2008, Heins said Monday he’s confident in the course laid out by his predecessors, which hinges on the new software.

The new software is called BlackBerry 10, and it’s due in new smartphones late this year. It’s a stable platform that can give BlackBerrys a new look and new capabilities. BlackBerry 10 will have a completely new user interface, built from the ground up for touchscreen input and “very fluid,” Heins said.

But it amounts to BlackBerry tossing out its own quirky, outdated software, first introduced in 1999, and adopting a slick, touch-oriented operating system, much like Android and the software on the iPhone.

Heins said BlackBerry 10 will offer “multitasking,” or the ability to run several applications at the same time. Phone software developers generally stay away from full multitasking because it can shorten battery life considerably.

One thing that could entice buyers: the new software will expand the choice of applications greatly, by running ones written for Android. There are hundreds of thousands of such apps, but it’s unclear how many of them will run on BlackBerry 10 without modification.

The PlayBook, RIM’s tablet computer, already runs an early version of BlackBerry 10. RIM had huge hopes for the device when it put it on sale in April, but quickly had to slash the price. In December, the tablets that originally cost $500 were selling for $200, below the cost of making them. RIM wrote off $485 million worth of inventory.

The main problem analysts see with BlackBerry 10 is that the phones are set to come out so late. When they come out, it will be more than five years since Apple released the first iPhone. Indianapolis Star

Acer’s media conference, held two days ahead of the official CES show, sets the scene for tough competition in 2012 between manufacturers readying to pump out Ultrabooks, which are small, thin yet powerful notebook computers with form factors similar to Apple’s MacBook Air.

Unlike regular notebooks, Ultrabooks have special Intel dual core processors coupled with inbuilt graphics, capable of performing many of the functions of high-end computers such as video editing and gaming.

Acer’s Aspire S5 weighs less than 1.35kg, has a 13.3-inch LCD, claims an instant-resume functionality of 1.5 seconds and battery life that Acer says will last several weeks in sleep state.

It has a black magnesium-aluminum alloy cover and looks less like the MacBook Air than other Ultrabooks so far. The Aspire is due to ship in the second quarter.

Acer today did not reveal the price of its Ultrabook, however general pricing of less than $1000 will be crucial if the Ultrabook is to be successful, given that powerful notebooks weighing a little more that are not technically Ultrabooks can be bought for about $500.

Analyst Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies told AFP the S5 was “quite significant”.

“It looks like the thinnest and lightest, and it sets the bar for the rest of the ultrabook vendors,” Mr Bajarin said.

Intel’s Ultrabook form factor also faces competition from high-end tablet computers and a new line of “Ultrathin” notebooks — rival AMD’s version of the Ultrabook that are due for release in Australia early this year.

Acer also announced 14-inch and 15-inch models of its Aspire Timeline Ultra notebooks with eight hours of battery life, dual core Intel processors, around 20mm thick, dedicated graphics for 3D gaming, and a slim DVD optical drive.

Acer also will roll out a cloud service — AcerCloud, which will allow users to retrieve multimedia and data files on any Acer mobile device. Acer said it would include AcerCloud on all new Acer consumer PCs without additional cost. By: Chris Griffith, The Australian

After overtaking Microsoft’s Windows Live Profile in Portugal and Mexico in early 2010, Facebook eclipsed StudiVZ in Germany and Google’s Orkut in India later that year, and soon unseated Hyves in the Netherlands, according to comScore, which measures use of online media. Now Facebook is poised to triumph in what has been viewed as its ultimate popularity contest, with comScore indicating the network is likely to dethrone Orkut in social-media-mad Brazil when its December data is released.

Facebook’s relentless spread is a vindication of founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s growth-first principle, under which the social network has focused primarily on adding users, not building revenue, since its beginning. Facebook will surpass 1 billion users in the next few months, analysts say, and that population will be a huge asset it can tout to investors as the company prepares for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock as soon as spring.

