Mobile Connections: Computers and Internet

Mobile Data Gaining Ground

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 06:30:06 GMT

Yesterday during it's 2nd quarter earnings, Verizon Communications announced 45.3% YoY wireless data growth, while its overall earnings grow 11.8% YoY to reach $12.1 billion. Its services revenue increased 11.6% to $10.5 billion as a result of new subscribers and demand for data services. It added 1.5 million net subscribers (almost all postpaid) during this period. Additionally Verizon Wireless increased its ARPU 0.9% YoY to $51.53. The interesting piece is that the total data ARPU actually grow 31.3% which show not only new customers signing up for data services, existing customers are either subscribing to data or upgrading their current data bundles. Verizon Wireless reported that its retail data customer base reached 49.6 million (~75% of its 68.7 million subscriber base)

A couple of weeks ago AT&T posted similarly strong results, 30% YoY increase in Net Income, Wireless data revenue and services both grew 52% YoY. It's wireless data revenue reach $2.5billion and the smartphone penetration increased from 8% to 18% over the year (iPhone sales is a major contributor to this growth).

According to some estimates ~80% of phones shipped in 2007 are capable of data services. 60% of Verizon phones are 3G devices. Almost all of them are now pre-configured for data access. The phone user can start using it anytime, however it they want better pricing they need to subscribe to a data bundle.
With such high percentage of data capable devices in the market, the opportunity is ripe for application developers to build applications and services that can be delivered directly to the users mobile devices without requiring blessings from the Mobile operators. The Mobile Operators should be happy to collect $$$ from the upgrades and new subscriptions of data services. As long as they continue to not be too greedy, this is a WIN-WIN-WIN situation.

Future Posts

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 07:43:10 GMT

Going Forward I am going to post all my new blogs posts at http://mobileconnections.blogspot.com

Please visit there to see what I have to say and share your views with me.

Thanks in advance for visiting MobileConnections and apologies for any inconvenience.

Happy New Year

Unified Communication and Mobile Devices

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 07:20:45 GMT

In November Avaya announced an iPhone version of its one-X Mobile client which allows iPhone to connect to Avaya IP PBX as a node. Once the iPhone becomes a node it gains access to PBX functions like conferencing, abbreviated dialing (3, 4-digit) and corporate voicemail. Through one-X Mobile client the iPhone essentially assumes the personality of the desktop phone including its Caller ID. Therefore, any call placed from the iPhone once it is connected to the PBX will display the caller ID of the desktop phone to the person being called and the iPhone can receive calls placed to the desk extension.

One-X Mobile client is already available for Palm Treos, Java WAP-based feature phones. Avaya also announced the client for RIM’s Blackberry devices and plans to have clients available for Symbian and Windows Mobile devices in 2008. For the Nokia E-series phones there is also a Dual-Mode client allows the Wi-Fi interface for voice connection while inside the corporate network and provides a handover between GSM and Wi-Fi. This capability is not available for other devices.

With this offering Avaya provide a very nice Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) story. By bridging mobile devices to a desktop phone provides a better single-number vision and bring another key device into the folds of the Unified Communications. I think it is time for speak up if it wants to be a player in Unified Communication especially after the recent announced from Microsoft’s OCS 2007.

Your Phone as Boarding Pass @ an Airlines Near You

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:38:08 GMT

Continental Airline is the first US airline to announce a pilot program for using the cell phone or a PDA as boarding passes. Air Canada, Spanair and serveral other airlines around the world are already offering it for some time. Continental is piloting it at the Houston Airport. In US the TSA will scan the 2-D bar code directly from your mobile device. This is the same barcode that you see when you print your boarding pass at home and many of the airlines today scan it at the gate. The passengers will be required to show a valid photo ID, which I am not sure why, ID is not required if I print the pass at home. Don't worry if you forget your phone home or if the battery dies, you can alway re-print a copy from the Kiosk at the airport. I certianly have printed my boarding pass at home and left it there a few times :-).

