txtNation and Failsafe Payments Certo Payment Gateway have announced a deal that adds additional 70 new markets for Certo Payment Gateways online mobile billing coverage through a new partnership with telco mobile billing provider txtNation's JunglePay service.

The new partnership enables customers in a total of over 70 markets to purchase the digital products they want and pay for them through their local mobile phone provider account. Over 200 individual providers can now be used to clear web payments and are now live on Failsafe Payments platform.

Both Merchants and Merchant Service Providers (MSP`s) worldwide can now enjoy a true one stop integration platform to access all integrated Certo Payment Gateway`s partners and services.

According to a 2008 study by Javelin Strategy and Research, over 75% of decisive consumers would prefer to add small online purchases to their existing telephone, broadband or mobile bills as an alternative to using credit or debit cards.

Michael Whelan, txtNation of txtNation adds, "Failsafe Payments adds a whole new dimension to txtNation's, JunglePay service.  By interfacing JunglePay to Failsafe Payments Certo Payment Gateway, we bring out a large network of mobile operators to bear across Certo Payment Gateway`s fantastic brand."

"Integrating txtNation`s JunglePay further enhances the big value of using our Certo Payment Gateway for multiple banks, alternative payment methods, fraud scrubbing 3-D Secure and much more all integrated into one single platform." says Patrick Sallnert, Chief Operating Officer for Failsafe Payments EU.

"We are continuing to integrate Mobile Billing providers to offer the Merchants and MSP`s worldwide that uses Certo Payment Gateway a simple technical solution and excellent coverage when enable Mobile Billing services for their customers." says John R. Williams, Sr., President for Failsafe Payments North America.

Huawei, together with Telfort, a subsidiary of KPN, today unveiled a preview of Telfort 2.0, said to be Europe's first Next-Generation Business Support System (NGBSS).  The system, named Telfort 2.0, is a new customer care and billing solution which began serving a selected number of new customers in a few of Telfort's shops in April 2010. In June 2010 all of Telfort's postpaid customers will be transferred to this new platform. In the years to come, it will also serve Telfort's prepaid and internet customers.

Telfort has partnered with Huawei to deliver a NGBSS that will integrate Telfort's complicated IT landscape, and increase its business efficiency. The new system is based on service oriented architecture (SOA) and combines TM Forum Frameworx (also known as Next Generation Operations Systems and Software, NGOSS) enhanced Telecom Operation Map eTOM and Shared Information/Data Model SID standards, which are the basis for future evolution and transformation.

By optimizing business processes, simplifying the creation and deployment of new products and services and enabling customers to handle a much wider range of activities through self-service, Telfort's new system will reduce the company's Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). In addition the simplified open architecture will reduce the time to market (TTM). With the reduction in TCO and TTM plus the enhanced self-service for customers, the company can offer various types of new service plans.

Telfort has adopted Huawei's convergent next generation business support system to replace its legacy systems, and has selected a managed services partner (MSP) for the long term. "The telecom market is changing significantly", Robin Clements, CEO of Telfort explains. "The cooperation with Huawei offers us an efficient and future-proof IT environment with which Telfort will continue to compete successfully under changing market conditions."

BT Global Services has selected SMS hubbing technology from mobile interaction service provider tyntec to be part of its Global Telecom Markets (GTM) portfolio. The deal will see BT combining tyntec's International Messaging Transit (IMT) technology into its wholesale offerings for mobile network operators (MNOs) and mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) clients.

SMS hubbing provides MNOs and MVNOs a ready-made, one-stop-shop portfolio of international SMS connectivity, doing away with the need for them to sign and manage hundreds of individual SMS roaming agreements. Having access to more than 700 mobile networks worldwide, BT GTM's SMS Hubbing service, based on tyntec's fully GSMA compliant hubbing solution IMT, can offer new and existing mobile operators global reach with one interface, one contract and one bill.

BT GTM will be offering the service to MNOs and MVNOs of all sizes, enabling large operators to reduce costs and increase reach whilst giving new operators instant global SMS capabilities. The hubbing solution allows customers choosing from a wide range of interface, connectivity, self-administration and reporting options. GTM will be offering the technology either as a fully managed service or with self-administration capabilities realised through a web portal.

Michael Kowalzik, CEO of tyntec, said: "Our agreement with BT represents a significant validation of our SMS hubbing technology. For BT Global Services to select IMT as its SMS hubbing solution of choice shows that it represents a truly market leading combination of reliability, flexibility and capability."

