OMG. Dat u mom?Yes, it is. Parents are horning in on their teens’ lives through text messaging. Sending shorthand cell phone messages used to be the province of the younger set — under the dinner table, in the car, at all hours of the night.

Now parents responding with their own quick dispatches — “RU there,” “Running L8″ — are part of the fastest-growing demographic in text messaging, which is one of the biggest areas of the mobile-phone industry.

Parents frequently follow their children into technology, setting up pages on the MySpace and Facebook social-networking sites, for example, to be part of their child’s network of online friends.

Adult text messaging is outstripping the growth rate among the youngsters. In the past two years, use of the technology by those ages 45 to 54 increased 130 percent, according to M:Metrics, a market-research firm. By comparison, those ages 13 to 17 increased their text messaging by far less, 41 percent.

Sprint Nextel said teens and ages 40 to 50 were the most active text-message users from June 2006 to June 2007. Among adults, mothers are driving the growth the most, the company said. Overall revenue from data services on cell phones, including text messages, surged 53 percent last year to $23 billion, according to CTIA, the wireless-industry trade group.

“Parents like the immediacy of it and that it is not intrusive. … It’s become an important way of communicating with their kids,” said Ralph de la Vega, chief executive of AT&T Mobility, the nation’s largest wireless carrier.

In a 2006 study commissioned by AT&T, 50 percent of adults who text-messaged said they started because of their children.

Suzanne Furman, of Rockville, Md., had watched her teenage son, Jesse, move his thumbs at lightning speed over the keypad, sending hundreds of messages a month to friends.

“It didn’t take me long to realize I’d have to learn how to text if I wanted to keep up with him,” Furman said.

So she did — with some prodding.

Two years ago, Jesse sent a message asking when she would come to pick him up from an outing with friend.

“I just stood there frozen and realized I had to figure out how to reply,” said Furman, who is an avid user of similar technologies, such as the Web and digital music. She thumbed through the numeric keyboard on her Motorola KRZR phone, taking several minutes to write, “Coming now.”

With that, Furman dove into a technology she says is still difficult to master but has become a staple for family communication. She now texts her husband to coordinate such chores as dry-cleaning pickups and sports practice drop-offs.

‘Perfect for moms’

Schools have caught on. Fairfax County, Va., and Montgomery County, Md. — two of the Washington area’s largest districts — send automatic text-message alerts for weather-related school closures and other emergencies. www.RainedOut.com sends message alerts on soccer practice cancellations in Washington area leagues.

“Text messaging is perfect for moms because it doesn’t require a BlackBerry or high-end data device, but can be used on any phone,” said Roger Entner, a senior vice president at IAG Research.

He added that working parents also use text messaging while at work to check in with their children.

For families, wireless carriers’ flat-rate plans have been a panacea for sky-high texting bills, in some cases incurred by a teen sending hundreds or thousands of text messages a month.

After that happened to Lynda Johnson, she switched her family to Sprint’s flat monthly plan. Her 17-year-old daughter and 20-year-old son were sending hundreds of text messages monthly. Now the Silver Spring, Md., mother tallies up her own text messages.

Her daughter, Jesse, was given a cell phone at age 14 for emergencies and for coordinating logistics with her parents. More often, however, Jesse would spend hours texting friends from the couch or back seat of the car.

When Johnson called her daughter, she said, “I could tell I was bothering her or interrupting because her voice was cold and hurried.”

So one evening, while Jesse was at a sleepover, Johnson sent her first text message: “Sweet dreams. Luv u.” It was a way to check in with her 14-year-old without seeming overbearing.

“I don’t want to interrupt her with her friends but also want her to know that I’m here for her.”

Finding Shortcuts

Bethesda, Md., mother Evon Ruffin had to learn a new language as well as the new technology. Cryptic abbreviations like OMG, for “Oh, my God.” And L8R for “later.”