At this point, there are some limitation, for example, a famliy traveling together will not be able to use it, unless everyone in the family has their own cell phone. Based on the success of these pilots, Continental Airlines will determine its plans for extention and hopfully other airlines will follow.

I am looking forward to seeing this offered at the Oakland airport, where I fly out of more often that I would like to. Then I can check in while driving to the airport and talking on the phone. But atleast, I don't forget my phone home, unlike my printed boarding pass.

PS. The 2-D bar code stores the passenger's name and flight information in an encrypted format, the authenticity of the bar code is confirmed at the time of scanning.

Ovi Starting To Get Personal

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:19:42 GMT

Also this week Nokia further mapped out the plans for Ovi. Ovie, meaning 'door' in Finnish. It started as a service to provide navigation, music, and games through a WAP portal on mobile devices. Going forward, Ovi deliver an integrated experience to users by providing easily access to all their content; social networks, synchronised contact lists through a dashboard from mobiles, PC, and web. The goal is to provide a common user interface that provides consistency and simplicity. These services will be available through 2008 and no specific dates are available yet. This is further clarifies Nokia's intention to compete with Apple and possibly others, who are seeking to be the comsumer's default personal information and entertainment portal.

The implications from Nokia's success can be significant, today Nokia has approxmately 1 billion customers. This can create a significant barrier for others to cross. Nokia is talking about partnering with operators and OEMS to deliver the proposition of Ovi. Nokia certianly has the global reach and financial backing to make this a success story and take market leadership.

Nokia Comes With Music

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:47:47 GMT

This week Nokia announed that by mid 2008 when people buy a Nokia mobile device they will recieve unlimited access to millions of songs and music free for 12 months. This new service is called "Nokia Comes With Music". Nokia's is partnering with Universal Music International, who will offer access to their entire catalogue to Nokia customers outside of the US. Users will be able to download and store as many tracks as they want from the catalogue during the 12 month initial service period. After twelve months the user can continue to gain access to the service, but will have to pay a subscription. However, the tracks they have downloaded during the initial trials period of 12 months will remain theirs.

This is an acknowledgment of the success of Apple tying music to iPhone is success. Nokia is clearly aiming to provide an alternative to iTunes. It smells like Nokia is planning to go head-to-head with Apple. Lets see what else gets announced at Nokia World 2007.

Amazon Moving the Technology of Book Forward

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:09:15 GMT

Yesterday Amazon.com announced the debut of Amazon Kindle, a mobile book reader device. Not that books were ever not mobile, but carrying 200 book with you all the time could be a challange. That is how many books a Kindel can hold. Additionally it has a built-in dictionary with a vocabulary of 250,000 words and definitition. You can also subscribe to on-line newspapers and blogs. Amazon claims that the screen has a paper like display to create an experience similar to reading a book. Kindle weighs 10.3 ounces at costs $399. Amazon is backing the offering with a library of 90,000 books that can be downloaded and each is priced @ $9.99, regardless of the print price of the book.

The device has a EV-DO interface, which provides a high speed wireless access to the on-line store of the books, newpapers, and blogs, for over-the-air download. EV-DO data services are provided in partnership with Sprint, however, the users don't need to pay for the wireless access, it is available as part of the device price. The benefit of EV-DO is that you don't need hotspots to get on-line access. However subscription to on-line newspapers is required.

Amazon is taking on the long estabilished book and paper publishing houses and venturing to change old habits of reading a physical book. Books have not been around for ever, but none of us remeber stone of clay tablets or papyrus parchments. It is a bold move forward and I personally see some benefits of having a Kindle. I have to admit my vocabulary is not as good as I think and I can certianly benefit for the built-in dictionary.

Nokia Ovi growing legs

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:54:52 GMT

Vodafone and Nokia announced an agreement to launch suite of integrated Vodafone services and Nokia Ovi Services on a range of 3G Nokia handsets. This is a big win for Nokia's Ovi given the speculations that launching Ovi Nokia will alienate its partner operators. The two companies also agreed that the new handsets will have two music services; one from Vodafone and another from Nokia.