“It’s been really surprising to us to see how quickly Facebook has grown, not just in Western countries or English-speaking countries, but pretty much around the world,” said Carmela Aquino of comScore. “I think part of it is the network effect — when you have a big enough mass of people beginning to jump on a social network, it’s only a matter of time that their friends get on the same network, and it starts to spread.”

Facebook is now used by more than half the population in the U.S. and a number of other countries, according to analytics company Socialbakers, but its growth is slowing in North America and much of Europe as it approaches a saturation point. Still, as Facebook prepares for its IPO, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social-networking company’s massive expansion in countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, South Korea and Vietnam suggests the social network has a bright future.

For investors, Facebook’s rise in Asia, South America and other developing nations “is a proof point that they can make it everywhere in the world,” said Jan Rezab, CEO of Socialbakers. He believes the social network’s user population could swell from more than 800 million to 1 billion as soon as April.

Facebook, which started in 2004 as a way for students at Ivy League universities and Stanford to socialize and didn’t open up to the public until 2006, first saw a majority of its traffic coming from outside the U.S. in 2009, according to Socialbakers. Now more than four out of five Facebook users log on from other countries.

Other online social networks also have a global draw. U.S.-based Twitter and LinkedIn pull a large majority of their visitors from outside the U.S. Even the most popular Russian social network, VKontakte, draws 43 percent of its traffic from outside Russia, according to a recent comScore study on the growth of social networks, which now reach 82 percent of the world’s online population, or 1.2 billion people.

That sense of a borderless world for social networks is nowhere more true than in Brazil, the world’s fifth-largest country, where Google’s Orkut had been the entrenched king for years. Orkut had six times the volume of Facebook’s monthly traffic as recently as January 2010. But while Orkut continued to grow, Facebook’s Brazilian traffic erupted in 2011, according to comScore.

Observers of the Brazilian Internet market cite many factors in Facebook’s sudden rise in the South American nation of 200 million people, including Facebook’s availability in the local language and the globalization of people’s social ties. By Mike Swift, Seattle Times

The low-cost three-carriage train is designed to run at a maximum speed of 100 km per hour and carry 600 passengers, Xinhua news agency reported. Trains run on coal or diesel creates more pollution.

Maglev also runs quietly, said Xu Zongxiang, general manager of the Zhuzhou Electric Locomotive Co. Ltd., maker of the train in central Hunan province.

A conventional train moves forward by using friction between its wheels and the track. The maglev replaces wheels by electromagnets and levitates on the guideway.

“It’s ideal for mass transportation, as it is quiet and environment-friendly. Its manufacturing cost is about 75 percent of a conventional light-rail train,” said Xu.

Maglev has a minimum turning radius of 50 meters and can run easily in the residential areas or on the hilly slopes. “It’s an ideal public transport option for Chinese cities and major tourist destinations,” said Xu.

Railway transport specialist Liu Youmei said the new train is green, economical and safe. “It can be used for public transport in populous areas and at scenic spots with fragile environment.”

Liu said China is one of a few countries that used maglev technology.

Beijing is currently building a maglev route that will be operational next year, Xinhua said.

Currently, a German-made maglev train is operated in Shanghai city. It went into operation Dec 31, 2002. Zeenews

Leonid Ksanfomaliti of the Space Research Institute of Russia’s Academy of Sciences published a research that analysed the photographs from the Venus mission made by a Soviet landing probe, Venus-13, in 1982.

The photographs feature several objects, which Ksanfomaliti said, resembled a “disk”, a “black flap” and a “scorpion”.

All of them “emerge, fluctuate and disappear”, the scientist said, referring to their changing location on different photographs and traces on the ground.

“What if we forget about the current theories about the non-existence of life on Venus, let’s boldly suggest that the objects’ morphological features would allow us to say that they are living,” the magazine quoted Ksanfomaliti as saying.

No data proving the existence of life on Venus, where the ground temperature is 464 degrees Celsius, has ever been found. Zeenews

Made of a magnesium alloy, the tablet weighs 1.18 pounds and is a third of an inch thick. It’s strength and rigidity is enhanced by a Corning Gorilla Glass 10-finger multi-touch screen. (The iPad 2, by comparison, is 0.34 inches thick and weighs 1.33 pounds.) The screen is treated with a smudge resistant coating, which was showing wear from thousands of hands at the International Consumer Electronics Show here.

