Category: Telecom

Xen Mendelsohn talks to Savka Andic, Research Associate at the Wireless World Forum, about the report:

Geographically speaking, China, India and Brazil will continue to be key markets for the next five years, all three of them ripe for growth. In the more mature markets, mobile content is still very much an emerging market for youth with a lot of potential. Operators and content providers are not yet finding the best ways to satisfy youth desire for mobile content, with the notable exceptions of youth MVNOs such as Ampd Mobile in the US and the East Asian operators. Ampd Mobiles success shows the considerable appetite which youth have for mobile content: an ARPU four times higher than the US/European average and content revenues nearly ten times higher than the US/European average.

The Mobile Technology Weblog points to a Reuters report which says that Nokia has sold 200 million units since 2003.

In the consumer electronic charts, Apple’s iPod reached the 100 million mark last month, Sony’s PlayStation 2 had sold 115 million by end-2006 and Nokia’s earlier top seller, the 3310/3330, sold 126 million units up to its retirement in 2005.

With sales of more than a million phones a week, the 1100’s volumes are comparable to all the phones made by the world’s fifth-largest vendor, LG Electronics, and not far behind Sony Ericsson, the fourth-largest player in the industry.

Business Week writes:

China’s mobile advertising market was valued at just US$17 million last year, well below the US$40 billion spent on ads in total.

A new kind of mobile advertising technology, however, could be the key that unlocks the country’s 461 million mobile phone screens to advertisers.

The technology uses two-dimensional barcodes, a more evolved cousin of the humble Universal Product Code found on groceries, to create an advertising channel with an aura of science-fiction.

The Mint has a story about mobile VAS companies going direct to consumers. There are a few quotes by me:

Rajesh Jain, founder and chief executive officer at software solutions provider Netcore Solutions Pvt. Ltd. said mobile content providers would find it difficult to go directly to the consumer because billing remains a problem and because of that, mobile phone operators will dominate.

Operators need to realize that the market can only expand when you let a thousand flowers bloom, he said. Only with an open publishing platform is made open, will you see the next jump.

In China, content providers get 80% and in Japan they get 90% of the revenue, noted Jain, whose company has its own mobile portal. These changes are still a pipe dream.

The Economist writes: “New wireless technologies will link not just people but lots of objects too. That will be tremendously useful; but getting there will be tricky.”

In years to come, wireless communications will increasingly become part of the fabric of everyday life. David Clark, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who helped develop the internet, believes that in 15 or 20 years’ time the network will need to accommodate a trillion devices, most of them wireless. To illustrate what that world might be like, Robert Poor, the co-founder of two wireless companies, Adozu and Ember, uses a modest example: light fixtures in buildings. If every one of them contained a small wireless node, people would not only be able to control the lighting more effectively but put them to many other uses too. If the nodes were programmed to serve as online smoke detectors, they could signal a fire as well as show its location. They could also act as a security system or provide internet connectivity to other things in the building.

Tomi Ahonen writes a letter to American executives to start SMSing. “I have the biggest key to your professional success, if you are an American executive today. Join Generation-C (Community Generation). Then the defining ability is not that you can Google, or set up a profile in Myspace or LinkeIn, or create an avatar in Second Life create user-generated content. No. Like we wrote in our book, the defining characteristic of Gen-C is addiction to SMS text messaging.”

mocoNews links to a post by Chetan Sharma and writes:

Chetan Sharma…chaired at the PAN-IIT event on Mobile Advertising – Technical Challenges and Business Opportunities. An interesting thing to look at is what the mobile advertising industry was forecast to be by 2005 by analysts at the turn of the centurybetween $890 million and $6.8 billion. In 2006 the actual mobile advertising market was $421 million. On the panel everyone was bullish about the industry (not surprising since theyre all in the industry, Infospace, Medio, Google, Voicebox) but they cautioned it will take time because the reach is not there yet.

A comparison was made with Japan: Japanese Mobile Advertising market: Clearly, Japan has had more experience with Mobile Advertising than rest of the markets. In 2006, the average revenue/user/year stood at around $4. For US, this figure was less than $1.

For all who get excited about the mobile numbers in India, take a look at China Mobile. From WSJ:

The listed arm of China’s largest mobile carrier by subscribers reported net profit of 17.56 billion yuan ($2.28 billion), up from 14.36 billion yuan in the year-earlier period. Revenue increased 20% to 77.71 billion yuan.
…
The company added 14.89 million subscribers in the first quarter this year, up from the 14.08 million users it added in the fourth quarter. It added 5.12 million subscribers in March, up from February’s addition of 4.91 million subscribers. China Mobile had 316.12 million subscribers as of the end of March.

Average revenue per user per month in the first quarter fell to 85 yuan from 93 yuan a year earlier.

The company’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization rose 14% to 40.72 billion yuan. Its margin for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, was 52.4%.

Engadget has a review: “Cost aside, this is one of the best smartphones and perhaps the best S60 device we’ve ever laid hands on, but let’s be honest, $750 can be a tough pill to swallow — especially considering we get nothing better than EDGE data.”

AllwaysOn writes:

John Doerr asserted the FCC will approve at least one new broadband network in the next year, wresting broadband power from the current duopoly of cable and telephone companies. His prediction was the second of the night at the Churchill Club’s ninth annual Top Ten Tech Trends Debate.

Doerr was not shy about the impact of this imminent approval: It could be the single most important thing we could do for economic development in the next ten years: get more broadband freely available. And if it’s ubiquitous and nearly free, he added, mobile devices “are really going to displace PCs.”