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Monday, February 10, 2014

Last week at The Fonecast: 10th February 2014

New deals and old problems

Mark Bridge writes:

Mobile phones have been hitting the mainstream news over the past few days. There was Channel 4’s report about data on second-hand phones not being properly deleted before the handsets were re-sold, there was the latest round of the Smart UK Project and there was Tim Muffett’s story about the mobile-enabled high street on BBC Breakfast this morning.

Also big news was Microsoft’s decision to pick long-time employee Satya Nadella as its new CEO. There’s a new role for founder Bill Gates as well, which suggests he’ll be doing more hands-on stuff in the future.

Partnerships have been another recent theme. MasterCard has teamed up with UK mobile payment and advertising business Weve to develop a contactless mobile payments system. I can’t imagine Visa is especially happy, given the relationships it has - or had - with O2, Orange and Vodafone.

And in other network news, EE and Three are reported to have signed a sharing deal for 4G services in the UK. Meanwhile Nokia and HTC have agreed a patent licensing deal with each other, as have Cisco and Samsung.

But there’s been breaking up, too. Sony Corporation has agreed to sell its PC business to Japan Industrial Partners and will stop making Vaio-branded computers, while Alcatel-Lucent says it’s talking to technology investment business China Huaxin about the sale of its Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise division. The times, they are a-changin’.

Finally, figures from Cisco anticipate an almost 11-fold increase in global mobile data from 2013 to 2018. A total of 190 billion gigabytes of data is expected to be consumed on mobile devices in 2018, which is the equivalent of every person on earth streaming a YouTube video clip every day. Mond you, more than half of this will be carried on WiFi rather than via cellular networks.

Which, as James talked about in our 2014 predictions podcast last year, prompts the question: exactly what is ‘mobile’ anyway?

On Monday mornings we summarise the past week’s mobile industry headlines in an email 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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Opinion Articles

f u cn rd ths thn wts th prblm?

Iain Graham writes:

Text language. Why do they do it?  What an interesting question!  Normally asked by people who have never ever sent a text, believing it to be the invention of the devil!! "Texters are vandals, doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago" asserted Jhn (sorry) John Humphrys of Radio Four fame writing in the Daily Mail. The new 'text language' has been blamed for many things including...

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Is Google’s new mobile phone distribution model really a big deal for the UK?

Mark Bridge writes:

“Google offers New Model for Consumers to buy a Mobile Phone”. Not my words but those of Vodafone as it announced it was the first operator to bring the new Google phone offer to Europe.

There’s a lot of talk about Google’s online ordering process for its Nexus One smartphone… or ‘superphone’ as the company described it at yesterday’s launch.

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Mobile shopping is worrying... and usually successful

Mark Bridge writes:

I really don’t like to complain. Honestly, I don’t. I’m an optimist. True, I can be a bit of a cynic – but that’s because I like to see things work first time.

So when I saw a headline that said “Shopping via mobile phone causes concerns for consumers”, I wasn’t surprised. Disappointed but not surprised.

And then I looked closer – and I got annoyed. Not annoyed at the companies that make mobile shopping so disappointing. No, annoyed at the organisation that published the report.

Author: The Fonecast
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Is mobile technology too young to predict?

Mark Bridge writes:

“Leave them alone, they’re just kids”

My word, Anakin Skywalker was a smart boy. Child prodigy. Wunderkind. Genius, some would say, albeit fictional.

But, without the benefit of hindsight (or the Star Wars box set, as many would call it), very few people would have expected him to marry his babysitter, fall into a volcano, turn to the Dark Side and end up looking like the late Sebastian Shaw.

Which brings me to the mobile phone industry.

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Did 2009 turn out the way we expected?

Mark Bridge writes:

At this time of year it’s something of a tradition – certainly within the mobile industry – to make predictions for the year ahead. It’s a trend we’ve followed with The Fonecast… and we’ve done reasonably well over the last few years.

We’ll be making this year’s predictions for 2010 in our programme on 23rd December. Ahead of that, I’ve been listening to our last show of 2008 to see what we thought 2009 would hold for us.

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