Asia to beat Europe in mobile TV: industry execs
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Asia is set to overtake Europe&#39;s  early lead in adopting mobile television broadcasting as Europe  struggles to find available airwaves for broadcasts, industry  executives at an Asian trade fair said this week.
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Five of the world's top mobile-phone manufacturers are joining forces on the delivery of TV broadcasts to handsets, opening yet another opportunity for content providers and hoping to drive demand for next-generation wireless devices and services.
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(InfoWorld) - After several quarters ofÂ lackluster financial performanceÂ in Asia, EMC executives are looking to get the company's operations back on track. "Our challenge is execution," said Steve Leonard, president of EMC's Asia-Pacific operations. "We have to do a better job of execution, and execution is fixable." During the third quarter, EMC's Asian revenue grew by 6.9 percent, far slower than other regions. The company saw growth of 20.6 percent in the U.S. and 19.4 percent in Europe, the Middle East and Africa during the same period. EMC's other geographical unit, which includes Canada, Mexico and South America, saw growth of 27.1 percent. Still, EMC's financial performance in Asia during the third-quarter was an improvement over previous periods. The company reported revenue growth of 2.2 percent and 1.4 percent during the second and first quarters, respectively. This sluggish growth contrasts with performance in earlier years, when the company posted annual revenue growth in the high teens. Leonard joined EMC in April, after running the Asia-Pacific operations of Symantec, with a mandate to revive the company's business in Asia. "We have asked some members of our team to leave the business, we've asked some team members to take on added responsibility, and we brought in some outside professionals from different companies," he said. Returning to faster growth in Asia will take time, Leonard said, noting EMC is taking a measured approach, looking to first resolve some operational issues before moving on to others. "We're seeing some early indications that some of those things are gaining traction," he said. For example, EMC is rethinking its sales model and is working more closely with channel partners across the region. "In Asia-Pacific, not working closely enough with partners means you miss a lot of territory," Leonard said. "We've re-engineered our partnership program, how we train, and how we reward our partner community." The company also wants to take advantage of its strong market position in storage to sell more software to customers, Leonard said. As part of this process, EMC wants to reinvent itself in the eyes of customers and show how string of acquisitions in recent years have changed the company from a provider of large storage arrays to a vendor that offers a range of products for storing and managing data, he said. Another area where EMC hopes to improve is support. The company is moving to a single support contact for all of its products, a change that should make life easier for customers, Leonard said. "We are improving day by day," he said.
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Telecom executives are excited by the potential for 3G cellular networks in China, but the country wonÃÂt say which technology it will use or who will get licenses.
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The latest contender, Flash OFDM technology carries data 10 times faster and is cheaper than 3G phone networks. AMSTERDAM: Europe&#39;s second largest mobile carrier T-Mobile said it had started the continent&#39;s
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The global mobile phone market is set to  grow to 2 billion subscribers by the end of 2005, fueled by  strong demand from developing economies in Asia and Latin  America, Deloitte & Touche said on Tuesday.
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The move by the European Commission could spur growth in the fledgling but potentially lucrative mobile TV sector.
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The mobile phone industry has been  predicting for years that the future of television is wireless.
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The media sector will be dominated by  a handful of companies that produce or distribute  entertainment, despite a proliferation of new technologies and  companies vying to deliver programming to homes and handheld  devices, a leading media analyst said on Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - Despite theÂ buzz around mobile advertising, end users and eager advertisers may have to wait a while for widespread deployments as the mobile industry sorts out the requirements for it. "The problem is, today we are highly fragmented," said Rob Conway, CEO of the GSM Association, the global trade group for GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) operators. He spoke Tuesday morning at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona. Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone Group, agreed. Despite the interest from advertisers in using mobile phones to deliver ads, the mobile industry needs to create a consistent framework. "If we went to Proctor and Gamble and said, this is how Vodafone does it but Orange is different, they will find it hard to move their ads onto mobiles," Sarin said. "If we don't move together we will have a fragmented medium and user base instead of a single valuable medium that reaches two billion people." A common framework would include specifications for the appropriate size of banner ads and length of video ads as well as a reporting mechanism to help advertisers measure the success of their campaigns. The GSM Association has recently established the Mobile Advertising Forum to begin to define such a framework. The group hopes to include a wide variety of interested parties, including advertisers, aggregators and content providers to set the parameters. Some end users are interested in the concept of mobile advertising because it can enable free or low-cost services in exchange for viewing advertisements. In addition, the mobile industry promises that it can offer advertisements that users may be interested in based on their location, for example. "It's about engagement with consumers," Conway said. "We will tailor-make ads for the taste of consumers." Mobile phones represent an enticing platform for advertisers who already eagerly address the 1.4 billion TV sets and 1 billion PCs in the world, said Sarin. With 2 billion mobile users on the planet, "we're clearly an important area," he said. Not all those users phone users, however, would be able to receive mobile ads. They must subscribe to a data service that enables the delivery of such content and a capable phone too, he said. Â
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Brazil, India, China and Russia are driving global telecoms growth, a report by UK watchdog Ofcom suggests.
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[Business India]: Singapore, Nov.4 : Seven Asia-Pacific mobile phone operators, including Bharti of India, with a combined total of over 56 million subscribers, on Wednesday formed an alliance aimed at creating a unified regional network.
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(InfoWorld) - Some mobile phone companies are looking to emerging markets to find early adopters and for a glimpse at services of the future, CEOs said during the opening day keynote of theÂ 3GSM conferenceÂ in Barcelona on Tuesday. In Senegal, for example, customers eagerly use a mobile Internet TV service that includes a DVR (digital video recorder) feature. "It's more advanced than in many other places," said Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO of operator Orange. The keynote focused on the importance of emerging markets to the future of the mobile industry. That compares with last year's opening keynote, which focused largely on the potential of wireless content services. Vodafone Group's CEO Arun Sarin pointed to South Africa, where HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) users make up 30 percent of the entire broadband market. That number is expected to increase to 50 percent by 2010, he said. Users in emerging markets are taking up such new technologies as mobile broadband because they don't have quality fixed-line networks, he said. The lack of quality landline networks may also be driving people in developing markets to exclusively use wireless, he said. In Europe, on average, 35 percent of phone usage is on mobile networks while in developing markets more than 50 percent of minutes are on mobile networks, he said. Naquib Sawaris, chairman and CEO of Orascom Telecom Holding, an operator offering services in Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, and Iraq, put it most succinctly. "You have two Indians and an Egyptian on this stage: It's our time," he said. Sarin also commented onÂ Vodafone's recent winÂ of a controlling interest in Indian operator Hutchison Essar. Mobile phone penetration in India is around 13 percent and Sarin expects that to grow to 40 percent, or 500 million subscribers, in a few years. Indians like to talk too, with an average of 400 minutes of use per subscriber per month, he said. That compares to 150 minutes in Europe.
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STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- LM Ericsson, the world's largest maker of wireless networks, said Friday that strong sales in Asia helped boost earnings 12 percent in the second quarter but its shares dropped as the results missed expectations.
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Europeans are a step closer to having television on their mobile phones: Two groups of companies said they would push forward with consumer trials and establish a standard for the technology.
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InfoWorld - Google&#39;s dominance may seem unassailable in North America, but it&#39;s the search giant that is playing catch-up in Asia, according to new survey results released Sunday.
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Asia is set to overtake Europe's  early lead in adopting mobile television broadcasting as Europe  struggles to find available airwaves for broadcasts, industry  executives at an Asian trade fair said this week.