Wireless Federation

Vodafone Netherlands has signed an agreement to provide network capacity to MVNO Blyk. The deal marks Blyk’s first expansion outside the UK, where it launched last September. The company, which offers free mobile services in exchange for viewing advertisements, expects to launch in the Netherlands in the second half of this year. According to Blyk, the Netherlands represents an attractive market for its advertisers, ranking among the three countries with the highest advertising spend per capita in Europe. Started by former Nokia president Pekka Ala-Pietila, Blyk targets 16- to 24-year-olds, collecting demographic information and statistics on their mobile use in order to target ads to their handsets. Blyk offers in the UK a SIM-only package with no contract obligation including 43 minutes and 217 texts per month in exchange for receiving up to six MMS ads each day. In the UK, Blyk uses the Orange network. The company has also announced a funding round with new investors Goldman Sachs and Industrial and Financial Investments Company. No details on the amount of the investment were released.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News

Brasil Telecom and the operator Oi are to merge, Brazil’s communications minister said, reported in Cinco Dias. Helio Costa said the government had received official communication that the two intend to merge, confirming rumours which have been in the market for months. Costa said the communications ministry would ask telecoms regulator Anatel on the procedure which the government should follow so that the merger “goes ahead and prospers”. A tie-up between Oi and Brasil Telecom would create a stronger rival to Spanish telephony giant Telefonica and Mexican magnate Carlos Slim’s operations in Brazil.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News

KPN’s German mobile subsidiary E-Plus has signed up its 15 millionth customer, winning 900,000 new customers since the end of September 2007, when E-Plus reported 14.1 million customers. The 15 millionth customer chose a Base 2 contract, which is part of E-Plus’s portfolio of mobile flat-rates sold under the Base brand. E-Plus will publish its financial results for the fourth quarter and full year of 2007 on 5 February.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News

Vodafone Group reported revenues for the quarter ended 31 December of GBP 9.163 billion, up 15.8 percent from the year-earlier period. Takeovers in Turkey and India and positive currency effects drove the increase, while organic growth was 4.4 percent. Proportionate for ownership, Vodafone finished the year with 252.3 million mobile customers, up by 10.8 million from September. Of the total, 24.7 million used 3G devices. Vodafone repeated its outlook for the fiscal year to March, for revenues of GBP 34.5-35.1 billion, while noting the recent strengthening in the euro could have an additional positive effect. Annual adjusted operating profit is estimated at GBP 9.5-9.9 billion, with a lower EBITDA margin year-on-year. Capital spending will reach GBP 4.7-5.0 billion for the full year, including GBP 1 billion in India.

In its core region Europe, Vodafone reported revenues up 7.3 percent to GBP 6.652 billion, with half the growth coming from exchange rate effects. Voice revenues showed an organic decline of 2.2 percent, hurt by cuts in termination and roaming rates, while messaging revenues increased 8.1 percent and data sales were up 35.5 percent on an oragnic basis. Voice usage increased 16.5 percent from a year ago, led by Germany and Italy. The region added a net 3.1 million new customers in the quarter, taking the total base to 109.1 million. The company’s fixed-line business generated revenues of GBP 462 million, with the Tele2 activities in Italy and Spain finishing the quarter with respectively 0.4 and 0.2 million ADSL customers.

In the EMAPA region, revenues jumped 46.8 percent to GBP 2.496 billion thanks to the takeover in India. Organic service revenue growth was 13.7 percent, with a 9.9 percent rise in Eastern Europe, the Pacific up 7.5 percent and the Middle East, Africa and Asia up 20.9 percent. The region added a net 7.7 million new customers in the quarter, of which 4.2 million in India, for a total abse of 112.0 million.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News

Mobile operator Orascom Telecom has been granted a commercial licence to provide mobile telephony services in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea using WCDMA technology. The licence has been granted to Orascom’s subsidiary Cheo Technology which is controlled by Orascom Telecom with an ownership of 75 percent while the remaining 25 percent is owned by the state-owned Korea Post and Telecommunications. The terms of the licence allow Cheo to offer services to its customers throughout the country. The duration of the licence is 25 years with an exclusivity period of four years. Orascom Telecom intends to invest up to USD 400 million in network infrastructure and licence fees over the first three years in order to rapidly deploy a high-quality network and offer voice, data and value added services at accessible prices to the Korean people. OTH intends to cover Pyongyang and most of the major cities during the first twelve months of operations.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News

