Born to be Wireless

Brasil Telecom (who is in process of merging with Oi) has launched two unlimited plans for its clients.
The first one offers unlimited voice calls for R$ 99 (US$ 59).
The second offers unlimited voice calls, SMS, data and video-calls and the client also gets a Nokia N95. This all for R$ 199 (US$ 119).

It's pretty much what american carriers are charging for unlimited plan in the US (US$ 99).
I hope the others carriers in Brazil starts to do the same :-)

Labels: Brazil, BrT

Oi Brazil has announced the acquisition of Brasil Telecom for R$ 5.863 billions (US$ 3.5 billion). The value was above the expected by the market, something around R$ 4.8 billion (US$ 2.8 billion).

The deal is still waiting for a change in the Brazil legislation (it isn't allowed to a phone company to buy another one in a different market) and the approval of regulation agencies.

Source: Folha de São Paulo

Labels: Brazil, BrT, Oi

TIM Brazil started it's 3G network and it is now the second carrier on Brazil to offer the service. The 3G network is working first on six cities: Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Florianópolis, Fortaleza, Recife and Salvador at 850 Mhz frequency. The carrier is waiting for Anatel (Brazil's FCC) approval for start the operation on Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

Labels: Brazil, tim

Oi president, Luiz Eduardo Falco, said today that conversations about Brasil Telecom acquisition by Oi continue. "All negotiations proceed, everybody is working in order to it happen. We have no news", said Falco after being questioned if there are any impediments from companies partners, as Opportunity group.

The conversations about companies merger started on Jan 2008 and the new company will be the largest telco company on Brazil, under control of Brazilian's capital groups La Fonte and Andrade Gutierrez.

According to Brazilian newspaper Estado de São Paulo, companies merger will be announced by friday (Apr 11).

Source: Estadão

Labels: Brazil, BrT, Oi

Brazil has finished its 3G auction with no big changes in the landscape—all the licenses were won by the big three telcos in Brazil (Vivo Participacoes, TIM Participacoes and Claro) reports Cellular News. There was a significant premium above the expected price paid for the licenses, ranging from 34 percent to 274 percent above the market price. Regulator Anatel has raised the forecast revenues from 4 billion reals to 6 billion reals (US$3.3 billion).

source: MoCoNews

Labels: Brazil

Brazilian operators Telemig and Amazonia have launched ad-funded idle screen content services.

The regional sister operators (recently acquired by Vivo) have adopted UK-based Celltick's so-called Live Screen 'idle screen' technology, through which they can broadcast targeted content and advertising.

Called Se Liga, the service has attracted commercial partners in the form of Fiat and Unimed, and will offer a mix of news, lifestyle articles, sports results, ringtones and games.

It will initially be available to 100,000 Telemig/Amazonia customers, with Celltick managing editorial content, programming and advertising.

Celltick CEO Stephen Dunford said: "Mobile marketing is already a reality in Europe and Asia. As a new media, Se Liga will show its potential for the South American market, delivering it a compelling marketing platform for tier one advertisers."

source: http://www.mobile-ent.biz/

Labels: Brazil

Visa has started a few more mobile trials around the world. In Brazil it is trialing remote payments, which lets people make payments on the their mobile phones. In Canada Visa will trial its payWave contactless payment service with the Royal Bank of Canada—the trial will start in Ontario in 2008 and use handsets with Near Field Communications chips. The same technology is currently being trialed in Malaysia in partnership with Maybank, Maxis and Nokia reports Wireless News. Visa is also trialling payWave in Taiwan. PayWave is also in some of Visa's US credit cards, so it doesn't need to rely on mobiles to get the technology going

Labels: Brazil

Claro, Brazil's third largest mobile operator and a unit of America Movil, has launched 3G services in the 850MHz band, (more here at Bloomberg). The service rolls out first in Brasilia, Recife and Fortaleza followed by Porto Alegre next week and Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro next month. Last week, Telemig Celular Participacoes launched a commercial 3G network in the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais state, in the same band.

Labels: Brazil

Brazilian telco Oi has announced plans to launch a mobile TV service on November 19 to kick off a series of services for exclusive content across all its platforms, reports Cellular News. The service (which sounds like its streamed over the network) will cost 5.90 reais (US$3.37) for two hours or 9.90 reais (US$5.66) per day (which seems a lot), and will include downloadable clips in a series called Humanoides (jointly developed by Oi), well-known channels like MTV, ESPN Brasil, TV Sexy Club, Cartoon Network and so on and user-generated content. The content aggregator is M1nd Corp.

Labels: Brazil, mobile tv

The app will allow users in Latin America to identify the title and the artist of songs being played while on the go!

MotoID was first announced in 2006 following a strategic partnership with the music discovery specialist Shazam. It works by providing song information and the option to purchase relevant content when the user captures a few seconds of the song he or she is interested in.

Motorola is not the only handset company investigating this technology. Sony Ericsson embeds MusicID, powered by Gracenote, in its Walkman devices.

source: http://www.mobile-ent.biz

Labels: Brazil, motoID, shazam

Telefonica is offering €3 billion ($4.1 billion) for Portugal Telecom's 50 percent stake in their Brazilian mobile JV Vivo. The bid could have a strong element of content consolidation behind it, reports Variety.

Taking full control of the mobile operator would give Telefonica an opportunity to "streamline operations" between Vivo and Terra, Telefonica's ISP in the country. This could have ripple out to Vivo's content partners, which include Fox, local broadcaster Bandeirantes, Warner Bros., and Nickelodeon. For its part, Terra has developed some content partnerships of its own to promote its broadband service, including a special children's portal with Disney and another that it runs in conjunction with Discovery—coincidentally also a partner of Vivo's.

