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Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Mobile virtual worlds.

Chipuya Town is a virtual world for mobile phones. "Users create a custom avatar, then step into a cute-ified version of Tokyo's Shibuya shopping district that's accurate right down to the advertising overload. (Companies pay up to $4,000 a month for ads on in-world billboards.)"

From Wired, issue 15.2.
by Richard @ 17:15

Monday, January 28, 2008

Mobile phone sales up again.

Nokia's market share has now risen above 40%. '"Their phones are a little bit cheaper, very much tilted towards emerging markets. Basically, they're taking market share from Motorola due to greater volume," said Greger Johansson, an analyst at Redeye.'

  • Nokia: 40.2%
  • Samsung: 14%
  • Motorola: 12.3%
  • Sony Ericsson: 9.3%
  • LG: 7.1%
  • Apple: 0.6%


"Overall, 332m mobile phones shipped in Q4 2007, up 13 per cent on the same period in 2006. Some 1.13bn shipped in the year as a whole, 12.4 per cent more than shipped in 2006".

Sources:
by Richard @ 09:55

Monday, January 21, 2008

Yahoo puts more effort in mobile.

At CES, Yahoo announced: an update to Yahoo Go, access to non-Yahoo advertising services, promotion of mobile widgets and hinted at support for a broad range of handsets include those based on Android.

'"Our job is to make sure Yahoo Mobile Widgets run on any platform that creates a good user experience," [mobile chief Marco] Boerries said. "Android for us is another mobile operating system like Windows Mobile and Series 60 that we plan to support once it becomes a reality"'.

Sources:
by Richard @ 18:24

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Almost half of Lithuanian and Finish households have a mobile phone but no fixed line telephone.

Almost half of Lithuanian and Finish households have a mobile phone but no fixed line telephone. A possible reason given for central and Eastern Europe is the lack of existing fixed lines.
The article also contains a nice graphic of EU countries ordered by homes with mobiles but no fixed line.

From The Economist, 28 November 2007.
by Jono @ 22:27

Friday, January 04, 2008

Mobile phones and political protest.

Mobile phones are used by protestors, and by governments in various ways:
  • "texts as tools of protest and dissent, simply summoning people to demonstrations—a technique first deployed in the Philippines as long ago as 2001—is old hat. "
  • political ringtones, highlighting corruption or lapses in diplomacy.
  • camera phones are being use to capture images showing abuse. An example is http://hub.witness.org/ (although mobile upload and site optimizations are currently in beta)
  • Voters texting complaints to election monitors, via FrontlineSMS, for example.
  • "In some places, like Belarus, the authorities have refined the art of blocking mobile coverage in specific places—such as protest venues. They have also turned text messages to their own uses: by using the state-owned network to spread warnings that a rally is likely to end in bloodshed."

From The Economist, 1 December 2007, pp. 75-6
by Richard @ 15:25