Wireless Business Forecast articles from December 2005

Wireless Business Forecast archives from December 2005

Lessons Learned: Community Standards --The Early Lessons of Mobile Community- Building.
December 1, 2005... This is the first "Lessons Learned" feature in a new series that highlights the best practices already emerging in mobile data. Wireless Business Forecast will be interviewing executives at the major carriers and content companies about what...

Discovery Report Card: Deck Cage Match Round 2 -- Cingular Wireless.
December 1, 2005... This exclusive Wireless Business Forecast series offers an initial critical analysis of the competing carrier decks, their suitability for discovering content, and the ways in which they do and don't serve the content providers who partner...

User Discomfort: The Many Gripes Regarding Mobile Data.
December 1, 2005... Don't expect too many mobile users to embrace phone content with the same enthusiasm with which they have adopted previous digital media. Recent studies of usage patterns and attitudes among the growing audience for mobile data suggest a lot...

Mobile Gets Some Mindshare Metrics.
December 1, 2005... When it comes to the media business, investments in content and marketing are made fundamentally on issues of media time and mindshare: how much relative time consumers spend with specific platforms. It took nearly five years for the winds...

WiMAX's Long, Slow Crawl.
December 1, 2005... Now that the hype machine surrounding WiMAX has been punctured by oh-so- many critics of the Intel-fueled PR, some more realistic market analysis is dribbling in. Fewer than 5 percent of broadband subscribers will use WiMAX solutions by 2010,...

It's Time For Mobile Video Search.
December 1, 2005... Video search is still very much a beta technology at companies like Google, Yahoo!, and BlinkX, but FUSAmedia (www.fusacapital.com) already is gearing up to be one of the first mobile video search services. Spinning off of its relatively new...

Third Parties Dominate Web2Phone.
December 1, 2005... Where do mobile customers go for services and content for their phones? In a surprising and ominous twist, it turns out that several leading off-portal brands already leave carrier Web sites in the dust. According to a recent HitWise rundown...

Deal Sheet 12/01/05.
December 1, 2005... Who's Doing What: InfoSpace Inc. [INSP] headquartered in Bellevue, Wash.; 425/201-6100 Is providing a new mobile portal for Cingular Wireless, a joint venture between the domestic wireless divisions of SBC [SBC] and BellSouth [BLS]....

It's All About Us: Rounding Up And Rounding Out Mobile User Tastes.
December 15, 2005... Despite high-profile announcements surrounding new mobile-TV development (MediaFLO and CBS on Verizon Wireless, live concerts on SprintTV, etc.), carriers that spend PR and R&D capital on these products are still missing the boat when it...

$8.3 Billion By 2010? Probing The Game Prognosticators' Numbers.
December 15, 2005... Predictions about the growth of the mobile-games market have been wildly inconsistent and often overblown. According to some 2002 predictions, mobile- games sales should have eclipsed console game sales (usually $8 billion to $10 billion) by...

ThumbPlay Taps SoftBank Capital For More Hard Cash.
December 15, 2005... A number of off-portal mobile content hubs will vie for consumer attention in the coming months, and ThumbPlay has emerged as an early contender. Courted by several venture-capital groups, the company says it settled on longtime tech backer...

Mobile Get iPodded.
December 15, 2005... Hate to say Wireless Business Forecast told you so, but... When Apple issued its brilliant iPod with video and an attendant distribution model for time-shifted video, we suggested it would help validate the format for mobile. Guess what?...

Cingular Crawls Into High Speed.
December 15, 2005... Something had to be done. That is Wireless Business Forecast's guess for why Cingular made its underwhelming announcement of a UMTS/HSDPA launch. Let us count the ways that this sorta-kinda launch falls flat. First, it is a wireless...

November Market Shares Stay The Course.
December 15, 2005... Wireless Business Forecast finds itself uncommonly speechless after seeing the latest content sales figures from m-commerce enabler Qpass. There was virtually no shift in revenue share among the major content categories. Ringtones remain...

Amp'd vs. Sprint: Losing In Order To Win.(mobile virtual network operator )
December 15, 2005... As youth-oriented mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Amp'd launches today, provocateur CEO Peter Addington nabbed some press last week by announcing a 99-cent price point for downloadable songs from his 200,000-tune MP3 library. This...

WBF Analysis: What's The Play, Coach? Is Mobile Gaming Ready for the Big Leagues? Are the Big Leagues Ready for Mobile Gaming?
December 15, 2005... In purchasing Jamdat for $680 million earlier this month, Electronic Arts opens up the relatively obscure cottage industry of mobile gaming to a new level of scrutiny from financial analysts who are having trouble getting their arms around...

Deal Sheet 12/15/05.(Illustration)
December 15, 2005... Who's Doing What?: Research in Motion [RIMM], headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; 519/888-7465 Haggles over patent infringement suit settlement with NTP Inc., headquartered in Northern Virginia; phone number and Website temporarily...

Editor's Note.
December 15, 2005... This will be your last issue of Wireless Business Forecast for 2005. Your next issue will be dated Jan. 12, 2006. We wish you a safe and happy holiday. [Copyright 2005 Access Intelligence, LLC. All rights reserved.]