Junk mail is costing China at least $760m a year in lost productivity, according to estimates from the Internet Society of China (ISC).

Chinese surfers receive about 20 spam emails a week on average, and waste about 13 minutes checking and deleting the messages, the ISC announced at an anti-spam conference held in Beijing this week The comments were reported by the People's Daily.

The figures do not cover other potential problems caused by spam, such as losses due to misinformation or fraud.

The ISC also reported that it was receiving close to 30,000 complaints a month about spam, of which 78 per cent related to dubious advertising and 11 per cent to pornography.

A further six per cent of complaints were 'unclassified' because they were in languages other than Chinese - mainly English and Japanese.

China is generally ranked among the world's top two spam generating nations, with about one fifth of all spam being relayed through or generated by computers in the country.

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A German mobile provider will broadcast parts of this summer's soccer World Cup to mobile phones using a Korean-developed system.

The broadcasts will be among the first widespread uses of a Digital Media Broadcast (DMB) system outside South Korea. DMB provides live TV transmissions to mobile phones and similar portable devices.

Debitel AG, one of Germany's largest mobile phone carriers, will offer the broadcasts to its customers in the country's eight largest cities from June, Korean government sources told local media.

Only T-DMB capable phones will be able to receive the broadcasts. No information on pricing was available.

Debitel is Germany's third biggest mobile phone company, with over 10 million subscribers. The company plans to expand the DMB service country-wide later this year, and to subsidiaries in other countries including France.

Korean phone maker Samsung Electronics said that it has been testing a DMB-capable phone in France and Germany since January.

The SGH-P900 features a 2.2in LCD 240 x 320 pixel display which rotates 90 degrees to provide a suitable widescreen format for TV viewing. Similar phones are already on sale in South Korea.

LG Electronics is also reported to be supplying DMB phones to a German operator. Both companies demonstrated DMB products at CeBIT this year.

Research firm Datamonitor predicts that mobile video broadcasts will generate $5.5bn in revenue by 2009, from 69 million subscribers worldwide.

DMB faces competition for this market from several other standards, including DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld), and video streamed over 3G phone data connections.

DMB broadcasts can be transmitted by terrestrial antennae (T-DMB) or satellites (S-DMB). The broadcasts are one-way only and employ frequency bands and digital transmission standards separate from those used for mobile voice and data.