gaming platforms, DoCoMo set up a giant booth splashed in black paint over yellow for a "street style" look. Multiple mobile play

stations circling the entire area had event goers lined up ten deep to try out mobile games like Monster Hunter, Sonic, Gundam,

and many more. Everyone who plays a game receives different free collectible badges that fit into a DoCoMo badge folder -- also

free -- guaranteeing big crowds here. Last year DoCoMo enjoyed great success with a similar system that handed out collectible

cards for each game.

Many handsets come with games already pre-loaded. The new DoCoMo N901iS, for example, has Dragonquest II (from Enix) pre-installed and ready to play. One of the most popular games was a mobile version of Sega?fs Sonic the Hedgehog in playable

demo form. Sonic will come bundled with one Foma 901i series phone starting this winter. An engaging game even on mobile,

the movements and execution on the Foma were reminiscent of the old Sega Genesis edition of Sonic. Capcom's Monster Hunter,

another popular game, will be exclusively on DoCoMo phones for a short time this winter but will soon migrate to other carriers'

game platforms according to a DoCoMo spokesman.

4:35:36 AM    comment   

This is an idea that is long overdue. Cell phones are the new wave of communication and the latest and greatest cell phones are a little too much for the non-tech savvy people. This is a phone for those people. Big buttons, makes calls, gets the job done.

This is the A101K from Kyocera. It has voice-only capabilities, and includes a handy clip for holding numbers that have been jotted down on a scrap of paper (43 Folders alert!). There is also a ring volume setting that can give those with lesser hearing an opportunity to use this easily.

Another simple phone is the A5517 from Toshiba. It is a little more advanced. This is similar to the A101K but does include a 2.4-inch screen that features large text. It is also capable of e-mail and some web applications. Yes, nana, the Web is a vast storehouse of infor... oh, nevermind.

3G Simple Cell-Phones Released [3G]

4:30:09 AM    comment   

A newly published patent filing reveals that Apple has been toying with ways to integrate a video cam into the latch of a laptop since 2004. And the company considered the idea again as recently as last year. Which means an iSight integrated PowerBook could arrive sooner rather than later considering that Apple has made a huge effort to push iChat AV onto people with the promise of a better videoconferencing experience. Our guess is that if they do decide to create a laptop with a built in video camera, it'll be in the PowerBook, which is long overdue for a design overhaul. Hopefully we'll see something before Apple goes all Intel on us.

Apple may build video cams into future Macs [AppleInsider]

4:28:00 AM    comment   

Rumor has it that Bang and Olufsen is teaming up with Samsung to create a few cute phones. This concept of melding the old world and the new isn't huge news—Nokia has already teamed with Carl Zeiss, for example—but to think that Samsung, of all the companies out there, needs design advice is a little hard to believe.

I would say that this benefits B&O a bit more than it does Samsung although we can surely expect slablike phones in the future courtesy of B&O's teutonic design labs.

Samsung, Bang and Olufsen To Design Phone [MobileBurn]

4:27:43 AM    comment   

Reliance Infocomm is planning to place an order for 1 million mobile handsets in the next two months, needed largely for its expansion in smaller cities and rural areas. It would be one of the largest orders by any telecom service provider in India, for which the company has initiated talks with global handset manufacturers like Nokia, LG and Samsung.

The company has operations in over 3,750 towns, of which 3,500 small towns and talukas, while it has covered 1.40 lakh villages. Earlier this year, the company had procured 2 million handsets of different makes and this proposed new acquisition will take the total number of mobile phones purchased to 3 million in 2006.

This procurement is the largest in India due to the sheer size of the order, however this is not the largest in the world as China Mobile Xingjiang had placed similar orders earlier, while South Korea Telecom (SKT) was also looking at placing similar orders.

Reliance’s way of doing business has always been big, in whatever it does. This not only affects the competition but also helps it leverage the scale with its suppliers.

