Juniper Research’s latest report titled “Mobile Money Transfer & Remittances: Markets, Forecasts & Strategies 2009-2014″ argues that the consumer demand for mobile money transfer services will see users exceed 500 million globally by 2014, most of which will come from the developing countries. The reason is simple – for many people living in such markets, a mobile phone will be their first touch with the banking system.

However, Juniper also points out that many of the mobile money services being announced will face political, regulatory or commercial challenges along the way.

Further findings from the report include:

• Sophisticated mobile financial services such as loans and savings accounts can add to the attractiveness of mobile money services, and help to reduce mobile operator churn;
• Africa & Middle East, Far East & China and the Indian Sub Continent will be the leading regions for national mobile money transfer services in 2014;

More information is available from Juniper Research’s website.

Simu Ya Solar - solar phone launched at Safaricom

A new GSMA report titled “Charging Choices” has revealed a $2.3 billion opportunity in the off-grid charging solutions such as solar phones or external solar chargers in emerging markets. GSMA’s Green Power for Mobile (GPM) programme commissioned the research, estimating there are 485 million mobile users without access to the electricity grid. Furthermore, a range of charging choices have been identified — all which could extend service availability and boost average revenues per user by 10-14%.

The research has found a significant interest in off grid solutions, with 60% of mobile operators interviewed already have or are exploring off-grid charging initiatives. However, there is currently only limited understanding about the full scope of options and the associated social and business benefits. Digicel and Safaricom, however, have demonstrated how to do this properly with their eco-friendly offerings… Additional details are available from the official press release.

ABI Research has conducted a small survey of 1000 mobile phone users in North America, asking people what they think about “green” handsets and whether they would buy them. Key points identified include:

• Approximately 7% of respondents would be willing to pay a premium for an environmentally friendly handset, and
• A further 40% would choose a green handset over a conventional one if price, features, and performance were equal.
• However, only 4% said they were “very familiar” with green handsets.

ABI argues that although components found in regular and eco-friendly handsets are the same, it is not that easy for manufacturers to fully “go green,” because such a move would involve revamping the whole supply chain and retooling the production process.

Hence, regulation could help. The EU has the most comprehensive regulations in place, which targets the most proactive handset vendors such as Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Samsung, and Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE)… Additional details are available in ABI’s special report titled “Green Mobile Devices.”

Despite the fact that many smartphone users download multiple applications to their devices, Strategy Analytics argues that only about four to six applications are consistently used on a regular basis.

The research company surveyed smartphone users in the US and the UK, and has concluded that the iPhone users have downloaded and installed the largest number of applications, but these are not necessarily used on a regular basis. As for the Android users, they seem to remove the apps they don’t use, while those with BlackBerrys keep almost all of the applications they download.

Christopher Dodge, Analyst in the Strategy Analytics User Experience Practice, said that “only 57% of all smartphone applications device are being used regularly.” His colleague, Paul Brown, Senior Analyst at the company, added: “Application developers need to ensure that their application is useful, usable and compelling in order to ensure it will be used regularly and not just downloaded, used a couple of times, and then discarded.” We couldn’t agree more.

[Via: CellularNews]

Fastcompany.com has an interesting piece about a an iPhone app that was created to monitor your heart rate, and then broadcast it to the social network of your choice! The concept fits within the wider area of ‘body computing’, which apparently is about using technology to monitor physical health.

You apparently need to get a patch first that you wear on your chest – this contains the necessary circuitry to sense and broadcast the information to the iPhone, where it’s read in to the App. From there it’s a question of choosing how you want to share that information.

This stuff does exist mind you – the App was created for the third Body Computing Conference, and there is medical device company called Corventis that supplied the patch.

All very cool of course, and a new kind of auto-tweeting perhaps: ‘my heart rate is …..!”

But I wonder if the likes of Nike and Polar are watching and thinking they’d like that slice of the market – unlike this proof of concept, Nike has already done plenty of integration with Apple with its Nike+ product – and Polar are recognised as being the leaders in ECG-accurate heart rate monitors – so how long before they come to market with something that does exactly this?

Well I don’t mind either way – I think the concept in and of itself is a neat one, and certainly those professional sportsmen/women, this might be an interesting way to engage with their fans for example.

[Via: fastcompany.com]

While the iPhone might be the most satisfying smartphone in the US, more and more Brits are looking toward the Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Pre to quench their smartphone cravings. A new survey from TNS indicates that a healthy 26% of the UK is interested in picking up an O2 (NYSE: TEF) Palm Pre of their own – they are either definitely or probably going to buy an O2 Palm Pre in the near future. Compared with just 16% of Brits that were showed initial interest in the iPhone in TNS’s 2007 survey, it’s clear that the Palm Pre is in higher demand than the iPhone.

