IntoMobile » General

Tomi Ahonen: Average users looks at their phone 150 times a day!

Dusan Belic — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:50:27 +0000

During the recent Mobile Web Africa conference in Johannesburg, 3G strategy consultant Tomi Ahonen took the stage to talk about the prospect of mobile technology and how it changes the world. Here are the highlights from his keynote:

Mobile is the fastest way to reach consumers. According to a study conducted in New Zealand, e-mail is read 48 hours after it is sent, while the average SMS is read in four minutes. In other words, SMS is 720 times faster than e-mail in message-opening throughput.
Nokia reported that the average person looks at their phone 150 times a day, or once every six-and-a-half minutes of every waking hour. In Africa, it’s 82 times a day, or every 12 minutes.
After optimizing its website for mobile devices, Tiffany’s sales grew 125%, prompting Ahonen to conclude that there isn’t going to be “one Internet.”
In China, mobile newspapers have converted 39% of their readers to pay for MMS news headlines. The country’s leading mobile operator, China Mobile, has 40 million paying users on SMS- and MMS-based twice-daily headline services of branded newspapers’ headlines.

Finally, Ahonen concluded that mobile is the fastest growing industry ever, going “from naught to $1 trillion in 2010, and is set to double by 2020.”

[Via: textually]

North Korea’s reaches 1 million mobile phone users

Dusan Belic — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:47:10 +0000

North Korea has hit an important milestone, having reached one million mobile phone users. The only mobile operator in the country, Koryolink, has seen a surge in the number of customers, with some 100,000 people signing-up during the each of the last five quarters.

Koryolink, which is 75% owned by Egypt’s Orascom Telecom and 25% by the state-run Korea Post and Telecommunications Corporation, said they’re now covering 14% of the country’s landmass, but that equates to around 94% of the population.

It’s good to see that even in places like North Korea, people are adopting mobile technology. However, the image is actually pretty gloomy at the moment — during the 100-day mourning period after the death of former country leader Kim Jong-il, anyone caught using a cell phone will be punished as a “war criminal.” We don’t like that… at all…

[Via: thenextweb]

Rome’s underground railway network to get mobile phone coverage by the end of the year

Dusan Belic — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:59:27 +0000

It’s a new (and logical) trend in the world to allow folks commuting to use the underground railway system to access mobile network(s). The capital of Italy doesn’t want to be an exception and has decided to offer its customers the ability to talk, text and access Internet services while taking a ride.

CommScope got the contract from a consortium of the country’s four mobile networks (Telecom Italia, Vodafone, WIND and H3G) to make this happen. It’s a three-phase project that is expected to be completed by the end of this year.

According to the company’s sales director at Wireless Innovations, Samuel Buttarelli – multi-operator, multi-frequency band, and multi-technology standard are common scenarios when working on train projects such as these. “Despite the complexities of providing wireless coverage in moving trains, narrow tunnels and enclosed stations, CommScope expects to quickly implement a successful solution with minimal impact on the existing infrastructure — resulting in greater passenger satisfaction and more loyalty to our operator customers,” he added.

Finally it’s important to add that CommScope has previously completed similar projects for Turin and Milan metro systems.

[Via: CellularNews]

China’s GPS service Beidou officially launches

Dusan Belic — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:38:24 +0000

When it comes to positioning systems, U.S. has GPS, Russia has Glonass and EU – Galileo. China is joining the race and has finally launched its own such system called Beidou.

According to a spokesman for the system, Beidou has started providing initial positioning, navigation and timing operational services to China and its surrounding areas. However, the coverage will expand soon with six more satellites set for launch in 2012 to cover most parts of the Asia-Pacific region.

The world’s most populous country started developing its positioning system in 2000 after deciding not to rely on Europe’s Galileo. So far, it [China] has launched 10 Beidou satellites, with the tenth being lifted into orbit earlier this month.

Beidou is reported to be compatible with all existing positioning systems…

Now call me a naive sucker, but can’t all countries agree and have a single positioning system which is governed by either UN or G8? That would make more sense, providing more accurate positioning (more satellites), while at the same time keeping costs down for all the parties involved…

[Via: CellularNews]

Man gets 20-year sentence for insulting Thai King in a private text message!

Dusan Belic — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 11:06:48 +0000

I always knew Thailand is far from a functional democracy, but I thought people can still say what they want. Apparently I was sooo wrong.

A retired truck driver was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sending SMS that a court deemed insulting to Thailand’s monarchy. 61-year-old Ampon Tangnoppakul got 5 years in prison for each message sent, though he denied sending any messages. According to his lawyer, Ampon doesn’t know how to send SMS and his phone was being repaired around the time the messages were sent!

But that’s not all — as far as I’ve understood, messages that caused the “problem” for Ampon were sent to another individual! It’s not like he (or whoever sent messages) used Twitter to spread the word. “Best” of all, the contents of the messages were not revealed in court!

