Born to be Wireless

I know this is not the focus of this blog, but since Yahoo is a great player in the mobile market and it has the single most-visited page on the Web (with 304 million unique visitors worldwide in May, according to comScore), it deserves a note:



Anyone who access www.yahoo.com will see a box on the right side of the side calling the stockholders to vote against Carl Icahn. When you click on the box, you'll be redirect to a page that attacks Icahn credibility as an investor. At the top of this page, you'll see the quote:



my two cents: It feels like Yahoo is fighting the battle of its life and Jerry Yang is using all he can use in order to win the proxy battle on Aug 1st! And since I passionate about Yahoo for almost 10 years (the age of my Y!Mail account), I really wouldn't like to see it bought by Microsoft :-)

update: according to comScore monthly search report, Google lost 0.3% (total of 61.5%) market share on search, Y! gain 0.3% (total of 20.9%), Microsoft gain 0.7% (total of 9.2%), Ask lost 0.2% (total of 4.3%) and AOL lost 0.4% (total of 4.1%). This data is related to U.S. market

Labels: carl icahn, Yahoo

In order to reduce 300 million euros in operational costs, Sony Ericsson will cut 2000 jobs all around the world within the next twelve months. This was a result of a drop of 97% in the earnings in the second quarter result.
It starting to look more and more like Motorola...

Full history here

Labels: sony ericsson

iSuppli’s Teardown Analysis Service on July 11 obtained an iPhone 3G and commenced a dissection in order to identify component suppliers, as well as to determine preliminary part and system costs.

Beyond the $174.33 BOM and manufacturing cost of the iPhone 3G, Apple is spending an estimated $50 on IP royalties per unit shipped. With the 8Gbyte version retail-priced at $199, and the estimated $300 subsidy paid by AT&T to Apple for each unit, Apple is selling the product at a price of $499, and spending $224.33 to produce each one. This gives Apple a BOM, manufacturing and royalty margin of 55 percent for each 8Gbyte iPhone 3G unit sold.

Source: cellular-news

Labels: iphone 3g

• The BIC® phone is ready to go! It comes with 60 free minutes, the battery charged, and the SIM card already in place.
• With the BIC® phone, you pay as you go, with a prepaid “mobicarte” refill card.
• The BIC® phone is easy to use since it focuses on cell phone basics: sending and receiving calls and SMS.
• The BIC® phone pack will be easy to find. It will be sold over the counter, in major supermarkets and local convenience stores (tobacco shops, newsstands, train stations, airports…), and will be available on 7 August 2008, at a suggested retail price of €49 including tax. The BIC® phone will be sold in Metropolitan France only.

Press release here

Labels: bic, france, orange

Mobile music discovery specialist Shazam has released a native version of its mobile application for the iPhone. The application is available now on the Apple App Store. Shazam fully integrates with and complements the iPhone, allowing users to discover, buy and share tunes simply by holding their iPhone up to a music system for just a few seconds.

Key user features include the ability to tag (identify) music anywhere; to build your own soundtrack; go straight to iTunes to preview and buy tagged music; see related videos of the track on YouTube; personalise the tag by taking a photo and adding it to ‘My Tags’; and send track details to friends via email.

It's really easy to travel between countries in Europe, and of course everybody uses their mobiles during the trips. For some time now, there have been complaining about the large coasts for roaming - voice, sms or data. Even European Commission has suggest to the carriers to cut their prices for roaming, something that, of course, didn't happen.
Now, the European Commission has released a plan to end "rip-offs for text messages abroad". Couple of days later, regulator agency in France has invited the carriers to cut SMS costs! I hope this reach Brazil as soon as possible ! :-)

PS: Nice site with SMS prices in Europe:

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/roaming/index_en.htm

Labels: europe, france, sms

The presentation even goes beyond the EA Mobile games. It also shows that Gameloft copied concepts from Disney and Taito. Of course, we all knew this is happening, and fair enough, it happens all over the industry and for many years already.

Details are on Jan Rezab’s Mobile Enthousiast blog.

Labels: mobile games

For those who registered in Apple's MobileMe between July 9th and July 15th, Apple is offering a 30 days extension as an "i'm sorry" gift for all the problems that occur this last week.