4:19:48 AM    comment   

World's largest mobile phone company by subscriber base, China Mobile has offered to buy ADAE group company Reliance Telecom. It becomes the second company after Russia's AFK Sistema to evince interest in GSM-based Reliance Telecom (not to be confused with Reliance Infocomm).

RTL's advantage is that it is completely debt-free and most of its subscribers are pre-paid customers, thereby reducing the risk of defaults. The company[base ']Äôs value has been estimated at close to $1bn but that is only likely to increase in a competitive bidding game, sources say.

Industry sources believe that a deal could eventually get done at a valuation of about $1.5 bn.

Reliance Telecom has 1.5m subscribers and provides mobile services in eight telecom circles of West Bengal, Kolkata, Bihar, Assam, the North-East, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Himachal Pradesh.

As of July, China Mobile has 227m subscribers, of which about 166m were prepaid subscribers.

4:19:27 AM    comment   

Airtel, in collaboration with ICICI Bank and VISA has launched mChq in Mumbai and Delhi NCR, which enables Airtel customers and ICICI Bank VISA cardholders to pay for their purchases using Airtel mobile phones.

The transaction process is one where the retailer/merchant sends an SMS mentioning the amount to the customer. The customer enters his/her personalized PIN number and sends an SMS back to the retailer acknowledging the amount to be paid. Both the parties then get a confirmatory SMS indicating the completion of the transaction.

There is a monthly fee of Rs 10 for using this service, which would be added in the monthly credit card bill of the customer. There would also be a SMS charge for the transaction over and above the normal rate of transaction levied upon the use of credit cards.

Giving the rationale behind launching this, ICICI Bank executive director Chanda Kochhar said,

[base ']ÄúAccording to statistics, card transactions only 1.8 percent of the total per capita income of India. We are targeting the rest of the cash/cheque base of 98 percent to migrate to this new service. Also the potential of adding more applications is huge. The service is also expected to revolutionize the entire merchant acquiring side in India.[base ']Äù

Mumbai-based technology partner of Airtel, A.Little.World, powers the mChq technology. IRDBT (technology arm of RBI) is the root key management (KMA) for mChq and the principal certification authority (CA) for use of public key infrastructure in mChq.

Had blogged Airtel’s plans to launch mobile payments around a month back.

With this service Airtel[base ']Äôs customers can make payments, often micropayments, using their mobiles instead of a credit card or cash. It would be interesting to see how Airtel chooses to implement it. Going the NTT-DoCoMo[base ']Äôs Mobile FeliCa way, which combines a multi-application smart card with i-Mode phones, would mean limiting itself to the high-end users. Airtel has a pan-India presence and its number of subscribers alone are more than the total number of credit card users in India. Has the potential to change many equations and create lot of opportunities if Airtel executes it right.

I think Airtel has taken the first right steps in this direction. On a related note, this post on Itz Cash and Oxigen is worth reading.

4:15:13 AM    comment   

LONDON, September 15, 2005 — According to the latest mobile research from IDC, the European mobile corporate email market will increase to around 13.5 million individual users — employees who use either a laptop/PDA or mobile phone to access email — in 2009, representing a compound annual growth rate of 36%.

4:14:55 AM    comment   

There is now one mobile phone subscription for every three people on the planet, according to researchers at Wireless Intelligence.

4:14:43 AM    comment   

Massachusetts's Information Technology Division has released Microsoft's formal 15-page reply to the state's controversial draft policy on information standards. That policy would mandate that the Open Document Format be used for all "office" documents (ie, word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation documents). Because OpenDocument is incompatible with Microsoft's Office applications, the Massachusetts policy would effectively require state agencies to abandon Microsoft Office. The state has also published various other comments it has received from companies, including IBM, Sun, Adobe and Corel.

