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The Telegraph.co.uk has an interesting story about a TV developed to sense hand gestures as a means of control, rather than using the traditional remote. Following on from all the hype regarding the combined gesture/hardware remote of the Nintendo Wii, Toshiba’s TV trumps that by doing away with the hardware altogether.

The system uses a small camera (currently mounted on the TV), plus some clever software to differentiate (a) the hand and (b) the movement itself, from the background.

Of course, we’ve also seen a ton of developments in recent months around motion/gesture control in mobile devices - from the iPhone, to N95, to LG devices (using accelerometers) - but could we envisage a situation one day (soonish) where you have a “Minority Report”-like interface to multiple consumer devices?

Toshiba believe this tech could be within TVs in five years - who knows where mobile development will have got to then?!!

[Via: Telegraph.co.uk / Image via: MASONS]

With 3G usage in the US surpassing Western Europe, it’s not all that surprising to hear that the US has seen mobile internet usage increase almost a third in Q2 2008. The US has seen mobile web access jump 29.4% from Q1 to Q2 2008.

Crisp Wireless reports that mobile internet traffic increased as mobile web users are taking a liking to in-the-hand mobile internet access. Notably, the following trends have emerged:

• Local news is viewed mostly in the morning, while national news is viewed continuously throughout day.
• Sports fans check scores and highlights during their favorite games, with highest traffic on evenings and weekends.
• Women visit the mobile web late at night and early in the week mirroring their online habits; and young girls are browsing late night, especially on the weekend.
• Entertainment and online services are accessed most in the evenings, primarily on the weekends as visitors are making their weekend plans.
• Visits per unique visitor increased marginally from 2.02 visits per unique visitor in 1Q08 to 2.06 in 2Q8.
• Average page views per visit decreased slightly from 3.96 in 1Q08 to 3.77 in 2Q08.
• Users typing property or site names drove 28.9% of search engine traffic.
• For sites that have an on-deck presence on all 3 major carriers, carrier decks are driving 45.74% of overall traffic; which is down from 53.4% in Q1 2008.

It seems that as the mobile web becomes more accessible to users with more and more 3G handsets in hand, mobile internet access is continuing to increase. And, with more smartphones hitting the market, it makes sense that users are finding their own way around the mobile web, and relying less on carrier decks to get on the wireless information superhighway.

Long live the mobile web!

[Via: CellularNews]

It looks like our immature, underdeveloped 3G wireless network infrastructure hasn’t stopped the US from passing-up Western Europe  in terms of 3G subscribers. According to comScore, 28.4% of US wireless subscribers have hopped on board the 3G bandwagon. Compare that to the 28.3% of western European wireless customers with 3G handsets in tow, and it’s apparent that the US has edged past Europe in 3G market penetration.

The US has seen an 80% increases in 3G usage since last year, which is impressive to say the least. With 3G handsets like the iPhone 3G and the Samsung Instinct burning up the 3G networks of AT&T and Sprint alike, it makes sense that the US has one-upped Europe in the 3G-game. And, with all new worthwhile handsets sporting 3G radios, the US isn’t likely to see much decline in 3G usage.

Press release

Sure, 100Mbps worth of downstream data is something we’d all like to see in the near future. Imagine cruising the wireless airwaves at speeds faster than we see with wireline broadband services. Yup, the 4G LTE networks of the future are most definitely going to be fun.

Getting 100Mbps data speeds from a particular cellular tower is easy enough. But, what happens when you’re cruising along at highway speeds and jumping from cell site to cell site? That’s exactly the question that Nortel and LG sought to answer with their latest LTE 4G network test. The two companies tested the  3GPP Release 8 Standard with an early LTE mobile phone hopping across multiple cellular sites.

The test is a milestone for 4G LTE networks around the world. The two companies successfully handed over the LTE cellular signal between multiple cell towers, showing to the world that LTE is slowly but surely marching towards a viable commercial release in the next few years.

After all, what good is all that wireless data if you can’t get at it in a moving car?

[Via: MobileCrunch]

The Insight Research Corporation has just released a new study, stating that those involved in Mobile content creation will spend more than $8 billion on the tools for creation, editing, management, and loading of that content. These could be Music and electronic game publishers, television broadcasters, video production companies, content aggregators, and telecommunications carriers worldwide.

The Market Analysis study by Insight is called “Content Management for Wireless Networks,  2008-2013” and covers the tech and market forces that will be involved in getting content on to mobile devices of various kinds - in essence, multi-channel delivery.

