I have now taken the liberty to go into Christmas hibernation mode, which is to say, took vacation leave off work until the new year. I may (and, to be honest, probably will) post during the holidays but to all of you who may not read these during the season, let me extend the very best wishes for Christmas/Holiday Season/Time you are not being bothered by Christians or people living in Christian countries because they celebrate Christmas. Peace, respect and understanding across languages, cultures, colours, territories, generations, religions (or belief systems), technology gaps is what I am wishing everyone. Don’t eat too much turkey, think of your loved ones, spend time with the children, relax and sleep in, party like mad, just have a good time!
Month: December 2008 Page 1 of 2
It was only a matter of time, I guess, and here it is: Estonia will allow its citizens to vote by SMS in 2011. However, the Estonians too have been watching the US Presidential elections in 2000 and decided hence that one needs some additional security to make it safe. Enter a chip that every citizen can apply for and get into his/her phone. If or if not this makes it really safe (my guess it that it should be possible to apply some decent security if the device is “hard-wired”), can (and probably will) be discussed at length by the experts. But it might just not matter much: I find it hard to believe that more people would actually jump through those additional hoops required to be admitted.
Blackberry maker Research in Motion is acquiring mobile content deployment solutions provider (quite a mouthful!) Chalk Media for $18.7m in cash. Chalk to what they call “pushcasts”, which – if I understand it correctly – is basically pushing podcasts to smartphones. The Vancouver-based company is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, so it still requires shareholder approval, and the deal is therefore not closed yet.
And the winner is… China Mobile. Hard to guess, huh? Some research shows that the Chinese carrier’s brand is worth $30.79bn. Vodafone and Verizon took the other spots on the podium. The top 10 is below (courtesy of the good folks at telecoms.com). And for some (by now a little outdated) comparison for how they rank amongst other industries, see here.
China Mobile | China Mobile | China | Asia | 30,793 | |
2 | Vodafone | Vodafone | UK | Europe | 22,131 |
3 | Verizon | Verizon Communications | US | North America | 20,382 |
4 | AT&T | AT&T | US | North America | 18,886 |
5 | T-Mobile | Deutsche Telekom | Germany | Europe | 16,802 |
6 | Orange | France Telecom | France | Europe | 15,489 |
7 | NTT DoCoMo | NTT DoCoMo | Japan | Asia | 14,871 |
8 | KDDI | KDDI Corp. | Japan | Asia | 14,454 |
9 | Movistar | Telefonica | Spain | Europe | 10,799 |
10 | Sprint | Sprint Nextel | US | North America | 9,661 |
An article tells us that AT&T Wireless intends to run all their phones on one platform as soon as 2014, namely on Symbian. Is this odd? I mean: the iPhone isn’t Symbian, is it?
Is it becoming boring or is it becoming more and more exciting? However you view Apple‘s forays into mobile, it is very, very remarkable (and I do indeed think exciting) indeed: in ads in the NY Times and the Washington Post (see here), the company reports 300,000,000 downloads in 5 months (I leave the zeros in for mere impact…). That’s 2.1m downloads per day – on a single handset model, which isn’t even the single best-selling one (well, it probably is of recent, but not historically) and is normally only available through one carrier per country (which means that it could also have been, say, 10m downloads per day if extrapolated to the total user base). Woah! Is anyone still skeptical about the equation pretty hardware + pretty UI + hassle-free shop-front + single platform + single distribution outlet = success for content?
The busy bees over at Juniper are in a pre-Christmas frenzy it seems; they’re very active recently (see here and here). Today, they have enlightened us yet again: according to their latest report, there is a niche sector that will actually be completely unaffected by the doom and gloom of the world economy, and that is mobile gambling. They predict this segment to double in size in 2009 to a not too shabby $3.6bn, 30% of which to be coming out of the UK.