Mobile Content & Applications
JIL’s slow progress doesn’t bode well for WAC
The Wholesale Applications Community is keeping up with the timeline it announced back in May and was registered as a limited company in the UK on July 1, as well as appointed a board of directors featuring an impressive array of top executives from leading carriers from different corners of the world. It has also fleshed out plans for its merger with JIL – a similar initiative launched in April 2008 by a select clique of operators; namely China Mobile, Softbank Mobile, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone. JIL will be fully subsumed into WAC by the end of September, Michael O’Hara, chief marketing officer at the operator association the GSMA, told journalists and analysts during a webinar this week. Read more »
Disney acquires Tapulous to further drive its strong customer engagement on mobile
Disney has acquired Tapulous, a Silicon Valley start-up that makes music games for Apple’s App Store. The acquisition is aimed at strengthening Disney’s mobile games division, which is already seeing strong growth driven by the mobile apps market explosion.
SIM-based services are driving mobile VAS market growth in Latin America
A number of Latin American operators are reporting good results from deployments of SIM-based mobile VAS. For example, Telecom Personal is seeing a high level of adoption of its SIM-based mobile VAS in Argentina. Telecom Personal and Oi in Brazil are offering the Windows Live IM service on mobile SIM cards.
Gemalto buys into M2M future
French mobile vendor Gemalto has acquired German M2M vendor Cinterion for €163 million (US$198.8 million) in cash in a bid to position itself to capitalise on the fast-growing M2M market. Read more »
No money is changing hands between Facebook and its new operator partners
The recent launch of Facebook’s new text-only mobile website, 0.facebook.com, is a good illustration of the kind of non-commercial relationship that online social networks and mobile operators tend to form. Although 53 operators from 45 countries have agreed to waive browsing charges for 0.facebook.com users for at least a year, they are getting no payment in return from Facebook. No money has or will be changing hands between the social network and its 0.facebook.com operator partners. Read more »
Nokia wags its long tail in the mobile web market
Netbiscuits, the mobile Internet publishing platform which powers mobile websites for brands such as Ebay, MTV, ABC and Universal Music, has unveiled data that suggests that there is a valid business case for publishers to optimise their online content for access by a range of mobile devices and not just for the smartphone A-list. Not doing so may mean missing out on sizeable chunk of traffic. Read more »
Do we need a wireless carrier e-commerce revolution to kickstart the mobile Value Added Services market?
Carriers’ online service purchasing mechanisms are apparently not as advanced as consumers might think. OSS and BSS industry sources are suggesting that as few as 10 to 15 percent of wireless carriers worldwide have an end-to-end e-commerce solution as part of their web presence. That is to say, an online storefront where the end user can purchase their mobile phone plus their voice, messaging and Internet tariff plans; and complete the transaction electronically without the need for any manual processes or further human interaction. Read more »
Low-end, mainstream and female: the bigger addressable market for Orange UK mobile media?
Orange UK released their sixth Digital Media Index earlier this month, revealing some intriguing mobile content consumption trends during 4Q09. Read more »
Changes to the terms of Apple’s iPhone SDK annoys developers, serves to perpetuate mobile application fragmentation, but may advance the argument for mobile web apps?
Clause 3.3.1 of the Terms of Service (ToS) that developers are required to sign in order to create Apple-approved applications for the App Store has been changed, to effectively ban the use of third party compilers that create cross-platform applications. Read more »
AT&T confirm video to be the ‘wrong sort’ of ‘killer app’ for the wireless industry, but are silent on how to monetise content successfully
At CTIA this year, the issue of the increasing dislocation between wireless carriers’ network traffic and the service revenue that they generate was a key talking point. Read more »
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