Islanders responded to an announced increase in the price of gas by pumping some service stations dry on Wednesday evening. A news release from the Island Regulatory and Appeals Agency went out shortly after 4 p.m. Wednesday, and word spread quickly. Gas went up six cents a litre overnight, and many Islanders rushed out to fill up on cheaper gas. “It was just chaotic,” said Michael Cahill, the assistant manager of the Shell station in Summerside. “We were taking bets...

MILAN: Stories of cellphones helping people in developing countries abound - some of them highlighted by the industry, in an effort to polish its image, and others by usersthemselves.

There are the women in Bangladesh and other countries who invest in a phone and then rent it to fellow villagers, making money for themselves while providing a key service for others. There are the fishermen in India who have increased their earnings by calling from their boats to various ports to see where their catch can get them the mostmoney.

But what about countries with advanced economies? Might cellphones have a nontraditional role there? Could cellphones help young people in the inner cities of San Francisco, Chicago, New York or London deal with fears about sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, forexample?

Yes, according to a report commissioned by the Vodafone Group Foundation and the United Nations Foundation that looked at ways in which nongovernmental organizations use cellphones. The Vodafone Group Foundation, which finances disaster relief and preparedness projects, and the UN Foundation, created in 1998 with a $1 billion donation by Ted Turner, have collaborated on several communications-related projects in thepast.

The report, presented recently in Washington, London and Brussels, profiles 11 organizations that have used cellphone technology to accomplish their missions, which ranged from sex education to dispersing emergency food to stopping fights between elephants andfarmers.

The report looked at 560 nongovernmental organizations and found that 86 percent of the people questioned use cellular technology in their work, with those in Africa and Asia more likely to use cellular networks than their colleagues in areas with traditional telecommunications infrastructure. Ninety-nine percent of the people surveyed said cellular technology had a positive effect on their work, with 95 percent citing time saving as the key benefit. Three-quarters of those surveyed said an important advantage of cellphones was that they made it possible to connect with people previously difficult or impossible toreach.

Cellphone coverage is working its way to the farthest corners of the globe - 80 percent of the worlds population now lives within range of a cellular network - but it was in San Francisco, just up the road from where Apple designed the iPhone, that a small organization found a way to use cellphones to inform inner-city youths about the perils of unprotectedsex.

This audience was hard to reach, according to Deborah Levine, executive director of Internet Sexuality Information Services, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, California. So the group developed Sex Info, a service that lets people request information by anonymous textmessage.

For the price of a regular text message, users can ask questions and get immediate automated responses to queries. The responses include the names and addresses of clinics where people can be tested for sexually transmitted diseases and get counseling. More specific questions are answered by trained experts. The group publicized Sex Info in San Francisco beginning in April 2006, but a request by text message can be made from anywhere in the United States. A campaign to promote the services has just begun in Washington and it is scheduled to expand to Toronto thisyear.

In the first three months of this year, almost 4,500 requests for information were made to the service, according toLevine.

“Young people dont always know who they can talk to and - like this - they can get that information on their phone, which they are using all the time anyway,” Levine said. “In most cases there is no cost for the users since many have unlimited text messaging plans with their mobile phonecompany.”

Levine said that the program was the first of its kind in the United States but that it was preceded by a similar program in London begun in 2002 by the Brook Advisory Center, a British charity. Brooks service, which receives an average of about 100 text message queries per month, responds to questions about contraception, pregnancy and sexually transmitteddiseases.

Action Insight | Written by ActionForex.com | Dec 19 07 06:04 GMT | Forex Daily Technical Report Cable Still Pressing Channel Support, Looking to MPC Minutes for Trigger Cable continues to press the important medium term channel support after yesterday’s CPI report failed to trigger neither a break through nor a rebound. Focus will turn to MPC meeting minutes to be released later today. Markets generally expect the minutes to show the decision to cut rates by 25bps to 5.50% earlier...