Nordic Wireless Watch / Silicon Valley is an exit market for Finnish mobile investors
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American mobile markets are maturing and Silicon Valley venture capitalists are starting to understand mobility, said Michel Wendell, a general partner in Nexit Ventures.
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Just a few years ago, Japan&#39;s lead in all things digital was easy to see. Japanese consumers could buy new domestic gadgets from companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic, often a year or two before they hit the market in other countries. But now things have changed. With gadgets increasingly coming out at the same time around the world, it&#39;s no longer the hardware that makes something cool, but what you can do with it.[Note: To see some of the technology and services described here in action, watch PC World&#39;s video,&#160;&quot; Made in Japan: Future Tech Today.&quot;]Mobile Digital TVTake OneSeg, Japan&#39;s mobile digital TV system. The entire electronics industry, TV broadcasters, and the government all agreed on a single broadcasting standard,&#160;eliminating the technical competition that&#39;s holding back such services in the United States&#160;and Europe.The result is a popular service that features all the regular terrestrial channels at no cost. Already, 14 million cell phones with the service have been sold, and the sight of people watching TV is becoming more common on trains and in cafes across Japan.The latest phones also allow you to record TV shows. And if you&#39;re in a public space but forgot to bring your headphones, it&#39;s no problem. A couple of button presses brings up the subtitles so you can enjoy the show with the volume turned down.&#160;In addition,&#160;a companion data service provides information about the current show, promotions from the broadcaster, and, often, a link to the TV station&#39;s mobile Internet home page.Mobile Wallet ServiceSomething else that&#39;s popular in cell phones these days is the &quot;Osaifu keitai,&quot; the mobile wallet service. Phones have smart cards embedded inside, and&#160;these cards let you&#160;add applications like electronic money, your commuter pass, an airline mileage card, or a credit card just by downloading some software.The strength of&#160;Japan&#39;s mobile wallet&#160;system is that the industry has settled on a single smart card, Sony&#39;s Felica. Once a person&#39;s phone has this hardware, he or she can add more functionality with software.NTT DoCoMo, Japan&#39;s largest cellular carrier, gives all its customers an electronic credit card application called DCMX Mini. It has a 10,000-yen ($94) credit limit, and charges appear on the phone bill. Big spenders can apply for more credit and use it just like a regular credit card. All you have to do is bring your phone within an inch of the reader, and the transaction can be completed.Electronic money--something that was tried many times but failed during the dot-com bubble--is now becoming very popular, thanks to &quot;Osaifu keitai.&quot;Of the electronic money systems in Japan, Edy from BitWallet is the market leader, accepted in more than 71,000 convenience stores, bookshops, and coffee chains&#160;as well as at&#160;vending machines. More than 37 million cards and cell phones&#160;that support Edy are on the market, and the network handles close to a million transactions per day on average.Connected CarsIn Japan, car navigation systems have been a must-have accessory in&#160;automobiles for years. Streets in cities like Tokyo often don&#39;t have names, so a navigation system can really save you time. But the latest systems, offered by companies like Nissan, come with something extra.Hook your navigation system to your cell phone, and you have a connection through which you can get the latest road and traffic data. The navigation system already knows where the nearest gas station is, but with the network link, it can also tell you where the cheapest&#160;station is, thanks to daily updates on&#160;gas prices.When you&#39;re driving, the phone can connect you to an operator who&#160;will help you on your journey and even remotely reprogram your navigation system so that you never have to take your hands off the wheel.About 10 percent of streets are covered with sensors that provide information on traffic. Nissan is experimenting with a new service that collects data about the roads you&#39;ve driven and the speeds you&#39;ve achieved, and feeds it to a central computer that adds the information&#160;to the traffic database for a more complete picture of jams.High-tech is also being employed in car safety systems like the Round View Monitor. The video from four cameras around the vehicle is processed and brought together into a single image so that you get the illusion of seeing your car from above. It makes backing into tight spaces really easy and is a big-step beyond the single cameras now found on some large cars&#160;and trucks.Warning of the Big OneOne area that&#39;s taken very seriously by people in Japan is earthquakes and disaster prevention. The problem is&#160;you never know when a quake could strike, right? Well, not necessarily.A new warning system has just gone into operation that seeks to quickly detect the weak but fast-moving primary waves from a quake and use them to estimate when the slower-moving but destructive secondary waves will hit.The system won&#39;t help people living at the epicenter of an earthquake, since both kinds of waves arrive virtually simultaneously. But in the event of a major quake, warnings of anywhere from a few seconds to up to a minute can be supplied almost instantaneously.That&#39;s enough time to halt trains and&#160;bring factory equipment to an emergency stop, and for homeowners to switch off the gas. Most deaths in the Kobe quake of 1995 were from fires that started after the quake, so preventing flameups is important.RobotsNo discussion of cool tech in Japan would be complete without robots. Japanese researchers are leading the world in robot technology, and humanoid bots like Honda&#39;s Asimo are especially impressive.The latest version of Asimo can serve drinks on a tray and has gained the ability to work