If this joint offering is successful, one can expect that the consumers will start to have a broader choice of services. However, right now the agreement is exclusive to Vodafone. But still better that having services only from Vodafone. Once such a mashup of services expands where other operator services from Orange, Telefonica's, ATT, and Verizon are also integrated with services from Window Live and Yahoo's services, the potential of Web 2.0 will emerge. It may be too optimistic of me to soon. But it never hurts to dream big.

iPhone - For Business E-mail?

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 04:23:16 GMT

Last June Apple launched its iPhone, one of the most successful mobile devices. iPhone is combination of a cell phone, a media player, and a web browser and with a first to-market a multi-touch user interface. Apple has already sold over 2 million of these phone in US alone. With success like this, Apple was able to successfully put to rest an old of "one device or multiple devices, best of breed, for individual function". Sony tried it with it's walkman phone, but did not get much traction. Now we see a number of phone vendors trying to compete with Apple.

Now when Apple launched iPhone, it was pretty clear that it was going to be a consumer device and business users or professionals are not the target. I think, I read it as part of the announcement. What is Apple thinking now?

Look at their latest iPhone campaign, the one about the airline pilot and the one about Ken, the guys producing a play "My first time" how by using the iPhone he is a better business man.

I bet, they are starting targeting the business users. This is one of the Apple's trick that Apple uses very successfully. "Keep the expectations low and over deliver." It has worked for Apple many time successfully.

Synchronica announced a free trail to get push e-mail on your iPhone for up to 60 days. With this service users can get their business Microsoft Exchange e-mail on their iPhone. Sweet....

Apple is one of the very few companies that knows that art of managing expectations. We'll keep an eye open for where Apple goes next with iPhone.

My Music in the Cloud

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 06:53:26 GMT

Last week AT&T announced it will make the Napster Inc’s extensive music catalogue available for download starting next month. According to the announcement a single song will cost $1.99 or $7.49 any five songs per month. With this announcement AT&T hopes to better compete with Verizon’s Vcast (2 million song catalogue) and Sprint Nextel.

It is expected that this new offering will not work with all the AT&T mobile devices, for example if Apple’s iPhone will be support this service. iPhone is uses Apple’s own iTunes. Note that iTunes does not allow iPhones to directly download the music to the phone. It requires the phone to be connected to the PC, where the music is download from iTunes whereas, all the services mentioned above allow direct download to the phone and also allows to download a second copy to the PC.

These are a new breed of services on the phones as they get more powerful and have larger on-board storage capacity. However, there are still a few unresolved issues; music copyrights, limited catalogue, user interface complexity, and bandwidth. I expect that will fix it self sooner than later (note, I did not say sooner that we think).

Expect to see more of the personal media showing up on a mobile device near you.

Better Management for Windows Mobile Devices

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 18:44:05 GMT

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer opened CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment show on 23^rd of October and announced the company’s new mobile device management platform, Microsoft System Center for Mobile Device Manager (MDM) 2008. MDM allows enterprises to manage Windows Mobile devices and roll out applications to the phones. The system will also allow employees to access company data across the corporate firewalls. The vision is to enable IT to easily and safely manage Windows Mobile phones like other corporate systems such as laptops, desktops and servers. MDM will be available in mid 2008.

This is a significant step to securing the corporate environment and including the mobile devices as managed assets. With MDM, IT managers will be able to provision the devices over-the-air, apply updates and in case to loss or theft, lock down or wipe the devices. The mobile phone users will be able to access the corporate networks through virtual private network (VPN). See details features at Microsoft.com.

Today there are approximately 140 different smart phones that run on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system. Last fiscal year Microsoft sold about 11 million Windows Mobile Devices, with the forecast to sell 20 million this fiscal year, which will end in June 2008.

