New white paper on Location-Based Services

We are pleased to present our latest white paper titled “Location-Based Services – Concepts and Models”. This is available under CellStrat (www.cellstrat.com) White Papers section. The copy posted there is an abstract. If you need the full version, feel free to email us at contact@cellstrat.com

MT

Attended Wireless Technology Forum, Atlanta 09-18-2008

Folks – I am back after a relatively long sojourn. Meanwhile my colleague Vishal has kept you entertained with some keen mobile insights and writings.

I begin with some notes from the Wireless Technology Forum that I attended today at The Ashford Club in Atlanta. The topic today was Mobile Applications for Business world.

There were speakers from TeleNav (Location Based Services firm), Southern Energy Emerging Tech Research, Cisco and UPS Mobility Marketing

Great set of attendees from all sorts of Atlanta based firms.

Some key issues which emerged are :

a) Security: This remains the big kahuna in all things corporate technology. Mobility adoption by businesses is highly dependent on being able to provide services in a secure environment. At the same time, corporate IT would like control over employees mobility solutions including laptops and phones. Same is true of pushing apps as in case of Phone app store. Hence the reason for popularity of BlackBerry still. In case of BlackBerry, corporate IT has total control over device content and applications. iPhone is creating some waves in corporate world but does not meet the security needs and control aspects which corporate IT requires. I am sure one Mr Steve is listening to corporates and would come out with robust security and control mechanisms in future versions of iPhone ecosystem.

b) Location Based Services: This is coming fast and offers compelling business apps in corporate mobile world – firms like UPS and TeleNav are doing some groundbreaking work in mobile asset tracking and fleet management as well as staff tracker on a location map. However larger firms are battling unionized labor force for adoption of new mobile apps. Unions do not want their members to be tracked and accounted for at all times. A UPS Truck driver would like to divert thru his favorite coffee shop sometime without his employer checking on his whereabouts using location tech.

c) Human Issues: As broached earlier, corporate adoption of mobile apps is dependent on employee enthusiasm. Employees like some apps like laptop and corporate email on mobile but location tracking gets into their privacy garden. Nobody wants to be tracked by their employer as to where they are at a particular moment. There is some resistance in corporate employee community about taking on new tech. The users complain about difficulty in learning mobile apps and use, the irony being that these users are good at ringtones and downloads ie more personalized content is finding easier adoption than corporate-tending apps.

d) Future trends: Ultra mobile worker is a given with powerful laptop and phone solution. Distributed ticket management to send tickets with video clips of field sites to expert engineers in central location is another possibility in future. The expert from Cisco felt that video and collaboration (aka Cisco products) are the future for corporate employee environment. We don’t disagree with any of these experts.

e) The Power of A: The company from Cupertino, Silicon Valley has created a phenomenon in iPhone. I can’t stop loving my personal iPhone 3G. Too good to be true. What to say of certain Mr Jobs ? Wow!! Anyway, iPhone is penetrating corporate world due to employee demand. Also every corp out there is having to tune its mobile apps to work on iPhone as this is what the consumers are demanding. Creating iPhone apps for online apps or mobile apps is not an option anymore for a good number of firms and developers. However Corporate IT is working with Apple to try to get more corporate features like remote wipe out, Outlook email integration, controlled App downloads and so on. Lets see if corporate IT succeeds in controlling employee iPhone features.

e) Killer apps in enterprise: Secure email till date remains the killer mobile app for corporates (of course voice is bigger but nobody talks about voice anymore). Machine to Machine communication in industrial and utility environments is expected to be a big use of mobile technology. Wireless broadband on WIMAX and LTE will open up some new business models and business use cases.

f) Vertical nature of mobile apps: This is key to the success of mobile applications in corporations. Most firms want applications customized for their business line. Eg for UPS, package tracking is important whereas for medical line, patient data apps are important.

Well Maury Margol, Bob McIntyre and Steve Bachman have done a fantastic job of the wireless tech forum for Atlanta based wireless community. Congratulations folks!!

MT

Forget Cell Towers…

Yes, you read it right…

Forget Celltowers… This will be the mantra of companies for reducing the company costs of deployment and maintenance of huge celltowers.

