Day 3 of Mobile World Congress 2009 being held at Barcelona was an eventful one as Verizon Wireless, the USA based mobile operator, made announcement on its 4G LTE network. The operator will work in collaboration with Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent to deploy this next-gen network in USA and is likely to commence the services by 2010. Starent Networks has also been selected as a packet core vendor for the deployment of the next-generation network. Field trials conducted by Verizon Wireless have demonstrated download rates of 50 to 60 Mbps peak speeds. Verizon will also set up an LTE Innovation Center to foster the ecosystem.
Google Latitude, a Google Maps application, has reported a user base of 1 Million, whereas, Twitter, the social networking site has recorded between 5,000 and 10,000 new user registrations each day in 2008.
IMIMobile, the mobile VAS firm, acquired NSN’s Music2You service. This service offers mobile operators and media firms the full-track music download subscription services. Some clients include Vodafone in India, AOL in Germany and Akado in Russia.
The Indian site, Babajob.com was selected as one of the five finalist for the Mobile Peer Awards. Other finalists include Fring, Unkasoft Advergaming, Orbster and Popcatcher. Over 160 mobile startups participated in the awards of which these five were the chosen ones.
Skype proclaimed a record 3billion downloads of its VoIP application till date. It has 400 million users, and adds nearly 350k new users each day. The company says 100 billion call minutes have been clocked using Skype across the globe, accounting to 8% of worlds call minutes.
Vihaan Network, promoted by Rajiv Mehrotra of the Shyam Group, unleashed the world’s first solar-powered GSM network on Day 3 of MWC’09. On the other hand, Digicel group, the Carribean mobile operator, showcased its solar powered handset Coral-200-Solar.
NAVTEQ announced the winners for its Global LBS Challenge, won by skobbler and City Guide, Carbon Diem, NaviGenie became the runners up.
Sybase 365 launched a geo-location service for mobile handsets dubbed as SMS Locator, enabling the users obtain turn-by-turn directions of locations closest to their current position. The service prompts users and supports abbreviations, acronyms, nicknames and common misspellings.
Jinny Software, an advertising network for mobile network operators, launched its mobile marketing and ad service.
Synchronica launched Mobile Gateway 4.0, a ‘push SMS/MMS/IM/email’ service that sends social networking and news updates to any mass-market mobile phone.
Telefonica Europe selected Amdocs ChangingWorlds to deploy a new Internet-like portal and a browser bar that provides intuitive navigation support, enabling the users to browse the new Mobile Internet service. The browser bar guides and provides links to both on- and off-portal content that matches their content preferences and behavioral profiles.