Polish operator Netia has agreed to sell its 23.4 percent stake in mobile carrier P4 to Tollerton Investments and Novator for EUR 130 million cash. The price represents a 63 percent premium over the EUR 79.7 million in equity contributed by Netia to P4. Netia expects to complete the deal in the first quarter, meaning it will not participate in expected capital-raising at P4 later this year. Netia announced already in early January that it was considering the P4 stake sale. The cash received will be used to finance its own growth and avoid the need for an equity issue. With the acquisition of Netia’s stake, Novator and Tollerton have full control of P4.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News

Portable navigation device maker Garmin International has announced its entrance into the mobile phone market with the Nuvifone touchscreen device. The Nuvifone is a 3.5G mobile phone, featuring a 3.5-inch touch screen, web browser and personal GPS navigator similar to Garmin’s Nuvi product line. The handset also provides Google local search, and access to Garmin Online, an online service offering constantly-updating information. Other multimedia functions of the Nuvifone include a built-in video camera, MP3 and MPEG4/AAC. Garmin anticipates that the Nuvifone will be available in the third quarter of this year.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News

The leading Chinese mobile search provider, is releasing some key search statistics that shed light on real user behavior and the state of the sector in the world’s largest wireless phone market. With the popularization of wireless search in the last couple of years, China’s wireless search market has developed rapidly starting from 2006. Many consumers have begun to touch on and enjoy the benefits of wireless search services. The industry value chain and roles of the mobile search providers, mobile carriers, handset manufacturers, ad agencies and mobile advertisers have all become much clearer.
Although some new players entered the market in 2007, there was also a shake out of the less competitive firms who focused solely on WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) for delivering their services. The delays in 3G license issuance and network deployment combined with new carrier data pricing/access policies have caused considerable strain on these firms as active WAP users actually decreased from 2006 levels.  Fortunately, users found alternative means of accessing the information they needed.  According to iResearch, the number of mobile search users grew to 61 million by the end of 2007, and is forecasted to reach 117 million by 2008 and to over 200 million by 2010.
As the only mobile search provider in China offering cross-platform services via SMS, WAP, instant messenger (IM) and on-phone applets, mInfo was certainly a beneficiary of this shift in the market. Even in the US market where 3G has already been deployed for several years and SMS adoption is much lower than in China, last month Nielson released a report stating that the US SMS search user base is almost twice the size of the US WAP search user base. In a market like China where SMS and Mobile IM adoption are both significantly higher than WAP adoption, the need for multi-transport mobile search services is clear.
“With the amount of user behavioral information we see each day, mInfo has a unique view into the habits and cultural trends of the Chinese people,” said Alvin Wang Graylin, CEO.  “This level of insight allows us to provide more relevance to our users in their search results and continue delivering new informational services they really want.  In this market where 85% of the population hasn’t used a computer, mInfo’s mobile search is bringing the benefits of on-demand information to the masses.”
  The top five search topic categories for 2007 were:
  1. Dining/Entertainment
  2. Stock/Financial
  3. Ring tones/Pictures
  4. Weather/Travel information
  5. Leisure/Recreational Content
Compared with 2006, Dining/Entertainment is still the most popular search topic, but Stock/Financial searches have jumped from fourth place into second, with a traffic increase almost eight times greater.  This is certainly not surprising given the mass interest in the financial markets after another year of over 100% growth.
The data showed some interesting trends, like that SMS and IM users had a greater tendency to do Local and Informational searches, whereas WAP and applet users tended to do more rich content searches.  SMS and IM users were also more geographically diverse having a greater spread of users across a broader set of cities compared to WAP users, which were overrepresented in the Guangdong province.  Since mInfo also operates the leading English language mobile search service in China (Guanxi(R)), it has some unique views on the behavior of English-speaking foreigners in China.  Foreign mobile search users were on average twice as active as Chinese users and tended to focus more on Local Search instead of other categories of services.  They also tended to be on average older and had a larger proportion of professionals and executives than the Chinese user base.
mInfo also found that the query model for mobile search is quite different from web search.  Mobile searchers tended to use query phrases (5-6 words/query) compared with web searchers who on average used about one to two keywords per query.  We find that mobile searchers tend to input phrases with qualifiers to improve specificity in an effort to increase relevance and get more precise answers in a shorter amount of time. mInfo’s unique natural language search capabilities are perfectly suited to this type of user behavior. mInfo’s able to decipher the intent of semi-complex user queries and provide highly relevant answers and not just a long list of potentially relevant links. This allows users to find what they are looking for in just 1- 2 steps as opposed to the iterative search refinements and numerous clicks needed to complete a traditional Web or WAP search session.
mInfo’s registered users increased by over 100% compared with 2006, a significant portion of which were coming from the younger part of the population. Users under the age of 25 comprised about 50% of total users with students accounting for over 28% of users. This is fairly consistent with the early technology adopter profile of this user segment. Data also shows a healthy mix of white-collar workers/professionals who comprised over 32% of total users. This statistic is higher than what most wireless sites/services see, but hardly surprising for mInfo since it targets many services specifically to this market segment. The three key coastal markets of Shanghai, Beijing and the Pearl River Delta region, accounted for almost half of mInfo’s users. The mix between male and female are fairly even at 53% and 47% respectively.
“Based on user growth and increased interest from advertisers, mobile search and mobile advertising are definitely trends for 2008 and beyond,” said Alvin Wang Graylin, CEO. “mInfo is proud to be in the forefront of this exciting space and playing a critical role in setting its direction at such an important time in the life cycle of this new media in China.”

