Phone and software makers urge cheaper Web mobiles
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Wireless operators need to make  mobile Internet much cheaper if they want it to become a  success that can generate extra revenues, major mobile phone  and mobile software makers said on Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - Vodafone has begun offering new fees and features to stir demand for mobile Internet services as competition hits the company's profits from voice services. Two of the group's largest subsidiaries, Germany's Vodafone D2 GmbH and Vodafone Ltd. in the U.K., announced new mobile data offerings on Wednesday with subsidiaries in several other markets planning customized packages of their own, according to Vodafone Group spokesman Mark Street. "Pricing for these new mobile Internet services will be on a market by market basis, and it will be up to each market to decide on features," Street said. "But what I can say is that as a group, we're looking at prices that are predictable and transparent and services that offer value for their money." The move comes as Vodafone, which has been facing tough competition from low-cost mobile phone operators, seeks new revenue streams to offset falling prices from its traditional cash-cow voice service. It has also been prompted by mobile Internet services, such as T-Mobile International AG's Web n' Walk, designed for quick, easy, and competitively priced mobile phone surfing. As of July 15, Vodafone customers in Germany can subscribe to the new mobile Internet service, called "Handy 2.0," available for a flat monthly fee of â¬9.95 ($13.44) . The service uses the open-source Opera mobile phone browser, which formats content for easy viewing on small displays, according to Vodafone D2 spokeswoman Bettina Donges. "Handy 2.0 will be like a PC experience," Donges said. "You'll be able to surf all around the Net with your mobile phone, the pages will be compiled fast, and they'll be easy to read." The new flat-rate Internet offering, however, doesn't apply to VoIPÂ applications, according to Donges. Vodafone will not support mobile VoIP service until it can guarantee quality service, Street said. In addition, Vodafone has struck Internet partnerships with eBay, Google, YouTube, and MySpace.com to provide services specially tailored for mobile phones. Customers access the Internet service through the Vodafone Live mobile portal. The portal service is included in the various bundled minute packages available from the German operator. Initially, several handsets, including the Nokia N73 and N95, the Motorola V3 and V980, and the Samsung Zv60 and D900i, will support the Handy 2.0 service, but other phones will be added over time. In the U.K., Vodafone is launching a similar service that takes Web pages designed for PCs and makes them easy to read on handsets. The Vodafone Mobile Internet offerings also includes partnerships with eBay, Google, YouTube, and MySpace as well as Yahoo. Analysts see a couple of advantages to the partnerships. By collaborating with these brands, Vodafone not only gives customers a better experience of using their Internet services on their phones but will also benefit from advertising revenue opportunities, according to John Delaney, principal analyst at Ovum Ltd. One slight difference between the German and U.K. offering is the price: U.K. customers who sign up for a data pack pay Â£7.50 ($14.90 ) per month for 120MB of data, which is equivalent to four hours of viewing YouTube or up to 160 mobile Internet pages every day for a month. Other customers are charged per kilobyte, up to a Â£1 per day for 500KB, with no additional charge unless the day's usage exceeds 15MB.