Oscar Ruiz, president Global Telecom Markets at BT Global Services, said: "tyntec's IMT solution provides a compelling combination of global reach, reliability and technology expertise for our Global Telecom Markets business. We aim to offer MNOs and MVNOs best of breed solutions, whatever the technology challenge, and we believe that tyntec offers this solution for SMS hubbing."

Vodafone today announced the winner of its Vodafone AppStar competition. FlickrShow was declared the best new app in Europe following a public vote.

Pedro Campos, an independent mobile developer, has been awarded a prize of €75,000 – on top of the €25,000 local prize he picked up from the first round of the competition.

Beating off competition from seven other country winners, FlickrShow was awarded the top prize for its innovation and the great user experience it offered. FlickrShow accesses Flickr in an unprecedented way, offering stunning slide slows and allowing you to search photos by keyword, username, colour and even by location using your phone's GPS system.

Pedro, aged 26, only took up mobile app development nine months ago and was attracted to the Vodafone 360 platform due to its open web standards policy and its cross platform reach, which he felt offers an intelligent and developer-friendly approach to the market. Based in Porto, Portugal, he is planning on using his winnings to invest in a local Portuguese web development company, to expand its mobile section.

Pedro said: "Winning the final stage of the Vodafone App Star competition is brilliant news. I made sure my app was not only easy to use but could help people in their everyday lives and it's great to see that it's been so well received by customers across Europe. Competitions like this really give developers a chance to shine and I'm grateful to the team at Vodafone for all their support. I'm looking forward to developing more apps for Vodafone 360 in the future."

Second place in the competition was awarded to a group of Italian students from Politecnico di Milano, for their travel app, Cool Traveling. Raffaele Bisogno, Marco Cavone, Tommaso De Pace and Stefano Francavilla, who are currently studying for a Masters in Computer Science, will now receive a further €25,000, taking their total prize winnings from the Vodafone AppStar competition to €50,000. Cool Traveling lets you plan a trip around Italy in a simple and cost effective way providing information on a range of travel services such as train and plane tickets, weather forecasts and accommodation guides.

The full shortlist of country winners that FlickrShow competed against includes:

• Germany – Lootogo: The world's first review guide to public conveniences where you can evaluate the best place to go, wherever you are.
• Greece – Social Whale: Lets you read and post status updates to all your favourite social networks with just one click.
• Ireland – Dublin Bus Info: Uses your mobile GPS to find bus stops near where you are in Dublin whilst providing bus stop and timetable information.
• Spain – Yata! – A location based application that provides user generated geo-located info created by other users in a given area, so customers can easily see their recommendations and tags on a map.
• Netherlands – Happy Birthday: A new, improved version of the best birthday reminder there is. Don't ever forget the birthdays of those you care most about again.
• UK – Jogger Tracker: Uses GPS to calculate information such as the amount of calories burned and distance travelled during a run. Info is then stored on the handset and converted into a graph.

"Customers have an insatiable appetite for mobile apps, so it made sense to give them the chance to judge for themselves who our winner should be. It's clear from the hard work and effort of our finalists that there is a lot of talent out there and it's great to be able to reward the best of the best, while demonstrating our own commitment to supporting the developer community," said Lee Epting, Director of Content Services at Vodafone. "The Vodafone AppStar competition is just one of the ways we are working with developers to help them reach customers worldwide. In future we will focus on providing developers with more of the right tools and support, as well as additional competitions to reward innovation in this space."

The Vodafone AppStar competition is part of Vodafone's ongoing engagement with developers. Vodafone recently announced a new publishing process for developers via the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) portal, enabling developers to use open web technologies to create, monetise and distribute apps to customers with JIL-enabled handsets. Apps submitted through JIL.org are supported by 50 different handset models across multiple European markets and offer an attractive revenue model for developers. In addition, developers benefit from a quick and transparent review process, which sees all apps assessed in 10 business days.

Telefónica is aiming to trim the cost of customer care and improve subscriber satisfaction at its Movistar operation in Spain with the deployment of the latest release of Telsis SMS Wizard, the natural language text query and response system developed by Telsis.

The group, which owns market-leading mobile brands throughout Europe and Latin America, is using its Spanish operation as a testbed, relying on SMS Wizard to automatically handle increasing volumes and types of customer care and promotional queries from subscribers.

