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Monday, June 18, 2012

Last week at The Fonecast: 18th June 2012

What next for Nokia?

Mark Bridge writes:

Oh, how cheerful we were last Monday. Apple previewed iOS6, which will bring mobile tickets (and 200 other new features) to the iPhone and iPad this autumn. Vodafone cut the cost of using your phone in Europe with its flat-rate £3-per-day EuroTraveller deal and a few days later Three came up with its own ‘unlimited’ European data roaming.

Yet by the end of the week there were fewer smiles in the mobile industry. The biggest bombshell came from Nokia. In a series of announcements on Thursday it said 10,000 staff would be cut (including three of the leadership team), factories would be closed and its Vertu luxury phone brand would be sold. There’ll be a new focus on location-based services and photography, helped by the acquisition of technology, patents and staff from imaging business Scalado.

There was also a Nokia link to last week’s other big acquisition story. Mobile computing business Psion plc is being combined with the Enterprise Mobile Computing business of Motorola Solutions, assuming shareholders are happy with the price. Psion’s EPOC operating system was the forerunner of the Symbian OS, now nestling within... Nokia.

Fortunately, most of the week’s other headlines were relatively upbeat. For example, it’s been a good week for mobile financial services. iZettle released its API, enabling its card payment technology to be incorporated within other applications, and picked up £20 million in new funding. Customers of the Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest were able to withdraw money from cash machines by using mobile phones instead of a bank card. And on the other side of the Atlantic, US-based mobile payment service Square said over two million individuals and businesses are now signed-up to use its app.

Supermarkets were busy moving further into mobile. Tesco took control of the WE7 online music service for a purchase price of £10.8 million, while Sainsbury’s spent much less on its eBook retailer. Just £1 gave it a 64% stake in Anobii Limited alongside HarperCollins, Penguin and Random House Group.

A different kind of selling was proposed by Everything Everywhere and Nokia Siemens Networks. They now have a machine-to-machine partnership that will allow vending machines to offer remote stock monitoring, location-based promotional messages and mobile payments.

Finally for now, our congratulations to Charles Dunstone and Dr Mike Short. Sir Charles of the Warehouse, as he’ll probably never be known, was awarded a knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. Meanwhile Dr Short of Telefónica Europe, who’s also president of the Institution of Engineering & Technology and a supporter of many other mobile organisations, is to receive a CBE.

Start your week with a reminder of the latest mobile headlines. Simply register at TheFonecast.com by clicking the link at the top right-hand corner of our home page and we’ll send you this weekly news summary by email.

The Fonecast is sponsored by 51Degrees.mobi. More details about advertising and sponsorship opportunities are available on the About Us section of our website.
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Opinion Articles

4G doesn't come to Three

Mark Bridge writes:

Earlier today, Three.co.uk published a blog post headlined “4G comes to Three”. But it hasn’t.

I spent most of this morning here at Mobile World Congress muttering about the blog before returning to it this afternoon. And suddenly it’s changed.

The blog post remains. The headline is completely different. Now we’re told “Three to launch leading edge 3G service”.

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How far does it go, mate?

Geoff Varrall of RTT writes:

About 15,000 years ago some indigenous Northern Australians decided that they needed a more efficient way of talking to each other than just shouting a lot.

And blowing into a long cylindrical tube proved to be just what was needed and seriously useful fun – the dawn of the didgeridoo.

Trumpets and bagpipes were invented at about the same time. The ancient Greeks used the trumpet in battlefield communication to devastating effect.

The way you can tell that your didgeridoo is better than everyone else’s didgeridoo is to blow into it and see how far the sound goes.

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Last week at The Fonecast: 20th February 2012

Mark Bridge writes:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So said Sir Arthur C Clarke.

Last week’s magic was supplied by imaging company Scalado, which announced a new product called ‘Remove’. The clue’s in the name: it can automatically remove unwanted people from photos taken on a mobile phone. Expect to see it on a handset near you before too long.

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Last week at The Fonecast: 13th February 2012

Mark Bridge writes:

It’s not been a good week for Nokia staff, with 4000 of them likely to lose their jobs from factories in Finland, Hungary and Mexico. The company says it’s moving device assembly to Asia, where it’ll be closer to component manufacturers. The three scaled-down factories will remain open with a new focus on smartphone customisation.

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Could a new legal framework for FRAND principles end the mobile patent wars in 2013?

Mark Bridge writes:

I’m not the first person to point out that mobile phone patent battles are raging all around us. They’ve been going on for years.

However, the topic of FRAND patents - those designated as ‘industry standards’ and therefore required to be licensed on Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory terms - has become an increasingly newsworthy topic.

In the last couple of weeks we’ve reported on an EC investigation into Samsung’s licensing of mobile patents and a Motorola/Apple legal battle that involves FRAND licensing.

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