By
Administrator on November 5th, 2007
Posted in Other Interesting Articles, Mobile Technology | Comments Off
By Rafat Ali - Thu 01 Nov 2007 09:03 AM PST
After threatening to do so for the last few months, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) has launched its all-you-can-eat music service, a week before the UK iPhone debut from Apple. As we have reported before, it is working with music firm Omnifone that will make 1.2 million tracks available for 1.99 pounds a week flat rate rental through MusicStation. Besides the compatible phones the service is working on now, it will roll out on other handsets over the coming weeks including touch-screen devices and BlackBerry smartphones, reports Reuters.
The phones will be available from Vodafone and Phones4U shops. Users can create playlists and share songs with other MusicStation users on Vodafone network.
iPhone goes on sale in Britain on November 9 through its deal with O2 and Carphone Warehouse, while Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has also announced its online music store.
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By
Administrator on May 12th, 2006
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By Tim Lohman, CRN (Mobile & Wireless)
The digitalisation of music is having a profound impact on the way the music
industry, telcos and mobile handset manufacturers do business.
Speaking at a CeBIT (www.cebit.com) forum on the impact of digital music,
Sony’s Gavin Parry said that after initially being caught off guard by the
download rush, digital music was now becoming a major income stream.
For Sony BMG Australia (www.sonybmg.com), digital song and true tone ring
tone downloads were now accounting for seven to 10 percent of revenues, he
said. In the US this was around 15 percent and in Asia more like 25 percent.
ITunes, once perceived as a threat to the company because of its allegiance
to digital music, was now the company’s eight largest retailer, Parry said.
The way in which music companies now signed on and marketed their artists
was also changing with the move to digital music, he said.
“We now ask whether an artist is CD- or download- or ring tone-biased and
that changes how we launch an artist,” Perry said. “It’s no longer a matter
of putting two singles then an album out. Now we might work with a mobile
phone handset company on a promotion, and then put an album on the market.”
With ring tones now often outselling CD single sales in Australia, digital
music was also transforming the telecommunications market and providing new
opportunities as the local market reached 100 percent mobile phone
saturation, Optus director products and services, Chris Lane, said.
“We are implementing our ADSL2 network and have launched our 3G service so
downloading a music track now a realistic proposition,” he said.
Motorola (www.motorola.com) marketing head, Neil Stewart, said digital music
and the hardware demands it placed on phones provided a major opportunity
for vendors as well as telcos.
“Phones now have stereo Bluetooth, a couple of GB of storage via SD cards
and big screens - all of that in two years is a massive increase,” he said.
“If anyone has the right to claim the ultimate in mobility and music, it’s
the mobile phone industry.”
Optus’ (www.optus.com.au) Lane said telcos and record companies now needed
to analyse their digital music sales models in order to avoid customer bill
shock brought on by combined content and data costs.
“We’re not as good as we need to be [around billing] and that is something
we are looking at as it is in our interest to get people to use this stuff,”
he said.
One possible solution would be to look at subscription-based models used in
other markets, Lane said. This involved near unlimited content downloads,
for a fixed fee and period of use - usually a month.
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By
Administrator on May 10th, 2006
Posted in Mobile Technology | 1 Comment »
GPS on Junior: Parents Tracking Children Through Cell Phone
By Kelly Shermach
www.EcommerceTimes.com
Part of the ECT News Network
05/09/06 5:00 AM PT
The future of GPS technology in locating children is anybody’s guess, said Lisa Rountree, director of marketing and strategy for Disney Mobile, but the same type of platform could be used for a variety of things. Families may use GPS technology on mobile phones to find the closest pharmacy or emergency room while traveling.
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Global Positioning System technology exists in nearly all mobile phones, but is obscured from use on most except in emergency situations. Recently, however, the Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS) Latest News about Walt Disney Internet Group announced that its new family-oriented Disney Mobile service will enable parents to tap into GPS Latest News about global positioning system location services to determine their children’s whereabouts.
Disney Mobile, to become available in June, targets families with children ages 8 to 15. Its features put control in the hands of parents. Mom and Dad may curtail Junior’s text messaging activity, for instance, to prevent surprisingly expensive bills at month’s end. Parents also may restrict the hours their children use their Disney Mobile phones, the numbers they call and their monthly budget for cellular service.
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Parents can locate their children — or at least their children’s phones — on their own Disney Mobile phones, or online at a password-protected Disney site. Logging into the feature online yields not only an address and accuracy rating on the address — the basic information relayed through any inquiry — but also a map. Accuracy of GPS readings are enhanced, because that technology is combined with the more commonly used cell tower triangulation method of reading a location.
