Soon more people will be doing their talking on mobile handsets than landlines in Europe. According to a new report from Analysys, a European consulting telecommunication and IT firm, the migration to mobile continues to replace traditional landlines. Even in Germany, where landlines still dominate, nearly a quarter of all calls originate on a mobile handset, a rise of six percent during 2006.
It is also interesting to note that the Analysys study users aren’t necessarily talking more, they’re just using land-lines less.
[Via The Register]
Today AT&T announced the launch of an over-the-air music download service with eMusic, the largest retailer of independent music. This new service will AT&T subscribers the ability to preview and purchase music via their mobile handsets from a catalog of 2.7 million songs. This new service, which is par of the AT&T Mobile Music Platform, is among the nation’s largest wireless music catalogs.
Songs purchased from eMusic Mobile are immediately sent to the user’s wireless handset, while a duplicate copy is available for download to the user’s PC at no additional charge. AT&T customers can subscribe to download five tracks a month for $7.49, while additional packages of songs are available for the same price.
“eMusic Mobile is not your typical over-the-air service,” said Mark Collins, vice president of Consumer Data Services for AT&T’s wireless unit. “This service, which is as unique as the independent artists found in the eMusic catalog, differentiates itself from the competition through its ease of use, subscription pricing model and the ability to play these tracks in any MP3 player.”
The eMusic Mobile service will be available on select AT&T music devices, with future models added in the future. These phones include the Samsung a717, a727 and the Nokia N75, as well as the new version of the Samsung SYNC.
AT&T
eMusic
Bloglines has created the “Ultimate Pro” edition of iBloglines for the iPhone audience. It’s got added functionality like a “pin” to save posts or feeds until you’re on the fixed Web, the ability to e-mail articles, search for content, auto-refresh, personalized preferences and it automatically hides images to compensate for EDGE’s slogginess.
I swear by Bloglines, and am happy to see any sort of mobile version. But it does hurt just a bit that Bloglines actually took away functionality from its simple mobile feeds a while back. It now takes at least three clicks to get to your feeds. And even with EVDO speeds, that’s still a timely process. The rest of the features — save the auto refresh function — still exist in the basic mobile version. But we at Mobile Crunch feel like we’re using the Web version on our Blackberry, when the iPhone is more capable of sizing down Web pages to the big, small screen. Please Bloglines, bring back (and enhance) a mobile version.
Bloglines
Calling in to a conference call has been easy enough from a mobile phone – and nothing beats soaking in the rays on a roof garden while listening to a long boring call (just don’t tell my editors). But now foonzMobile from RPM Communications will let mobile users take part in a conference call that will cost nothing other than the minutes sued for a regular call. Users simply send a short text message (“START”) to FOONZ (36669) to get the ball rolling. foonzMobile then replies with a text message with the instructions, allowing you to initiate the call. Additional text messages are sent to the other parties with a number to call, and participants simply the dial that number and foonz does the connecting.
“Conference calling isn’t just for business anymore,” said Michael Bayer, CEO and co-founder of RPM Communications, Inc., the parent company of foonz. “People who want to share news, get a group of friends together, or let team mates know that practice is cancelled can forget about phone trees or calling people one-by-one. foonzMobile makes group voice communication as immediate and easy as text and IM, and it’s available to every one of the 230 million people with cell phones in the US. And of course, it’s available to businesses too.”
Additional features are available to registered foonzMobile users, but anyone can try out the service by text messaging. We’ll give the service a spin soon and let you know what we thought.
foonzMobile
RPM Communications
Calls between EU countries may just get a little cheaper this week. Under new EU rules, telecom companies have until the end of July (as in today) to offer customers a new pricing structure that means cheaper “roaming” fees. And users have two months to say whether they want to move to the new plans or stick with their existing contracts.
The European Commission calculated that mobile phone carries made about 8.5 billion euros profit a year from roaming charges! Makes you want to always stay in network doesn’t it!
[Via BBC]
Budgets are something that many college students have to deal with, and students will look for ways to make ends meet. This week Mobile Campus, a provider of mobile communications, information and transactional services for university students, announced the findings from their recent Vizu poll. According to the survey, students frequently look to save money by utilizing the exclusive discounts offered to them as students. The Internet remains the preferred channel for accessing these discounts, but a small minority are already receiving discount offers via text messages to their mobile phones.
Of course we have to take some of these findings with a grain of salt (or possibly several grains of salt), as text messaging is channel of delivery that already being used by Mobile Campus to target college students. But with many college students relying on mobile phones as their primary — and often only phone — it is no surprise that marketers will seriously target college students via text messages.
Mobile Campus
Yesterday we reported that according to a recent Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association (AMTA) study, very few mobile handsets are actually being recycled. So what is happening to them? Well, landfills are probably where a lot of them are ending up, making for a future environmental disaster.
Even if, as the report suggests, people are actually keeping the phones as backups for now, what is going to happen when users have numerous backups? With the average phone being replaced in 18 months, there are millions of phones that have no where to go. And Jeff Angel, the director of the Total Environment Center (TEC) claims that industry efforts to reclaim disposed phones isn’t working with just three percent of all mobile handsets being recycled.