Although I'm a resident of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I have to admit that I haven't been paying much attention to this situation up until now. I assumed it was just another case of anti-Microsoftism, an assumption backed up by the press's "Massachusetts Dumps Office" headlines. I was wrong. This isn't about Microsoft. It's about a state government launching a serious and comprehensive initiative to replace its fragmented, inefficient set of traditional information systems with a modern, coherent, and flexible IT architecture that allows data to be shared and reused easily. The adoption of OpenDocument as a standard is just one element of the state's ambitious plan. As described in a comprehensive technical paper, called the Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM), the state aims to make a transition "from siloed, application-centric and agency-centric information technology investments to an enterprise approach where applications are designed to be flexible, to take advantage of shared and reusable components, to facilitate the sharing and reuse of data where appropriate and to make the best use of the technology infrastructure that is available."

The proposal for adopting consistent, open standards for document formats needs to be understood in the context of this broad, long-term effort. The state, like other government bodies, is struggling to meet three particular challenges with regard to the large number of digital documents it produces and stores: (1) sharing the information in those documents seamlessly among diverse agencies (overcoming the incompatibilities of its various existing systems and data formats), (2) ensuring the accessibility and integrity of those documents in perpetuity, and (3) guaranteeing that information can be dispersed quickly in the case of a disaster or other emergency. (The problems that governments had in respnding to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, some of which can be traced to an inability to share data among diverse computer systems, reveal the urgency of this last goal.) To accomplish these goals, it is requiring that all government agencies use a common set of non-proprietary, XML-based data standards, including OpenDocument for office documents. While the state admits that OpenDocument is in its infancy as an approved standard (it was recently certified by the OASIS standard-setting group) and that it will likely undergo substantial changes, it is nevertheless the only certified, non-proprietary standard available. (It should be noted, in fairness to Microsoft, that while Microsoft is a member of OASIS, the committee on document standards is dominated by representatives from Sun and IBM, two companies with an interest in undermining Microsoft's control of office software.)

In its response to the state's proposal, Microsoft makes valid points that deserve careful consideration. It points out that shifting to a new standard like OpenDocument would entail risks, costs, and disruptions. State workers and contractors, who currently rely on Microsoft Office (or other applications with proprietary document formats), would have to have their existing applications replaced with new applications that comply with OpenDocument, such as the open-source OpenOffice suite. Considerable retraining would likely be required, and untold numbers of existing documents would have to be translated into OpenDocument. "Given [that] the majority of Executive Department agencies currently use office applications such as MS Office, Lotus Notes and WordPerfect that produce documents in proprietary formats, the magnitude of the migration effort to this new open standard is considerable," argues Microsoft. "There is simply no principled basis for causing the foregoing costs to be borne by the Commonwealth, its citizens, and the private sector, particularly given a) the significant flaws with the OpenDocument format, and b) the availability of more cost effective alternative ways to achieve the Commonwealthís principal data interoperability objectives."

Microsoft also points out that OpenDocument, as an "immature" standard, lacks flexibility in its current form and that relying on it may limit the state's ability to capitalize on technological advances from Microsoft and other companies: "the OpenDocument format lacks a number of capabilities that are increasingly important in modern computing environments. Modern documents need to be able to handle embedded pictures, audio, video, maps, voice, data, database schema, web pages, and other data types. The ETRM proposal acknowledges that these needs are not yet addressed. Similarly, the proposal does not address the integration of documents with communication, collaboration, messaging, document management systems or other applications. In short, by limiting state agencies to the use of specific technology, the proposal will simply penalize agencies by prohibiting new useful technology advancements, whether from Microsoft or other sources."

Finally, Microsoft argues that the state is being unfair. It claims that its own XML-based document formats, while proprietary, are "openly documented, royalty-free licensed formats" and thus adequately fulfill the state's definition of "open formats" as "data file formats based on an underlying open standard, developed by an open community, and affirmed by a standards body; or de facto format standards controlled by other entities that are fully documented and available for public use under perpetual, royalty-free, and nondiscriminatory terms [emphasis added]."