Carriers have tried to aid adults new to texting. AT&T, for example, offers a four-page guide on lingo. Verizon Wireless’s Quick Text feature allows users to choose from a menu of phrases like “What’s up?” and “On my way,” so they don’t have to type each letter.

Ruffin said she draws her own limits on joining the text-message culture. Not so her husband, who recently sent her wife a one-letter text that read “k” for “OK.”

“Come on now, ‘OK’ is already abbreviated,” she protested. “And you’re going to try to shorten it even more? Please.”

Variety-Q has created a new online gay and lesbian social network and dating community. The website Variety-Q.com is an all-inclusive site designed to encourage networking and communications within the GLBT community. The social network provides its members an opportunity to share pictures, videos, instant/private messaging and email all within the community. The site also features a community forum to encourage member participation.

Variety-Q significantly differs from other online social networking communities by focusing solely on the GLBT community, which includes an estimated 16.5 million people within the United States alone (according to Planet Out Partners, Inc. 2003).

Variety-Q.com maximizes its appeal to GLBT individuals by consisting of several small communities that reflect the diverse populations within the GLBT community. Each community is directed to the Variety-Q.com site via its own URL. Community members are also provided direct URLs to their individual profiles within the website.

The communities consist of the following:
-Variety-Q: The main site including the general community for their GLBT members.
-Pride Parent World: gay and lesbian parents or prospective parents
-Find My LTR: gay dating and networking
-Sapphic Hearts: general lesbian community
-Black Sapphic: African-American lesbian community
-Black Retreat: African-American gay community
-Gay Othello: gay singles and couples seeking interracial relationships

Existing GLBT communities are primarily providing dating venues for the community. To this end, Variety-Q.com welcomes couples and mature members by providing them with a space to network, blog, share details in addition to the dating component.

The website will focus heavily on the community forum. The forum includes topics surrounding issues of social, political, medical and familial importance within the GLBT community. Professionals are featured to help members who seek advice on specific issues related to a particular forum discussion.

“We are hoping that the GLBT community will respond to our efforts to provide a valuable service. Our VQ-TV video channel includes new content via the YouTube community, our forums are relevant and we have designed a website around community versus strictly dating. Additionally, our dedication to equality for the gay and lesbian community is demonstrated by our commitment to GLBT non-profit organizations” said Damien Gray, CEO of Variety Board (the parent company of Variety-Q.com).

Variety-Q.com is a private venture designed to form an all-inclusive virtual gay and lesbian community. The website can be reached via www.Variety-Q.com.

For additional information or media inquiry contact:

Media Relations
Variety-Q
press@variety-q.com
www.varietyq.com / www.Variety-Q.com

Identity thieves are moving beyond traditional phishing attacks and using popular social networking and video-sharing sites to infect our computers with spyware.

Symantec’s latest Internet Security Threat Report, which covers the last half of 2007, is scarier than any summer movie.

While malware used to be aimed at affecting a user’s computer, the report says, now it’s aimed at stealthily collecting the user’s information.

Marc Fossi, one of the computer security firm’s researchers for the report, spins this scenario: ID thieves compromise your friend’s account and infect his Web page with malicious code dressed up as something you might want to download — a picture or a link. When you click on it, your computer is infected with a tiny piece of malicious code called a Trojan.

“That very first Trojan is pretty dumb in itself,” Fossi said. Its job is to sit undetected and then surreptitiously download instructions from a website the hacker controls.

Its first assignment may be to collect your account user names and passwords. Once it has collected and transmitted that information to its programmer, Fossi said, it may get new instructions for a series of other spy and hacking jobs on your accounts. Hackers may use your user name and passwords to plant malicious codes on your Web pages and sell the rest of your information on the black market.

Hackers have been so successful at getting our information, the report says, that black market prices have dropped.

Your Gold Card’s worth about 80 cents — down from a dollar in the first half of the year.

Bank accounts trade for about $10, Symantec said. And sellers give discounts to those who buy in bulk.