The survey also showed the 27% of current O2 customers were interested in picking up a Palm Pre. That compares with 17% of O2 customers that were looking to pick up an iPhone from their carrier in 2007. The numbers point to a UK Palm Pre launch that might just give the US launch some insecurity issues.

To be fair, the higher interest in the Palm Pre is likely attributable to the Pre’s free-on-contract pricing. The iPhone was offered for £269, and many of those initial iPhone customers are coming up on contract renewals that would allow them to put a Palm Pre in their pockets for free. There’s also the possibility that the iPhone itself may have boosted Palm Pre awareness by way of bringing the smartphone to forefront of the consumer mind.

The Palm Pre hasn’t been the fantastic success that Palm had hoped for the US market, but all is not lost. If TNS survey results pan out, Palm could see the Pre carving out significant market share in the UK.

[Via: CN]

If you thought the iPhone was the best smartphone you’ve ever used, you’re not alone. According to JD Power & Associates’ latest survey of 1,148 respondents, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL)’s iPhone is the most satisfying smartphone in both the consumer and enterprise segments (yet again). And, when it comes to featurephones (which don’t run mobile operating systems that can install and run third-party applications), LG takes top billing. The JD Power survey found that LG’s not-so-smartphones were the only handsets to earn satisfaction ratings above the industry average.

How did it all break down? While the iPhone scored perfectly in 5 out of 6 smartphone satisfaction categories, its ongoing lack of battery longevity earned it an abysmal score of 2/5 stars in the “Battery Function” category. Still, it was enough to trump both LG and RIM (BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM)) in the consumer smartphone segment, as well as RIM in the enterprise space.

Apple’s iPhone has long been known to satisfy. But, with Android phone offering compelling designs and eye-catching UI’s from the likes of HTC and Motorola (NYSE: MOT), we’re expecting to see the Apple’s lead in consumer satisfaction starting to close. We have to wonder what JD Power’s next survey will show.

[Via: JDPower]

… well at it is, according to InMobi!

InMobi is the largest mobile ad network in Asia, Africa and Indonesia, and has released data showing that RIM’s Blackberry device may be leading the handset race in Indonesia. From January 2009 to June 2009, mobile ad requests on Blackberry phones increased by 842%, compared to mobile ad requests on Indonesia iPhones, which increased only by 205%.

RIM’s Blackberry device (the info doesn’t say which models) was released three months before the iPhone in the country in January of 2009. Although Blackberry and iPhone had similar growth patterns after the iPhone launch, the two handsets took dramatically different growth paths beginning in April 2009.

Indonesia is predicted to be the third largest mobile market after China and India by 2010 according to the ROA Group. Already, mobile users in Indonesia far outnumber active Internet users by 5 to 1, and the country boasts a 56.8% mobile penetration rate verses a 10.4% according to Internet World Stats.

Just in case you wanted to know, the top mobile Internet operator in Indonesia is Indosat, which leads the market with 75% share, followed by Telekomsel with 18% and Excelcomindo with 3%. Fierce competition between mobile operators and a price war between vendors created an influx of affordable mobile phones this year.

After getting a demo of some of the cool vector map capabilities on the N900 at CTIA, I prodded a Nokia (NYSE: NOK) rep about what they’ve been working on with augmented reality (since zooming down to street level on the map to check out the 3D rendering of a stadium was awfully close). He mentioned that there’s an project in alpha within Nokia that involves OCR character recognition that would effectively translate text seen through the camera into other languages. Sounds like a logical extension of Point and Find. Camera quality is a bottleneck, but now that phones are getting into the 8-12 megapixel range and optics are continually improving, picking up small text is becoming less of an issue. Given, this program will probably produce the garden variety hilarity of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) translations, it’s all you would need to get by in a foreign country.

And let’s face it: you know you’re living in the freaking future when you can point your phone at a bunch of alien characters and have them magically make sense. Combined with something like Sakhr’s voice translation software, one could be well-armed to handle some pretty exotic locales.

[pic]

Those boys over at iFixit have done it again – this time they’ve taken apart the Nikon Coolpix S1000pj (catch name, eh!) camera! Now, you might be wondering why this is so exciting – well two (linked) reasons:

1. The camera has a project onboard – yes indeed!
2. These  projector modules are coming to mass-market mobile near you relatively soon!

So it’s interesting to see right now how they’ve fitted in the projector module to a device with a slightly larger form-factor. Bear in mind the camera doesn’t try to be a phone, it just does a couple of things (like take pictures, and beam ‘em) really well – so there’s a little space in that housing to fit the projector module. But it won’t be long before they are commonly featuring (and yes, I know these modules have already been on a couple of mobile devices to-date, but they weren’t mass-market).

Anyway, check out the full teardown here at iFixit.

[Via: iFixit]