Mobile news: snippets from the weekend press.

[mobaholic]

All the news on the mobile industry from the weekend papers...

The Times   

Mobile operator 3 has banned its customers from downloading data abroad to save them from enormous bills.  Only customers who specifically ask for it are able to engage in data roaming and even then 3 recommends a £50 limit.  In the next two weeks EU telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding will decide on whether to impose legislation to force mobile companies to cut the roam charges. 

The Guardian 

On Friday the high court ruled in favour of Vodafone, and said the company does not have to pay extra corporation tax on its Luxembourg based subsidiary.  The mobile company had set £2.2bn aside in the event of losing the six-year battle with HM Revenue & Customs, but Vodafone said they were ‘naturally pleased’ with the judge’s ruling.   

Mobile networks have raised minimum charges on pay-as-you go tariffs as they attempt to gain back lost revenue.  O2 and T-Mobile have doubled their connection charge last week, and Vodafone imposed their raise last month.  At the same time the European commission is planning on cutting prices that mobile phone companies charge to connect calls.   

The Guardian also writes about saving money on Sim-only contracts.  T-Mobile gives customers 500 minutes for £20 a month and 1,400 minutes for £30 a month.  All the major operators apart from 3 offer Sim-only deals. 

Daily Mail Online 

The American Embassy in London has banned visitors bringing mobile phones to the building.  A nearby family-run store has turned the visa applicant’s problems to profit, as they offer to look after mobile phones for £10 a time, bringing the store £1,000 each weekday.

[mobaholic]

Today's Mobile Today gives the following snippets from the weekend press:-

The Telegraph

Investors are expecting the share price of Carphone Warehouse to fall further.  The Best Buy deal unveiled in May has not impressed the investors and question marks over the company's accounting are not helping. 

The Financial Times

Yahoo! has announced that it rejected Microsoft's and Carl Icahn's attempt to to replace its board and buy its search business.  Yahoo! described the joint move as an ’odd and opportunistic alliance.  The company had repeated an offer to sell all of Yahoo! to Microsoft for at least $33 per share and also offered to negotiate a search-only sale but Microsoft rejected both. 

Eager customers around the world queued to greet the new 3G iPhone by Apple and become the first to own the gadget.  The launch in 21 countries simultaneously suffered from sporadic problems; a flood of new customers overloaded the servers causing problems for customers to activate the phone. 

The Times

Wales’ first billionaire, Sir Terry Matthews, is lending £2 million to Newport Networks, the telecoms equipment group he co-founded in 1986 and sold to Alcatel in 2000 for £4.4 billion, making him an estimated £600 million.  The business suffered first-half losses of £4.3million and a damning review of the business which said that more jobs must go.

[mobaholic]

The Times

Phones 4u’s chief executive, Tim Whiting, and founder John Caudwell split a £101m payout last year bucking the trend on the high street. Providence Equity Partners and the management took the cash out just less than two years after buying the business from the founder for £778m. Phones 4u has opened 64 new stores since. 

Google UK showed that it is not immune to economic slowdown. The company revealed its first decline since it began reporting as a public company in 2004. According to the chief economist, Hal Varian, the crisis in the housing market was the main source of weakness.   

The Daily Telegraph   

Ghana’s opposition party has blocked Vodafone’s attempts to takeover Africa’s most important telecoms market, Ghana Telecom. Ghana's main opposition party, the National Democratic Congress, believes that the acquisition goes against national interests and with the parliament going on summer recess Vodafone may have to wait until October to get clearance. 

Financial Times   

Sony Ericsson’s disappointing second-quarter results will lead to a 17% reduction of its workforce. The company reported pre-tax profits of €8m, down from £327m in the same quarter last year. President Dick Komiyama said they had too many similar products and the company needs to ‘sharpen up its portfolio’. 

The Inquirer   

O2’s web application for viewing MMS messages for users with non-MMS capable mobile phones no longer requires authentication. With Google’s help there is no difficulty scanning the site and indexing customer’s MMS messages without knowing the exact URL parameters.

See:-    here.

[mobaholic]

What the weekend papers say 27.7.2008

"Telegraph

Vodafone’s problems will be underlined when it’s biggest rival in Spain, Telefonica will report much stronger performance in the Spanish market this week.  Vodafone blamed the faltering Spanish economy for the problems in the group’s third biggest European market.

Financial Times

Samsung reported a 51% rise in quarterly net profit on Friday.  The results were lower than analysts expected and shares fell even with the brisk sales of flat panel displays and mobile phones offsetting the weak performance of the company’s chip business. 

The Independent

The EU internet proposal, which allows national governments to force internet service providers to hand over private information about their customers to the police raises civil liberty fears.  The new telecoms package is due to go before the European Parliament in September".

Acknowledged thanks to Mobile Today.

[mobaholic]

Somewhat late this week ( after problems on the Mobile Today website     ):

The Times

Shareholders re-elected all nine of the current directors Yahoo!’s board, demonstrating their backing of the company’s stance on the merger talks with Microsoft.

