The FDA banned PPA in early November."The thing is, they've known about this for years," said Ernest Cory, a lawyer in Birmingham, Alabama, who is fighting the case for Melissa White, who had a stroke after taking GSK's Contac Cold Capsules.The case is one of the first product liability suits against GSK and its subsidiaries SmithKline Beecham Corporation and SmithKline Beecham Consumer Healthcare, based in Philadelphia.Another action has been started in New Jersey by Debbra Vanhooser, who suffered a stroke after taking GSK's Contac 12 remedy.As well as those writs, class action suits are understood to be being filed in Washington DC, California, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey. A spokesman for GSK said he was aware that many legal actions were either in progress or likely to be launched shortly.The list of companies whose products contained PPA reads like a drug industry Who's Who. They include American Home Products, Schering-Plough, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Novartis and Pfizer.Contac Cold Capsules, Alka-Seltzer, Dimetapp Elixir, Halls Mentholyptus, Robitussin and Sinutab are some of the cold cures with PPA that are believed to cause health problems.GSK issued a press statement saying they were stopping manufacturing products with PPA in the US and Canada and warned consumers to read the label for PPA.Since the recall, lawyers across the US have been advertising for clients.. BT Cellnet's customers are turning their backs on using their mobile phones to access the internet, according to figures obtained by The Independent on Sunday. BT Cellnet's customers are turning their backs on using their mobile phones to access the internet, according to figures obtained by The Independent on Sunday.The revelation, ahead of the planned flotation of Cellnet's parent BT Wireless later this year, raises huge questions about the £4bn the embattled telecoms giant paid for its third-generation mobile licence. BT's new chairman, Sir Christopher Bland, has already stated that, with hindsight, BT should not have bid for the licence.Worries about third-generation mobiles are likely to overshadow the £20bn demerger of BT Wireless later this year.Analysts had hoped that internet access would drive growth at the mobile phone quartet which dominate the UK Vodafone, Orange, One2One and BT Cellnet.BT's internal figures reveal that Genie, the WAP mobile service operated by BT Wireless, has been hit by a massive slump in WAP usage in the first quarter of this year.Total visits to Genie's WAP internet site fell by over 60 per cent from 115 million in January to 40.5 million in April.Figures also reveal that the number of minutes BT's mobile users spent surfing the web dropped from 36 million in January to 12 million in April.Analysts said that the figures suggest the use of BT's WAP service has been largely supported by a three-month trial offered over Christmas and consumers have been reluctant to continue to use the services beyond this time.WAP has failed to live up to consumer expectations, being slow and expensive to use.Of the four main networks, BT Cellnet is seen as the chief proponent of WAP and mobile internet services. Earlier this year, it launched a big marketing push for Genie.
The company has also used its "Surf the BT Cellnet" tagline as a key part of its advertising in a bid to position itself as a cutting-edge operator.Critics say that BT launched WAP too soon and initially the service was slow to access, difficult to use, and offered limited information."In some respects BT Cellnet has been ahead of the other operators in terms of pushing WAP," said Louisa Greenacre, a telecoms analyst at ING Barings. "[Genie and BT Cellnet] were very active in terms of advertising and giving away free WAP phones but they've come in for a lot of criticism from people saying they over-hyped it. When people got the phones, they saw it wasn't like surfing the internet and were inevitably disappointed." A spokeswoman for Genie said: "We can't comment on unattributed information of this kind. Genie officially publishes its growth figures on a quarterly basis. The next scheduled date is June, quiet period permitting."One2One, Britain's smallest mobile operator, had 140,000 active WAP users in January this year, according to its latest figures, with Orange registering 188,000 active WAP users in April.Vodafone does not release figures for the number of active WAP users..
The daggers were drawn for Microsoft again recently, with a curious group called Procomp blasting its " " strategy as another attempt to monopolise the IT industry. The daggers were drawn for Microsoft again recently, with a curious group called Procomp blasting its " " strategy as another attempt to monopolise the IT industry. It may have a point, but what is beyond doubt is that is one of the most significant things to have happened in IT for a couple of decades, and at the same time the most confusing.At a recent conference in the US, Mark Frank, technical evangelist for the enterprise and partner group at Microsoft, gave an hour-long presentation mapping out. This was a boiled-down version of his usual three-hour stint, he said a comment that had some delegates fleeing in distress.But surely if anyone could explain the vision, it would be someone accustomed to presenting it to Microsoft's application partners the people who have to go out and actually build something that works on its platforms.It's not the front-end and overall vision that is the difficult bit. The range is Microsoft's attempt to take its client and server platforms and extend them to the internet.