Microsoft is, in essence, arguing for the maintenance of the status quo. It says that "Commonwealth agencies should be allowed to choose the technologies that best suit their needs, particularly in a context where, as here, multiple open and competing technologies/formats are available and supported in the marketplace, with many document conversion utilities already available and with no licensing barriers to future conversion software." But this reveals the flaw in Microsoft's position. The state has determined that the status quo is neither desirable nor sustainable. It believes that the lack of standardization in technology and data is undermining its ability to do its work effectively on behalf of its citizens. The state, in other words, has made a conscious decision to endure short-term disruption in order to achieve a flexible and efficient IT architecture for the future.

Indeed, when Microsoft points out the difficulties inherent in translating existing documents in a variety of incompatible, proprietary formats into a single open format, it is inadvertantly backing up the state's argument. The only way to guarantee that the state's document archive will be accessible in the future is to move to a common standard today. If translating all those documents will be hard now, as it no doubt will be, imagine how much harder it would be if the state put the job off for another decade or two. The status quo is the problem the state has to solve; it is not a solution to the problem.

While Microsoft is also correct in stating that adopting an immature standard like OpenDocument is risky, its position here is transparently self-serving. The only way that a standard can move from immaturity to maturity is by being used, as broadly as possible. If everyone followed Microsoft's advice to shun new standards, then no mature open standard would ever develop, and proprietary standards, such as Microsoft's, would forever go unchallenged. If there's to be progress, there has to be a risk-taker.

What about the argument that Microsoft's freely licensed Office document formats meet the state's requirements for openness? (In a preliminary decision earlier this year, the state itself seemed to agree with this argument.) There is ongoing debate over exactly how freely these formats will be able to be used once they're rolled out in Office 12 next year. But the real problem here is that Microsoft is a private company that ultimately must act in the best interests of its shareholders, not necessarily in the best interests of the governmental agencies that use its products. It's not enough to believe in Microsoft's sincerity about freely licensing its formats today; a state has to ask itself whether at some future point Microsoft might, for good business reasons, change its current approach - or, for that matter, whether Microsoft Office will even exist in anything like its current form in 10 or 20 or 50 years time. Again, it's important to remember that the state's proposed policy is focused not on the short or even the medium term but on the long run. It has to make the decisions today that best guarantee the fulfillment of its long-term goals.

In commenting on Microsoft's response, Massachusetts's secretary of administration and finance, Eric Kriss, put the state's position into perspective. "It's an important issue," he told the Boston Globe. "'Open formats are at the very heart of our democratic process. The question is whether a sovereign state has the obligation to ensure that its public documents remain forever free and unencumbered by patent, license, or other technical impediments. We say, yes, this is an imperative. Microsoft says they disagree and want the world to use their proprietary formats."

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned about the immediate implications of the state's decision. As a test, I downloaded a document in the Open Document Format from the state's web site. I was unable to open it with any application I have. I would like to know how the state will ensure that its residents, and not just its workers, will have access to state documents in the future, given that only a tiny minority of residents currently have OpenOffice applications on their computers. But despite my personal qualms, I think Massachusetts is doing the right thing in coming to grips with the problems inherent in the current model of organizational computing. Putting off the pain of adopting a better approach to managing information technology and digital data will only make the pain worse. The state has clearly given a great deal of thought to its plan, and it should see it through. Microsoft has said that it will not make its Office applications compatible with the OpenDocument format. As a private company, it has every right to make that decision. What it doesn't have is the right to impose its interests on a government body - or, for that matter, on anyone else.

4:14:24 AM    comment   

Stuck in an airport with CNN yammering on and on in the background? Well, pop in the TerraTech USB TV Tuner and pick up reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond. The TerraTec is a self-contained tuner with software for watching TV on your PC. Interestingly enough, you can also record live video through the tuner and it also pics up digital signals, which I suspect are a bit more prevalent overseas than here.

Overall, looks like a great way to add live TV to a laptop sans breakout boxes and other heavy junk. Pricing is set at about $200.

TerraTec launch USB key TV tuner [Pocket-Link]

4:13:38 AM    comment