I first wrote about disposable cell phones nearly two years ago, but they finally look like they’re about to hit the market.

Reuters reports that Hop-On says it’s gotten FCC approval to sell a mass-market recyclable cell phone with 60 minutes of service. Price: $40.

“Hop-On mobile devices are plastic, two-way phones the size of a deck of playing cards. Users talk and listen to callers via a microphone/earpiece connected by a thin wire. Customers buy scratch cards in increments of additional talk time of 60, 90 and 120 minutes, according to company officials. “

The first phones will run on CDMA networks — Sprint and Verizon. A second wave, priced at $29, will run on GSM networks — Voicestream (a/k/a T-Mobile) and Cingular. In all cases, toll charges will be extra.

If you like Slashdot (not to everyone’s taste), here’s their discussion of this.

 

The New York City school system is about to get a new chancellor: Joel Klein.

Yes, that Joel Klein. The one who (successfully, so far) represented the U.S. government in its antitrust case against Microsoft. The one who was, until today, the U.S. head of Bertelsmann. (What this means for Bertelsmann, one of the world’s five largest meda companies and the CEO of which was pushed out yesterday, is fodder for another article.)

Here’s what the NYTimes says about it.

Interesting. Klein is the second chancellor in a row to come from the business community rather than the education industry. Klein is also very much the choice of Mayor Bloomberg, himself a successful businessman. (For those of you who don’t follow city educational politics, Bloomberg recently got control of what used to be called the Board of Education — which has eluded mayors for decades — and appears hell-bent on implementing some serious systemic reform.)

 

Story in the NYTimes this morning that Ziff Davis, hobbled by debt and crushing declines in the tech advertising market, will probably go Chapter 11 this week. At one time, Ziff Davis also owned a thriving events business that included Comdex, which it spun off and is now called Key3Media. So, should Ziff have kept the events biz? Umm, probably not; it’s being delisted from the NYSE today. That’s what happens when you’re trading at 5 cents.

Fortunately, Ziff doesn’t owe me any money, though I do have an assignment from them, which I probably need to inquire about.

 

When the New York Sun launched this past spring as the first new daily broadsheet in decades, some thought it odd that there wasn’t a companion website for the right-leaning daily. Myself, I considered it a good idea to concentrate on the main deal and wait to go online until the underlying machine was spinning steadily.

The Sun’s site now appears to be up and running, though I haven’t seen an announcement of it anywhere. www.nysun.com carries a small selection of major stories from that day’s edition, with a list of other pieces that you can see my actually getting a copy of the print edition and paying 50 cents.

 

So while Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom are splashed across the airwaves and the front pages, as the stock market plummets and people’s retirement funds are wiped away in a matter of weeks, what’s Congress doing? Why, making it harder for poor people to declare bankruptcy, of course.

A “bankruptcy reform” bill has been moving through Congress for the last year, and the NYTimes reports that it’s finally cleared a conference committee. The most salient point in the bill is that credit card debt would not be discharged in a bankrupcty; it would still have to be paid off.

It should surprise no one that the moving force behind the legislation is MBNA, one of the more aggressive mass-marketers of credit cards — particularly to the “sub-prime” borrowers who have worse credit and fewer financial resources. These people, of course, pay higher rates, tend to carry balances, and default more often. The plan was that the fees these borrowers paid would offset the higher default rate. It didn’t work out that way, and MBNA has successfully gotten Congress to bail out its damaged business plan.

Some interesting points from the Times that should be skipped by those who still respect the legislative process:

• “Ranked by employee donations, MBNA was the largest corporate contributor to President Bush’s 2000 campaign.”
  
• “The company acknowledged that it gave a $447,000 debt-consolidation loan on what critics viewed as highly favorable terms to a crucial House supporter of the bill only four days before he signed on as a lead sponsor of the legislation in 1998. Both MBNA and the lawmaker, Representative James P. Moran Jr., Democrat of Virginia, have denied that there was anything improper about the loan.”
  
• The compromise that moved the bill forward was the elimination of a provision that would have allowed anti-abortion demonstrators to get out from under paying court fines and judgements. Just what that provision was doing in the bill in the first place would make an interesting discussion on its own.

I don’t know if the bankruptcy system does or doesn’t need reforming. But this bill looks like Congress and the financial industry are perfectly willing to step on the necks of the very people whom they helped trip up in the first place.

 

The NYTimes architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp, presents an idea for rebuilding the World Trade Center site, simultaneously fixing another problem with lower Manhattan. Interesting reading.

 

From CNet:

Year-end surge to lift IT spending. A last-minute shopping spree as IT buyers scrape out their budgets will push computer technology spending beyond 2001 levels, predicts research firm IDC.

It’s news to me that IT buyers have budgets to scrape out. But what’s more important to me, frankly, is that IT sellers start to advertise again. Jeez, could magazines get any thinner?

 

When the World Trade Center was destroyed, a big part of downtown Manhattan’s mass transit hub went with it. The weekly broadsheet NY Observer fronts a story about options for rail in the rebuilding.

As with most infrastructure projects in New York, this one is proving difficult, with competing interests from different rail agencies, and divisions of the same agency. The core question is whether commuter rail should be extended from Midtown to Downtown, or should the city keep the current (and prior) system of requiring suburbanites to change to a subway — and pay an extra fare — to get Downtown?

One interesting option — and this is real inside baseball for rail foamers  — will bring a kind of hybrid subway/commuter rail from Long Island to Downtown:, using existing track:

… the plan would require LIRR commuters to switch at the Jamaica station for a special shuttle that would follow existing LIRR tracks to the Atlantic Avenue Terminal in downtown Brooklyn. From there, it would use a “drill track” fifth center track used only in emergenciesn the A line until just before the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop. There, it would move onto the F line and use the Rutgers Street Tunnel that currently runs between the York Street F stationhe last in Brooklynnd the East Broadway station on Manhattan龝 Lower East Side. From there, it could make any number of switches onto existing tracks into lower Manhattan…. Commuters from Long Island would make only one stop after boarding the shuttle in Jamaicat MetroTech in downtown Brooklynefore barreling towards lower Manhattan.

 

XM Satellite Radio will start carrying Playboy Radio on September 3. Playboy Radio?

 

A story in the Washington Post says administrators at American University are apparently using copyright as a means to suppress a campus gadfly‘s taping of a public lecture by Tipper Gore.

“It is a very technical charge to assert as the basis of campus punishment,” said First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams. “A lawyer can make a case that her copyright rights were violated, but it is a very unattractive case.”