World is undergoing a recession…many well established companies are going and many have already gone bankrupt like the most recent Lehman Brothers. Also, many companies around the world are cutting costs by cutting down their man power around the world…

Seeing all this, it is very clear that in times to come, telecom companies too will follow the same route with continually decreasing voice and data rates and thus, decreasing margins.

In my opinion, to reduce costs, telecom companies would some how like to pass on more and more costs to the consumers and what better way will there be, then to pass on the cell tower costs to consumers. WHAAT??? Cell tower costs to consumers…Am I joking here!!! NO…I am not. It’s easily possible…

HOW? Ofcourse by using femtocells technology that will be used when 4G comes into play provided by LTE (Long Term Evolution). Now people may ask…What is that??? For this…you may like to see one of my earlier posts in this blog on femtocells and additionally…you may want to read the white paper on Femtocells written by our company experts.

To tell you briefly…how it will minimise the cost to companies, I would like to mention that femtocells will eradicate the network costs and also eliminate some, if not all, problems of backhaul that stymie 4G networks. It seems theoretical now, but when LTE comes in…people will be able to get whooping speeds of upto 150Mbps. Femtocells are small devices which can be installed by a group of houses or even a single house as a stand alone unit. It costs miniscule in comparison to a celltower and maintenance costs too are almost nill.

It’s already being deployed in US, Europe and since recently, idea is being explored by Russians too and looking for good vendors to supply them the same so that they don’t get left behind. Even I came in contact with some people who are looking to deploy these femtocells asap…mainly because of these reasons i.e. costs less, give better connectivity and last but not the least can be great where houses are in congested spaces and tower signals there, are weak or compeletly missing.

But inspite of having said all of the above…I do feel that it will remain a complimentary technology in 4G and not all countries will be able to shift so fast to femtocells…so we will still see the cell towers for some years to come…

Vishal

iPhone Users discover yet another bug…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Early iPhone adopters have been wondering if the steady stream of bugs (and subsequent patches) has an end in sight. It turns out that but another bug has recently been discovered, this one centered on a user’s inability to password protect their phone. Potential snoopers discovered that it was quite effortless to skip the password screen and could access contacts, browse the Web, read e-mail, and even make calls!

Even under password protection, the iPhone (wisely) allowed for the placement of emergency calls in the event that the phone was picked up in a crisis or the user was in a situation that didn’t allow sufficient time for password input to call for help. The problem lies in the fact that by double-clicking the Home key while in the Emergency Call screen, the iPhone defaults to the Favorites menu, which gives anyone full access to the data within the phone.

The simple way to close this gaping hole yourself is to change the double-click preferences for the iPhone Home button. Those who would rather wait for a more permanent software fix, take note that Apple acknowledges the security hole and is working on a software patch.

Vishal

Generating Content Mobility…

A beautiful article from wireless week…

Social networking and the content shared among their users is coming to the mobile world.

With the proliferation of 3G networks globally, it’s possible now to take a video on your phone and send it to a social networking site like YouTube, Facebook or MySpace. As video-capable phones increase in number and wireless broadband networks expand, analysts believe user-generated content also will expand.

In fact, within the next five years, nearly 1 billion people could be using their mobile phones to send and receive user-generated content to each other and social networking sites on the Internet, according to estimates by Pyramid Research. The analyst firm estimates mobile social networking will start to take off in 2009, and by 2010 will reach 300 million users. By 2012, 18% of all mobile subscribers will be using phones to access a social network, or about 950 million people.

Social networking sites and user-generated content (UGC) are intrinsically tied together, with members of YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and their brethren posting blogs, photos, videos and music clips.

“Video is where it’s at,” says Nick Desai, CEO of Juice Wireless, which is launching JuiceCaster 6.0 at the CTIA Wireless 2008 show. JuiceCaster is a mobile social-networking application and service that allows phone users to share videos, images and messages between devices and to online social networking sites. The upgrade allows users to create content like videos on their phones and send it as a status update to their friends.

Desai says people who belong to social networks expect to be able to use their phones to access them. Since the mobile phone is becoming the primary communications device, he says, it only makes sense to use it and take advantage of its real-time, and location, capabilities.

Publishing Videos
One of the main reasons people sign up for JuiceCaster is because they want to be able to use their phones to capture video or photos and publish them instantly to their social networking site (SNS). “We make that an easy, 1-click process,” he says, because JuiceCaster works within the camera application on the phone.

