Analyst: Nokia Leads Strong Smartphone Market To Triple In 2014

February 11, 2010

With the economy expected to continue improving, analyst firm Forward Concepts forecasts a compound annual growth rate of 24% for Smartphones to the 496 million unit level in 2014.

Follows some of the key findings of the Forward Concepts latest study.

  1. Smartphone shipments worldwide grew 18% in 2009 to 171 million units at a $67 billion level. The Smartphone semiconductor and display revenue reached $11.7 billion.
  2. Nokia continued to lead Smartphone shipments in 2009, with a market share of 36.4%, followed by RIM at 19.4%, Apple at 14.9% and HTC at 6.3%. Sharp follows with a 3.5% market share, then Samsung at 3.4%. 18 other Smartphone vendors constitute the remaining 20% share.
  3. Western Europe has overtaken Japan to be the leader in Smartphone consumption, with a 23% 2009 market share. However in 2010, North America is forecast to become the leading Smartphone market, driven by iPhone and Android phones,  with a 22% share, closely followed by Western Europe at 21.6%, and fast-growing China at 17%.
  4. Symbian continues to be the leading Smartphone operating system, with an estimated 43% unit market share in 2009, while RIM’s Blackberry OS (19%) and Apple’s OS X (15%) has supplanted Microsoft Windows Mobile (13%) for the #2 and #3 positions. Linux variants, including Android, reached 8%, followed by, Palm’s WebOS with 2%. In 2014, Forward Concepts analysts predict that Android will grow to the #2 position, followed by OS X in 2014.

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[Video] Sybase Bearish On Mobile Advertising Opportunity; Sees Mobile Video Surge

November 17, 2009

Sybase 365 Marty Beard bullish on the mobility market, but not mobile advertising

When I think of Sybase, I naturally imagine large databases and perhaps analytics software, but not as a mobile messaging operator!

But as I learned last night, I was dead wrong: Sybase, through its mobile subsidiary Sybase 365 is the world’s largest inter-operator mobile messaging company.

This year, Sybase 365 expects to reach $200 million in revenues (up 14% from last year) or about 1/5 of the company overall revenues.

“We connect virtually all the 900+ mobile operators in the world and reach over 4 billion mobile phone users [out of 7 billion worldwide],” explains to me Sybase 365 President Marty Beard, speaking yesterday at TiE’s first entrepreneur week in Santa Clara, Calif.

For Beard, the closest competitors are Syniverse – which recently acquired Verisign’s mobile messaging business for $175 million in cash – and Ericsson IPX solution.

Mobile advertising has not lived up to its promise

By being at the centre of the world’s SMS and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) traffic, Sybase 365 can spot early trends in mobile commerce around the globe including hot areas like mobile CRM, mobile banking and mobile money transfer. Surprisingly, mobile advertising is not one of them.

“Most of the mobile advertising business has been around messaging, sending SMS or MMS to consumers and not banners or even ads inside these messages. Pure advertising on mobility has just not lived up to its billing at this point,” adds Beard.

Sybase saw traffic surge after Apple enabled MMS on iPhone

Another new trend in the mobility market is the uptake of videos transferred on mobile networks using MMS. This is especially true since Apple added the MMS feature to its latest iPhone 3GS device. ”When Apple enabled MMS, the traffic spiked 600% and video is a huge part of that,” said Beard.

Follows are excerpts of our video interview with Beard at the TiE event. First on Sybase 365′s business:

And then on mobile advertising:

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HTC VP Americas: Competitors Are Criminals! (video)

October 29, 2009

The head of HTC's business in the Americas, Jason MacKenzie, explains why competitors' App Store strategy is a crime to developers!

In a keynote style that reminds me of Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer, HTC’s head of the Americas went as far as accusing his competitors (Apple, Motorola, Nokia or Palm) of committing a crime on developers with their App Store strategy.

“A lot of OEMs, a lot of manufacturers talk a lot about apps… Apps, apps, apps, great, cool apps. But what do they do? They relegate all of your hard work and your application to a simple little icon that is in a sea of a hundred of other icons… But unless you’ve got the best icon graphic in the world, when I hold that phone here [about 2 feet away from this eyes] yours look no different than anybody else. We think that’s criminal. Literally,” said Jason MacKenzie, VP Americas at HTC, in his keynote speech the Sprint Open Developer conference yesterday.

On the other hand, the Taiwanese phone maker promotes its Sense framework that let developers put their applications and widgets in front of users, mingled with the smartphone (Android or Windows Mobile) user interface. “We believe that your application should breathe and live on the device and that’s why we developed Sense,” adds MacKenzie.

Early next year, HTC promises to release the Sense SDK (software developers’ kit) for developers to create their own widgets and personalised screens.