Telsis SMS Wizard lets people ask questions by text messaging in any language and idiom they choose, and responds instantly by text with appropriate answers. The latest version of Wizard supports quicker and easier creation of services that combine text and voice, and Movistar has been quick to exploit the new functionality.

The first new Wizard application to be developed by the operator could automatically send subscribers a text message satisfaction survey immediately upon completion of a voice call with customer care agents. Other applications are in the pipeline, says Telefónica CRM technology director Mario Soro Fernández.

"We are on a mission to drive down the cost of customer care but at the same time improve customer satisfaction levels. Too often this industry has embarked on cost-cutting in the knowledge that in reality subscribers will end up with poorer service. Our view is that by developing self-service channels alongside the call centre, we can have the best of both worlds. This latest Wizard application will enable us to prove our theory by giving Wizard a dual-role: as a self-service channel of communication through which subscribers can get answers to an ever-wider range of queries, and as the means by which they can tell us immediately if we are getting things right."

Movistar deployed SMS Wizard in 2005, using it alongside IVRs and agents to handle an increasing range of routine ‘how do I' queries, as well as support seasonal and rolling promotions and the flagship Lend Me 4 Euros service which lets pre-pay phone users text for an instant balance top-up.

At sister company O2 UK, SMS Wizard is giving millions of pre-pay customers self service control over O2 Rewards, the award-winning loyalty programme that gives free credit worth 10% of the previous quarter's top-ups, up to a maximum value. Customers can either send a text message or make a voice call to the Telsis system – which automatically responds via their choice of channel. Through a common business back- end, it enables them to join the scheme, check their points balance, claim Reward talk time, or opt-out.

Telsis products are in use with major mobile and fixed network operators worldwide. The company has an extensive range of carrier-grade infrastructure solutions including SMS Routing and IN voice platforms, as well as media gateways for NGN and VoIP support. Telsis has a long history of enabling operators to benefit from the introduction of innovative value added services, and is now leading the industry in defining a new global standard for SMS service usability and customer experience.

Bitstream today announced commercial availability of the second generation of its BOLT mobile browser. Among BOLT 2.1's new features are tighter integration with Facebook and support for HTML5 video as well as several new Flash video streaming websites.

"In just a few years it is expected that more people will be using the Internet on mobile devices than from desktop computers," said Anna Magliocco-Chagnon, CEO of Bitstream.  "Bitstream has engineered BOLT to maximize the utility of the Internet on mobile for end users, give handset manufacturers an important competitive differentiator for their mobile phone lines, and provide mobile network operators another way to compete for new users as well as to better manage the data usage on their networks.  Bitstream has always believed there should be a singular entity called the Internet, as opposed to a desktop iteration alongside a lighter, less functional mobile version."

An April 2010 report from the analyst firm Morgan Stanley found that video accounts for 69 percent of all mobile data traffic worldwide.  With the inclusion of HTML5 video, the BOLT mobile browser is now claimed to provide the industry's broadest video support.  HTML5 video is a new standard for delivering streaming video via an Internet browser without requiring an external plug-in.  Though a relatively new standard, a study released this month by the video aggregator and search firm MeFeedia found that 26 percent of online video available is today already encoded for HTML5.

Through the use of BOLT, users can watch HTML5 videos on any website on which they appear.

BOLT 2.1, Bitstream is claimed to offer the largest selection of Flash video support available on all categories of mobile phones, adding mtv.com, nick.com, bbc.co.uk (UK), maniatv.com, svtplay.se (Sweden), hungama.com (India) and bollywoodhungama.com (India) to a list that already included youtube.com, cnn.com, espn.com, video.google.com, video.yahoo.com, vids.myspace.com, blip.tv, dailymotion.com, metacafe.com, rutube.ru and www.mocospace.com.

BOLT 2.1's integration with Facebook – by far the most popular domain visited by BOLT users around the world – includes the ability to use Facebook's instant messaging service and to seamlessly copy text or links and post them to a Facebook account directly from within the BOLT browser.  The most important new feature of BOLT 2.1 is tabbed browsing which gives people the ability to simultaneously browse multiple websites and easily switch between them, a functionality that was a top request from BOLT users.  Additional notable upgrades in BOLT 2.1 include a faster widget gallery with updated user interface and a server upgrade to WebKit 4.03, keeping BOLT up-to-date with the latest Web standards.