intelligently with other Asimo robots in the vicinity to get jobs done faster. Two of the robots have spent most of January working at Honda&#39;s Tokyo offices, bringing tea or coffee to guests--and almost certainly entertaining the visitors at the same time.Rival car-maker Toyota has a clutch of robots, including one unveiled in December that plays the violin. (It follows a trumpet-playing robot created&#160; a year earlier, so perhaps a robot orchestra is in the making?) The company also has Robina, which is intended to serve as a guide in a public space. Toyota put it into use last year at a public hall in Japan and expects robots like Robina will be commercially realistic in the middle of the next decade.Taking on a much more serious role is Twendy One, a home-help robot developed by Tokyo&#39;s Waseda University. It can do many of the basic tasks that a frail person may need help with, such as&#160;assisting people out of bed and serving up toast and drinks.The robot is still under development but could have a bright future. Japan&#39;s population is aging fast--already, 22 percent of people are over 65--and the birth rate is slowing. That likely means a future shortage of workers. It&#39;s one of the reasons money is being poured into robot technology in this already technology-saturated nation.
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InfoWorld - Nokia has offered to buy Trolltech, the Norwegian developer of a widely used application framework, for 844 million Norwegian kroner ($153 million) in cash. Nokia hopes the Trolltech development team will give its own software efforts a boost.
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Finland plans to sell as much as 1.37 billion euros ($1.83 billion) worth of shares in TeliaSonera AB, the Nordic region s largest phone company, as part of the country s program of stock sales to reduce debt.
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After the party, the hangover; after the binge, the bills. In the late 1990's, Finland sprinted ahead of rivals and neighbors, propelled by the runaway success of Nokia in the mobile phone industry and reveling ...
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The Russian wireless market is a springboard for growth.
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Intel, Nokia, and Symbian's alliance should shake competitors' confidence.
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It&#39;s easy to be wowed by Japan&#39;s mobile communications infrastructure. &quot;Next-generation&quot; 3G coverage is now so ubiquitous that carriers have already stopped launching 2G phones; an impressive array of attractive handsets offer free digital TV; phones can be used to pay for goods and train rides, thanks to embedded contactless smart cards; and on the mobile information superhighway data whizzes along at 3.6Mbps. But watch out for the off-ramps.While Japan has led the world with many of the services offered to consumers, in some ways the mobile ecosystem here is downright backward as I found out last weekend when I tried to buy a new phone. A broken handset necessitated a new model and this is where my story begins.In Japan, phones are sold by carriers and not the phone makers. Companies like Fujitsu, NEC, Sony Ericsson, and a few foreign vendors including Nokia, Samsung, and LG sell their phones in the thousands to carriers. This gives carriers the ability to pretty much dictate to the phone maker what software needs to be installed.This model is one of the reasons that mobile Internet services like I-mode took off here so quickly. There was no chicken-and-egg situation with phone makers and users waiting for each other to take the plunge. NTT DoCoMo decided I-mode would be in new phones and so it was.But this model has a downside. Phones are so tightly customized to each carrier that it&#39;s not practical to keep the same handset when switching carriers, and if you see a phone you like you can only buy it if it&#39;s offered by your carrier.Back to my story. The new phone was looking quite expensive so I decided to switch carriers and take advantage of a free phone on a competitor network. Japan launched number portability a year ago, so I could make the jump without losing my cell-phone number. I&#39;d still have the hassle of a new e-mail address, but it appeared a small price to pay.Before long I had a new phone in my hands, but my phone numbers remained locked in the old handset. The new carrier didn&#39;t have a cable to hook up to my old phone so they couldn&#39;t transfer the address book and it wasn&#39;t possible to beam it between the phones. While my old carrier was gung-ho on Bluetooth, my new carrier wasn&#39;t so enthusiastic, so the new phone had no support. Similarly, while the new phone offered infrared, the old phone didn&#39;t. Heavy customization strikes again.Back home I fired up my PC and managed to get my address book from the old phone into the computer. Getting it to the new phone via a memory card seemed like an easy task ... but no! The VCard file wasn&#39;t being properly read by the new phone. Carriers, it was explained to me when I called the help line, often used custom fields in their VCards so there were sometimes problems. So much for a common standard.I won&#39;t bore you with the technicalities of how I eventually got my address book into my new phone, but suffice to say this story has a happy ending. I&#39;m now back in cruise control, enjoying all the attractions the mobile superhighway has to offer.The number portability system that enabled me to keep my phone number is coincidentally one-year-old this week. About 3 percent of users in Japan -- roughly 3.7 million people -- have made use of the system during its first year -- far less than the industry predicted, or feared.One thing that&#39;s said to be stopping users from switching is the inability to keep their e-mail addresses. While carriers fussed over the details of keeping numbers, they forgot, or perhaps ignored, the need to carry e-mail addresses between carriers. In other countries this wouldn&#39;t be a big deal because most messaging is done via SMS, which relies on phone numbers, but in Japan the advanced stage of the market has again caused hassle for consumers.