Follows the video excerpt where MacKenzie talks about competitors’ app strategy and HTC Sense:

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AT&T Blames Poor Wireless Service On Network Upgrade

August 31, 2009
Glenn Lurie is AT&Ts president looking after the carriers relationship with Apple

Glenn Lurie (right) is AT&T's president looking after the carrier's relationship with Apple

What’s the point of having an innovative mobile device like the iPhone, when the cellular network just… sucks!

Well according to AT&T, this might be coming sooner rather than later, as the mobile carrier revamps its wireless network in Silicon Valley with “an 850 overlay”, causing even more service disruptions.

But in the meantime, the now centre of the mobile word – being the birthplace of the iPhone –  will have to do with more poor quality calls or worse, dropped calls!

“We’re going to spend $5.5 billion in our mobility networks alone. We’re the biggest spendor of CAPEX in the U.S. of any company… We’re getting massive growth in data usage, not just because of the iPhone, but netbooks, laptops… we’re seeing high level of usage that no other carrier in the world is seeing at this particular time,” said AT&T president Glenn Lurie, who’s also in charge of the carrier’s “relationship” with Apple.

In other words, be patient and it’s going to get a lot better… Just like us, you probably heard that before!

iPhone exclusivity drives innovation

Asked about AT&T’s exclusivity of the iPhone in the U.S., Lurie argued that this was the only way to spur some technology innovation (like the iPhone visual voicemail) in what became the world’s leading mobile market, ahead of Asia and Europe.

“Now guess who’s coming to see us,” jokes Lurie.

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Amitious Outlook For Mobile Internet Traffic

August 4, 2009

During the dot-com boom, research firms were beside themselves to project gargantuan growth for the Internet and Internet traffic. Many of these forecasts proved to be wildly overstated.

Could this be happening again?

Mobile data in 2014 will exceed all 2008 Internet data, projects ABI Research

Mobile data in 2014 will exceed all 2008 Internet data, projects ABI Research

A New York research outfit weighed in with an astonishing prediction Tuesday which at first glance seems like data deja vu. Five years from now, according to ABI Research, mobile data traffic to cellular handsets, such as the iPhone, and to computers with cellular modems will exceed all the Internet traffic (wired and mobile) in 2008.

Computers with cellular modems will lead the growth. Computers with built-in cellular modems (both 3G and 4G) will account for 50 percent of mobile traffic in 2014, the firm said.

In that year, mobile traffic volume will total 1.6 Exabytes, with a quarter coming from video and audio streaming. Peer-to-peer file sharing will account for just 1 percent of traffic.

ABI should be commended for putting a stake in the ground. Let’s see how the prediction holds up mid way through the next decade.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

PayPal To Follow IPhone And Open To Developers

July 22, 2009

Ebay hopes PayPal can tap into the developer fervor that has so far generated 65,000 independent applications for Apple’s iPhone.

The online auction outfit will announce on Thursday that third-party developers will be able to include it in applications they write. The goal in opening up PayPal to outside developers is to accelerate innovation and expand its use, said CEO John Donahoe.

PayPal will announce the opening of its platform on Thursday, says eBay CEo John Donahoe

PayPal will announce the opening of its platform on Thursday, says eBay CEo John Donahoe

Already, PayPal is the feather in eBay’s cap. The payment service’s revenue grew 11 percent in the second quarter the company reported Wednesday while revenue from the company’s flagship auctions fell 14 percent.

PayPal now makes up almost a third of the company and the goal is to double its size in three years.

The open-platform effort at PayPal is analogous to what Apple has done with the iPhone and will be announced on Thursday, Donahoe said on a late Wednesday earnings conference call.

The move is obviously part of an effort to make PayPal a global force in the emerging market for Web payments. EBay already is summoning sales resources to the task.

The company said it attracted new merchants in Europe and Asia to PayPal during the second quarter as platform’s spread in the eBay market place begins to level off.

“It’s got real global momentum,” says Donahoe.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

IPod Market Dwindles As IPod Touch And Apple IPhone Take Over

July 21, 2009

Apple steered a steady course through the difficult economy with quarterly revenue up 12 percent and profits ahead of Wall Street expectations.

But its iPod business hit a wall that analysts had anticipated for some time. Sales were down 11 percent in the company’s third quarter and units (10.2 million were sold) were off 7 percent.

Apples traditional iPod sales were down in the recent third quarter

Apple's traditional iPod sales were down in the recent third quarter

The company offered the explanation that traditional iPods (its Shuffle, Nano and Classic) were losing out to the iPod Touch and iPhone. The sales volume of the traditional models declined while the Touch rose 130 percent, said CFO Peter Oppenheimer on a Tuesday afternoon conference call.