JuiceCaster is offered through Cricket, Midwest Cellular, U.S. Cellular, T-Mobile USA and two Puerto Rican operators. Other deals with Tier 1 operators are expected to be announced soon. Desai says the service has 70,000 users, some of whom have a free WAP version and others who subscribe to be able to use the integrated camera feature.

Juice also has a mobile video search service which allows members to search the JuiceCaster network for videos by subject.

A California company named eMotive Communications also is eyeing the mobile UGC space. It already offers push services including songs, images and video through a deal with Skype, but CEO Anthony Stonefield says it will get into mobile uses soon.

eMotive is developing the ability to provide user-generated content as a kind of ringtone, which could include text that vibrates the phone, animation, video, a song clip or a voice recording. The service is most appropriate for 3G or 4G networks because of the bandwidth needed and because it works in an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture.

“We have more carrier trials requested than we can keep up with,” says Stonefield, because ringtone sales revenue has flattened. Personalized, user-generated content can change that, he says.

User-generated tones
User-generated and commercial ringback tones are part of the portfolio of LiveWire Mobile, a division of NMS Communications. LiveWire’s service provides 10,000 songs as part of Virgin Mobile USA’s ringback service, which has 100,000 subscribers.

Social networking and the content shared among their users is coming to the mobile world.

With the proliferation of 3G networks globally, it’s possible now to take a video on your phone and send it to a social networking site like YouTube, Facebook or MySpace. As video-capable phones increase in number and wireless broadband networks expand, analysts believe user-generated content also will expand.

In fact, within the next five years, nearly 1 billion people could be using their mobile phones to send and receive user-generated content to each other and social networking sites on the Internet, according to estimates by Pyramid Research. The analyst firm estimates mobile social networking will start to take off in 2009, and by 2010 will reach 300 million users. By 2012, 18% of all mobile subscribers will be using phones to access a social network, or about 950 million people.

Social networking sites and user-generated content (UGC) are intrinsically tied together, with members of YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and their brethren posting blogs, photos, videos and music clips.

“Video is where it’s at,” says Nick Desai, CEO of Juice Wireless, which is launching JuiceCaster 6.0 at the CTIA Wireless 2008 show. JuiceCaster is a mobile social-networking application and service that allows phone users to share videos, images and messages between devices and to online social networking sites. The upgrade allows users to create content like videos on their phones and send it as a status update to their friends.

Desai says people who belong to social networks expect to be able to use their phones to access them. Since the mobile phone is becoming the primary communications device, he says, it only makes sense to use it and take advantage of its real-time, and location, capabilities.

Publishing Videos
One of the main reasons people sign up for JuiceCaster is because they want to be able to use their phones to capture video or photos and publish them instantly to their social networking site (SNS). “We make that an easy, 1-click process,” he says, because JuiceCaster works within the camera application on the phone.

JuiceCaster is offered through Cricket, Midwest Cellular, U.S. Cellular, T-Mobile USA and two Puerto Rican operators. Other deals with Tier 1 operators are expected to be announced soon. Desai says the service has 70,000 users, some of whom have a free WAP version and others who subscribe to be able to use the integrated camera feature.

Juice also has a mobile video search service which allows members to search the JuiceCaster network for videos by subject.

A California company named eMotive Communications also is eyeing the mobile UGC space. It already offers push services including songs, images and video through a deal with Skype, but CEO Anthony Stonefield says it will get into mobile uses soon.

eMotive is developing the ability to provide user-generated content as a kind of ringtone, which could include text that vibrates the phone, animation, video, a song clip or a voice recording. The service is most appropriate for 3G or 4G networks because of the bandwidth needed and because it works in an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture.

“We have more carrier trials requested than we can keep up with,” says Stonefield, because ringtone sales revenue has flattened. Personalized, user-generated content can change that, he says.

User-generated tones
User-generated and commercial ringback tones are part of the portfolio of LiveWire Mobile, a division of NMS Communications. LiveWire’s service provides 10,000 songs as part of Virgin Mobile USA’s ringback service, which has 100,000 subscribers.

