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Last week at The Fonecast: 25th March 2013

Mark

I’m moving on up, you’re moving on out

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Mark Bridge writes:

Farewell, ST-Ericsson. It didn’t bode well when CEO Didier Lamouche announced his planned departure a couple of weeks ago – and now both STMicroelectronics and Ericsson have confirmed they’ll be splitting the company between them before closing it down.

Meanwhile, as new CEO Carlo Ferro prepares to take over, there are also succession plans in the air at UK rival ARM. Warren East is off in July, handing over to company president Simon Segars.

Remaining with the subject of newness, Google has announced a new note-taking service called Google Keep. It was described by the company as an online equivalent of ‘sticky notes’ – but there was no mention of it being anything like Evernote.

UK-based mobile ticketing business Masabi announced a new £1.8 million investment from a group of investment firms led by Fontinalis Partners. Incidentally, Fontinalis was co-founded by Bill Ford Jr., the great-grandson of motoring pioneer Henry Ford.

And sticking with a transport theme, Juniper Research forecast that a fifth of all consumer vehicles in North America and Western Europe are expected to have app-capable multimedia systems by 2017.

That’ll just add to the figures revealed last week by mobile network analytics and optimisation specialists Actix. They discovered that only 30% of smartphone data sessions are user initiated; most begin automatically without the user even noticing. As Actix points out, it means that quality of service reports and usage monitoring aren’t necessarily as straightforward as you might think. After all, a dropped connection isn’t all that important if you don’t notice it.

Last week we went to Mobile Monday London, where we talked about mobile start-ups and learned about business funding opportunities. You can listen to the panel discussion on our website or read highlights on the Mobile Monday site

Every Monday morning we summarise the past week’s mobile industry headlines in a newsletter that’s very much like this article. To receive it, simply register your email address at TheFonecast.com by clicking the link at the top right-hand corner of our home page.

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