Other companies are also looking at solving the same problem. Last month Hewlett-Packard announced their Enterprise Mobility Suite, to manage mobile devices. Hewlett-Packard closed the acquisition of Bitphone, a Mobile Device Management company, last February. Research In Motion, with its BlackBerry Enterprise Service provides the similar services for its BlackBerry Devices. Motorola also announced last June Good Mobile Messaging 5 for remote management of devices. There are smaller companies like Synchronica and Perlogo etc. that are looking at solving the same problems.

There is a shortcoming with Microsoft’s new MDM, it supports only Windows Mobile Devices and companies do not standardize on one type of mobile devices. In majority of the cases, the user selects devices of their choice. However, Microsoft executives left the door open for possibility of managing non-Windows Mobile devices in future.

Open Phone OS

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:05:21 GMT

On October 15, Motorola announced agreement to acquire 50% stake in UI Holding BV, currently wholly owned by Sony Ericsson. UI holding BV is the parent company of UIQ Technology AB. Under the agreement, both Motorola and Sony Ericsson will work together to to develop the UIQ open interface platform. Sony had acquired UIQ earlier this year from Symbian LTD. RAZR handsets was a great success for Motorola for a ground breaking phone design. But some estimates RAZR sold over 50 million units. However, it is no secret that the user interface was simply horrible. With this new partnership announced, the expectation is the Motorola will push the open platform model phone and expect to gain enhancements in its user interface. Possibly to better compete with iPhone, the new standard in mobile device user interface.

UIQ Technology licenses the UIQ open user interface and development platform to mobile phone vendors around the world. This platform is based on Symbian and is already used by many Sony Ericsson phone, but has not been adopted by major phone vendors like Nokia, Symbian or Microsoft. UIQ launched the first touch-screen uder interface for phones in 2002, a little known fact, perhaps it was too far ahead of its time.

Motorola and Sony Ericsson are communicating their commitment to further advancing UIQ as a strong, independent cross-vendor user interface for smart phones and media-centric phones. They also agreed that UIQ will be vendor and chipset independent. Both the company said they will increase their corporation and support for the UIQ developer program as well.

"This is an important transaction that demonstrates the increasing importance of open operating systems for all handset vendors. By working together in a strong, mutually beneficial partnership, hand-set vendors can reduce development costs and help operators launch more consistent services with greater efficiency," remarked Miles Flint, President of Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications.

Is it possibly that this is a leading indicator for Mobile OS market consolidation. But certainly a positive, at least we will see some improvement in Motorola’s mobile User Interface. We will keep our eyes and ears open for the three finalists.

Nokia Show the Door

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:15:20 GMT

Today Nokia revealed its new online multimedia strategy and as also unveiled a range of new phones. Ovi (Finnish word for door) is Nokia's new brand for online gaming, social networking, mapping, and music. The portal, also named Ovi, will be open to other vendors and will be accessible from a mobile phone or a PC. With this announcement, Nokia is clearly moving into tying services to devices and bypassing the mobile operators. I like that, “Open Web Access.” The first service is expected to be available in November and will be the updated version of Nokia's mobile gaming platform, N-Gage Arena, currently works only with the company's N-Gage mobile game consoles, but will soon work with other Nokia devices too. Another service could be a mapping service. It remains to be seen how the operators respond to this. Either they will work out a revenue sharing model with Nokia or, in case that does not work, they may block Nokia’s services. A mutually acceptable deal will be good for all; Nokia, Operators, and the users of the services.

Of the phones announced today I particularly found is the NEW N95 to be interesting. N95 has 8GB of internal memory (same as the high-end iPhone) for games and music. However, the version introduced in North America has much lower memory (160MB). They are also highlighting e-mail, but I believe that is basic e-mail and not business class e-mail similar to Window Mobile Devices and Blackberry. A couple of interesting features of this phone are that high quality large screen for video with the large amount of internal memory and a high pixel (5M) camera, which can support up to 30 frames per second video capture and a larger screen (2.8”) which QVGA resolution. Nokia also showed integration with online photo storage and sharing services like Flickr. Of course it has an integrated GPS with location based search, which is certainly very interesting, which I expect will be available in the next version of iphone.