The Spanish incumbent has had some money to play with since closing a deal earlier this month to sell its 75 percent stake in Endemol to a consortium that included the company's founder John de Mol, Italy's Mediaset and Goldman Sachs, for $4.6 billion. But this doesn't mean that PT will sell. PT's CEO Henrique Manuel Fusco Granadeiro told Reuters today that it is not interested in giving up its stake in Vivo. The European operators invested in Brazil—they also include Telecom Italia—have long been embroiled in attempts to wrest control from each other in the market

source:MoCoNews.

Labels: Brazil, Vivo

Jumbuck Entertainment Ltd. has launched its 'Chat do Mundo' service with Vivo, the largest mobile phone service provider in Brazil and the Southern Hemisphere. As a result, Vivo subscribers can now interact using a Portuguese-language version of Jumbuck's popular mobile chat service. Initially, Chat do Mundo will use the WAP protocol, with an SMS version following soon to offer compatibility with a wider range of handsets.

The agreement represents a significant expansion for Jumbuck into a new geographic area that offers attractive subscriber and revenue growth opportunities. This new Portuguese-language service adds to Jumbuck's already extensive language capabilities offered to subscribers that speak English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian and Spanish.

Furthering its reach, Jumbuck will shortly deploy 'Chat do Mundo' with leading carriers in Portugal, including Optimus, TMN and Vodafone. The Brazilian mobile phone market has shown substantial growth in recent years and has recently surpassed 100 million users.

Labels: Brazil, chat, jumbuck, sms, wap

Labels: Brazil, telefonica

The volume of short message service (SMS) traffic in Brazil surged 20% to 8.4bn messages in 2006 compared to 7.0bn in 2005, newspaper Gazeta Mercantil reported, citing estimates from mobile messaging solution supplier Okto.

Around 90% of this volume is person-to-person, while the application-to-person market, which integrators such as Okto can bill for, accounts for the remainder, Okto CEO Ann Williams told BNamericas.

Despite the small market, Okto expects growth in SMS to continue in 2007, although Williams declined to give a figure.

Brazils telecoms operators have continuously upped their revenues from data services, now at 7-8% of the total, Williams said.

Media groups are also increasingly finding new ways to use SMS to interact with the public such as to vote on TV programs like Idols, she said.

Companies that are coming to Brazil from outside see the billed message market as just starting out in the country, according to Williams.

Indeed, Brazil has lagged behind countries such as Argentina, Mexico and Chile in the interactive content market.

On the other hand, Brazil has been more advanced in the corporate services market, with internet banking messages or text messages from call centers, Williams said.

"This gap is set to decrease in 2007," she predicted.

Okto, which provides SMS, MMS, SIM Browsing and WAP services, expects to boost its volume of billed messages to 500mn in 2007 from 250mn in 2006, while rival company Yavox hopes to grow by 60% to 160mn messages from 100mn last year.

Okto, which has a staff of 65, has media clients such Band, Editora Abril, MTV and SBT, as well as local retailers Extra and Submarino.

Yavox, which received capital from Intel Capital (Nasdaq: INTC) in 2004, has 60 clients including local media giant Globo, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Pepsi, Motorola (NYSE: MOT) and Citibank (NYSE: C.

Labels: Brazil, marketing, messaging, okto, sms, yavox

Fox Latin American Channels (FLAC) has sealed deals to promote its mobile TV content and related offers available in Brazil, Variety reports. The unit has partnered with Claro, making its stock of ringtones, wallpapers, images and other content from the network’s programming available to the Brazilian mobile operator’s 23.9 million users.

Source: MoCoNews

Labels: Brazil, Claro, Fox, mobile, ringtones, tv, wallpapers

BREW market still expected to grow 47% by 2008 before declining.

Redwood City, CA, March 1, 2007: “The Latin America downloadable mobile game market hit USD $65 million in gross revenues in 2006 and is estimated to reach USD $195 million by 2011, according to the just released report from EJL Wireless Research titled ‘Latin America Mobile Games Market Analysis and Forecast, 2006-2011,’” says founder and President, Earl Lum.

The three largest countries in both gross revenues and total game downloads for 2006 were Brazil, Argentina, & Mexico. The report analyzes the mobile games market for 11 countries and 38 mobile operators within Latin America and addresses handset technology, mobile game decks and mobile game publishers/developers.

“Despite the transition from CDMA to GSM technology across many operators in the region, BREW remains healthy and strong edging out J2ME in both games downloads and gross revenues in 2006 and we expect the migration to occur slowly across the operator decks. The largest challenge in the region remains centered on VIVO in Brazil and its migration to GSM and J2ME content. We believe that this transition will not happen immediately,” says Lum.

The report is currently available for purchase and information can be downloaded at www.ejlwireless.com. EJL Wireless Research will be attending both the upcoming Game Developers Conference 2007 in San Francisco, CA and CTIA 2007 in Orlando, FL.

Labels: Brazil, games, Latam, report

The idea is to cover as many areas as possible, from the kernel to the User Interface in mobile Internet and Multimedia. Developers from many areas such as Jeff Waugh (Gnome), Zack Rusin(Qt/KDE), Marcel Holtmann (BlueZ), Chris Hofmann (Mozilla) and John "J5" Palmieri (RedHat) have already confirmed their participation in the event. INdT staff are working hard to make this first edition a huge success, and if you are interested, please visit the Bossa Conference web site or drop an email to contact@bossaconference.org for more information.

Labels: Bossa, Brazil, Conference, Linux, mobile