New Public Phones More Than Just Talk
New Yorkers and people just passing through can now go to a street corner kiosk to surf the Internet, check e-mails or have their photo taken by a Web cam, city officials announced yesterday.
New Public Phones More Than Just Talk
At 25 kiosks, folks can e-mail, surf Web, take photos
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By Shaya Mohajer
STAFF WRITER
November 17, 2003
New Yorkers and people just passing through can now go to a street corner kiosk to surf the Internet, check e-mails or have their photo taken by a Web cam, city officials announced yesterday.
The cost to the consumer: 25 cents a minute for Internet and e-mail use; 50 cents to have a digital photo captured by the high-tech telephone booth's Web cam and sent via e-mail; and $1 to create and send a video e-mail.
Twenty-five high-tech phone booths have been set up in Manhattan, each equipped with a keyboard, tracking ball, touch-screen and a Web cam in addition to a regular old telephone (at 25 cents for three minutes for local calls).
Coins or credit cards are both accepted.
"I think it's a great thing and very easy to use," said Mar Figuera, 37, who sent her parents in Barcelona an e-mail message with a video showing her blowing a kiss from a street corner booth at 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue - one of the 25 TCC Teleplex kiosks announced yesterday by the telephone company's president Dennis Novick as well as the city's commissioner of information technology and telecommunications, Gino Mencini.
The ATM-like booths, approved under a city franchise agreement, allow users to go on line to government or tourist web sites (www.nyc.gov or www.nycvisit.com) free of charge, officials said.
The British company Marconi Interactive Systems developed the Web phone booth technology and has sold such kiosks to telephone companies worldwide, from Bangkok to Rome. New York is the first major city to try them, with local officials promising more if they prove popular.
"If you can't remember where a particular restaurant is, or if you're looking for a festival or something to do in the city, you can look up guides, restaurant reviews, movie trailers or retrieve an e-mail," said Novick.
Mencini said the new phone booths "are going to be great for tourism and great for New Yorkers." According to Novick, ordinary pay phones in New York City are used 250,000 times a day, a sharp decline from the days before cell phones. These days, half of New Yorkers now own cell phones, he said.
"During the blackout this past year, for two days, two things were working in New York City: flashlights and pay phones," Novick said.
Posted by Craig at November 18, 2003 12:05 AM