Trojans aren’t easy for end users to find. They may use a “shotgun attack” to exploit multiple gaps in your computer security at the same time, the Symantec report said.

“It’s pretty scary and overwhelming,” Fossi said.

When a computer security guy says this, it’s time for the rest of us to be very afraid.

So what can you do to protect yourself?

• Take a holistic approach to security, Fossi said, and have many layers of protection. Antivirus software isn’t enough. You also need firewalls and anti-spyware or anti-phishing software that can tell you if information is being exported from your computer.

• Don’t use the same user names and passwords for all your accounts. It makes a hacker’s job easier.

• Don’t open or respond to phishing e-mails, which often carry malicious code. Delete them without reading them. If your bank really tried to contact you, you will find the same information when you log into your account.

• Look at URLs to make sure you weren’t redirected to a spoof, or counterfeit, site.

• Don’t download information from sites you don’t know and check over your own Web pages to make sure there’s nothing lurking that you didn’t post.

The FTC has an easy-to-understand guide to computer security at onguardonline.gov. The site also can help you find reliable tools to protect your computer.

Staysafeonline.org also provides good information about computer security and has links to products.

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team issues alerts and posts helpful information on its site, www.us-cert.gov. See its “Recovering from a Trojan Horse or Virus” for a step-by-step guide.

To read Symantec’s report, go to symantec.com/threatreport/.

ONEsite, Inc., the leading provider of enterprise community and social networking software, announced today the launch of its new Class A datacenter and a series of wide ranging performance enhancements to the patent-pending technology of the ONEsite Platform.“It took two years to grow through 1 million users and now we are growing at 1 million users every two months,” said Bob Crull, ONEsite’s CEO. “Our platform is both flexible and fast. If a company wants to engage their users, we have the software and infrastructure to ensure it is a pleasant experience.”

With media and entertainment clients that include Clear Channel and Univision, ONEsite has created a system that can not only handle a high volume of day to day traffic, but the capability to deliver a consistent user experience even under an intense spike in traffic. The latest enhancements provide a 10x increase in performance and the capability to handle over 20 million users with hardware on hand and rapidly scale to support exponential growth.

The ONEsite platform is architected to scale horizontally. Its caching strategy delivers 70-90% of pages directly from the cache while still providing users with an interactive, dynamic experience. The newly launched datacenter and architecture upgrades greatly enhance the effectiveness and capacity of its proprietary clustered server environment.

ONEsite maintains dual datacenters in Oklahoma City and is able to provide consistent operations with the loss of either datacenter. The company is a subsidiary of Catalog.com with a 14 year tradition of delivering innovative, scalability internet applications and services. Ineffective scalability that has crippled many growing social networks and their providers does not affect the ONEsite platform which has been specifically architected to provide the performance and scalability critical to the success of its clients.

About ONEsite
ONEsite offers full-featured social networking platform built on patent-pending technology. Its open, scalable architecture provides one of the highest levels of functionality, flexibility, reliability, and interoperability in the industry. ONEsite technology is complemented by a talented and experienced team that delivers more enterprise-class community destinations than any other white-label social networking provider.

ONEsite has a proven ability to create the distinctive, engaging and successful social experiences demanded by leading media, entertainment and lifestyle brands including Clear Channel and Univision. ONEsite offices are located in Oklahoma City, Los Angeles and Seattle with expansion underway in New York and London.

For more information visit: www.onesite.com .

The coolest ad technologies aren’t the ones that cost the most–they’re the ones that engage users. Thankfully, this year’s crop of cool tools doesn’t require the kind of attention your MySpace page does. From reaching people on their mobile to enhancing your online videos, these innovative ad trends can set you apart as a tech-savvy company while reaching users right when they’re ready to buy–and encouraging them to buy more.Bar Codes With Extra Info
While you may think of “airline check-in” or “mail tracking” when you see the black-and-white squiggles that make up QR, or “Quick Response” codes, these 2-D data matrices are beginning to find their place in advertising.