Legion of Angels News Archive

It’s becoming a rite of summer: as the mercury rises, Apple introduces a new version of its iPhone. And as the new-and-improved device went on sale last week, campers once again lined the sidewalk in midtown Manhattan. The new iPhone features faster Web browsing, clearer audio and basic GPS functions; so far, reviews have been mostly positive. But as early adopters clamor for this latest high-tech status symbol, let us consider the group at the other end of the wireless bell curve: the one in seven Americans who still don’t have a cell phone.

According to the latest data, the U.S. “adoption rate” for mobile phones stands at 85 percent. That’s higher than the percentage of Americans who have DVD players (84 percent), home PCs (80 percent), digital cameras (69 percent) or MP3 players (40 percent), according to the Nielsen Co. “The concept that within my lifetime we’d have the kind of penetration we have today is unimaginable,” says Martin Cooper, 79, the former Motorola researcher who invented the portable cell phone in 1973. But for wireless providers, it’s a mixed blessing. With fewer virgin customers to bring online, the industry’s subscriber base grew by just 8.8 percent in 2007. To keep revenues rising, the big carriers are focused mostly on stealing each others’ existing customers and getting mobile users to spend more on ringtones, streaming music and other add-ons. But a handful of start-ups are aggressively pursing wireless holdouts. The bulk of the un-mobile fall into three groups, says senior analyst Chris Collins of Yankee Group: children, the elderly and the credit-challenged. (There’s actually a fourth group, prison inmates, but companies haven’t yet found a way to target that elusive niche.)

Lots of parents have mixed feelings about kids’ having phones, but they’re showing up in school backpacks at earlier ages. By some estimates, half the country’s 28 million 8- to 14-year-olds already have handsets of their own. To attract these youngsters, big carriers all offer discounted “family plans,” but lately smaller companies have tried to sell phones and service plans designed specifically for kids. Among the latest entries is one from a company called kajeet. Its phones allow parents to set limits on calls or texts; remotely turn off the device during school hours, or block calls or texts from bullies. To prevent surprise $300 monthly bills, kajeet features a pay-in-advance system, with a basic charge of $10 a month and 10 cents per minute. CEO Daniel Neal says consumers are becoming more averse to the “hidden gotchas”—cancellation fees, service fees and random charges—found in typical wireless plans. Neal believes 80 percent of the 8-to-14 crowd will have a phone within three years.

Fear of runaway bills is a hurdle for elderly consumers, too. But more of them (and their adult children) are becoming convinced it’s good to have a phone handy for emergencies. To appeal to this crowd, last year Jitterbug began selling a $147 phone with an uncluttered keyboard, a huge display and other elder-friendly features (including a $15-per-month, 30-minute rate plan). It has no camera or text messaging, and if a user gets confused while making a call, he can hit zero and ask an operator to connect him to someone on his contact list. Jitterbug hopes the phones may have appeal beyond the elderly: in a May survey it commissioned, 32 percent of mobile subscribers said their current phone has more features than they know how to use. “Simplicity is really the cornerstone of our business,” says cofounder Arlene Harris.

For consumers without bank accounts or credit scores—the third big group of cell-phone holdouts—prepaid phones have long offered an alternative to traditional wireless contracts. Lately, per-minute charges have come down from 35 cents to 10 cents, and companies have offered a better variety of phones; as a result, prepaid phones have been the fastest-growing segment of the cell business. Even so, companies are trying new ways to make them appealing. Trumpet Mobile, which began selling prepaid phones in Radio Shack stores last year, gives customers a phone, a prepaid debit card and the ability to send money via mobile phone using Western Union. Trumpet hopes its service becomes popular among Latino immigrants, who are already using it to send money to relatives overseas.

While these start-ups are long on imagination, so far none will say exactly how many customers they’ve signed up. That leads observers to believe their numbers are low and their odds of survival are unclear. Indeed, one reason big wireless companies haven’t chased the holdouts more aggressively is that they aren’t likely to spend $49 per month—the amount of the average U.S. mobile customer’s bill—making them only marginally profitable (if not unprofitable). And while parts of Europe and Asia feature wireless penetration rates above 100 percent (thanks to people who carry multiple phones), no one is ready to bet when America may hit the magic number, partly because our country still has rural areas with poor coverage. “There is some argument that it will never get there—that it will never be cost-effective,” says Richard Siber, a veteran industry consultant. So even as the early adopters keep buying phones full of new tricks, there will remain at least a smattering of folks who can’t be blamed for the obnoxious ringtones that have become so much a part of life in our wireless age.

Source — Newsweek

For 41 hours, he stood on the sidewalk.

He was just 17 years old, a freshman at Boston University, and he didn’t know what else to do. A jury in New York had just acquitted the four police officers whose 41 bullets had killed an unarmed Guinean immigrant named Amadou Diallo.

So Joshua DuBois wrote “NO MORE” on a placard, planted himself on an expanse of pavement along Commonwealth Avenue, in front of a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr., and stood there - 41 hours for 41 shots.