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Trolltech, a provider of software development platforms and frameworks, hopes to open up mobile application development to Web developers with support for WebKit.Trolltech plans to announce on Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it has integrated QT, its development platform, with WebKit, the Web browser technology used by Apple, Nokia, Google, Motorola and others. The integration should make it easier for developers to build products that integrate online components into mobile phone applications.Trolltech, a Norwegian company that&#160;Nokia recently announced plans to buy, has integrated the tools so that developers can build the bulk of an application using HTML and the rest using C ++. By using HTML to create most of the application, handset makers can save development costs because C ++ engineers are typically harder to find and more expensive to use, said Benoit Schillings, CTO of Trolltech. However, they can still create some features using C ++, which offers more functionality and performance.A handset maker could decide to use HTML to create features that it might want to tweak to appeal to different audiences. For example, a handset maker may want to enlarge visual items on a page in a phone designed for older people, and they can adapt and customize those features quicker using HTML than C ++, Schillings said.Even though the applications may be primarily built using HTML, they don&#39;t have to be browser-based or require an Internet connection, he said. However, he envisions interesting ways to combine offline and online applications.For example, Trolltech has demonstrated an address book application that phone users can access without going online. The application collects information from a user&#39;s Facebook friends, adding photos or other new content from friends&#39; Facebook pages into their address book entry.The Qt WebKit integration will be available as a module in Qt 4.4, which is expected to come out in the second quarter.Trolltech also planned to release Qtopia Phone Edition version 4.3 in Barcelona, adding support for new features including touch-screens. The new Qtopia Synch Agent syncs data between Qtopia and Microsoft Outlook.&#160;
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Location-based services are trying to revamp the Web experience to be less cumbersome on mobile devices.
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(InfoWorld) - Money talks. That's why mobile phone advertising has become such an irresistible topic. As mobile phone executives converge on the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, which runs from Monday to Thursday, many plan to meet and discuss how they can benefit from the rush toward ad-funded mobile services. Interest in mobile ads is being fueled in part by higher-speed devices that are encouraging more users to surf the Web, by new broadcast mobile TV services that could attract a new breed of viewers on the go and, above all, by numerous ambitious startups, particularly MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators), which are eager to sink their teeth into a huge market. More than 2 billion handsets are spread across the globe, and their numbers are growing by the minute. Arguably, the mobile phone is the most personal consumer goods device we own. It's a trusted communication companion, for the businessperson and consumer alike. And unlike a newspaper or even a computer, it's assigned to a single owner. That has marketers licking their chops. They're excited over the prospect of being able to target their ads in a highly personalized way. And mobile operators, which have been reluctant to leverage their customer base for mobile marketing purposes, now see an opportunity to create a new revenue stream they simply can't resist. Several groups are already testing the waters or are just about ready to dive in. In Europe, for instance, HotSMS in the Netherlands currently delivers a free, ad-sponsored SMS (short message service) offer. Blyk in the U.K. and i-Wood in the Netherlands are preparing to launch free or heavily-subsidized voice and data services in exchange for mobile phone users' consent to receive ads. Vodafone Group, Europe's largest mobile phone operator, is working separately with search engine giants GoogleÂ and Yahoo. Google is developing a service that would link advertising to Internet searches -- a counterpart to its flagship business of selling ads linked to regular Internet searches. With Yahoo, Vodafone aims to jointly develop advertisements in a variety of formats, including banner ads and short videos. To help make ads interesting to customers, the operator plans to offer discounts on services such as mobile TV, games and MMS (multimedia messaging service). In the U.S., Sugar Mama, an MVNO owned by Virgin Mobile USA, gives prepaid customers additional minutes by watching online ads, answering questions by SMS or filling out surveys about products and services. Another MVNO startup, Xero Mobile plans to provide college students with subsidized talk time in return for viewing targeted, relevant advertising. AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and Verizon WirelessÂ have signalled interest in developing mobile advertising strategies of their own. Earlier this year, U.S. startup AdMob opened for business as a middleman for managing cell-phone ads. It joins Third Screen Media, which helps companies deliver ads to phones without a glitch. Not surprisingly, in Japan, which is often far ahead of the curve in delivering new mobile phone services, NTT DoCoMo Inc. has been running small banner ads on its mobile portals for more than five years. Clearly, there's money to be made. Informa Telecoms & Media, a division of Informa, expects mobile phone ad spending in 2007 to more than double from 2006 