So what is the solution? Well, one program that has been started is an industry-partnered program with Landcare Australia, where a tree will be planted for every handset recycled. The “Old Phones, New Trees,” program should get the tree-hugger lot involved, but that’s still a long way to go. Another option is a $10 refundable deposit on mobile phones. And there have been other programs suggested such as having to turn in an old phone to keep your number when buying a new phone.
Australian efforts are to boost collections of old phones by 200 percent and halve what goes into landfills within the next three years. That’s a good first step, but there is still a long way to go. And if you think this is bad. Where do you think those used 50-inch plasma TVs are going to end up in another decade?
[Via PC World]
Last week we reported that Oxygen Media was working on mobile game based on the reality TV series The Bad Girls Club, and this week additional details were announced. The game, which is being developed by Hong Kong-based Artificial Life, Inc., will be able for the 3G platform later this August. In addition to the 3G game, Oxygen and Artificial Life will also launch several other 2G games based on The Bad Girls Club in the coming months.
In the 3G version players will take the role of a new member of the club, and will have the usual agenda: to gain fame and win notoriety in the tabloid world. Players must prove to be a scandalous and notorious bad girl and win a spot on the cover of the Tabloid!
“Gaming is so huge with women, and Oxygen has been looking at how to break into this arena,” said Oxygen senior vice president Cynthia Ashworth. “This game presents the perfect opportunity to take our most popular television series to a new level by creating a mobile game that is on brand with the show and also connects with our young, tech-savvy female audience. This is only the beginning for Oxygen in the gaming arena.”
Bad Girls Club 3G Mobile will be available via download at the end of August for an initial price of $3.99.
Oxygen Media: Bad Girls Club 3G Mobile
Our friends at GameDaily have gotten the scoop on the arrival of PopCap Games new free Web version of Bejeweled for the Apple iPhone. This popular puzzle game is available via the Safari browser. This version of Bejeweled was developed for PopCap Games by Polish game creator Arkadiusz Mlynarczyk, one of the first coders to take advantage of the device’s gaming abilities with the Bejeweled clone known as Diamenty. As it is a browser-based title no download is required, yet much of the original functionality and gameplay remain.
[Via GameDaily]
Namco Networks announced today that Peanuts flying ace Snoopy will now soar onto mobile handsets. Woodstock’s nest has fall and he needs Snoopy’s help in Snoopy the Flying Ace, the latest mobile game from Namco Networks. The game will let Snoopy fly him Sopwith Camel fighter plane (which we’ll see as his dog house) deep into enemy territory to capture balloons and raise Woodstock’s nest.
“Snoopy’s aerial escapades are some of the most memorable moments from the Peanuts comic strips and are appealing to mass-market consumers, making them an ideal storyline for a mobile phone game,” said Scott Rubin, vice president of sales and marketing for Namco Networks. “Peanuts is one of the most beloved entertainment brands of all time and is a great addition to our lineup of top-selling, brand-based mobile games.”
Snoopy the Flying Ace is the first mobile game available through Namco Network’s partnership with United Media, a worldwide licensing and syndication company that owns the rights to the Peanuts brand. The game is available today on Sprint PCS handsets, and will be available on other carriers later this year.
Namco Games: Snoopy the Flying Ace
At this past weekend’s Comic-Con in San Diego Paramount Pictures and Shangri-La Entertainment offered a peak at the upcoming Beowulf movie to enthusiastic crowds. Now comes word that a mobile game will arrive in time for the November 16 movie release.
Gameloft has announced that it will publish the mobile handset version of the game, which will coincide with the release of the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PSP versions. Gameloft will develop, publish and distribute the game in more than 75 countries. Based on the classic English poem, the film version is being brought to the big screen by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery.
[Via GameDaily]
By 2010 a fifth of all e-mail could be wireless. So says a study by analyst firm Gartner, which predicts that 20% of all e-mail will be accessed wirelessly. This rise will see e-mail take over from other messaging services including text messages and MMS, although it might be some time until mobile e-mail completely overtakes SMS.
The key to this all, according to the Gartner study, is convergence on the client side, making the technology less complex for users. By 2017, predicts Gartner, wireless e-mail will be fully integrated with other messaging tools.
[Via vnunet.com]
Here is a number we didn’t want to see… In Australia only three percent of discarded mobile phones ended up being recycled last year. And with 8.7 million phones being shipped to the land down under that’s a lot of handsets that could be ending up in landfills, as the average user is upgrading their phones every 18 months to two years. According to recently released figures from the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association the proportion of phones being recycled is actually falling! The group is now calling on governments world wide to make the mobile industry more accountable for collecting unwanted phones.
However, the association research did indicate that many consumers are keeping old phones as a backup or spare. And as someone who had an old drawer of phones knows, there are also programs where phones can be donated to those in need.
[Via The Age]
Match.com will soon let you keep track of your dates from your mobile handsets with MatchMobile, which will be available to users in the United States, the U.K. and Canada later this summer, and then to nine additional countries by the end of the year. The service will provide subscribers with text messages to their phones when they receive an e-mail from other Match.com users. For an extra $5 monthly fee, MatchMobile subscribers can receive and answer e-mail from suitors via their mobile phones.