Ampon is not the only one prosecuted for insulting the Thai King. There’s a growing number of cases in the country under a law imposing harsh penalties for making insults or threats directed at royal family, even in PRIVATE communications.

This all sounds like it’s happening in North Korea, not Thailand. And yes – I’m NOT going to visit Bangkok anytime soon…

[Via: NYT]

Intel to make future notebooks MasterCard PayPass compatible, but what about NFC?

Stefan Constantinescu — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:01:56 +0000

When Intel bets on a certain type of technology, it usually becomes a standard. That’s the kind of power they have because of their massive scale. An astonishing 80.2% of the computers that were sold in Q3 of this year had Intel chips inside. MasterCard, looking to take advantage of Intel’s dominance, has announced that they’ve partnered with the chip giant so that future personal computers will be able to read PayPass enabled credit/debit cards. The deal is a “multi-year strategic collaboration”, which means it’ll take a while before you’ll actually see a PayPass logo on a notebook at your local electronics shop. George Thangadurai, General Manager of the PC Client Services Division at Intel, says:

“Our goal is to enable users of Ultrabook devices and future generations of Intel-based PCs to enjoy the convenience of e-commerce while making online payments safer from malware and hackers with the advanced security capabilities of Intel Identity Protection Technology. Online commerce is a key focus area for Intel, and through this partnership with MasterCard, we intend to deliver an innovative, personalized and safer e-commerce experience to consumers.”

No more having to enter 16 digit numbers, plus a security code, plus your full address. Amazon’s one-click, Apple’s iTunes, and Google’s Checkout services have already solved that problem, but we’ll take Intel’s word that they see online payments as being something they want to keep their eye on. If they really believe that though, and aren’t just saying it because their public relations people think it sounds nice, then what about NFC support? Now of course you’re not going to use your laptop to buy something from the corner store, but what if you’re looking at something on your screen that you want to buy? Surely tapping your phone against the palm rest is infinitely easier that busting out your wallet, finding the right card, taking it out, tapping it, putting it back in your wallet, and so on and so forth.

[Note: Intel's most embarrassing bet was on WiMAX. That failed miserably.]

Tudor Brown, President and Co-founder of ARM, to step down in May 2012

Stefan Constantinescu — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:27:13 +0000

Last week ARM announced that Tudor Brown, President and Co-founder of the British semiconductor company, is going to retire in May 2012. Since the inception of ARM in 1990, their technology has shipped in over 15 billion chips. What makes ARM such a unique company, and what’s given them the success that they’re now experiencing, is that they look at the business model of microprocessors from a completely different angle. Instead of designing chips and then making them in fabs that cost far too much to build, maintain, and upgrade every few years, ARM simply does the best that they can in terms of design and then licenses their work out to anyone willing to cough up the dough. There’s a reason Intel based products are expensive, they need to recoup their investments. ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments, and NVIDIA on the other hand, these companies don’t have to worry about the dirty job of building chips; their focus is on leveraging ARM’s predesigned processors and slapping them on the most compelling system on chip they can make while also making sure that Android, Windows Phone, Symbian, whatever, is optimized to run perfectly on said chip.

Even better, say you don’t want to use a predesigned ARM core like the Cortex A8 that’s in the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and Samsung Galaxy S. Just call up ARM and ask them for the schematics for the ARM architecture and you can build your own ARM compatible chip. Similar to how AMD makes x86 compatible chips, Qualcomm and Marvell make ARMv7 compatible chips. It’s more expensive for them to do that, but just look at where Qualcomm is today thanks to the blood, sweat, and tears they’ve poured into Snapdragon. Nokia’s first Windows Phones have Qualcomm inside, half the Android phones on the market have Qualcomm inside, and we’re pretty sure that quite a few laptops running Windows 8 are going to have Qualcomm inside once they start shipping in 2012.

Anyway, Brown says ARM is in a “very strong position” for future growth, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that mobile is blowing up.

Adobe kills Flash for mobile devices, proves that Apple was right all along

Stefan Constantinescu — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:17:48 +0000

Apple has been getting a lot of heat over the years for their refusal to support Adobe’s Flash software. Companies such as Nokia, RIM, and even Google in the mean time have proudly been standing tall and shouting at the top of their lungs about how their platforms are technically superior because they can render every website that exists on the internet. Steve Jobs, till the day he died, firmly held on to the belief that Adobe should go screw themselves. In fact, he even wrote a 1,700 word letter explaining Apple’s logic back in April 2010:

“Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath.”

Here we are, less than a month after Jobs has passed, and Adobe has given up. Here’s the internal Adobe memo that was leaked to ZD|Net announcing the good news:

“Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.”

So what’s Adobe going to focus on now? What they should have been doing all along: HTML5 and other associated native web technologies.

[Image above of Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen]

Update 1: Here’s the full, official blog post from Adobe.

Update 2: RIM has pledged that they’ll support Flash on their own.