Deeper Penetration of Preteen Demographic
“We spend a lot of time talking to parents and families in general. There certainly looked like there was an opportunity in the mobile market,” Lisa Rountree, director of marketing and strategy for Disney Mobile, told the E-Commerce Times.
“Amongst teens, 60 percent are on their parents’ mobile plans — and even if they’re not, their parents tend to pay for their mobile use,” claimed JupiterResearch Senior Analyst in Wireless Julie Ask. Teens who pay for their own cell phones typically are at the older end of the demographic and come from lower-income households. That said, mobile service providers need to satisfy Mom and Dad before delighting youngsters.
Like it does with its primetime cable channel programming, the entertainment giant is focusing on the tween market — ages 10 to 14 — as its sweet spot for mobile phone services. “A phone is the most requested and most denied gift kids today ask for,” Rountree explained. “It’s a badge they desperately want; it’s the way they keep in touch with friends.”
Their parents desire a tool that lends safety, security and peace of mind. “A cell phone is a natural choice,” Rountree says. Unfortunately, every parent Disney interviewed had a horror story that likened giving a child a cell phone to giving them a credit card and sending them to the mall. In either scenario, adults dread receiving the account statement at the end of the month.
With Disney Mobile’s Family Monitor feature for budgeting, parents likely will be more comfortable trusting offspring with a mobile phone. In addition, they can choose to use or not use GPS to track their children.
Parents have long had the ability to call their kids to inquire about their location. However, Disney Mobile goes one step further by letting working moms and dads who leave home before their children board a bus for school find out whether they arrived there — even if their phones are stashed in lockers. It can also help harried parents find the soccer field where their youngsters are practicing lest they show up across town only to find an empty green.
Mapping GPS Use Into the Future
Still, JupiterResearch’s Ask cautioned that GPS technology is active only when a phone is turned on and remembered by its child owner. There’s no substitute for mutual trust between a parent and child, and a privacy-wary teen can disable the GPS feature on a mobile phone or conveniently leave the device at school while skipping a couple of classes mid-day. For parents who have experienced a breakdown in healthy communications at home, Disney Mobile’s Family Locator won’t work miracles. Still, “for a lot of parents, it’s enough to know ‘I can call my kids and they’ll answer the phone,’” she said.
While Disney Mobile is the first cellular phone service to turn GPS technology into a consumer-controlled tool and tout the capability in its marketing efforts, other mobile communications companies aren’t far behind. “We are looking into this kind of service,” David Clevenger, executive director of public affairs for Verizon Wireless, told the E-Commerce Times. “It could serve as a good tool for parents.”
The future of GPS technology in locating children is anybody’s guess, Rountree said, but the same type of platform could be used for a variety of things. Families may use GPS technology on mobile phones to find the closest pharmacy or emergency room while traveling.
“It’s never going to be foolproof,” said Ask. “It’s more a peace-of-mind issue.”
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Administrator on May 5th, 2006
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Ajaxian » Mobile
Friday, April 7th, 2006
Ajax to Make Mobile Web 2.0 a Reality?
Category: AjaxView the technorati tag: Ajax, MobileView the technorati tag: Mobile
Mobile applications, while getting much better, have been floundering on the edge of things (besides the ones that just push out content like ringtones and games, of course), seem bit too slow for most of us fast-paced, short attention spanned individuals. Sure, there are some exceptions out there, but on the whole, there’s just not that much appeal. Fortunately, it seems like things might be turning around - and it’s thanks to Ajax.
Ajit Jaokar writes in his new article on the LinuxWorld Magazine site that Ajax just might be the “hallmark of mobile Web 2.0″.
Recently, Opera announced the availability of AJAX on mobile devices through their browser. Considering the popularity of Opera in the browser market (especially in the mobile browser market), this announcement is indeed very significant. Having been involved in creating mobile services for a few years now, I believe AJAX will replace both Java ME and XHTML as the platform of choice for developing mobile applications.
He goes on to back that statement up with comments that he knows “web 2.0 mobile” is more than just Ajax on a cellphone, but also that the momentum behind Ajax development combined with a current lack of simple, easy to use development methods could drive Ajax up in the ranks even faster.
He compares Ajax to other technologies currently being used to develop mobile applications (like Java ME and XHTML), and notes three problems that, no matter the platform, you’ll still see when developing these apps. It’s his opinion, thought, that Ajax will eventually make its move and overtake the slower, “seriously flawed” model that the Java ME camps have followed up until now.
