Gorillabox has announced it is partnering with WRN to provide Streaming video Mobile TV services to media companies.
Gorillabox is making the G-Box platform available to WRN’s client, inlcuding notable broadcasters such as Virgin Radio and Voice of America, amongst others. The content and platform will be Gorillabox’s responsiblity, whereas WRN will handle the marketing of services.

Comment: it’s a straight-foward enough partnership, but what about the name?! Gorillabox has got to be one of, if not THE best name for a mobile company in ages! It does conjure up a very funny picture, especially in light of the recent Kong movie – and I am sure the partners’ service will be a lot better than the film!

[Via: Mobile Marketing Magazine]

(note: yes, I know this is the poster for 2007!)

O2 (NYSE: TEF) has announced itself as the lead sponsor of the Wireless Festival this year, making it four consecutive years.

The festival will have a selection of international artists across four dates in July, as well new music from artists on the O2 blueroom stage.

As in the Dome, O2 customers will have VIP areas, which will be managed using NFC technology (something else that O2 is becoming a bit of an expert at). In addition to that mobile techology, tickets will also be able to be purchased via Mobile – last year O2 sold £200K this way, doubling on 2006.

Other Mobile technologies will include UGC (user-generated content) to get pictures/videos on to big screens and O2 Active (the portal) – all for free via Bluetooth!

This to me just indicates O2’s total leadership in marketing activities in the UK – as well as the O2 (Dome) and the iPhone, O2 continues to innovate and lead the pack – time to get out another Ben rating:

Well done (again again!!) O2

[Via: Mobile Today]

No sooner have we crossed the mid-point of February (highlighted nicely with Valentine’s Day!), than a story about Xmas 08 appears – stop the madness! Where will it all end!?

Anyway, this story is about the battlelines being drawn up for Christmas as regards what the “hero” devices might be – in the Prepay segment (i.e. those which often sell in supermarkets).

Apparently, supermarket chains have been out at MWC, and industry experts are saying that the traditional Mobile sales pandemonium this year will be led by 5MP camera devices (such as the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N95 above), in a £80-100 tier.
This would mean an extremely interesting period before Xmas, where both retailers and device vendors are scrabbling to up their numbers for Q4 – of course, what will be the prepay handsets are actually already in circulation, since they drip down from being “new postpay” to “cheap prepay” over the course of the year.

As you might expect, big players will be Nokia, SE, Samsung and LG – all with established devices in circulation – this shouldn’t rule out new devices coming on to the market though!

Last year in the MNOs, it was Orange who dived deepest, with 000,000’s of LG handsets in an super-cheap £10-20 tier. In the supermarkets, obviously bitter rivals Sainsbury’s and Tesco were major players – and this year you can be sure both these chains had buyers at MWC, making the deals for Xmas.

Of course, lest we not forget the other major forces in UK retail – Argos (a UK chain, where you buy from a catalogue in store and then the products are delivered via conveyor belt to you from a store room upstairs!) is a pivotal retailer as far as some vendors are concerned – judging by how full my local Argos was last Xmas, I would certainly not disagree!

So, it will be interesting to see how the retail landscape for Mobile devices plays out this year – and whether those 5MP prepay devices will be the difference-maker!

[Via: Mobile Today]

Ewan Spence is a free spirit in the smartphone world. He speaks his mind, even though it can get him into trouble, and I admire him greatly for that. There is one thing about being an editor that we don’t write about, but it is a part of our daily routines. Spam. No I’m not talking about making your penis larger or wiring 20 million euros into your bank account, I’m talking about companies who feed us overdrawn metaphors, sentences with absolutely no meaning and hopes mascaraed by contempt thanks to a phrase equivalent to the score played played at ones’ funeral, you know the one I’m talking about, “coming soon”.

I’ve seen several people write about this very topic over the past year. The one that sticks out, apart from Ewan’s piece, is Gizmodo’s Joel Johnson who essentially rips the entire consumer electronics industry a new asshole.

It takes balls my friends. Testicles that weigh so much you need a horse and carriage appointed by the king himself every time you wish to head to the market hall to purchase your daily recommended dose of thunder and lightening. Ewan, Joel and I all have friends in the PR industry, and the only way you get true friends in this push and pull world is if you call them out on their own bullshit.

Exhibitions like CES, MWC, CeBIT, etc, are not about new hardware, software and services. They’re essentially giant parties where PR people treat themselves to a long evening of drunken debauchery that is the equivalent to a circle jerk for a mans ego. When morning comes and that pressed shirt touches your clean skin after you showered away your deepest regrets for joining a company who hasn’t made anything cool since that free pen with a pulsating LED you give to the new bloggers on the block, remember this: You carry the torch. You are the foot soldier in the fight that companies face every quarter to add an extra million to their bottom line. We, the press, we’re the people who tell the world if your product is brilliant or utterly useless. Please talk to us in English, nor PR talk, please be a real individual and acknowledge that there are other people in your space doing the same thing you are.

The PR person who drinks a cup of coffee with you the next day and talks about how much money he lost on a bet, another companies’ product or actually cares to listen to your opinion of what it is he is trying to push, that ladies and gentleman is a PR person who can be my friend.

That is a soldier who recognizes he is part of something bigger than himself.

You may remember that yesterday I made a couple of posts regarding Mobile Advertising – one of these was about Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) Italy and Amobee doing a deal – Amobee’s part of which is powered by QuickPlay Media.

Well, a nice lady from QuickPlay’s PR agency emailed me to let me know about a couple of other announcements that Quickplay have made recently – which I thought I would share with you all:

• The company recently announced FREE streaming video for Blackberry (NSDQ: RIMM) subscribers, lowering the price barrier for consumers looking to sample mobile content. It’s initially available for the 8130 handset, on EVDO networks in the USA. Eligible customers can visit www.videostreamsmobile.com to download the app and start streaming straight away
• The company recently introduced what will likely be a very provocative feature – the ability to pause, start and stop long form video, and also parse the video into smaller segments for easier “internet” like viewing.   The service allows for subscribers to pick up where they left off in the viewing experience whether the battery died, the service went out, or they simply had to stop watching

If you want to check out the full press releases for each of these announcements, you can look here and here.

2ergo has won a five-year contract with O2 UK to provide mobile marketing services, utilising it’s multisend platform. As the name suggests, the platform will allow O2 (NYSE: TEF) to communicate with it’s end-users, over SMS, MMS, and Email.

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