Not much other then a report right now, but it looks like TDK has teamed up with Japanese Semiconductor Energy Laboratory to make a bendable microprocessor. The transistors will be made on glass first, then transferred to plastic. The processor will also have wireless capabilities and built-in signal encryption.

Firm makes bent CPU [The Inquirer]

2:04:27 AM    comment   

The company is ready to launch its interactive TV application, through, which users can play a game on their TV through SMS. The service would first be launched on SMS and then would also be available on IVR. The company is launching it in Delhi first and is tying up with all the cable operators in the city for providing the game on the TV. The company would start testing this service shortly.
The other new services that the company intends to provide in future include applications on location-based services, and applications on bluetooth and RFID.

1:41:38 AM    comment   

There are daily downloads of about 1 million paid ringtones and about 100 million SMSs, and this may grow even further in coming months, say operators. VAS services presently contribute about 10 per cent of the total telecom revenue.

It is estimated to grow at an annual rate of about 30 per cent to 40 per cent. Cellular Operators Associaton of India has projected that VAS will contribute up to 20 per cent of total telecom revenue within three years. India has an average revenue per user (ARPU) of $8 per month, which is the lowest in the world. It is less than half the ARPUs in Asia Pacific ($18.9) and below one-fourth in Western Europe ($37.40). The global average is $21.30 per month.

SMS still contributes a significant part of non-voice revenue services, according to COAI. About 65 per cent of the total non-voice revenues come from SMS, while caller line identification accounts for 8 per cent of the total VAS revenue. The remaining 27 per cent of VAS revenue comes from services like games, ringtones, mobile entertainment and multimedia messaging.

The VAS revenue is expected to account for up to 20 per cent of the total revenue in the next three years.

1:19:55 AM    comment   

Check out the report “Telecom Sector Update - November 2005″ on India Infoline for a good roundup of the state of industry and some stats, graphs and news.

1:18:27 AM    comment   

ET speculates that Aircel is in discussions with Malaysian telcos, Maxis Communications and Telekom Malaysia with the intention of inducting a strategic partner. The size of the transaction is expected to exceed $700 million. Of the two telcos, Maxis is believed to be closer to clinching the deal.

When contacted by ET, top sources at Aircel said the company was in discussions with Telekom Malaysia. [base ']ÄúThe due diligence will start in January,[base ']Äù they said.

While the sources denied that Aircel was talking to Maxis, industry sources said the company was in fact is closer to a deal with Maxis. An announcement might be made as early as next week, the sources said.

Maxis is owned by Malaysian tycoon Ananda Krishnan while Telekom Malysia is a listed entity which is controlled by the Malaysian government.

According to industry sources the investor in Aircel, may eventually buy a part of the Tatas stake in Idea Cellular. When contacted, Idea officials said they were not aware of any such development. Sources said the Tata stake was not up for sale.

Aircel sources did not elaborate on those issues but said they were waiting for the government to announce its 3G policy in January next year, before taking a decision on any deal.

[base ']ÄúWe do not need the money. We are waiting for the government to announce its policy. Then we shall decide on all this (the various deals) in January,[base ']Äù they said.

The deal includes Aircel[base ']Äôs Tamil Nadu circle and 10 new circles in North and Eastern India for which the company has received licenses. Of these, Aircel has started its GSM operations in Assam, North East, Orissa, West Bengal and the J&K telecom circle. It is in the process of rolling out its operations in Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, MP, UP(East) and UP(West). It has a subscriber base of 22 lakh across all the circles.

1:17:12 AM    comment   

Indian Express story on how Indian TV channels are scrambling to make available Mobisodes of their programs.

After the success of The Great Indian Laughter Challenge, Star One launched a series of one-minute gags on mobile.

MTV has taken on the task of releasing fresh mobisodes every day, all based on their new youth-centric serial, Pyaar Vyaar and All That.

Sony plans to release mobisodes based on Indian Idol, Ek Ladki Anjaani Si and Deal Ya No Deal.

Zee is currently working on assembling humorous moments from the show Hum Paanch into mobisodes. They[base ']Äôre also considering relaunching some vintage projects like Banegi Apni Baat on mobile.

Mona Singh may become the first TV actor to star in a mobile series featuring her as the protagonist.

[base ']Äò[base ']ÄòWe[base ']Äôre also finalising a series of scripts and situations for 30-second mobisodes. One example is a story where Mona is an ordinary woman by day, but transforms into a superhero after the sun sets,[base ']Äô[base ']Äô explains Vishal Gondal, CEO, Indiagames.

