Week in Review: 26th January to 1st Febuary, 2004

Introduction
This week in review sees many new deployments of video telephony services worldwide. Also shown are examples of how wireless technology is improving the efficiencies of medical health care. There is an ongoing trend of large media content companies forming strategic partnerships with mobile operators and this trend is likely to intensify as competition in data services increases. Wireless telephony reached the sky and across the oceans as new and novel ideas begin to see their initial deployments.

Events
The mobile music industry got another boost this week with the news of Raijin Records now releasing CD's and ring tones for the mobile music industry. Also Funmail announced Wallpaper Universe, a new wallpaper syndication service. Interesting services included O2's payment plans for petrol using a mobile phone, a mobile physic service by Wirejack, a football membership scanning process using a camera phone and SEGA
announced the launch of its mobile content service with Verizon Wireless.

Devices
The case for Blackberry connectivity to enterprise servers strengthened this week with Samsung and Research in Motion working in partnership to ensure such conectivity is offered on all Samsung mobile devices. Also it was pointed out that smartphone sales are poised to outsell their PDA competition in the coming months.

Technology
New developments in technology have not been in short supply this week. However there were also a couple of warnings handed out about possible problems to come. One interesting development was the axing of Mobimajic by NTT DoComo. Mobimajic was a joint venture with Microsoft with the plan being to roll out the Microsoft operating system on Docomo's line of wireless devices. Docomo will now use Symbian instead. What is not clear is how exactly Microdoft have failed to live up to Docomo's expectations.

Another issue was the problems found with high-speed WLAN products using proprietary protocols to enhance sppeds. It was found that such SUPER G products can have a major impact on standards based 802.11 products. It was strongly advised by a Cisco executive to invest in standards compliant products and its hard to fault such a sentiment when such scenarios arise.

Conclusion

If anything is certain within the wireless sector of recent times, one trend is becoming clearer and clearer. Mobile operators and content providers are forming more and more strategic partnerships and these alliances will become stronger and stronger in times to come. It remains to be seen which of the mobile operators will be the most successful in marketing of content. Most important is the need to package content in bundles that make sense for the customer base being targeted. As ever the most crucial point will be pricing. Pricing must be based on content bundles and not on individual applications, similar to how satellite television bundles are sold today.

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