Not to be outdone in 2007 Microsoft—which
claims to have about 23 per cent share of the
smartphone OS market—added to its portfolio
with the $46m acquisition of mobile music
services offering Musiwave.
Meanwhile, internet search giants Google
and Yahoo have both signalled their mobile
ambitions during the last year; the former
with the launch of its open handset software
stack, Android. More recently, at this year’s
Consumer Electronic Show, Yahoo announced
a series of developments to its on-device portal
Go, chief among which was the opening of
the platform to third party developers.
Intel, Sony, Motorola and OpenMoko also
used January’s CES to let the world know that
they’re well aware of the current trends in
mobile data services provision and customer
acquisition.
Intel is betting that that ultra mobile internet
devices will be the “next big thing in
computing,” and the company announced that
it would be making a significant push into
the mobile space in 2008. The firm’s president
and CEO, Paul Otellini, said that the world is
Mobile Communications International | First for news, best for business
“going ultra mobile, with smaller, more powerful,
connected mobile devices delivering a
no-compromise web experience in an ultra
low power device small enough to fit in your
pocket or purse.”
Motorola announced the acquisition of
mobile music company Soundbuzz for an
undisclosed sum. Soundbuzz is a privately
held, pan-Asian music platform, that Motorola
hopes will expand its Asia mobile music offerings
beyond China and into India, Southeast
Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
In January, idle screen ad specialist Celltick
announced that its solution now includes a direct
to consumer offering. Celltick’s Livescreen
Media solution streams messages to handset
screens when the phones are idle and, hitherto,
has relied on the client being installed
on SIM cards—and therefore depended on
the cooperation of the operator community.
Not any more, as Celltick now has a version
of the client that can be distributed in a text
message, allowing internet companies and
content providers to reach users even when
the carriers aren’t interested. Whether this
CUSTOMER OWNERSHIP FEATURE
will have an impact on carriers’ inclination to
endorse the product remains to be seen.
Geraldine Wilson, vice president and general
manager of Connected Life at Yahoo
Europe describes 2007 as a “seminal year”.
She suggests three key developments that
helped shaped the year, and which give a
sound indication of developments to come.
First, operators have recognised that they
need to open up to brands that customers
trust. Second, the operators have realised that
they need to introduce tariffs that customers
are familiar with in the fixed environment,
namely flat-rate. And third, the industry was
presented with its first taste of a device that
caught the imagination of the public far more
than operators had been able to do with any
of their services—the iPhone.
These changes are not necessarily bad news
for the carriers, says Wilson. “I absolutely
believe operators have a key role to play. How
they embrace the challenges will dictate how
much they retain. I think the route to success
is working in partnership. They have certain
strengths, we have certain strengths, and
that’s the key to unlocking the internet, not
by everyone trying to do bits that they’re not
very good at,” she says.
But what made carriers such as Vodafone
and Telefonica “recognise” that they need to
partner with trusted brands? According to
Informa analyst Paul Lambert, writing in
Informa Telecoms & Media’s Global Mobile,
it boils down to a collective “failure” to make
a success of mobile data services. Lambert
suggests this failure is down to a “lack of
interoperability among subscribers on different
networks,” and a “lack of awareness
among end-users that an operator brand
stands for services as much as it does for
enabling basic telephony.”
Not surprisingly, the carriers disagree
with Lambert’s assessment. Mike Short, vice
president research and development, Telefonica
O2, says: “One of the characteristics
of the Telefonica Ovi deal is how do we get
more usable and usage oriented services. The
iPhone deal is entirely about that, i-mode was
entirely about that. So these three things [Ovi,
iPhone and i-mode] are an examples of that
trend in this decade.”
According to Short, Club Nokia was largely
a development forum that brought together
different players. Being “quite technical” it
was more appealing to the early adopters and
the solutions driven end of the market. Short
reckons Ovi is integrated more from a “service »
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