A survey by QPass, has shown that the ringtone industry has lost $40 million since Q1 2004 and will loose a further $123 million by 2007. The problem is that many pesky kids are saving the (free) preview tones and putting them on their mobiles. While this does certainly happen, I suspect it’s dwarfed by [...]
Archive | July, 2005
Sousveillance Hits the Big Time
I’m not real happy to revisit this topic, but after examining how mobile phones played into media coverage of the earlier London attacks, I was interested to see the Metropolitan Police make an appeal for cameraphone images and other footage taken in the four relevant areas before or at the time of the incidents today. [...]
Turning Bluetooth On Doesn’t Constitute Opting In
Justin Pearse over at NMA reports on the division in the UK marketing industry over Bluetooth, with no clear mandate on the legality of sending unsolicited marketing messages using the technology. Evidently the “Electronic Communications Regulations” say explicit consumer consent is needed for marketing messages, and that’s a chicken-or-egg problem for marketers that don’t have [...]
Mobile Monday Austin
Just wanted to put the word out to our readers (if any) here in Austin, like me — a Mobile Monday group is starting up, with the first meeting August 1. Visit mobilemondayaustin.com for more info and to RSVP. Hope to meet some of you there. —–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo
BT’s Privacy Measures Outrage Call Centre Industry
Let’s assume you’re free and single and in a bar looking for some action with a member of the opposite sex (or same sex actually as we’re not homophobic here. Oh no, many of our readers seem to come from a certain gay chat room according to our logs, and very welcome they are too). [...]
Linux Beats MS in SmartPhone Shipments
Last week, I looked at the share of the SmartPhone market held between the two operating system leaders, Symbian and Microsoft. In that battle, Microsoft was being battered and outsold by 8 to 1. I didn’t examine too closely the Linux position as it was very much a niche play according to the stats I [...]
Prepay Data Card: No Good, Either
Jupiter analyst Julie Ask (she of the ringback tone trial saga) pointed out a new prepaid data card offering from Vodafone UK, saying the pricing model might help it compete with hotspots for business users’ access — if for no other reason than there aren’t many people that can justify the high monthly cost of [...]
TheFeature Archives Now Available!
I’m happy to report that the archives of TheFeature.com are now available at thefeaturearchives.com. I’m still waiting for Google to index the pages, so the search box isn’t much help yet, but you can browse by topic, though I know that’s not too elegant either. But, after spending the bulk of the day messing with [...]
BlogRoll
Rather than feature our HUGE BlogRoll on the home page of MobHappy, we thought it would be altogether more managable to post it here and then provide a link from the home page. This way you get to find all the excellent blogs we like to follow, without having it rammed down your throat on [...]
Unabated Optimism On Handsets
Got an email from Gartner just now saying they’ve upped their handset sales estimate for 2005 to 779 million units. Their initial estimate for the year was 720 million, which got bumped up in May to 750 million. Gartner also adds its prediction that handset sales will break the 1 billion per year barrier in [...]
Recent Comments