Frigital Records

That, at least, is the dream outcome for the backers of mobile TV, for whom the Games are a golden opportunity to burnish the reputation of a medium that has failed to live up to its potential since it was launched in 2004.

“For certain events, the most important thing is to learn the result instantly,” said Yun Weijie, president and chief executive of Telegent Systems, a Silicon Valley semiconductor maker.

“The quality of the images doesn’t matter sometimes,” he said. “That’s exactly the case with mobile TV and the Olympics.”

Telegent produces chips that let cellphones receive TV signals free of charge. By the end of 2007, the firm’s chips were in use in five million handsets throughout Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa, Yun said.

China accounted for half of the total.

“TV will become a standard feature for cellphones in China by the end of this year, just like cameras,” Yun said.

Watching TV on a cellphone is already routine in Japan and South Korea, auguring well for the industry’s prospects in China.

But mobile TV in China has long been criticized for a lack of eye-grabbing content and bandwidth restrictions that have left viewers frustrated waiting for their screen to light up and — as Yun admitted — disappointed by the poor quality of the image.

But things are changing.

In April, China Mobile, the country’s largest mobile operator, launched trials of third-generation (3G) mobile services based on TD-SCDMA, a home-grown standard, in eight cities, including Beijing.

Eager to show off 3G, China Mobile has bought some 40,000 mobile TV-enabled handsets and is handing them out to staff and guests for the Games.

ZTE Corp, China’s No. 2 telecoms network gear maker, won a contract to provide about 8,000 of the phones.

“The original plan was to distribute the phones after the games,” a ZTE official said. “However, China Mobile decided to do it before the games kicked off, because they think the development of mobile TV technology has already reached a satisfactory level.”

The official declined to be named as he is not authorized to speak to the media.

Growing Fast

China had over 600 million registered mobile phone users as of June, by far the largest market in the world.

Only 12 million, or two percent, of the users currently subscribe to mobile TV, bringing in 4.6 billion yuan ($670 million) of revenue a year, according to CCID Consulting in Beijing.

But the private consulting firm reckons both subscribers and revenue could grow tenfold by 2012.

Studies by In-Stat China, a high-tech market research firm headquartered in Arizona, show that over 60 percent of existing cellphone users are interested in mobile TV.

“Nowadays, people’s attention and time is segmented, so they want multi-functional converged handsets,” said Kevin Li, In-Stat China’s telecoms research director.

The cost of receiving TV is low, if not free, and television is traditional family entertainment, Li noted. “So copying TV content to mobile phones is attractive to many people,” he said.

Among foreign investors seeking to tap the China market is Sheikh Sultan Al-Qasimi, chairman of Gulf Holdings. The United Arab Emirates firm has already invested in mobile TV in six countries, mostly in southeastern Asia.

One of Al-Qasimi’s investments, Movaio Pte Ltd in Singapore, has forged a partnership with China Teleformation, a mobile TV content provider in China.

For Al-Qasimi, the attraction of mobile TV in China is that it is largely protected from swings in the economic cycle.

“If you have a boom, people’ll have money to spend, so you have customers,” he told Reuters on the sidelines of a recent conference in Beijing. “When you have a downturn, you have more customers, because they have nothing to do.”

Source:http://www.pcworld.com

Most Global Positioning System devices are made to sit snugly in the confines of a car, where they rarely have to contend with dust, dirt or raging rapids. Garmin’s new Nuvi 500, however, is intended to take more abuse than the average G.P.S. unit. The 7.6-ounce device is meant to work both in a car on the highway and in the hand on a mountain trail.

The Nuvi comes with maps of the 48 contiguous states, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. It is resistant to water and dust and offers voice-based turn-by-turn directions while the user is on foot or in a vehicle (although it does not pronounce street names). An emergency locator feature indicates the exact longitude, latitude and elevation; it also includes directions to local hospitals and police stations.

For off-road adventurers, the Nuvi 500 has topographic maps of the United States and even supports navigation charts for boating. The $500 device has a 3.5-inch display.

Social networking tools aren’t really new in the computing world. After all, AOL was the granddaddy of social networking environments back in the Internet’s early days. But the extension of these environments to mobile devices is new. According to an Informa Telecoms report, about 50 million people, or about 2.3 percent of all mobile users, already use the mobile phone for social networking, from chat services to multimedia sharing. The company forecasts that the penetration rate will mushroom to at least 12.5 percent in five years.

The Complete Experience

A complete mobile social networking experience is composed of three specific elements:

• Sharing and storing personal information and profiles, including browsing for friends and contacts, reading status messages, commenting on photos and blogs, uploading photos to a personal profile and updating personal status messages.
• Asynchronous messaging, including e-mailing and sending messages. These types of messages are generally stored and are available in offline mode.
• Real-time messaging, including instant messaging and the ability to chat synchronously with friends. This type of communication is online, interactive and collaborative in nature.

For their mobile users, the current major communities attempt to offer a mix of services from these three elements. The more traditional communities, like Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) and MSN , offer an application/service for each element such as MSN Messenger, MSN Hotmail and MSN Spaces. Recent social networks such as Facebook and MySpace offer a more integrated experience, and yet none of the solutions currently covers all three components in one seamless application. Without providing all of these elements, we believe that the mobile operators will be unable to deliver the social networking experience that consumers expect on their mobile handset.