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By
Administrator on January 27th, 2006
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bluepulse - the write once, play anywhere mobile platform. at MobHappy
bluepulse - the write once, play anywhere mobile platform.
by Oliver Starr on January 22nd, 2006 in Analysis, Mobile techie stuff, New launches
bluepulse logobluepulse, a product of Bluepulse Pty. Ltd in Sydney, Australia may just be the first company to have “cracked the code? to one of the single most significant and confounding problems faced by mobile developers, carriers, handset manufacturers and most significantly end-users.
The company has developed a proprietary technology platform called OADP (Open Application Delivery Platform) which when combined with their SPOT (Small Portable Object Technology), the company claims (and my experience so far as well as that of a number of people besides myself) confirm that their bold claim, that they’ve overcome the barriers of
* compatibility
* connectivity
* billing
* distribution
IS TRUE.
In the real world this means that regardless of phone or carrier, you can download their bluepulse software platform, install a few widgets that are available either free, can be developed by the end user or professional developers or purchased, and in just a few moments experience a substantially similar experience as any other user on any other phone and any other network.
I previously blogged about bluepulse over at my other blog, MobileCrunch where I suggested that we may be seeing the first giant application success of Mobile 2.0. Let me go one further. If what I’ve experienced and what’s been reported to me bears out to be true over some time, what we’re really seeing is the kind of essential technology development that will make Mobile 2.0 possible! Bold words to be sure, but until the barriers come down and users everywhere can have a common experience regardless of where they are or what phone or carrier they have we’ll never see the sort of mass adoption and use that we enjoy with the PC.
In fact, this is a topic that I think bears much greater analysis and discussion; the disparity in sameness that is a huge barrier to global adoption. As much as the IEEE and other standards bodies spend bickering over standardization, why is it that as much as I know about phones, I have to poke around like a newbie every time someone hands me a phone I’ve never seen before? You’d think with the great reduction in number of entry methods on a typical phone (a keypad vs. a keyboard) it would be simple enough to arrive at some basic standards that hold true no matter what the phone.
Think about this for a moment. When you log on to a PC there are some basic steps that are always the same no matter what. You log in, either click a desktop shortcut or the “start? button on your taskbar and from there you activate programs and go about your business. With a phone about the only standards are that you dial numbers and hit send. For mobile data the rules go out the window. This is why bluepulse excites me so much. I put it on several phones from the high end Motorola A1000 smartphone to the Nokia N90 to the Nokia 6820 with its brilliant (but tiny) screen. Although the display real estate is really different the display itself and the operation of the program and the widgets I’ve installed.
Although not all the widgets are free there are enough that you can get a real feel for the application, particularly since it includes a chat client that consolidates AIM, Yahoo, MSN and ICQ into one interface (think Meebo for phones as Mike Arrington at TechCrunch put it).
The one complaint I have relates to pricing of the widgets that are not free. Fees are billed in credits which you can buy with a credit card or (if you’re in Australia) via SMS. The problem is that it’s a little confusing keeping track of what you’re really being charged. If I buy 2000 credits, which is apparently the smallest increment I can buy (and which costs $25) and a widget is 8 credits a day how many days will it take to use up my credits? Of course the answer is 2000/8 which equals 250 (days), but I would suggest that a simple conversion is done that provides end users with some additional information to include cost per credit in your local currency ($25/2000 = $ 0.125 per widget) and your daily spend is calculated based upon the total pulse credits required for your widgets times whatever your cost per pulse credit happens to be. In other words, for US a credit is one and a quarter cents so 8 credits equal 10 cents. Thus, if my daily spend is 8 credits, I’m spending 10 cents per day. I think making this all transparent would be very useful as people gain a lot of comfort from seeing that what they’re buying is only a few pennies. Clarity brings confidence and confidence is what supports purchases.
Anyway, although I’d blogged this before, I felt that this was something too important to overlook and since I don’t know which Mobhappy readers also check out MobileCrunch, I though it would be a good idea to post this here too. I’d deeply appreciate feedback from readers on this too. If you’ve tried bluepulse could you please comment your experience along with your carrier and your phone? I’m trying to get an idea of just how far this “universal compatibility extends. Also, do tell what widgets you’ve tried especially if you’re using some beyond their free stack. Thanks.
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Administrator on January 1st, 1970
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At a WiMAX Forum Plenary today [7/13/05] and tomorrow in Vancouver, PanAmSat will use WiMAX to…read more…
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