“I was completely disconnected from social activism, or the world around me - I was almost devoid of a social consciousness before then,” DuBois said. “But I was struck by the injustice. So I stood in the middle of Marsh Plaza with a sign and tried to talk to whoever came by.”

That vigil - which the politic DuBois now says he thinks of as a listening session and not a protest - marked the beginning of a journey for DuBois that has now taken him, at the age of 25, to the post of religious affairs director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

DuBois, who says he found his religious and political voice while a student in Boston, heads what has become the most intensive outreach effort by a Democratic candidate to people of faith in a nation where the most frequent worshipers also tend to be Republican. He oversees a staff of four, as well as six interns, who have organized about 200 town hall meetings about faith and now are launching a series of smaller house parties to discuss values and the campaign.

“I think you’re going to see a lot of folks who have never voted for a Democrat before really give Senator Obama a hard look,” DuBois said. “We don’t expect to outright win the evangelical vote - for some his positions are a nonstarter, and we respect that - but there are a whole bunch of others who may disagree with him on some tough issues, but agree on others and say, ‘I’m going to vote for him.’ ”

Dubois has had a hand in numerous efforts to reach out to the faith community - he pulled together Obama’s recent meeting with conservative evangelical leaders, for example. His shop also oversees a faith portion of the Obama website where staff members blog about faith-related developments, and provides resources for a large number of faith-oriented campaign groups such as Utah Catholics for Obama. And, DuBois said, his group also counsels church officials on how to comply with tax regulations limiting their political activities.

“We’re very upfront - we’re a campaign, and we want you to vote for Senator Obama - but we’re not going to try to co-opt religion, we’re not going to try to use religion to divide folks, we’re not going to steal church directories to call people to vote,” he said.

DuBois was born in Bar Harbor, Maine, and spent his first few years in Cambridge, but was raised in Nashville, which he considers his hometown, and then in Xenia, Ohio, where he attended high school. His stepfather is an itinerant minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He chose BU, he said, because “I wanted to see the world - to go to a bigger city - and BU stuck out as a cosmopolitan campus in the middle of a downtown area.”

During his vigil on the plaza, among those who stopped by to talk was Eugene Schneeberg, a fellow student at BU, who invited DuBois to church. “Initially, I was not interested in reintegrating myself in a Christian community, because I figured I knew it all, growing up in the church,” DuBois said. “But what I didn’t really know was how to have a personal relationship with Jesus.”

DuBois wound up joining Schneeberg’s congregation, Calvary Praise & Worship Center, a tiny evangelical congregation in Cambridge affiliated with the United Pentecostal Council of the Assemblies of God, a small, predominantly African-American denomination. DuBois, although just a teenager, started preaching when the pastor was away and was named an associate pastor. He and Schneeberg also led Bible study at a halfway house, and some days they would walk along Massachusetts Avenue, offering pizza and conversation to homeless folks along the way.

“He was just 18 or 19, but his wisdom belied his age,” said the Rev. Warren F. Collins, pastor of the church.

DuBois graduated cum laude from BU in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. From BU, he went to Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and National Affairs, where he earned a master’s degree in public affairs in 2005. He then enrolled in the part-time program at Georgetown University Law School, but he left for the campaign.

At the same time, he was quickly garnering experience in politics, as an aide to Representative Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, and then as a fellow in the office of Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York.

He first encountered Obama on television - DuBois was at a restaurant in Washington when he saw Obama’s keynote speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston - and he was struck in particular by one Obama line, “We worship an awesome God in the Blue States.”

“I had been struggling with whether I should go into ministry or politics, and I felt that God was leading me to find a way to do both, but I didn’t know any politician that got that intersection right,” DuBois said. “That phrase jarred me.”

DuBois decided he wanted to work for Obama, then a candidate for the US Senate. He wrote to Obama’s campaign manager and got a form rejection. After Obama arrived in Washington, DuBois twice drove to his office but failed to get a job interview. After a third appeal, Obama hired him as a Senate aide. Part of his job was addressing faith issues.

Adam Taylor, the senior political director at Sojourners, an evangelical antipoverty organization, said DuBois became “part of a loose network of progressive-minded Christians” who have been meeting in Washington for the past few years.

Taylor said that although DuBois grew up in the black church, whose adherents have traditionally voted for Democrats, he has proved deft at reaching out to “parts of the electorate that were almost written off by Democrats for decades, particularly white evangelicals and white Catholics.”

DuBois’s counterpart in the Hillary Clinton campaign, Burns Strider, said DuBois has done well communicating with religious voters for the Obama campaign.

“He’s a young guy, but folks should not be fooled by that,” Strider said. “After the Kerry-Bush race, when a handful of us were taking up the cause of expanding the faith conversation in the Democratic Party, Joshua was one of those with us. He has a lot of knowledge and toughness, is really focused on his job, and does it quite well.”

Source — The Boston Globe