Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 10

	This Month's Issue:
	Managing the Content Revolution

A Short Review of Mobile World Congress

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Yahoo! is continuing to notch up deals with carriers (including AT&T, T-Mobile and Vodaphone) to provide device applications that add to the existing search and mail and information services available in Yahoo! Go. Yahoo! oneConnect provides a single integrated interface to multiple text, email, IM and social networking services (as well as to that old voice service, also available somewhere on your phone). Yahoo! Go and oneConnect are Java applications run on just about any device running Windows, S60 and, indeed, OS/X. Here’s what makes this new environment interesting: if an end-customer’s carrier doesn’t pre-bundle the Yahoo! applications, then a customer using an open device can just navigate to the Yahoo! web site and download them anyway.

DiTech is still enthusiastic about voice quality… it was the only exhibitor at the show to make a big deal about this and so the company deserves at least a mention for persistence. DiTech has added new measurement capabilities to demonstrate just how bad mobile voice can be. The company is gaining some traction with carriers, but in the exciting new world of mobile Internet, voice quality is not top of everyone’s list. The DiTech approach uses smart (patented) algorithms to measurably improve voice quality in the network; but an algorithm embedded in a piece of software can be deployed just about anywhere in the voice path with effective results. So if carriers don’t deploy it, it could be shipped in end-user devices.

Microsoft’s Windows Mobile continues to evolve, and it is no longer just a cut down version of the desktop OS. It is stable and well integrated with the Microsoft Live services, which makes it appealing to carriers who want to present their customers with a richer services experience out of the box. MS has now closed a deal with Sony/Ericsson, so Windows Mobile is now available on handsets from all the leading manufacturers, except Nokia. With the acquisition of Danger (makers of Sidekick) Microsoft moves squarely into the social networking space.

In the meantime, Nokia has not been idle. They announced that the S60 operating system is now deployed on 73 devices, and powers more smartphones than any other OS. This evolution of Symbian is explicitly

Is there really going to be a battle over person-to-person voice, a service that’s been with us for over 120 years?

aimed at the mobile Internet user, with GPS integration, widget support, touchscreen support and the ability to work on both WiFi and 3G networks. So far, wireless carriers do not permit third party voice over their 3G data paths, so the S60 Skype, Gizmo and Vox applications are for WiFi only, for the time being. At least that gives customers the opportunity to directly compare price/performance of wireless carrier voice directly against VoIP over WiFi.

Which prompts the thought: is there really going to be a battle over person-to-person voice, a service that’s been with us for over 120 years? Or perhaps, as it is doing with mobile Internet services, the industry will move towards a pragmatic accommodation enabling true convergence: any service on any device on any network, in the next iteration of this new mobile ecosystem.

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