Mark Bridge writes:
The past few days have seen the arrival of two familiar seasons. Not only has the sun peeked its head from behind the clouds in an approximation of Spring but the mobile industry has been releasing its quarterly results.
In the last week we’ve had figures from Microsoft and from Google. Both appeared to be in pretty good shape, although Google’s Motorola Mobility business is still making a loss.
Sticking with talk of money, Visa Europe is enhancing its mobile payment service to offer participating banks two new features: Multi-Currency and Immediate Payments. Together they’ll make it possible for consumers to receive money sent from mobile phones across Europe within 30 minutes.
Meanwhile Vodafone launched its M-Pesa mobile money transfer and payment service in India – a market of around 700 million potential customers awaits – and Ofcom announced plans to simplify premium rate call charges.
Moving seamlessly to the legal world, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has upheld a complaint about an ‘unlimited’ mobile data tariff from T-Mobile, while Foxconn’s parent Hon Hai has signed a patent licensing deal with Microsoft.
But it’s innovation that’s caused the most buzz this week. Top of the list was Twitter’s music service, which is called Twitter #music. This is a discovery service that links with iTunes, Spotify and Rdio to make help with recommendations and sharing trends.
We also have Orange’s all-in-one VoIP and messaging app, which is now available on Android and will become RCS Joyn compatible later this year.
And finally there’s HTC, LG and Samsung all joining the Power Matters Alliance, which wants an open standard for smart wireless power. Mind you, all three manufacturers have also used the rival Qi wireless charging technology – so this story’s not over yet.
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