Gossip

Glamour and Billing Systems? - well, it depends what you mean by "glamour"

Your gossip sniffer wasn't looking forward to the trip to Billing Systems 2004. It was, he reckoned, going to be about billing systems. And then, he found what people are billing for.

The image - shot at Billing Systems 2004 may not look too clear in this photograph, but trust me: seen with the naked eye on the Nokia 6600 phone, there was no doubt about the gender of the model.

Image quality was astonishingly good, even if that isn't altogether apparent from the quick bit of footage your hunky mouse managed to shoot, with an ordinary digital camera (HP945, since you ask). The image is a still from the video clip

It was, as XXXprovider.net executive Jana Soukupova demonstrated, genuinely live video, and all one can hope is that the "internet worker" at the other end of the link was enjoying her job as much as she should have been.

Jana apologised for the fact that I could be billed for the time spent watching this young woman perform her gynecological exercises, but I couldn't talk to her "because it's over GPRS." But the billing algorithm worked perfectly.

"She's in our studio in Prague," I was assured. Over the web, you could, indeed, ask her how she felt. But, presumably, it's not necessary to ask what she feels ...

The service is aimed at webmasters and phone data providers, and prices to these people are subscription based, from $99 upwards a month. Oh, and it's 24 by seven, she assured me. I wasn't billed for that information ...