For kiddie specialist Hungama TV, it will be a natural progression from Hungaming, a cellular gaming zone that it just launched.

Soon, TRP driver Hero will jump media with smaller storylines. [base ']Äò[base ']ÄòMobisodes help generate interest by providing a sampling of our most popular shows,[base ']Äô[base ']Äô says Siddharth Kapur, senior VP, marketing, Hungama TV.

Like ringtones and games, Mobisodes are of download-and-consume type. But the larger download size puts extra load on the operator’s 2G GPRS network. If the user experience in downloading a mobisode is sub-standard it would be affect their takeoff.

1:14:52 AM    comment   

Sumedh Mungee gets it, when he sees stark similarities between Japan and India in their market conditions, which were essential to i-Mode’s success.

From Webcams and i-Mode at Wap Review:

So why is the mobile web and particularly i-Mode so popular in Japan. There are many factors such as the high cost of both dial-up and broadband wired Internet. In 1999, when i-Mode was launched, only 23% of Japanese had access to the Internet by computer [base ']Äì the phone became their computer. Home computers are still less common in Japan than in the US and Western Europe and are perceived as hard to use compared with the simplicity of i-Mode! So how is it that Japanese find i-Mode easy to use and most Westerners believe that WAP is frustratingly difficult? If you look at the relatively few i-Mode sites that are in English, you will be surprised at how dull and sparse they look. There are several reasons for this. For one, almost all the graphics in i-Mode are provided by emoji, a collection of over 200 small icons that are resident in the handset[base ']Äôs ROM and thus don[base ']Äôt appear if you aren[base ']Äôt using an i-Mode browser. Cost is another factor. i-Mode has traditionally been a metered service and rates are high by Western standards, .20 Yen per 128 byte packet (about 2 cents per KB) although unlimited data plans have recently been introduced at around 4000 Yen ($33.20) per month. As high as these rates appear, they are cheap compared with the cost of making a phone call which is around 80 cents per minute (incoming calls are free). Keeping i-Mode pages small and task oriented makes i-Mode cost effective. Checking a train schedule or sending an email with i-Mode costs less than 5 US cents. Finally, i-Mode pages seem designed for utility rather than flashiness, i-Mode developers, who probably use i-Mode daily themselves, must know that unless a page is easy and inexpensive to use it will not get traffic.

There is one dissimilarity though. Phone calls and SMS costs are the cheapest in India and data is expensive.

So would i-Mode meet success in India, unlike its other not so successful attempts outside Japan.

1:13:06 AM    comment   

Starting an internet business may be easier than ever, what with cheap computers, free software and bandwidth out the wazoo, but that just means it'll he harder than ever to make money. The latest evidence: Om Malik reports that VOIP provider SIPphone will announce 1-cent-per-minute PC-to-phone calls tomorrow, matching Yahoo's promotional rate and undercutting eBay's Skype. Also tomorrow, Malik notes, Microsoft will enter the market. "This is turning into a brutal price war," he says.

Low barriers to entry, microscopic marginal transaction costs, a commodity service and a bunch of competitors fearful that a rival may gain market share. Do I hear a half cent a minute?

1:02:30 AM    comment   

The free-for-all continues. Amazon.com has opened up its Alexa search engine to all comers. Just as Amazon's affiliates can tap into the company's merchandise catalog to build their own stores, so entrepreneurs and tinkerers can now tap into Alexa's vast catalog of web content to build their own applications or sites. And, for modest fees, they can even use Amazon's computing platform as their own computing infrastructure. Just plug into the utility socket.

John Battelle, who broke the news, sees this as a potential "game-changer" in the search world. Om Malik sees it as a commoditize-thy-enemy's-product tactic: "Amazon.com is trying to inflict death by a thousand cuts to rivals including the GYM Gang" - ie, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft. Phil Wainewright calls it - gulp - "a seminal moment in the dawn of Web 3.0."

Whether Amazon's looking to make money or make it harder for rivals to make money, the move does look like something of a watershed. What's interesting is that it separates, or unbundles, the "engine" that, in a real sense, powers the web from the applications of that engine. And it turns the engine into a cheap commodity. It's not hard to think of what happened when another engine - the steam engine - became a commodity a couple hundred years ago. An incredible number of applications of steam power were rapidly invented. Now, the search engine is far from the steam engine, but the example shows what can happen when you commoditize a basic piece of commercial infrastructure, giving a lot of people and companies access to it. The big question is: Are there a whole bunch of incredibly valuable search applications to be invented, or will this just set off an explosion of cute mashups? We'll see.

