After seeing the demonstration that Visa just gave me at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I'm pretty sure it won't be too long before many of us will be paying for everything from our groceries to our Dunkin Donuts wirelessly with our cell phones. Visa had a "pod" in the Near Field Communications [...]
CES: Wireless payments at the register with your cell phone are around the corner
Sprint Nextel, the third-largest wireless carrier in the United States, plans to lay off about
5, 000 employees in the coming months, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
The company suffered a net loss of about 300,000 wireless subscribers in the last quarter of 2006, said company officials on Monday. They projected lower sales for 2007 than analysts has anticipated.
Most of the planned layoffs will be completed by early April, they said, and will be spread throughout the company, whose total employees are about 64,600.
Sprint and Nextel Communications merged in 2005 with the hope that the two wireless companies would become a vibrant force offering attractive new products and services. But the firm has struggled to manage its networks, and customers have increasingly turned to such rivals as Cingular and Verizon Wireless.
The company also said it plans to eliminate 300 retail stores and kiosks as well as one million square feet of leased space by the end of the year. Last year it relinquished two million square feet of office space.
source: People's Daily Online
1) Increased focus on manufacturers selling multiple "diverged" devices to users.
It only makes sense that Nokia (NOK), Apple (AAPL), Motorola (MOT) would want to offer multiple, simple, well-designed devices....strong margins should follow.
2) A lot of noise about VoIP over 3G.
Sure to steal much of the spotlight in '07.
Dean says that he's waited forever, but that this could finally happen in '07.
5) Spectrum lobbying noise, regulation momentum and lawsuits ratchet up several notches.
Dean predicts that the lawyers will stay busy (2.5GHz licenses - spectrum neutrality - getting 900Mhz GSM ready for UMTS, etc....)
The key lesson for IMS advocates to learn during 2007 will be integration - come down from your ivory towers & learn how to blend IMS with non-IMS - the real Internet, enterprise networks, SDP's, music & TV platforms and so forth. If the IMS community doesn't wholeheartedly embrace these areas of integration, in both the network and on devices, it will stagnate in 2008 and die in 2009. Isolation and "purity" is doom.
7) Navigation becomes rather more important on mobiles. Mobile search doesn't.
Handset-based navigation will become more prevalent (I agree).
Mobile search is going to take some time.
8) The City WiFi bubble bursts
Deano's not a fan of the muni-wifi. Seeing how I'm a fan of the T-Mo Hotspot, I guess I'm not either.
9) Flat-rate data becomes the norm, with browsing the killer app, driven by high-res screens
All Dean comments in numbers 9 and 10 - too interesting to summarize:
I'm still waiting for my trial X-Series phone, but I've been increasingly impressed with browsing experience recently. While cheap data tariffs are one critical driver, another has been largely overlooked - increasing screen resolution. The standard for mid-to-high end phones is now QVGA (320x240 pixels). This will increase, either with Nokia's weird 416x352 (or something like that) or more standardized full VGA (640x480). I'm a firm believer that there is no "Mobile Web," and that most people would much prefer a mobile broadband ISP experience, accessing the one, real, Internet. And of course, that means their favorite web brands & downloadable add-on client software too. The signs are already there at the end of 2006, but 2007 will be the year the mobile industry stops fantasizing about beating Google and Yahoo and Skype, and instead just gets on with optimizing their performance for their customers. Long live the Smart Pipe strategy . . .
10) No, No, No, No, No
OK, this post is already long enough, so I don't have time to detail my reasons for all of these, but I'm sure they'll crop up on the blog in coming months. Mobile IM won't replace SMS (sorry VoIP fans . . . ). Laptops with built-in HSDPA won't sell much (and even where they do, the cellular bit won't be activated by most owners). WiMAX will get a few more major operator advocates, but still won't be seen as a threat to "normal cellular." Mobile TV won't make much headway. Web 2.0 stuff like social networking really won't be a big deal in mobile outside Japan, Korea & maybe the US, unless carriers work out a way to give decent Internet access & capable devices to prepay users.
Oh, and maybe Apple's Phone-i (hey, Linksys got the iPhone brand . . . won't play music at all, but will be "just a phone." See point 1.