The company expects a further decline over time as it “cannibalizes itself,” with the iPod Touch and iPhone, says Oppenheimer.

Caution aside, the iPod business will last for many more years, he added.

A slowdown in iPod sales has been predicted for several years as the market has become increasingly saturated with the tiny MP3 players. It seems to have finally arrived.

Apple investors were not overly concerned. The company’s shares rose 4 percent, or $6.60, in after-hours trading.

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As Mobile Web Startups Proliferate Making Money Is Still Elusive

July 16, 2009

A new wave of mobile startup is creatively reshaping the way people will think of and use their mobile phones in coming years.

Before long today’s pocket-sized communicator will become a credit card, a photo store, as well as a user’s primary source of information from the Web.

Micro transactions are promising, says Tapulous Andrew Lacy

Micro transactions are promising, says Tapulous' Andrew Lacy

But this vibrant incubation of new applications is missing one key ingredient: a straightforward way of turning turn technical innovation and site development into revenue.

The proliferation of smart phones, such as Apple’s iPhone, the latest Blackberries and the Palm Pre, is enabling this transformation – opening the door to more complex applications and pushing data in steady streams to mobile users.

The dramatic shift is still several years away. But several early innovators were on display at the MobileBeat 2009 conference Thursday in San Francisco.

One startup, AppStore HQ, wants to create an easier way to locate useful iPhone apps. With tens of thousands of applications available, “it’s easier to get your applications found than get a camel through the eye of a needle,” says exec Chris De Bore.

The company is starting with the iPhone and hope to expand to apps for Google’s Android and the Blackberry.

Boku has already begun turning the phone into a payment device and now boasts operations in 50 countries. Urban Airship plans an alternative way to push data to cell phones and is even working on push alerts for RSS feeds – a potentially huge market. (Apple and other phone developers have begun offering their own push technology for phone data.)

Another promising startup – Touchnote – is rooted in the real world. It wants to make money by turning cell phone photos into postcards it mails to recipients.

But making money is no guarantee. Opentable has been able to use its iPhone application to deliver dinners to local restaurants, for which it gets a fee.

But Flixster’s hope of selling movie ads into its movie location app is a work in progress. The evolution of the phone payment system is also creating confusion.

Payment restrictions make it hard to know whether to charge for a game application and make money with virtual products or to charge for the game itself, says Andrew Lacy of Tapulous.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Employment Picture Improves In Technology But Job Still Disappear

July 13, 2009

The loss of almost 34,000 technology jobs in the second quarter isn’t exactly good news. But it represents a big improvement from the first three months of the year and offers a sign of greater stability in the technology business.

Challenger Gray & Christmas reported Monday that the 33,891 U.S. technology jobs lost during the second quarter represented a 60 percent improvement from the first quarter, when 84,217 positions were cut.

They were about equal to the cuts made during the second quarter of 2008.

While the better performance suggests the sharp slide in the technology market has moderated, it continues to show a market place in decline and leaves open the possibility of a second dip in technology sales.

The computer sector saw the greatest decline in the period while telecom and electronics saw the strongest rebound. The telecom industry saw just 1,876 job cuts compared with 18,972 in the first quarter.

Telecom and electronics appear to be benefiting from business strength in wireless markets as Americans continue buying cellular phones and competition to outdo the iPhone heats up.

First quarter (top row) and second quarter technology job cuts from Christmas Gray & Challenger

First quarter (top row) and second quarter technology job cuts from Christmas Gray & Challenger

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Palm Frees “GSM” Pre, Cuts Exclusive Deal With UK Operator O2

July 2, 2009
The GSM version of Palms Pre has surfaced in Vietnam. Next, the UK?

The GSM version of Palm's Pre has surfaced in Vietnam. Next, the UK?

Palm Pre second act is set to begin in Europe, a month after its launch in the U.S.

According to British daily newspaper The Guardian, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-company chose O2 as the exclusive operator for the U.K. market. A press conference will be held next week to unveil the news.

O2 is also the sole distributor in the UK for the iPhone 3GS which comes free with an 18-months contract (for the 16GB version), spurring rumours that the Pre will also be available for free with an 18-months contract.

Palm GSM Pre has been ready since February

Palm first showed the “world” version (or GSM) of its smartphone last February at the Mobile World Congress last February in Barcelona.

Indicative of an imminent launch – presumably in September – Palm’s GSM Pre has recently been seen “in the wild” in Vietnam and reviewed by a local reseller.

However it first appears that Palm’s Pre data transmission speed will not match that of the iPhone 3GS.

Here’s the video excerpt of the Palm GSM Pre review from a local Vietnamese reseller:

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