One other thing's worth noting: This promises to add yet a few new wrinkles to the confusion surrounding copyright and intellectual property on the internet.

12:57:47 AM    comment   

Faced with the prospect of losing a sizable chunk of its ad business to Microsoft, Google has, apparently, made AOL a counteroffer it can't refuse. According to media reports, Google will give Time-Warner, AOL's beleaguered owner, a cool billion in return for a 5 percent stake in AOL. It will also give AOL the privilege of selling ads that will run on Google's search network, which up to now has been restricted to ads sold by Google. Finally, in a concession that apparently clinched the deal, Google will give AOL ad content special treatment, according to the New York Times:

Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before.

So much for the purity of the algorithm.

In isolation, the deal seems to be good news for Google - it's going to make it harder for Microsoft to build up its own ad service and challenge Google's nascent monopoly. But the deal may not be an isolated event. The question is: How many more deals will Google need to cut with advertisers and publishers in the future? Is this deal a sign that Google is consolidating its power or losing it?

UPDATE: A Washington Post piece has more details on the deal, including how Google will subsidize AOL ads on its network through a "substantial fixed-dollar budget."

12:56:45 AM    comment   

The New York Times has updated its story on the deal between Google and Time Warner, providing further details about the terms. It reveals just how desperate Google was to maintain the AOL partnership:

In the new arrangement, Google will offer promotion to AOL in ways it has never done for another company, two executives close to the negotiations said.

If a user searches on Google for a topic for which AOL has content - like information about Madonna - there will be a special section on the bottom right corner of the search results page with links to AOL.com. Technically, AOL will pay for those links, which will be identified as advertising, but Google will give AOL credits to pay for them as part of the deal. They will also carry AOL's logo, the first time Google has agreed to place graphic ads on its search result pages.

Google will also provide technical assistance so AOL can create Web pages that will appear more prominently in the search results list. But this assistance will not change computer formulas that determine the order in which pages are listed in Google's search results.

Google will also make a special effort to incorporate AOL video programming in its expanding video search section and it will feature links to AOL videos on the video search home page. These links will not be marked as advertising.

An executive involved in the talks said Time Warner asked Microsoft to give AOL similar preferred placement in advertising and in its Web index and that Microsoft refused, calling the request unethical.

Ouch.

12:49:18 AM    comment   

This is pretty cool.

Nokia has updated their predictions and is now saying that there will be three billion mobile phone subs by 2008, two years ahead of everyone’s previous estimates of 3 billion by 2010. This makes perfect sense as I’ve noticed over the past couple of years that the estimates for mobile phone sales at the beginning of the year are usualy 25-30% lower than the actual numbers by the end of the year. Look at the predictions for 2004 and 2005, there were mid-year correctons by all the analysis firms in both years.

“We’ve changed our forecast due to the faster growth in emerging markets,” said Parikshit Bhasin, country general manager of Nokia Philippines at a yearend briefing.

Statistics from Informa Telecoms Media had about 1.56 billion GSM-based mobile phone subscribers in the world in the first nine months of 2005, said the Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSA).

Growth is expected to come from the Africas, some parts of Europe, Russia, India, and of course, China, GSA said.

Nokia expects the total number of mobile handsets sold worldwide to reach 780 million by end of 2005, a slight improvement from the second quarter forecast of 760 million

Nokia for its part said that it had sold more than 66 million mobile phones worldwide at the end of third quarter this year. This was amid earlier speculations that global demand was slowing down.

So what does this mean to me? Well, since I’m thinking about services for the industrialized, mostly Western countries which are already reaching mobile saturation, and moving on to advanced data services, probably not a lot. But I think as an indicator of global trends, it means we’re just at the beginning of some really cool opportunities. If you think of a timeline where people first get a phone, then move along the technology cycle where the handsets get more powerful, networks get faster and rates get cheaper, there’s going to be a lot of people connected really soon. Also, as time goes on there’s chances for countries to leapfrog older cellular technology and arrive at 3G sooner because of the economies of scale from manufacturers. But even with plain-old SMS technologies, there’s a lot of interesting SmartMobs-like changes coming to many parts of the world.

Cool stuff. Now I have to go back and change a bunch of slides… ;-)

-Russ

12:47:32 AM    comment