levels to $1.5 billion. By 2011, the market researcher projects spending of more than $11 billion. As enticing as mobile marketing is, industry experts warn advertisers, mobile phone operators, MVNOs and others to move carefully into this new area. The high level of personalization enabled by mobile phones makes these devices inappropriate for blanket advertising and any attempt to leverage users' IDs for unsolicited "spam" ads is guaranteed to alienate consumers, according to Emma Mohr-McClune, principal analyst at Current Analysis Inc. Mohr-McClune argues that consent and relevancy are the twin keys to unlocking mobile marketing's potential, without busting the lock entirely. Operators will have to offer their customers something in exchange for advertising consent, and they must make it relevant. And customers are more likely to accept advertising on a mobile phone if the promotions appeal directly to their own tastes and interests. All of which suggests that mobile phone advertising will most likely appeal to younger customers. "This is definitely a youth-driven market," Mohr-McClune said. "Youth is very price sensitive so they'd be interested in services that are free or heavily discounted." Ask a few and they'll agree. "If the phone service is free or a lot cheaper than what I'm paying now, sure, I'd be interested," said Michael Amos, a 25-year-old cook in DÃ¼sseldorf, Germany. Amos currently has a flat-rate subscription, which he said is comparatively low priced but something he'd drop for a cheaper service. If operators are prepared to lower fees or drop them altogether, they'll want to make sure they generate enough money through ads to offset lower subscription revenue. One way is to keep users in "walled garden" mobile portals where operators would have better control over the flow of mobile ads and the revenue they generate. Some operators may find it easier to work with companies like AdMob, which also serves as a broker and can strike deals for advertisers with individual carriers around the world. Still, mobile phone operators, MVNOs and others entering the mobile ad market should be aware that the service is no free ticket to print money, warns Sarah Harris, a senior analyst at Strategy Analytics Inc. in London. There have been failures, such as Spotcast Communications Inc., which launched an advertising-supported service in Hong Kong in 1999 but shut it down a year later, she said. Harris speculates that the service was canned because only the most strapped-for-cash users were really adopting it with any eagerness. Not necessarily advertisers' favorite people, these consumers were happy to "play the game" and receive the ads but not willing to go out and spend money. Similar advertising-supported services were launched a few years ago in Europe for fixed-line phones but "you really don't hear anything about them anymore," Harris said. If the ad market for online PCs took years to mature and generate revenue, the market for ads zapped over the airwaves will take time, too. Nevertheless, momentum is growing as new ad-hungry MVNOs sprout up like mushrooms. Operators know that if they don't carve out a chunk of the mobile advertising pie before the others, they could be left nibbling on the crumbs.
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Getting in to Gears Analysis The most critical battle in the wireless world is to take the reins of the mobile internet as it evolves, and that means all the majors are trying to create a software platform that will make the web even more usable on a small device than it is on a PC, and so drive new applications and revenue streams.â¦
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Mobile operators are starting to wake up to the potential of giving their customers access to the net.
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One domain, &quot;.mobi,&quot; will be set up for websites trying to work with the restrictions of Internet surfing on cell phones.
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Companies trying to deploy Internet phone calling face varied costs depending on the technology provider, according to a report.
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Cell phones may be the next battleground for companies offering internet phone services that don't depend on your desktop and router. By Randy Dotinga.
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Those who don't mind carrying a paperweight already have plenty of options for "smart" phones that do more than just make calls. The rest of us are stuck with a sad compromise between size and function.
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Petitions federal agency to open up the mobile phone industry to "unlocked" devices and third-party applications--such as Skype.
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The wide variety of operating systems on mobile phones is hindering the growth of cool mobile Internet applications, according to Arun Sarin, CEO of network operator Vodafone.
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Mobile phone giants Vodafone and Nokia have teamed up to simplify software for cell phones written with the Java computer language that promises to bring cheaper, smarter handsets.
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With Firefox Mobile and Skyfire closing in, Opera may need a new mobile browser pricing plan.
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Millions of pounds will be spent in the coming months trying to persuade people to upgrade to 3G phones. What do two users of the services which have been launched already think about what their fancy phone can do?
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Revenue from its basic phone service is slipping as consumers make more cellular calls and experiment with upstart Internet-based phone providers.