♦  Telecommunications Research

Mobile Location Services

Consumers have discovered that the appeal of location-based services extends beyond pinpointing locations, businesses and other points of interest. For example, buddy beacons and friend finders based on location-based service technology allow mobile users to determine each other’s physical location. Given the potential for commercial and social applications and revenues, eMarketer forecasts that 486 million consumers worldwide will be using location-based services by 2012, up from 18.9 million in 2007.

Marketers, too, are interested in location-based services - after all, connecting with consumers at the last three feet of a transaction is the holy grail for advertisers. Just this year, marketers first introduced national-level mobile location-based service campaigns.

In February 2008, CBS teamed up with Loopt, a social mapping service, to offer location-based services advertising. Under the terms of their agreement, CBS would run localized banners on CBS Mobile News and CBS Mobile Sports to point Loopt customers to nearby local businesses based on their physical location.

In September 2008, Quattro Wireless partnered with uLocate to offer location-based advertising inventory exclusive to the iPhone. uLocate’s location-based service application, called WHERE, is already one of the most-popular downloads at Apple’s iPhone App Store.The launch includes brands such as Toyota, Sony, Comcast and Lionsgate, and delivers different ads based on location to iPhone users who have downloaded WHERE.

from Mobile Location-Based Services (EM-2394)

Wireless Digital Music

VGF-WA1 wireless digital music streamer shows that convergence has become an unavoidable issue in the audio industry as well. VGF-WA1, also marketed as a ‘wireless speaker’, demonstrates Sony’s strategy to boost the declining audio market by converging it with wireless technology and PC, which has become the main tool in our daily lives.

The device is appealing to the convenience-loving today’s consumer, as it enables streaming music directly from the Wi-Fi connected PC, bringing one’s personalized music in MP3 or ACC format to any room in the house, without the trouble of moving the music from PC to the player. This means that there will be less CDs and the frequency of PC and audio usage will increase.

Through the device launch, Sony seems to be trying to extend its business by connecting the music downloading market with the traditional audio devices, which market has been declining. For the future, it can be interpreted that Sony will increase integrating its existing device infrastructure into the wireless network and be active in M2M convergence and M2M data communications segment as well as expand its existing contents business, including music and gaming, based on the infrastructures and wireless networks.

from Analysis on Wireless Digital Music Streamer (RO-0015)

VoIP in China

One of the significant wild cards in the global VoIP market is China. There is little doubt that tens of millions of Chinese Internet users will embrace Internet voice services, but what is less clear is how many will be prepared to pay for such services. China-based Shanghai iResearch estimates that PC-to-PC VoIP users in China currently number over 40 million, and will rise to 80 million by 2008.

Recent research by In-Stat suggests that two distinct paid VoIP markets are developing in China - the legal and the illegal. According to the Chinese Ministry of Information, only traditional telecom companies can provide VoIP services. However, PC-tolandline services, such as the Skype Out service, have emerged in China and already have over one million subscribers, according to In-Stat.The forecasts below show that VoIP offered by telecom companies will play second fiddle to virtual VoIP providers in China. It will be interesting to see if Skype (operating as Tom Online in China) escapes the ire of its telecom competitors or the relevant regulators in the years ahead.

from Broadband Services: VoIP and IPTV (EM-2279)

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