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Investor's Business Daily - The buzz in wireless is that 2008 is the year of the smart phone, and that has sparked a hive of activity by makers of cell phone chips.
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Reaping the benefits as buyers turn to smart phones
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(InfoWorld) - Nokia, one of the first handset makers outside Japan to turn a phone into a wallet, now wants to sell services that will make these kinds of devices useful. But the Finnish mobile equipment giant isn't doing so directly. Instead, it has formed what it calls an independent third party, a joint venture with Germany's Giesecke & Devrient, which makes smart cards. The venture, Venyon Oy, based in Helsinki, was launched in December and is about to open a Singapore office to complement locations in Munich and Dallas, according to Chief Executive Officer Lauri Pesonen. The mobile phone payments Venyon wants to facilitate are based on NFC (near-field communication), which uses an RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip and antenna to exchange information with a payment station from a range of a few centimeters. Typically it would involve tapping the phone against a subway turnstile, a vending machine, a payment device at a checkout stand, or another phone, Pesonen said. Phones are perfect for payment because people carry them almost everywhere, Pesonen told journalists at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday. NFC is already available on some credit and debit cards, and NFC phones will get cheaper when they no longer need a separate smart card for the feature. Such phones should hit the market next year, he said. Like 3G (third-generation) mobile data services, NFC first got off the ground in Japan with slightly different technology, in this case Sony's FeliCa system. Now big names including Sony, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Visa International Service Association, and MasterCard International are backing the technology through the NFC Forum and there are trials taking place in several places around the world. But outside Japan and South Korea, there are few phones equipped to use it. Venyon isn't aiming at the hardware end of the problem but at the need for an infrastructure through which retailers and financial services companies can work with carriers and handset makers. Although standards bodies are working on specifications for this, Venyon is worried that the market will be in full swing by the time those standards are finished. If each set of partners develops its own technology, fragmentation would slow down adoption, Pesonen said. Venyon is offering services to support mobile NFC applications that can be downloaded and managed over the air. For example, a service that lets the user prepay for subway rides would involve the transit operator, the mobile carrier, a financial institution and software that needs to be downloaded to the phone. Venyon would provide that service behind the scenes, Pesonen said. OvumÂ  analyst Roger Entner thinks many people eventually will embrace payment by phone for its convenience. The practice might be even more popular in countries where consumers don't yet have credit cards, he added. But Entner is less worried than Venyon about fragmentation. The company wants to jump out ahead and grab market share, but more competitors means better ideas, he said. "I have great trust in the market forces," Entner said. NFC could well succeed but faces an uphill battle in the U.S., in the view of analyst Clay Ryder at Sageza Group. Fewer U.S. consumers make small, daily payments on transit systems. Phone payments initially would appeal most to people in their early 20s, he said.
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Investor's Business Daily - Could Russia's hypergrowth in cellular subscribers start slowing?
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Should investors connect with this troubled telecom?
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Cell-phone unit won't be profitable this year.
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Struggling electronics firm considers breaking itself up in a move that could reshape the mobiles industry
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BERLIN â Once dubbed the Frankenphone by unimpressed mobile phone aficionados, Nokiaâs oval, game-focused N-Gage model quietly disappeared from the market not long after its introduction in 2003.
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Blog: With full leasing ownership of the 700MHz spectrum, Google will try to effectively cripple the cell phone industry.  Before you scoff and say this is a bunch of garbage, consider this: Google will only offer the $4.6 billion if the government agrees to th