Odd News

Well I guess that no matter where you are from, you have a name for when someone calls and hung up a half-second later without giving you the opportunity to answer. In Romania we call it beep, like in other parts of Africa, but there it is used also flash. In Sudan it's simply a missed call, while in Ethiopia it is miskin or pitiful call. The one that I like it is the French bipage. It's widely practiced and the booming mobile market faces with this phenomenon that it's growing fast from which mobile operators had not yet find a solution to get money. However, cell phones networks owners introduced programs like Orange Senegal who according to Kofiloto, Informa principal analyst, allows customers to send a 'Rappelle moi' ('Call me back') when their phone credit is below $0.10 (5 pence). With Safaricom Kenya, it is a ‘Flashback 130' (limited to five a day - and with the slogan 'Stop Flashing! Ask Nicely'). Vodacom DR Congo's 'Rappelez moi SVP' service costs $0.01 a message. In the online Journal of Computer Mediated Communication will be published a study of this phenomenon written by Jonathan Donner, an India-based researcher for Microsoft who first discovered the flashing calls in Rwanda. And it shows among others that 20 to 30 percents of the calls made in Africa are half a second flashes. U.N. International Telecommunication Union showed that from 25.2 millions mobile users the figures showed an increase to 192.5 million mobile phone users in 2006. The missed calls also bother due to technical reasons, because according to Faisal Ijaz Khan, chief marketing officer for the Sudanese arm of Kuwaiti mobile phone operator Zain (formerly MTC) there are 355 million calls across the whole network every day in Africa and that might lead to the a network swamp. The reasons for giving a beep are numerous, generally it's because the user ran out of credit, or because you want to let the person next to you know that you were thinking of her/him or because it's a pre-established code. Cameroonian researchers Victor W.A. Mbarika and Irene Mbarika invented the name the booty call to express the beep followed by the message call me now. Will the mobile phone owners find a way of charging the missed calls? Stay connected and find out.

related story: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20070927/tod-uk-africa-beeping-cb1d00a_1.html

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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