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News Mobile Advertising
 

A huge revolution in location-based advertising is soon to take place, according to the chief exec of Google.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos, Eric Schmidt said that mobile users could be affected by the soon-to-be truly mobile internet.

“It’s the recreation of the Internet, it’s the recreation of the PC (personal computer) story and it is before us - and it is very likely it will happen in the next year”, he told assembled journalists.

At the moment, reports Reuters, analysts have been cautious about the future of mobile advertising, or advertising that targets where the phone users is, and consultancy Forrester predicting revenues of under $1 billion by 2012.

But, according to Schmidt, this is a massive underestimation.

He explained that Google wants to be a key player in this market by bidding for airwaves to launch an open US wireless network, which would see it competiting against established telecommunications players.

Analysts immediately responded by stating their concerns that Google would be over stretching itself as it would be a very expensive move tbut Schmidt dismissed this saying that location-based advertising - which could, for example, direct hungry travelers to nearby restaurants - would be “a very, very good business”.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News Mobile Advertising

SEEKING CLOSER TIES WITH MADISON Avenue, San Mateo, Calif.-based mobile ad network AdMob has opened a New York branch.

The AdMob East office will be led by ad sales veterans Adam Schneider and Robyn Borok, and will focus on expanding brand advertising on AdMob’s mobile platform. Much of that effort will involve continuing to educate agencies about mobile marketing opportunities, according to Tony Nethercutt, AdMob’s vice president of sales.
“We are spending a ton of time on education about mobile, what the possibilities are and best practices, and just trying to demystify it,” he said. “People make it way too complicated. It’s a lot like interactive, but with a few more subtleties about what you can do.”

Started in 2006, AdMob now sells banner and text ads on more than 3,000 mobile Web sites from big-name marketers including Ford, Procter & Gamble, BlackBerry and Best Buy. The company says it is serving 2 billion impressions per month. With growing interest in mobile advertising, Nethercutt said the time had come for the company to have a physical presence in the ad industry’s capital.

The larger agencies AdMob has worked with to date are GM Planworks, Avenue A|Razorfish, OgilvyInteractive, MEC Interaction and AKQA. “All of these agencies have groups they’re starting and assigning mobile expertise to,” Nethercutt said. “So we’re talking with a lot of players in the [mobile] space, and expect those relationships to grow.”

In the last few months especially, Nethercutt said he has seen agencies incorporate mobile into broader interactive media buys through media planning tools like aQuantive’s Atlas and DoubleClick’s MediaVisor. “It’s definitely becoming more of a staple on interactive buys as advertisers take advantage of the things mobile can bring to the table,” he said.

Making face time with the agencies on behalf of AdMob will be ad sales directors Schneider and Borok. Before joining AdMob, Schneider was a founding executive at mobile startup Cellfire, and previously was vice president of sales at online rewards network MyPoints.

Borok was previously advertising director for Child magazine and has also held ad sales-related positions at Primedia and iVillage.

During the last year, AdMob has grown from a dozen to 60 employees, including some working overseas, Nethercutt said.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News Mobile Advertising