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Posts Tagged ‘voice’

How Facebook friends can get you free calls

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

In the US and want free minutes? Time to install a new Facebook application. It’s called Fund My Phone and it’s part of Virgin Mobile USA’s Sugar Mama service, which lets customers rack up free minutes, usually by sitting through advertising.

Fund My Phone works slightly differently: it gives you free minutes if you encourage all your Facebook mates to endure some advertising spots. Free-minutes-seekers install the application, tell all their friends about it, and for every four mates that watches a one minute trailer of some sort and gives their feedback, free minutes get sent back to the original user.

In principle, it’s a canny idea but how many of people’s Facebook friends are more than vague acquaintances they added to boost their friends list and make themselves look popular? Asking them to watch some adverts for you should separate the wheat from the chaff and you might even get some free airtime out of it to boot.

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Posted in Mobile Marketing | Comments

T-Mobile switches on US 3G network – without data?

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

According to a number of reports, T-Mobile is finally – finally! – launching its 3G network in the US from today.

The 3G network will be switched on across 20 cities this year including Las Vegas and Los Angeles, with New York being the first to get the third-generation nod, and those hungry to test out the service will have a choice between four 3G handsets.

Given it’s taken T-Mobile ages to get this up and running, if this latest snippet about the switch-on is true, it sounds like madness: according to endaget, T-Mobile will launch its 3G network without data. Yep, 3G will be kept initially for voice, with EDGE acting as data carrier. Without data capabilities, this 3G rollout is looking like a dangerously damp squib.

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Posted in T-Mobile | Comments

Microsoft’s TellMe comes to BlackBerry first

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

More doom and gloom from the handset people. After Nokia said it though the worldwide mobile phone market might shrink next year, Sony Ericsson has reported its profits have nosedived over the last quarter, its market share has dropped (enough to see it slip behind LG to number five in the biggest device makers) and a lower average selling price.

Sony Ericsson puts the slip down to a “slowing market growth in mid-to-high end phones in markets where Sony Ericsson has a strong presence”. At the same time, the company says it expects all the handsets that it announced previously but will sell in the next quarter will help make a difference in future – like the “high end” Xperia X1 and “high end” Walkman and HSDPA phones. If Sony Ericsson is having trouble shifting high end models and taking a profit hit, perhaps boasting about the slew of high end models coming soon is not the best way to rectify it?

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Posted in Mobile Applications | 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

Vlingo lands $20m and a spot on Yahoo

Monday, April 7th, 2008

Bored with text input for mobile search? Yahoo has taken the wraps off voice enabled search for its oneSearch product for the BlackBerry users in the US, with more devices and countries coming soon. The base of the service is Vlingo’s speech recognition, which grabs the spoken search terms and enters them into oneSearch.

Yahoo is obviously rather fond of this technology – it’s also announced that it’s invested in Vlingo as part of a $20 million series B funding round for the company. Vlingo said it will put the money towards expansion and R&D.

Voice is, let’s face it, still the killer app for mobiles so it’s actually surprising there aren’t more people talking up voice-enabled search, especially given the push for mobility in emerging markets where literacy rates may be low. Does anyone know what Google’s up in this area?

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Posted in Mobile Applications | Comments

US to Dish up next mobile TV offering?

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

The US could be getting another mobile TV service, according to The Financial Times. The paper quotes analysts as saying broadcaster Dish Networks “could be considering launching a mobile TV service to compete with the leading US mobile phone companies” after bidding at the US 700 Mhz spectrum auction and winning enough licences to “create a nationwide footprint”.

The speculation the spectrum will be used for mobile TV rather than voice or data stems from the nature of the spectrum Dish, through a company called Frontier Wireless, bought: the spectrum is suited to video but can’t handly two way communication.

But whether that actually translates to mobile TV remains to be seen. After all, few broadcast mobile TV services are up and running commercially, let alone are bringing in the revenue. Dish so far has refused to comment on its plans for the spectrum. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if there’s more mobile TV on the way.

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Posted in Mobile TV | Comments

In-flight mobile calls take off with Emirates

Friday, March 21st, 2008

The world has finally got its first commercial in-flight mobile service, thanks to Emirates and supplier AeroMobile. Emirates saw its first call on flight EK751, on a plane travelling between Dubai and Casablanca yesterday.

According to AeroMobile, it’s the first time that voice calls have been allowed on commercial airline flights, after the European Aviation Safety Agency and the United Arab Emirates-based General Civil Aviation Authority gave the system the thumbs-up.

It looks like AeroMobile and Emirates have really done their research here. There’s a second aircraft coming online soon, so the service isn’t just a one-off, BlackBerry email and other GPRS data applications will be available later on this year and there’s even a politeness policy enforced making sure that passengers keep their mobiles on silent. If Emirates get the pricing right, it could be the testbed that proves demand for in-flight mobility.

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Posted in Mobile Services | Comments

Operators ask to dodge termination fees

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

The Competition Appeal Tribunal has referred the question of wholesale mobile termination rates – the fee each operator charges another to connect a call on their network – to the Competition Commission after appeals by BT and 3.

The appeals come after Ofcom changed the controls on mobile termination rates early last year, which it said at the time would save operators £400 to £500 million a year and that saving should be passed on to retail customers.

According to The Guardian, the operators are now hoping to get termination rates down to nothing in order to be able to offer all-you-can-eat call plans of the type that have become common in the US. If that’s the case, great. If it saves the operators money, that’s great too – as long as the operators remember to send a bit of those savings our way, as Ofcom asked for.

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Posted in Operators | Comments

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