Here’s what they look like:

It’s a cool idea, and if you keep leaving things behind and losing them, then it’s something you should look into. It costs around a fiver for a single item, or £12 for 3 items. They also have a “comprehensive” service that even pays to ship the items back to you, no matter where in the world you lose them. Your details are kept confidential, with the finder reporting directly to TagBak, so your privacy is assured.

Get TagBak Now!

I came across a website of the house removals company, a website that lets you key in your requirements for a moving company in the UK. You key in your details once, click on “Get Quotes” and get quotes from up to 6 different companies who will be able to help you out. That’s much better than having to look up different companies in the yellow pages and phone around trying to get comparative quotes. They seem to cover the whole of the UK and can even help you if you’re planning to make an International Move.

Check them out if you’re about to make a move.

Have you ever used Twitter by SMS? You can tell the service to SMS you whenever there’s a new Tweet you might interested in. At least you could until today. Twitter has decided to close down SMS sending from the UK, citing cost as the main issue. They report that as they were unable to get the deals they wanted with mobile operators, it would cost them around $1000 per user per year to maintain the service. In a bid to cut costs, they have eliminated the service in all but three countries, India, Canada and the United States. They try to temper their press release with some good news, which consists of a promise to find more operators in more countries.

The UK SMSs were sent by a Manx operator, so that’s probably a pretty big loss of revenue for them. Still, if Twitter’s idea of “working out something” with the mobile operators was too aggressive for Manx Telecom’s business model, then it might have not been viable for them to handle the business. Considering Twitter haven’t managed to get any traction with *any* of the UK providers, I’m sure they must have been quite aggressive in their proposition. One option could have been for them to tie the number to a premium mobile number and charge the recipient a couple of pence for receiving SMSs. This would then have left the choice up to the Tweeter rather than having the service snatched away like this. It could even have generated some revenue for them. Instead they seem to be taking steps to kill a captive UK market.

To tell you the truth, I’ve never used the SMS flavour of Twitter. Some claim that this was the reason behind Twitter’s penetration, but I just don’t buy it. Can you imagine how annoying it would be to receive SMSs every few seconds, just because someone Tweets. It would drive me bonkers. There are loads of Twitter clients around, which really just need a data connection and seeing the size of a Twitter data packet, it’s definitely more elegant a solution than SMS. However, if your phone doesn’t have a browser or email support, you’re stuck. Any SMS users out there? How did you find the service? Will you be able to live without it? Will you be switching to Jaiku?

If you’re in a different country check out the T&Cs which list all the different countries it’s appplicable for and what dates the promotion is on.

Just to give you a taster, here’s the first verse:

The world today is filled with villains stealing one’s identity

And terrorists intent on acts of violent extremity

Our citizens are prisoners, our criminals at liberty

Our nation at the mercy of felonious proclivity

Our very own Home Secretary will rebuild our society

A model of sagaciousness and picture of propriety

It’s patent that protection of the future of humanity

Relies on Mr Clarke to put an end to this insanity!

It’s quite amusing to watch the debate. We’ve had ID Cards in Malta for many years now, and in fact, I was born into the system and assigned an ID Number at birth. It has proved to be more practical than not and having a primary key for every individual does lend itself quite elegantly to implementing information systems around people. The current situation in the UK is that people are identified by a couple of personal attributes (Name, DOB etc) and their residence over the last few years. Not very reliable at all. I remember failing a credit check once, because I had only been in the UK for three years and was unable to provide address details for the last five years.

Will be interesting to watch how the whole thing pans out.

As predicted just a few days ago, Google has this morning launched UK versions of its local and mapping services. Yes, you can now find Pizzas in Plymouth with the aid of everybody’s favourite search engine.

The services appear broadly similar to their US counterparts, and are apparently accompanied at the launch by a UK version of Google SMS. Its subdomain isn’t yet active, but a direct link (below) works.

There are a few problems with the mapping data though. Some streets appear fine; however, it appears other areas, particularly where streets have been redrawn, renamed and so on, throw up some pretty strange results. Also, there isn’t yet a satellite picture service for the UK.

Posting on the Google Blog, Richard Boardman, Usability Analyst, said: “I guess my colleagues got tired of my moaning, so I’m delighted to introduce Google Local UK and Google Maps UK. The Google UK office and a few of us homesick Brits in California have been helping out with the development.”

View: Google Local UK | Google Maps UK | Google SMS UK

View: Google Local US | Google Maps US | Google SMS US

Read full story… [Neowin.net]