Even with Yahoo!’s board re-elected, Jerry Yang the chief executive, disappointed Wall Street by offering few new ideas to revive the company’s share price.  Yahoo! is under pressure to assure that it can halt declining profits, compete more effectively and return the share price to $33 - the amount Microsoft offered three months ago.

The Telegraph

The Telegraph has launched a new made for mobile website, which includes news, sports and travel.  The new site is designed to be easy to navigate, the use of pictures kept to a minimum and a simple layout to ensure that it loads correctly with all browsers.

Guardian

The furniture store, Ikea will start offering mobile phone packages to the company’s loyalty cardholders, offering a flat rate on calls and texts.  The Family Mobile pay-as-you-go service is available to all 1.4m Ikea Family members in the UK.  Jason Baker, the customer relationship manager, claims that the deal is at least 25p cheaper than comparable offers.

See:-  here.

[mobaholic]

What the weekend papers say 9.8.2008.

Telegraph

Vodafone with Microsoft and The Royal Bank of Scotland have joined to back the government with backing a business support website, a Facebook for entrenepeurs.  The website is to be launched this autumn.

Financial Times

Doubts hang over Vodafone's investors with Vodafone's shares falling rapidly from last November.  Part of Vodafone's problems appears to be that the company's earnings come from plain phone calls rather than more profitable data services such as internet browsing.

The Inquirer

Orange will be the first carrier to offer the new Blackberry Bold, beating T-mobile by weeks. T he new phone will be in shops on the 16th of August with tariffs starting at £45 per month with the phone free.

See:-   Mobile Today.

[mobaholic]

What the weekend papers say 16.8.2008

The Times

Manchester United signed a £10m phone deal with Saudi Telecom, the biggest phone company in the Middle East.  The five year deal grants Saudi Telecom the rights to use the football club's logo and images in marketing.

Telegraph

Yahoo! Has appointed two new non-executive directors to it's board to appease Carl Ichan.  Former Viacom chief executive Frank Biondi and ex-Nextel Partners chief John Chapple were chosen from of list of nine candidates provided by Carl Ichan.

Guardian

According to a judgement by the competition appeal tribunal (CAT) on Friday Britain's five mobile phone networks owe BT tens of  millions of pounds for overcharging customers to call mobile phones from a fixed-line phone.  The decision could lead to a huge reduction in costs of calling a mobile and open the way to unlimited calling packages.

The Inquirer

The Japanese have started to recycle mobile phone's LCD displays into portable TVs, approximately 60,000 per year.  In Britain most out-of-use mobile phones end up as landfill rather than get recycled".

See:-   Mobile Today.

[mobaholic]

There was not much news over the bank holiday weekend.  Mobile Today only had one item to report:

"What the weekend papers say 23.8.2008

The Telegraph

It is believed that Vittorio Colao at Vodafone is considering a possible management shake-up just after taking over as the new chief executive last month. He could appoint two senior executives to run Vodafone's businesses the company's recent expansion efforts in Asia and Africa".

[mobaholic]

What the weekend papers say 31.8.2008

The Independent

Vodafone is accused of dishonesty as the company is blocking customers from legitimately cancelling their contracts.  With charge raises starting from tomorrow, any customer who's bills are likely to increase by 10% is legally allowed to abandon their contract, but Vodafone has been telling customers they are still bound to the agreement.  Earlier this month the mobile phone giant announced that minimum call charges would be going up 25%.

Financial Times

Vodafone was confident on Friday that it would win control of Vodacom, South Africa's largest mobile phone operator.  Earlier in May Vodafone made an offer to buy 12.5% more from its joint venture partner Telkom in addition to the 50% that the company already owns.

See:-   Mobile Today.

[mobaholic]

What the weekend papers say 7.9.2008

The Times

Nokia admitted on Friday that market share is shrinking due to aggressive pricing by rivals.  The shares came down nearly 10% and the company gave warning that its third-quarter market share would drop below the 40% achieved in the second period.

A tie-up with BBC and Nokia will allow customers to download all BBC programs transmitted in the past seven days to the new Nokia N96 starting from next month.  The 16 GB storage of the phone enables 40 hours of programmes and BBC shows can be downloaded via 3G or wi-fi.

Google will challenge Microsoft by launching its own web browser.  News of the launch leaked out days before the official release. 


Telegraph

Google announced the launch of the "Dream" phone on its 10th anniversary.  The new phone will be launched in Britain before Christmas, possibly as early as November.  It will operate using T-Mobile's third-generation network and the much hyped Android open-source operating system.

Barclaycard is planning a new expansion to contactless card payments.  The company now plans to make it possible integrate the chip into mobile phones instead of on a card.


The Observer

Cable & Wireless boss John Pluthero will be in line to collect a £20m jackpot if share prices reach 230p from Friday's close of 166p.  Mr Pluthero would receive one of the largest payouts by a UK executive.  In two months the company will announce its demerger which will see the British operation that offers telephony and internet services to split from the international division.