Official note here

Labels: apple, MobileMe

From Twitter blog:

"We’re excited to announce that Twitter has acquired Summize—an extraordinary search tool and an amazing group of engineers. All five Summize engineers will move to San Francisco, CA and take jobs at Twitter, Inc. This is an important step forward in the evolution of Twitter as a service and as a company.
Summize is a popular service for searching Twitter and keeping up with emerging trends in real-time. Like Twitter, Summize offers an API so other products and services can filter the constant queue of updates in a variety of ways. The Summize service and API will be merged with our own and integrated under the Twitter brand."

Labels: twitter

According to Reuters, Sony Ericsson is talking to India handset-make Spice Mobile about a possible merge. The value of India company would be something up to US$174 million.
"They want to acquire a majority stake, but it has not yet been finalised if it will be a 100 percent buyout," the Economic Times cited the source as saying.
It would be a nice step for SE if Spice could provide technology and the scalability for selling low-end devices, which has never been a priority for SE. The company, a joint venture between Japanese electronics maker Sony, and Swedish telecoms equipment maker Ericsson has lost the fourth position in sales for LG and some analysts are calling it the next Motorola

Labels: sony ericsson, Spice Mobile

Apple says it sold more than 1 million iPhone 3G handsets over the launch weekend. The 1 millionth handset was sold yesterday. iPhone 3G is available in 21 countries - Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and the US. The device goes on sale in France on Thursday.

Labels: iphone 3g

According to Avian Securities, Motorola will end this second quarter with 8.5% share, a reduce from 9.3% on Q1. Same Avian Securities released on June that no motorola device is between the top best-selling handsets on the USA.
Same analysts are expecting Motorola to end up with 6% share by the end of the year... that's a shame for a company that once had 20% share

Labels: motorola

Apple and China Mobile has returned conversations to lunch iPhone on China. The motivation was Apple giving up revenue share.
Maybe Steve Jobs realized that just iPhone's device profit over China Mobile's 400 million subscribers is a lot better deal than keep fighting :-)

Labels: china mobile, iphone

Sony Ericsson and Handango join efforts to making available more content to the SE users: all SE phones with Symbian UIQ OS will have access to InHand, an application store.
Also, Handango will provide content to SE Mobile Web Store.
Released the same day of iPhone's App Store :-)

Labels: handango, sony ericsson, symbian, uiq

The new iPhone OS 2.0 software has been unlocked and jailbroken. It was released just hours ago
by the iPhone Dev Team. The first one took a couple of months, but this one was actually unlocked before Apple released it to the public.

Labels: google, iphone 3g

Best Buy announced today that early sales results are showing the Samsung Instinct™, exclusively from Sprint, to be the retailer’s best selling handset in the past two years. According to MocoNews, a Best Buy spokesperson said the Instinct is selling comparably to the super hot Motorola Razr during the holiday period of 2006.

Labels: samsung

Nokia announced today that it has completed its acquisition of NAVTEQ, a leading provider of comprehensive digital map information.

Full release: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080710/ukth011.html?.v=18

Labels: navteq, nokia

Medialets, a company that got off the ground June 1, is providing a mechanism for developers to include ads in their applications and make them free to iPhone users on the App Store. Revenues are split between Medialets and the developer—Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) gets none. Developers need to drop a code into their applications for the ads to show up correctly and allow for Medialets to offer metrics and tracking info on each ad campaign's performance.

It sounds like just the kind of thing Apple wouldn't tolerate: a company partnering with others to offer applications for free on its App Store and then monetizing their work through ads. But Medialets CEO Eric Litman says that's exactly the case and that none of the advertising revenue will go to Apple's coffers. "It's in Apple's best interest" to see developers prosper on the new distribution model, Litman said. Perhaps it doesn't hurt that the longtime online executive worked at NeXT Computer Inc., a company founded by Steve Jobs in 1985 after he left Apple Computer.

By the way, the release of the App Store is schedule for today! I'm waiting....

Source: http://www.moconews.net

Labels: apple, Apple App Store, iphone

sweet... http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/talk/index.html

Labels: iphone