John Orlando, marketing vice president for LiveWire, says the next step for ringback tones will be to make it possible for users to create their own tones. “We have operators asking for it, and we believe that we can deliver it by the end of the year or the first quarter of 2009,” he says.

Yospace, a British company, developed a user-generated content site called SeeMeTv which is available through the carrier 3 U.K. SeeMeTv lets users upload their own video clips and gain revenue when someone downloads it. Orlando says LiveWire is looking at doing much the same thing for user-created ringback tones.

All of the social networking sites have some ability to link to mobile phones. As an example, YouTube launched a mobile interface last June, although only a small portion of the YouTube videos were available on phones. YouTube also has made select videos available through Verizon Wireless’ V CAST service. It recently opened its access even wider and now estimates more than 100 million mobile subscribers can access YouTube. Users also can upload videos from their phones but only through a 3G network.

“People want to participate in the YouTube community in a way that fits their individual lifestyles, so to that end, we’ve built a mobile service that will allow partners to seamlessly integrate YouTube videos into their offerings,” a spokesperson says. “Our goal is to support users being able to access their media from wherever they are. We want to extend the social aspects of YouTube to mobile devices – sharing, rating and interacting with content.”

The YouTube spokesperson says most mobile phones, even those with video capabilities, still don’t provide an optimal experience because of latency issue. Consumers also often don’t realize their phone’s capabilities.

Ryan Burke, an analyst with Compete, says the Holy Grail for most social networking sites is the ability to use location information, so friends can share location-based content in real time. That’s the big attraction that mobile UGC can offer, he says, so he believes mobile social networking and UGC will take off when location is built into the content that is shared.

“User-generated content and social networking are proven models [on the Internet],” he says. “Consumers like to create their own content and share it with their friends. There’s no reason mobile user-generated content won’t take off.”

Wireless Carriers will always need Internet as a Savior…

Yes, This is a fact considering the current scnario. Major chunk of revenues the wireless carriers are generating, is coming from web browsing on mobiles.

People around the world are increasingly becoming busier day by day and thus everybody wants to be able to check mails or other stuff while they are on the move so that they can concentrate on more important things when they are at their work places. Hence, they are increasingly using web on their mobiles.

Verizon, which leads U.S. wireless operators with its 60 percent 3G subscriber penetration, saw the most growth in 3G usage and the most data revenue — $2.6 billion for the quarter. However, AT&T the exclusive provider to the Internet-friendly iPhone, had only 25 percent 3G subscriber penetration but also saw its data sales come close to Verizon’s at $2.5 billion, proving that the Internet on the phone is a powerful driver of data revenue.

If you want deeper insight on this post…you may want to check out a related blogport here.

Vishal

India Getting Ready For 3G Wireless Broadband…

Coming soon in India – world’s fastest growing mobile market – 3G services by the dozen. And what that means is a looming free-for-all in a market where competition is already fierce, prices super low, profits even lower and consumer is the ultimate winner.

Indian Department of Telecommunications (DOT) is getting all set to introduce about a dozen 3G licenses in some of the more densely populated regions including the South Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu (including Chennai), Karnataka, and Kerala. The information comes to us from our friends at Packetology, a Telecom research firm focused on the Indian market.

Other states getting 3G will include North Indian state of Haryana (right next door to Delhi and home to many outsourcing outfits), while ten licenses will be up for grabs in Kolkata (Calcutta) and Madhya Pradesh. In other large markets such as Mumbai (Bombay) and Delhi, the number of licenses available be far fewer because the available spectrum is in limited quantities. Delhi will have only four licenses while Bombay can accommodate upto eight licenses.

According to initial DOT 3G policy, each carrier was going to get 5 MHz of spectrum and only 25 MHz of total spectrum was available. However, more spectrum has become available, hence the boost in the number of players who can bid for the spectrum.

The availability of such a huge amount of spectrum and licenses makes India one of the few unique places to have aggressive and highly competitive 3G market from get go. Most countries have between 2-to-5 players. UK has five, US has four, Brazil has four and most Asian countries have two or three. With this kind of liberal licensing of spectrum, and the existing 2G operations in place, some regions might get over a dozen operators offering phone services.