Niche Networks

It is not unrealistic to consider a scenario where an individual would belong to a number of networks. While this is easily managed on the desktop, this creates an important real estate problem on the mobile handset. As the core of any social networking site is based on the same fundamentals, we can easily imagine the benefits for a user if they could launch a single mobile application and access all their social network communities instead of launching different mobile applications.

Apply the same line of thinking to the address book (or contact list). While short message service, instant messaging and e-mail are using different addressing methods — phone number, IM client ID, or e-mail address — they relate to unique individuals who have different means of communication. End-user needs research indicates that consumers are seeking a unified address book where all relevant contact addresses (portal IM, e-mail or phone number) are stored in a coherent and unified way. Also, when it comes to social networks, mobile operators need to think about efficient ways to manage contact lists, as many consumers have thousands of contacts whereas many of the lower-end feature phones cannot handle such extensive contact lists.

A Critical Junction

Finally, there are a range of services emerging on the horizon that will improve the overall mobile social networking user experience. For example, location and presence services can facilitate social networking and collaboration. Single address books enable subscribers to connect quickly and easily. For most users, the current reality is that no single place exists from which these services can be offered.

The future of mobile social networking is at a critical junction. The market demand is ripe, and carriers and communities must find a simple way to bring the best of these communities to the mobile masses. The key is a unified social networking messaging platform that will allow the mobile operator to deliver greater value to their subscribers, empowering them to easily add, remove and manage their profiles from multiple participating social networking communities within a single application. Mobile service providers that seize the opportunity to deliver a streamlined social networking platform that works ubiquitously across consumer phones through to advanced smartphones will reap the rewards of higher average revenue per user, increased usage, greater user retention and expanded brand loyalty.

Early evidence showing sharp increases in Internet usage on phones, not just computers, has emerged from services Google has begun offering in recent months on Blackberry e-mail phones, Nokia devices for multimedia picture and video creators and business professionals and the Apple iPhone, the world’s top Web search company said.

“We have very much hit a watershed moment in terms of mobile Internet usage,” Matt Waddell, a product manager for Google Mobile, said in an interview. “We are seeing that mobile Internet use is in fact accelerating.

The growing availability of flat-rate data plans from phone carriers instead of per-minute charges that previously discouraged Internet use, along with improved Web browsers on mobile phones as well as better-designed services from companies like Google are fueling the growth, Waddell argued.

Google made the pronouncement as it introduced a new software download for mobile phones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software that conveniently positions a Google Web search window on the home screen of such phones.

Similar versions of the search software which Google introduced for BlackBerry users in December and certain Nokia phones in February have sped up the time users take to perform Web searches by 40 percent and, in turn, driven usage.

The software shortcuts the time it takes for people to perform Web searches on Google by eliminating initial search steps of finding a Web browser on the phone, opening the browser, waiting for network access, and getting to Google.com. By making a Google search box more convenient, mobile phone users have begun using the Internet more, the company said.

“We are actually seeing a 20 percent increase in the number of searches by people,” Waddell said.

Google’s mobile plug-in software lets users customize their phones to feature Google mobile services instead of relying solely on software features network carriers have pre-installed on the devices.

“Faster is better than slow, especially on a mobile device, where fast is much better than slow,” Waddell said. “Not only are we are seeing increased user satisfaction but also greater usage.”

Microsoft expects to have sold 20 million Windows Mobile devices by the end of its fiscal year in June, which together with Blackberry and Symbian-based phones represent upward of 85 percent of the Internet-ready smartphones sold in the world.

Users of phones based on software from Research in Motion, Nokia’s Symbian-based phones and now Microsoft Windows Mobile can download the software at mobile.google.com .

Google officials said in August that they had seen a similar surge in usage of Google.com via mobile devices following the launch of the Apple iPhone last year. The iPhone offers a full-featured Internet browser unlike many phones.

Waddell said Google had seen iPhone users perform as many as 50 times more Web searches on these computer-phone devices as users of standard mobile feature phones typically do.

On Tuesday, the organization announced that 10 mobile WiMax products had received the “WiMax Forum Certified Seal of Approval.” Four base stations, from Alvarion, Motorola, Samsung, and Sequans, won certification, along with mobile modules from Intel, Samsung, Beceem, Airspan and ZyXEL.

According to the WiMax Forum, more than 100 mobile WiMax products will be certified by the year’s end, with more than 1,000 certified by 2011. This will also include products designed to work at the 3.5GHz frequency, and the forum said on Tuesday that it would start accepting certification applications for such products in the third quarter of this year, with the goal of completing certification by the end of the year.

“We are setting an industry precedent by conducting certification in a way that has never been done before,” WiMax Forum president Ron Resnick said. “To ensure interoperability for global operators and consumers, the WiMax Forum supports the end-to-end certification process, from equipment development to test equipment validation (to), finally, product certification. The WiMax Forum is the only consortium to certify base station equipment, which is key to ensure true network interoperability and a high quality of service among user devices and network equipment.”

Tuesday’s announcements could go some way toward bolstering mobile WiMax’s lead on its main competitor, the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) of 3G. LTE has not yet been standardized, though that hasn’t stopped chipmaker NXP from announcing last week that it would have an LTE-compatible modem available for interoperability testing in the first half of next year.

The 2.5GHz products should be usable in Clearwire and Sprint’s WiMax network in the United States. However, mobile WiMax’s chances in the United Kingdom are largely dependent on the results of an auction for the same spectrum, to be held by telecommunications regulator Ofcom toward the end of this summer.