BOLT has been installed nearly 7 million times since its debut in February 2009.  Over the past few months, more than 30,000 users installed the consumer version of BOLT each day, while hundreds of thousands of people began using pre-installed versions of BOLT on newly available devices from Bitstream's OEM partners in Asia and Eastern Europe.

Radio Waves has announced a line of low loss high quality jumper cables, the RWR series. Available in both RWR-400 and RWR-600 the jumpers are made from high quality cable and connectors. They offer low loss and great flexibility at a value price, and the jumpers carry the same 5-year warranty as Radio Waves' microwave antennas and have rapid lead times.

"Our new RWR-400 and RWR-600 jumpers allow customers to get high quality antennas and coaxial jumpers from a single source" said Andy Singer President of Radio Waves. "We found that third party manufacturers could not offer the same great lead times as Radio Waves could for antennas, so now we manufacturer both the antennas and the jumper cables, providing superior lead times to our customers."

Intec, a provider of Business Support System (BSS) solutions, has announced the availability of Version 5 of InterconnecT Optimised Routing, its wholesale trading and routing product.  

Intec's InterconnecT OR V5 is a complete solution for the trading and routing of wholesale traffic and said to lower costs, enable new revenue streams and maximises interconnect margins whilst maintaining call quality. Interconnect costs are minimised by determining optimal routing plans while maximising the utilisation of available network assets. The solution incorporates a suite of advanced quality measurement tools which allow the operator to ensure reliable, high quality call termination thereby helping to maintain customer satisfaction and boost international call revenues.

"InterconnecT Optimised Routing has been a key component in the growth of TeliaSonera International Carrier's voice business since 2006," said Simon Dodsworth, Director of Trading Operations. "Access to real-time volume and QoS information is vital for TeliaSonera International Carrier to enable timely and accurate decision-making. The ability of our traders to make key margin-generating decisions has been enhanced by the live quality feed provided by the latest version of the product. We are very pleased with the solution's performance to date and we are confident that the new version will continue to support our plans to further optimise our business processes."

"With the rapidly increasing number of trading and routing partners, operators need the best technology to help them optimise profitability by tracking wholesale margins,"   commented David Heaps, Chief Product & Strategy Officer for Intec.   "Intec is delighted that a number of the world's leading operators, including TeliaSonera International Carrier, are already deploying Version 5 of OR and taking full advantage of the most advanced tools on the market, to manage their international wholesale business."

The release of Intec's InterconnecT OR V5 follows extensive investment in the product with new features including active test calling and a new near real-time Quality of Service Monitor – both key tools in operator SLA compliance.   Intec says user experience is greatly enhanced and the product is benchmarked to handle up to one billion events per day, comfortably supporting traffic levels for the world's largest operators.  

For customers looking to apply Business Intelligence to their wholesale business, InterconnecT OR V5 also offers an extensive reporting and data analytics package; customers can take advantage of the built-in standard reports and business analytics with full drill-down and "slice & down" functionality, or customise them to their specific needs.

Other significant enhancements include trading automation in the area of price list management and exchange, bilateral net cost calculations, and streamlined switch configuration management.

The industry's first enterprise class cellular router with Qualcomm Gobi technology is now available from UK based, solutions specialist, Horsebridge Network Systems.

Gobi technology supports either High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) or Evolution-Data Optimised (EV-DO) networks from the same cellular radio, which means the Digi TransPort WR44 can connect to virtually any cellular network in the world.

Horsebridge says customers can now benefit from reduced costs and improved efficiency by utilising one solution for use in multiple regions. The WR44 also minimises risk by being able to develop with the system as required.

The Digi TransPort WR44 is an all-in-one router with an integrated Wi-Fi access point. The multi-function unit provides high-speed connectivity to remote devices by combining a 3G cellular router, security, advanced routing, an Ethernet switch, global positioning system (GPS), telemetry and Wi-Fi access point within one device.

"Qualcomm's Gobi technology is unique because it provides reliable, transparent 3G connectivity to both EV-DO and HSPA networks," says Horsebridge Managing Director, Geoff Smith "This will allow customers to access global networks and critical information from nearly anywhere in the world."

The combination of enterprise class features and flexible wireless functionality makes the router ideal for connecting remote devices in vertical applications such as transportation, remote offices and retail point-of-sale, says Horsebridge.