I have mentioned this earlier: Next week, I will be headed to beautiful Prague in order to attend and contribute to the European Mobile Media Conference. If you can, make sure to head over (there is even some last-minute discount).
Tag: Vodafone Page 5 of 7
Did you know about Vodafone’s Flipfont app? No, I didn’t think so; it seems to have gone more or less unnoticed. Well, it allows you to – listen to this – customise your phone frontpage. Woah! How cool is that? The downside? Well, you need to pay £1.99 for the pleasure, per screen! I don’t think so… And, apparently, (now) so does Vodafone. Amidst the iPhone/AppStore rage and the “revelation” that UI might actually matter to people, they seem to have realized that changing a font will not necessarily change the uptake of consumption to new levels. And because they cannot have the iPhone (although it has the Blackberry Storm, which is performing much better than the initial damning reviews would have suggested), they will launch their very own app store, or so they said (if you read Dutch, that is; how nice that we have a Dutch blogger amongst us who translated it for us).
“If you think of three players, China Mobile is very strong in China; it’s a big country. Vodafone is very strong in Europe, Africa, India. Verizon is very strong in the US.“If these three companies could work more closely… in the management of customers, procurement and service creation, we could be unbeatable, quite frankly.”
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 And for some (by now a little outdated) comparison for how they rank amongst other industries, see here.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 |
Vodafone UK announced that they will make flat-rate data part and parcel of every post-paid contract. Price plans start at GBP 25 (c. $50) per month and do away with the additional GBP 7.50 for a data plan previously required. It is subject to a rather low “fair use” policy of only 500 MB although – somewhat funny – a Vodafone spokesman apparently said that they would not charge users for excess anyway. So what then?
Anyway, let’s not dwell on petty details on a good day: flat-rate data will remove the fear users often have had in the past that they might incur horrendous charges if they would browse the web from their phone. On an “unlimited” data plan, this will be removed. Users will find it easier to access so-called “off-deck” destinations as well. This opens the playing field for the content industry and pushes a number of doors wide open. Great stuff!
As an aside, Vodafone also revealed some stats on mobile Internet usage on their network. In case you care, their top 4 searches were for:
- Bebo
- eBay
- Windows live Hotmail
The top 10 mobile internet sites were:
- BBC
- MSN
- Bebo
- Sony Ericsson
- Yahoo
- MySpace
- Windows live Hotmail
- YouTube
Funny little press reports today tell us that T-Mobile “ditched” Nokia handsets that are capable of supporting the Finnish giant’s Ovi (Finnish for door) multimedia portal. The German originator of these news is slightly more cautious: they also report that T-Mobile denied this and merely point out that T-Mobile has less Nokia phones on offer than a week ago and has – quite noteworthy indeed – removed all those that were “Ovi-enabled”.
The background is of course Nokia’s move into the multimedia service area (on which I first wrote about here). Nokia scored some early successes, namely with Telefonica (see here) and Vodafone (see here) but the threat to operator-driven content offerings was clear from the start. Whilst Telefonica and Vodafone were quite content on having the Ovi portal to music, video and games offered from Nokia’s platform, on their desktop alongside their own offering, T-Mobile allegedly sees this as a threat to its own plans. It is, hence, yet another iteration of the fight of carriers for their ground in the media sector.
T-Mobile might feel strong in the media space due to its iPhone monopoly in Germany but even if (and I suspect that that is not the case), it would be a somewhat desperate attempt: if such drastic moves as locking out the market leader’s handsets are required to keep customers on its own content offerings, is it then not a clear sign that such offerings might not actually be cutting it? In particular when the competitor is an OEM that in itself does not really enjoy a particular flair of creativity and buoyancy in media terms…
I would suggest that Nokia is (only?) a noteworthy competitor because of its market share in the OEM market, and not because it is such a good media company. Constraints with a view to placement on the phone’s “desktop” as well as walled gardens and consumer fear for super-high data charges (see an absurd example here) drive people to what is there, not what is best. This is not even disrespectful to the fine folks at Nokia; it merely is to demonstrate that a lot of players are not even there yet, so that it is too early to say who is best. The desperate moves of the carriers as well as historical performance on the content side suggests, however, that carriers may not be the best suited ones. Given that content is only a fraction of their data revenues, this may not actually be a bad thing: could it not be pointing them to do what they’re really good at, i.e. operating a network. If you want to call it a pipe, fine, but just make it a very, very smart pipe, and everyone (most importantly your customers) will love you!
A nice piece of rumour was brought out by the fine folks at MoCoNews: allegedly Nokia is in talks with Facebook to cooperate on mobile. And if this was not enough, there is also talk about the mighty Finns taking an investment in Facebook, and this would arguably be somewhat more significant (in cash terms at least) than the $10m stake the Samwer brothers of Jamba-fame acquired last week.
MoCoNews speculates that this could involve something as prominent as the YouTube button on the iPhone. This of course would appear to be a challenge given that most carriers will determine themselves what is and what is not on the handsets that are being sold through their retail outlets. But then Nokia has recently made strides on that front recently (as will be shown below).
A move with Facebook would fit in seamlessly with Nokia’s evolving strategy towards providing entertainment services rather than only being a hardware vendor (albeit the world’s largest by far with a whopping 38% market share globally): 2007 marked a year were Nokia acquired a number of companies and announced a number of initiatives and products that push the company way further down the service provision end than ever before: it acquired digital map specialist Navteq (Finland’s largest acquisition ever), bought the mobile marketing and advertising folks from Enpocket, it struck a content deal with Telefonica and another one with Vodafone, all gearing towards its comprehensive content offering Ovi (see here).
Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s multimedia guru, went on record in saying that the Internet will be the tool that will tear down the carriers’ walled gardens. He continues to preach his ongoing theme (I heard about this the first time 2 years or so ago) that carriers are no entertainment companies and should therefore not fiddle with content. That might well be true, I guess. Now, if it comes to the Internet opening those walls, well, Facebook ranks #7 on the Alexa traffic charts. And, distinct to the (few) higher-ranked sites, Facebook’s clean set-up and approach would seemingly make a conversion to (higher-end) mobile handsets easier than with, say, MySpace (#6).
Finally, Nokia tried to coin the phrase of “circular entertainment” (I blogged about it here where I mocked their “survey” approach) where they hold that, by 2012, 25% of all media would be created and consumed from within a circle of peers rather than from traditional media. If or if not the numbers were correct, the concept is very convincing (read e.g. Jaiku-founder Jyri Engstrom‘s rather insightful thoughts on object-centered sociality). Enter Facebook… ‘Nuff said, I guess…
German carrier T-Mobile today scored a victory against competitor Vodafone: the court declared that the exclusive deal the carrier struck with Apple over the distribution of the iPhone, the coveted darling of mobile fashionistas, in Germany.
The court ruled that it could not find a violation of German competition or anti-trust laws. Vodafone had invoked an injunction forcing the sale of unlocked devices, following which T-Mobile offered the unlocked device without a contract for a whopping EUR 999. This let a competitor, Debitel, into offering a cheaper contract to owners of such unlocked iPhones under the terms of which they would also get EUR 600 back (the difference between the T-Mobile price for locked and unlocked models).
The decision is not final; Vodafone has the right to appeal. Also, the judgment does not do away with the fact that French law prevents the closed business model favoured by Apple where it is also on offer unlocked. Under European law, unlocked French iPhones can be re-sold in every EU country once deployed in the marketplace.
The biggest impact of this of course is that it effectively puts Apple’s approach to force operators to pay it cut of the usage revenues under threat. This might now be averted as cross-border trade will likely remain marginal compared to overall sales.