While an earlier version of Match.com was available for mobile phones, and was used by nearly half a million users, this new app will allow subscribers to tap into Match.com’s database of nearly 15 million registered users.
[Via Reuters]
Today Buzzwire, Inc. (formerly 4th Media) announced that its streaming mobile media service is available as a public beta. This upcoming service will let users create their own customized program lineup and access it on their mobile phones. A formal launch with select carriers is scheduled for the fall of 2007.
“Consumers are living mobile lifestyles and should have their media readily accessible on-the-go, whenever they want it. There is an amazing world of audio and video content available on the Web, and consumers can’t make sense of how to get it while mobile,” said Andrew MacFarlane, CEO of Buzzwire. “Now Buzzwire will provide a place where consumers can find, add and share audio and video feeds, including their own – with instant, hassle-free access on their mobile phones.”
The service will let users create custom playlists via a Web and mobile interface, which does require a client download. The initial library of about 5,000 media sources includes more than 2,000 audio clips with daily news, sports updates and other factoid, along with 1,000 video clips and access to 1,700 live radio stations from around the world. Buzzwire is backed by Matrix Partners and Spark Capital, and during the beta preview the service will be available directly to consumers.
Buzzwire
As we reported last week Virgin Mobile was pulling the plug on Movio, the under-performing Mobile TV branch that was launched through a partnership with BT using the DAB TV standard. Now with the partnership dissolved it seems that Virgin Mobile will likely discontinue sales and production of the Lobster 700TV mobile handset, which had been the carrier’s flagship mobile TV device. Owners will still be able to access DAB radio, but that hardly seems enough of a draw for the awkwardly designed phone.
Virgin Mobile hasn’t ruled out launching a new mobile TV service using the DVB-H standard in the future. Let’s just hope they design a better phone next time.
[Via Mobile Burn]
Today Verizon Wireless announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Rural Cellular Corporation to further enhance the Verizon Wireless’ network coverage in markets adjacent to its existing service areas, and increase coverage by 4.7 million, and customer base by more than 700,000. The terms of the deal would have Verizon Wireless acquire Rural Cellular for approximately $2.67 billion in cash and assumed debt.
Rural Cellular’s network has severed approximately 716,000 customers as of March 31 of this year. It is spread across five regional territories, with networks located in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Massachusetts, Alabama, Mississippi, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Kansas, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Rural Cellular utilizes both CDMA and GSM technology in its five regional markets, and Verizon Wireless has announced that it plans to deploy CDMA service in those existing GSM markets, converting the GSM customers to CDMA.
“Verizon Wireless continually looks for opportunities to enhance our customers’ wireless experience,” said Lowell McAdam, president and CEO of Verizon Wireless. “The addition of Rural Cellular’s markets will enable us to expand our services into areas where previously we had little or no presence, and will give Rural Cellular’s Unicel customers access to the nation’s most reliable network and a broader range of voice and data services.”
Verizon Wireless
Rural Cellular Corporation
A new report from research firm Frost & Sullivan predicts that next generation mobile networks, customized multimedia content and user-generated content could drive growth in Europe’s saturated mobile communications market. According to the study’s findings mobile operators investing strongly in next generation mobile networks and deploying HSDPA networks across Europe. These networks will boost the adoption of user-generated and other multimedia content.
“The mobile market in Europe is reaching saturation and maturity and is ready for innovative challenges,” notes Frost & Sullivan. Research Analyst Saverio Romeo. “These challenges, namely next generation mobile networks, customized multimedia content and user-generated content, can combine to provide fresh impetus for growth in the mobile industry.”
The study also found that there would be challenges, especially as mobile penetration exceeds 100 percent in some European nations, and the growth rate could be at a slower pace than in the past as a result.
Frost & Sullivan
If you commute by mass transportation in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut tri-state region you can use the Dadnab service to help plan your trips. Users can send a text message with an origin and destination to ‘tri@dadnab.com’, and just seconds later get a text message back detailing optimal routes and travel times, and includes which buses, trains and even ferries to take. The service uses scheduled information from a coalition of 16 transit and public safety agencies
“Prior to creating the Dadnab service, it was hard for me to use public transportation on the go; I had trouble memorizing the exact times, routes and stops for my trips,” says site founder and operator Roger L. Cauvin. “Now I just send a text message and receive an itinerary on my phone.”
Dadnab also serves Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle. Maybe a Los Angeles version could just say, “sit in endless traffic.”
Dadnab
Do you feel the need to stay in constant touch with colleagues and friends? Do you check your e-mail at all times of the day? Well, you’re not alone. According to a new AOL service, the average e-mail user checks his or her mail and estimated five times per day, and 59 percent of mobile users check every time a new message arrives. Washington, DC according to the survey is the most “e-mail addicted” city in the United States. Maybe the government is hard at work… or maybe they’re checking e-mail during those long Senate hearings.
[Via The Market News]
