Mark Bridge writes:
I’m reminded of a sketch from BBC TV’s ‘The Young Ones’ in 1982. The four horsemen of the apocalypse are waiting around.
“What’s new?”, asks Pestilence. “Microchip technology”, replies one of the others. “That’s quite a new thing, isn’t it?”
Quite new. It’s probably the best description for much of last week’s mobile industry news.
We had the Simply Tap shopping app being launched by The Mobile Money Network, having been running as a trial for a bit. I’d say it sounds a little like the Contact Secure text service that Keith Curran talked to us about in 2009.
We heard about two new Motorola XOOM tablets hitting the UK this month, following the launch of the original XOOM in February. We had Jawbone revealing more about the UP fitness and diet wristband it announced in June.
There was Vodafone planning to test ‘open’ femtocells in a dozen UK communities after a successful trial in a Berkshire village. We learned about Yahoo! launching the long-awaited Livestand ‘digital newsstand’ for the Apple iPad.
And we heard about BlackBerry’s BBM Music app going live in Canada, the United States and Australia – but not in the UK yet.
There’s nothing new about legal action in the mobile industry, with the Samsung/Apple battle catching the European Commission’s beady legislative eye – although it’s somewhat unusual for Apple to lose not one but two cases in the course of a week.
And sadly there’s nothing new about job losses; this time it’s Everything Everywhere and Motorola Mobility adding to the redundancy figures.
On the other side of the coin, there was good news for mobile ticket company Masabi and mobile payment company Monitise, both of which have received new funding from investors.
Finally, telecoms regulator Ofcom produced a series of maps showing mobile phone coverage. The sort of thing you’d do for technology that’s... well... quite new.