Archive for the ‘All Stories’ Category

Open Mobile Summit: T-Mobile experimenting with services, trying out ‘new muscles’

dueaSan Francisco — It comes as not one bit of a surprise when one finds out that Brad Duea, T-Mobile senior vice president of value-added services, comes from Napster. Duea, who sat on a panel at today’s Open Mobile Summit event here on carrier “innovation,” brings a unique perspective to that topic. Even today, what carriers think of as innovation remains quite painful to developers, content providers, Internet players and the like.

T-Mobile, with Duea’s help and energy, is aiming to change that. (more…)

Droid Bionic adds another LTE device to Verizon portfolio

bionicUsers don’t seem to be making network speed the primary driver of their mobile buying decisions – at least not yet. Devices still rule the day. But that could change as faster services, like Verizon’s LTE network, get paired with either a) a truly killer device, or b) full families of devices. With the (later-than-promised) release of the Motorola Droid Bionic on the Verizon network today, we may be seeing both forces in action. (more…)

Class 5 replacement, LTE the old and new driving thriving (!) IMS market

Is IMS no longer a dirty word? Infonetics Research this week said the IMS equipment market was up 87% in the second quarter versus the year before, driven by a very varied bag of market drivers. In some ways it’s not surprising: carriers, both wireline and wireless, surely can’t deploy next generation IP networks without a healthy dose of IMS software elements. At the same time, after years of being the “next-big-thing,” it is somewhat ironic for IMS to now be somewhat of an overnight success. (more…)

Strikers picket Verizon CEO’s home

Less than three weeks after assuming the top spot at Verizon (CP: Verizon pulls trigger on Mcadam for Seidenberg), Lowell McAdam last night had the opportunity to experience the downside of the CEO position as hundreds of Verizon strikers picketed his suburban New Jersey home. (more…)

ITU to recognize creative communications do-gooders

Geneva is beautiful in October—and any creative thinkers involved with information or communications technology (ICT) who may want to experience the Swiss city should consider entering a competition announced recently by the International Telecommunications Union. (more…)

Latest patent fall-out: Could Verizon’s FiOSTV be affected?

fiostvQuick hit: Verizon could — though it would seem to be a long-shot — be forced to alter or even shut down its FioS TV service in a patent dispute with ActiveVideo Networks. A U.S. District Court recently awarded ActiveVideo $115 million due to Verizon infringing on four of the company’s patents. ActiveVideo is now pursuing an injunction to stop the “unlawful use” of its patented technology in Verizon systems (Briefing Room: ActiveVideo Files for Injunction Against Verizon to Stop Unlawful Use of Patents in FiOS Service). (more…)

Smartphone owners, iPhone owners in particular, flirting with lunacy, study finds

A new Telenav study offers a nice bit of anecdotal evidence that, while Android smartphone use is rising, it’s not thanks to defecting iPhone users. The survey of 500-plus American adults, divided almost evenly between men and women, found 83% of iPhone owners — well more than any other type of smartphone owner — to believe that other iPhone owners would make the best romantic partners.

Surely these are not people likely to forfeit the iPhone 5 for an Evo 3D. (more…)

NetCracker: Experience management encompasses optimization, personalization and data consistency

netcrackerThere’s no hotter topic in the back-office these days than customer experience management. But what does it mean?

NetCracker, with the help of the TM Forum, surveyed 50 global service providers to get some answers. Among the raw results: 28 percent of service providers identified the need to reduce problem resolution times and 22.7 percent indicated that there is a need for increased self-service capabilities. Meanwhile, 45.5 percent acknowledged a need to provide intuitive and personalized offerings.

(more…)

iCloud and Office 365 are debuting. Could one help the other?

msvicloudThe cloud is a busy place this week.

Microsoft launched Office 365 yesterday, and Apple has opened its iCloud.com Web interface to developers.  Tech site 9 to 5 Mac, apparently giving the bird to Apple’s NDA, has posted a number of images of the beta site, which reportedly features a very iPad, iOS-like interface and includes a number of new Web apps, including Mail, Calendar and Contacts. There’s even a Find my iPhone Web app, underscoring how Apple — in way that neither Microsoft nor Google has or perhaps can — created a cloud solution that feels to be very much about users’ devices, not just their software. The more iOS-running devices you own, the more of a boon iCloud is likely to be (CP: With iCloud, Apple changes definition of ‘cloud’ to fit own needs).

There are reportedly no ads in iCloud (an area where Microsoft last week took a nice jab at Google for its related links-style text ads in Gmail) and pricing, Apple revealed, will be as follows:

• take up less than 5GB of storage and it’s on the house;

• add 10GB, for 15GB total, and it’s $20 a year;

• add 20GB, for a total of 25GB, and it’s $40 a year;

• add 50, for a 55GB total, and it’s $100 a year.

While Apple will have millions of consumers to court when it publicly launches the iCloud in the fall, Microsoft will more aggressively be going after the enterprise set — where it may face conflicting ideas between executives and IT professionals, according to a Marketing Solutions survey sponsored by Dell.

The survey found 57% of IT respondents to harbor fears about security in the cloud, 32% to be leery of industry compliance or governance issues, and 27% to harbor disaster recovery concerns — and they’re the ones more excited about the cloud.

More interestingly, the IT professionals were asked about their thoughts — and their perceptions of the thinking of the senior executives around them. For example, while 47% viewed the cloud as an “extension of long-term trends toward remote networks and virtualization,” only 26% thought their “business leaders” felt the same.

Just as personal smartphone use (hello, iPhone) prepared business professionals for mobile deployments (and in many cases increased their likelihood) perhaps the arrival of iCloud in homes will help to make off-duty executives more aware of and comfortable with the idea.

This could help to bridge what Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell services, calls a “lingering disconnect in expectations between IT professionals and senior business executives,” in order to “drive transparency and focus on business results and outcomes to help bridge that communications gap.”

We’ve seen knock-off phones and copy-cat app stores; how about a fake brick-and-mortar ‘Apple Store’?

China was “a big part” of Apple’s through-the-roof iPhone sales, Apple COO Tim Cook shared during the company’s latest earnings announcement. (Unfiltered: Apple’s record-breaking iPhone sales came thanks to developing markets.) (more…)