Pitch is Live! It actually went live last week, and now here’s the official press release:

Social Networking Goes Mobile with Pitch

Pitch launches new mobile entertainment community with free content

20 November 2006 — Pitch, the UK’s first advertising-funded mobile content provider, today launched a brand new service offering users a fully-interactive entertainment community on their mobile handsets. Bringing the Web 2.0 social networking phenomenon to the mobile phone, Pitch’s new service features instant messaging, photo and video upload and sharing as well as access to an exciting new online community.

The new service will run alongside Pitch’s existing advertising-funded mobile content offer, so that in addition to free mobile content (videos, games, ringtones, screensavers and wallpapers) Pitch customers can enjoy a suite of social networking applications on their mobile phone.

Through the new service, Pitch customers can build their own mobile home page, complete with a unique user name (PitchTag) and inbox, allowing them to send messages to friends or groups, as well as participating in real time group chat with other Pitch members. Thus users can create and join interest groups, enabling them to stay in touch with old friends or meet new people with similar interests – all through their mobile phones. Pitch does not charge for this service, so the only costs users incur come from data charges, making instant communication significantly cheaper than sending a text through a network operator.

Creating a PitchTag tag allows a person or even a brand to promote their Pitch mobile space anywhere. Texting the tag to the Pitch short code (for example ‘Yourname’ to 87000) delivers an instant hyperlink straight to a specific home page. In addition, Pitch members can upload and share as many pictures and videos as they like, through the unlimited Pitch Albums feature.

A web application of Pitch, to follow in December, will complete the service, allowing customers to use and manage their Pitch profile from both PC and mobile.

Pitch CEO Lourens de Beer commented: “Web-based social networking is being embraced worldwide as the ultimate next-generation lifestyle tool, with a myriad of different applications and creative opportunities for individuals to express themselves and their opinions, interacting with each other in a unique space. For the first time, Pitch brings bring all the benefits of personalised social networking to the mobile handset, a medium perfectly-suited to this phenomenon. The mobile phone has taken next step in becoming the ultimate and indispensable social communication tool.”

This has pretty much been my entire life for the past 3 months…

I think the title says it all. I know I’ve not been posting much (well, at all) for a while, but this really deserves a mention..

A story in today’s Guardian reveals that a team of researchers cracked the protection on the UK’s new biometric RFID passports in 48 hours, using less than £200 of over-the-counter electronics equipment.

“If you can read the chip, then you can clone it,” [Lukas Grunwald, founder of DN-Systems Enterprise Solutions in Germany] says. “You could use this to clone a passport that would exploit the system to illegally enter another country.”

Here’s a link to BoingBoing’s coverage as well…