Thanks to fierce competition in the 2G services, India continues to be one of the fastest growing mobile markets – about 300 million at last count – mostly because prices are seriously low. Still, the presence of such a high number of players makes you wonder if there will be anyone who will be able to make money. The looming WWF style competition is going to keep large US and European carriers out of the market, though there has been news that AT&T and Verizon are very keen on entering the Indian market.

The new 3G players in India will be looking to build their networks very cheaply in order to compete and offer ultra low prices to end consumers. This would mean despite a huge buildout, companies like Siemens, Nokia, Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent and others should forget about making any real profits. The Chinese vendors – Huawei and ZTE – can mop-up, because they are willing to sell at a loss in their bid to gain market share. Infonetics Research, a Campbell, Calif. – based market research firm recently said that China and India are two major drivers of telecom equipment sales.

So who wins in this? Qualcomm & Nokia! The spread of 3G technologies brings a lot of royalty money into Qualcomm’s coffers. Similarly, Nokia is the strongest mobile brand in India and has a 3G portfolio of phones to match.

The big question that looms large in my mind: by introducing so many players in the market, is DOT killing the golden goose? In other words if there are too many players – dozen odd – and no one is making money, it would (and could) lead to a situation where they start shutting down. It could in the end the competition would decline and might result in an increase in prices.

Vishal

Oz as a Competitor for Research in Motion and Microsoft…

Email on the smartphone has been the domain of Research in Motion and Microsoft, but consumer email provider Oz believes their monopolies in the push email market are ending. Oz isn’t tackling the enterprise email market, though. Instead it’s targeting the growing number of smartphone users that don’t hail from the corporate world but still want to access push email’s functionality: small- and home-business users and particularly consumers.

Oz yesterday unveiled SmartMail, the next evolution of its consumer email platform, which incorporates many enterprise functions into what is essentially a client that accesses portal-based email such as that offered by Yahoo, Google or a hosted business service. The OZ SmartMail™ solution offers advanced capabilities for the savvy consumer, small business or home business professional who require more advanced email functionality, but do not want the high costs associated with enterprise email subscription plans.

Though Oz announced the availability of the SmartMail suite yesterday, it has already landed a customer. Verizon Wireless has been deploying the SmartMail client on many of its smartphones in the last few months, including the Motorola Q line and the Palm Treo and its recent HTC smartphones.

Vishal

FCC Chairman gets into the hair of wireless carriers

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin has a love-hate relationship with wireless carriers. Sometimes he is known to help them with corporate plans and growth strategies, at other times, he gets into their cross-hair and creates what mobile carriers may consider obstacles.

Recently he spoke about regulating ETF (Early Termination Fees) fees which carriers charge when customers leave before the end of their contracts. Typically these fees range from $125-$250 per subscriber and are levied when the customer decides to disconnect her or her service before the usual 2 year contract ends. The fee is levied to recoup the discounts provided on phone sales. If a customer gets a discounted cellphone, they have to sign a contract promising to remain loyal to the carrier for a set no of years, typically 2 years. If the customer breaks the contract and leaves before the end of the contract term, they are liable to pay the ETF.

Mr Martin wants to regulate the ETF amount and tie it to the price of the device. It may be logical to suggest that a $200 device does not warrant the same ETF as a $500 device. Also Mr Martin wants to reduce the length of the contracts and let consumers jump ship sooner. It is all about consumer choice.

There have been lot of class action lawsuits recently on ETFs and per Mr Martin’s plan, states won’t be allowed to entertain class action lawsuits on these topics once FCC starts regulating the ETF and contract practices.

On this one, FCC is with the consumers..

MT

Verizon + Alltel => Done

As we reported yesterday, Verizon signed a deal to acquire Alltel for $28.1 billion. Wow..are things fast. The rumor arose yesterday and the deal is done today. Possibly Verizon kept it under the wraps to thwart any competitive bidding. As we suspected, Alltel walked away with a billion dollars more than the figure mentioned yesterday. The two private equity firms behind Alltel – Goldman Sachs and Texas Pacific Group were able to recoup their $27.5 billion and some more in seven months. Nice deal for them. With credit markets in crisis, these firms probably want more cash on hand and they walked away with a nice profit (albeit not a large one) in a short time.

AT&T lost its No 1 leadership mantle. But these things hardly matter. Too much M&A to pin No 1 mantle on any one firm for too long…

MT