..means a busy industry. So what are the string areas this month?
A brief countback of the news flooding in to Mobile Europe’s poorly-appointed offices reveals that this month there has been a lot of action amongst the OSS vendors (much activity on the electronic mail prior to the TeleManagement World shindig in Nice); a high level beavering amongst the PR departments of the messaging providers (must tag something onto Global Messaging conference — will a consumer survey about how the kidz luv SMS do?), and a fair amount of activity amongst the chipset vendors (must pre-announce product not actually shipping to handset vendors until after the Greeks have fitted a roof to the Olympic stadium). Finally, there is contract release after contract release coming out of Russia, mainly, as well as other “Eastern” European countries.
All well and worthy and so much activity keeps us all in beer and biscuits, but there is a serious side to this most perfunctory of market snapshots. Whilst the big ticket headlines may focus on 3G rollouts — say Ooh as Vodafone launches “3G enabled Vodafone Live!” (snappy, non?) in two of its European markets, say Aah as T-Mobile “responds” with something similar — the action we try to cover takes place under the covers.
What is in place in the network and the back office to create new services to take advantage of the coming 3G networks? How are we going to get more people to understand what an MMS is, how they can make one, send one, or sign up for delivery of MMS from their operator? What can be done to increase functionality, reduce power demands and drive down costs in the handset to support these new, revenue generating services? How can we manage the performance of applications across 3G networks, so we can tell not just how the network is performing but the application across to the top of it? (Also, how about those Russians eh, they’re spending gazillions on new networks, how can we get into some of those markets? Or is that China, or both?)
We address all of these topics, and more, in this issue. As ever, we continue to do so day to day on our growing website, which I am please to say more and more of you are signing up to.
Until next time, have a good month and if you want to send us your own thoughts, please mail me at: keith.dyer@nexusmedia.com