An excerpt of this research report, table of contents, and ordering information are online at http://www.insight-corp.com/reports/content08.asp. This 112-page report is available immediately for $3,995 (hard copy). Electronic (PDF) reports can be ordered online.

[Via: 3g.co.uk]

A new piece of research suggests that consumers of mobile content are more loyal to the sites where they get the content from, than those accessing through the internet. This surely is good news for Operators and some Content Partners with off-desk presence…

Prof. Philip Sugai and Prof. Donghun Kim, both professors at the International University of Japan, have written a paper called “Consumer Loyalty and Willingness to Pay for Service Attributes Across Digital Channels: A Study of the Japanese Digital Content Market”. The research aparently looked at more than 400 users in Japan, and found out what made people loyal, on both free and paid-for content sites.

Well we know the Japanese market is a different one to that in Europe, but I also wonder if the answer was always going to be that Mobile content consumer would be more loyal - because of various obstacles that defeat them looking for farther afield (e.g. interoperability of mobile-friendly websites, payment mechanisms, poor search engines, etc).

The complete paper has just been published in the August edition of the journal “Telecommunications Policy,” and is available for download through the Elsevier Publishing website: http://www.elsevier.com. More details about this paper are also available through the Mobile Consumer Behavior website, http://www.MoCoBe.com

[Via: 3g.co.uk]

Just how many SMS text messages do US wireless users go through each month, day, or hour? According to VeriSign, a veritable boatload - a technical term, to be sure.

The Mountain View, CA.-based company has announced that it ferried about  95.4 billion SMS text messages between wireless carriers in the 1H 2008. The volume of text messages set a new record for text messages sent in the first half of any year to date. Add to that the fact that VeriSign pushed through a record-breaking 648 million texts in a single day and 42 million text messages in a single one-hour window, and it becomes clear that more and more users are becoming savvy to the SMS text messaging craze.

Q2 2008 alone saw  52 billion messages zipping through the wireless airwaves, with daily averages in the period hitting 572 million messages - more than double the average daily volume of 230 million messages in Q2 2007.

What’s to account for the boost in text message usage? It’s most likely a combination of increased wireless penetration in the US, an increase in savvy consumers with SMS-friendly keyboard-toting smartphones, and perhaps the prevalence of mobile phones among the younger demographics.

In the end, we’ll likely see SMS text messages take a back seat to instant messaging and email services that aren’t subject to per-message fees or messaging limits.

[Via: RCR]

Hardware, software, firmware, or networks. No one really knows what’s going on with the iPhone 3G that’s causing all these network problems, but new data points to the problems being rooted in the wireless network itself.

At this point, we can rule out the iPhone’s antenna as causing the network issues. And, Apple has announced that their iPhone 2.0.2 OS should help alleviate some 3G connectivity woes.

The latest data from Wired’s global iPhone 3G data speed survey allows for some interesting interpretation. The data shows that the iPhone 3G sees the highest wireless data speeds in countries with fully-mature 3G infrastructure capable of serving up 3G data at faster-than-US speeds. On the downside, the data also shows that the US wireless infrastructure is likely to blame for our iPhone 3G’s data sluggishness.

So, what’s the deal? AT&T hasn’t had the extra three years worth of 3G development that our European friends enjoy. And, as such, Yankees have to suffer with an immature 3G network to use with our iPhone 3Gs. But, it’s not like we didn’t already know about the US’s woefully lagging wireless networks.

[Via: Wired]

Informa Telecoms & Media expects the number of femtocells deployed by the end of 2013 to exceed the 40 million mark, with 22 million net additions in 2013 alone. This installed base could help operators to make significant savings by offloading up to 8% of total mobile traffic to fixed networks via the end-user subscriber line.

However, whether these savings materialise depends on such factors as the nature of the operator, the mobile access technology involved, the value proposition to the end-user, the region targeted, and the level of investments the operator has already made in upgrading its mobile network.

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Mobile advertising marketplace, AdMob, recently released July Mobile Metrics Report, which focuses on increasing usage of the Mobile Web in Africa and worldwide mobile browser marketshare.

According to AdMob, mobile Internet usage is growing across Africa, with particularly strong growth in Nigeria and Egypt. The company has seen traffic increase 21% since they began tracking the Africa market in Q1 2008. The report also noted that Nokia dominates device marketshare throughout Africa, with 50.6% of the market — the Finnish giant is the most popular device manufacturer in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and Tanzania.

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