Despite its slim size, the tablet has retained a Micro USB 2.0 port, a Micro HDMI port and a Micro SD card slot. It has a front-facing c2-megapixel camera and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with an LED flash.

The X10 has a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connection but no ability to connect to a mobile phone network because the company said most people prefer to use a phone as a hotspot and not have another plan to subscribe to.

Toshiba will not beat the iPad on price. Its tablet is slated to be available in two configurations, a $530 16GB version and a $600 32GB version in March. By Roy Furchgott, The New York Times

PC makers last year realised that the iPad was virtually insurmountable in the tablet space so this year they are trying a new tack – beefing up thin laptops with tablet features.

The new Ultrabook laptop category, created by chipmaker Intel, is an umbrella term describing laptops that weigh less than 1.8kg, are less than 20mm thick, have at least 5 hours of battery life and boot up in less than seven seconds.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, organisers expect 30-50 Ultrabooks to have launched before the week is out. They are similar in design to the MacBook Air – thin yet powerful.

At Intel’s CES press conference this morning the company showed a slew of new models from brands including Asus, Samsung, Lenovo, Acer, HP and Toshiba. Acer is claiming it has the thinnest Ultrabook with its Aspire S5 measuring just 15mm at its thickest point.

Samsung announced its Series 5 range of Ultrabooks that come in 13.3-inch and 14-inch screen sizes. The 14-inch version weighs 1.39kg, measures 17.6mm at its thickest point and includes 500GB of storage. Both will be available in Australia in February this year starting from $1499.

Intel’s vice president and general manager Mooly Eden said touch had so far “skipped” laptops but this year that would change.

“People do not want to give away the physical keyboard but they want to enjoy both worlds – the real keyboard and the touch screen,” he said.

Intel showed off a concept Windows 8 Ultrabook with a touchscreen that can be manipulated using multiple fingers and gestures. The laptop also included an array of sensors typically found in smartphones and tablets that allow users to, for instance, manipulate games by tilting or moving the laptop.

Another Windows 8 concept laptop folded up to convert into a tablet. But the most innovative Windows 8 concept, dubbed Nikiski, features a clear panel at the base of the laptop that is a touch pad when the laptop is open, but becomes a screen when the laptop is closed, providing users with at-a-glance access to notifications, email, news feeds, calendar and other apps.

Windows 8 is due to be released in the second half of this year.

Intel has partnered with speech recognition firm Nuance to bring voice recognition to Ultrabooks this year. This will allow users to issue voice commands to their laptop – performing tasks such as opening applications, checking social media sites or playing music and video – without the need for a clunky headset.

“We love our devices like these Ultrabooks, we’ve got a relationship with them, [so] why not talk to them?,” said Nuance CEO Peter Mahoney.

Once voice recognition is standard, the next step is to allow users to interact with their laptops just by motioning with their hands, without touching the screen or trackpad at all. Intel showed a concept laptop with a demo that allows users to play a slingshot game, firing shots just by making hand gestures in front of the laptop’s webcam.

There were 75 Ultrabook models currently being designed by various manufacturers and the marketing campaign, starting early this year, would be Intel’s most significant since the Centrino laptop campaign in 2003, Intel’s marketing chief Kevin Sellers said.

Some of the models of Ultrabooks released this year will include built-in near field communication (NFC) chips. One application of this is the ability to hold your credit card over your laptop and the NFC chip will automatically read off the details and enter them into an online form, so you don’t have to worry about typing out your credit card, number and security code when buying something online.

Intel, which joined up with MasterCard to develop the feature, said your credit card would only be able to be read by your laptop, to make the system more secure.

In the second half of this year Ultrabooks will also come with new Intel anti-theft software that allows owners to lock or disable the system if their laptop gets stolen. By Asher Moses in Las Vegas, Sydney Morning Herald