Financial Times

Internet developers and mobile industry executives say that the launch of Google's new Android phone will hit stores "with a fizzle rather than a bang".  Industry experts believe that Apple's iPhone was a text-book case of how to develop and market a consumer product and the Android is totally opposite due to Google's lack of consumer focus.

See:-   this.

[mobileman]

What the weekend papers say 14.9.2008

"News on the mobile phone industry according to the weekend papers.

Telegraph

The board of Cable & Wireless is set to meet at the end of this month to discuss the demerger of its international business.  The demerger plan would mean one share in the company's UK division and one share in its CW International for every share of the shareholders. 

The Times 

Tesco has signed a deal with Cable & Wireless worth £100m for employees to start using mobile phones for all calls instead of landlines.  A private GSM network will be built for Tesco across all stores and distribution centers. 

The owner of O2, Telefonica the Spanish mobile group, has offered to buy the remaining shares of Telefonica Chile that the company doesn't yet own in a deal estimated £550m.

Financial Times

Mobile operators around Europe are putting up a fight against the European Comissions new plans to cut wholesale charges.  Viviane Reding, the EU telecoms comissioner, is suggesting the reduction of charges mobile operators impose on each other when connecting calls to others' networks.  According to Reding, customers are having to pay redundantly high prices due to operators implementing such high charges on each other".

Source:-   here.

[mobaholic]

What the weekend papers say 21.9.2008

News on the mobile phone industry according to the weekend papers.

The Times

Carphone Warehouse returned to the bidding and has offered £450m, 25% less than the company's earlier expectations, for the British arm of the broadband supplier Tiscali. Tiscali put itself for sale in May this year.

Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, announced last week that a mutant gene was found in his DNA which several studies have linked to Parkinson's disease.

Financial Times

Yahoo's new board is set to meet for the fist time on Tuesday next week.  Carl Icahn's intentions are to pressure for a deal with Microsoft.  “Yahoo is a really great company but I think they have to do something with Microsoft or Google is going to kill them”, he commented on Friday.

The Telegraph

A new study reveals that mobile phones may increase the risk of brain cancer by 5% in children.  The European Parliament voted last week in favour of urging ministers in Europe to bring stricter limits for exposure to radiation of mobile phones and other devices.

See:-   here.

[mobaholic]

My apologies for late posting.       

What the weekend papers say 28.9.2008

News on the mobile phone industry according to the weekend papers


The Times

BlackBerry maker Reasearch in Motion (RIM) argued last Thursday that the high cost of producing more sophisticated models would pay off in the long term as share prices fell more than 25% and investors fear the company's plans to broaden it's horizon.

Guardian

Four big mobile phone operators, Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-mobile, have said 'no' to phone reglator Ofcom's plans for two-hour mobile phone number transfers.  At the moment transferring takes about two days in the UK.  Vodafone says its not against easy porting, concerns are of a ”costly and ill-conceived plan”. 

Financial Times

TeliaSonera the nordic telecommunications company has expanded its Asian business with acqusition of stakes of operators in Cambodia and Nepal.  Over half of the company's operator income comes from Asian and Eastern European investments. 

The Observer

The demerger of Cable & Wireless is the topic in tomorrow's board meeting and if approved could be announced within weeks.  The approval of the demerger would split the British and European fixed-line operators from the international side of the business.

See:-   here.

[mobaholic]

What the weekend papers say 5.10.2008

"Financial Times

Mobile operators '3' and T-Mobile signed a deal with BT wholesale.  The contract worth several hundred million pounds, will provide high speed links between their base stations.

T-Mobile admits to losing 17million customer's confidential information, such as names, addresses and phone numbers including politicians, celebrities and business leaders.


The Guardian

Nokia's new service allowing customers to download unlimited numbers of tracks is making artists nervous about their royalties.  Artists are concerned that they will not receive enough of the proceeds.

See:-   Mobile Today.

[mobaholic]

What the weekend papers say 19.10.2008

The Times

Cable & Wireless has postponed the demerger plans until next year because of the situtation with the financial markets.  The company was due to split it's UK arm from international operations when unveiling half-year results in November. 

The government plans to extend the powers of state surveillance by requiring a passport from every customer wishing to buy a mobile phone.  A national register of 72m mobile phones would be part of a bigger database to fight terrorism and crime.  The move is targeted especially for prepaid phones, which are popular with criminals.

 
Telegraph

A new use of GPS-enabled mobile phones has opened a wave of business for the gaming industry.  A gaming platform has been developed that allows young people to use thier mobile phonest to play virtual games outdoors.


The Financial Times

Sony Ericsson recorded it's first quarterly loss in five years when announcing the results of Q3 2008.  The net loss was due to decrease in sales of mobile phones.  Dick Komiyama, the president, announced of plans to raise profitability by cutting the handset range by 20%.


See:-  Mobile Today