Posts Tagged ‘commerce’

Is Nokia becoming Fox?

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

That’s one of the opened-ended questions posed by Kerrianne Gauld, Biz Dev at Smith & Williamson Corporate Finance on MoMoLondon this afternoon. Have a read:

Hi

I’m doing some research on the mobile advertising sector and wondered if anyone had any views on the sustainability of the sector. If the projected ad spend by 2013 will be $2bn and the revenues from mobile transactions will be $300bn won’t there need to be a huge shift in the technology/consumer culture/backoffice infrastructures to enable this to happen? There appears to be a number of issues between 3rd party developers, handset manufacturers, and network operators that will need to be settled before sufficient industry standards are in place to fully facilitate this boom.

Just looking at the proliferation of premium content/advertising networks that are springing up suggests that the marketplace is growing quickly, but I wonder how many of these firms are able to offer something that adds true value. Nokia bought Enpocket to help it ‘establish Nokia as a leader in Internet services’ and is continuing to make regular acquisitions along this path, including MOSH in June. Is Nokia becoming Fox?

I can see why the industry is excited, but I’m not sure whether it’s just hype or not.

Would anyone like to share their views? You can email me direct if you’d prefer not to post to all.

Cheers
Kerrianne

Kerrianne Gauld
Business Development
Smith & Williamson Corporate Finance

Kerrianne raises some interesting points. If you’re suffering from doubt and wondering if we’re walking through a hype-laden industry, here’s my patented 1-step hype detector process:

1. Is/Can/Will your mother using it?

If yes, you’re fine.

If no, you’re in Hypeville.

There are a range of players ready to plug the gaps — First Data is one of those that springs to mind when it comes to mobile transactions. However the mobile industry itself — and the mobile operators in particular — still can’t work out what day it is.

Today I’m a media company. Tomorrow I’m an internet services company. On Tuesday I’d like to flog you 40p/min cross network telecommunications services to call your granny. And on Wednesday I’m trying to become big in music.

And we move on.

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Posted in Mobile Commerce, Operators, Opinion | Comments

IBM kicks off universal translator, mobile soul removal

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

IBM has been touting the latest initiative to come out of its Research Labs, aimed at building a slew of services for the developing economies where mobile phones are the de facto web access device.

There’s a lot of fluff around the initiative (social networks go mobile - who’d have thought it?), but some potentially interesting work. Here’s what IBM says it will be working on:

Universal Mobile Translator
IBM’s researchers are developing new technology to facilitate speech between individuals who speak no common language with the goal of free-form dialogue facilitated by a PDA. IBM technology is already allowing travelers using PDAs to translate menus in Japanese and doctors to communicate with patients in Spanish. IBM real-time translation technologies will be embedded into mobile phones, handheld devices and cars.

Portable Power in Your Pocket
IBM’s SoulPad software allows PC users to separate a computer’s “soul” — the programs, settings and data it holds — from its body, the disks, keyboard, screen, processor and other hardware from which it is comprised. Once a computer’s soul is stored on a storage device like a portable USB hard drive or iPod with SoulPad software, it can be carried around and reincarnated in any other computer simply by plugging in the storage device and starting the computer up.

Social Networks Go Mobile
Consumers can communicate with their social network friends regardless of where they are with voice and SMS from either a PC or a mobile phone. This is huge for generation Y consumers. For example, young shoppers looking at purchasing clothes in a store are increasingly looking for immediate feedback via their social networks, and the easiest way to make this happen is via mobile devices.

Healthcare Goes Mobile
IBM Research has brought together mobile phones and “presence” technology combined with health records to provide a potential “good samaritan” with information on how to aid people in critical medical situations. This combination of IBM Research capabilities and IBM WebSphere Presence Server exemplifies IBM’s ability to create enhanced mobile applications for everyday life.

Interesting, it also says it’s working on “voice-enabled mobile commerce” - if there ever was an application that should be more developed, it’s speech input, particularly for developing economies. After all, how useful is text input and SMS in countries where there’s an 50 percent illiteracy rate?

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Posted in Mobile Development | Comments

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