According to the findings of a new survey from Cognito, despite the trend towards business mobility, many UK enterprises lack the expertise needed to implement a comprehensive mobile strategy.

While 86% of IT departments have been charged with the responsibility of implementing a mobile strategy to help improve employee productivity and business efficiency, nearly a half of IT directors say that their team lacks the skills needed to integrate a range of business critical applications with mobile devices. More worryingly, says Cognito, 1 in 4 blamed the potential failure of mobile projects on the mobile industry's lack of experience in supporting business customers.

"This is a reality check for mobile IT in the UK. Whilst there have been significant advances made in mobile applications, hardware and networks, successfully applying these to complex business scenarios requires an emerging set of skills that organisations do not typically possess," said Steve Alderson, Managing Director at mobile systems integrator Cognito. "When enterprise level IT departments that command significant budgets are struggling, we've no doubt that smaller teams with fewer resources will find it even more difficult to support a comprehensive mobile business strategy. As a result, companies are only able to go as far as implementing mobile email using one of many off-the-shelf solutions on the market."

According to the survey only a half of UK enterprises today have a mobile strategy that goes beyond basic email. However, for businesses that depend on employees working out in the field, email is just one of many business critical applications. For example, a delivery driver or salesman out on the road would benefit from direct access to a CRM database. An effective mobile strategy requires these workers to have an equivalent standard of IT to employees in the office. Unfortunately for businesses that do plan to go beyond email, the survey says it uncovered a major concern: A third of IT directors said they were worried that their company's lack of experience in mobile IT strategies would significantly impact the ROI from these projects in the near term and reduce long-term investment in this area.

Alderson continues, "The greatest rewards from implementing mobile technology are usually across business critical functions where a high degree of automation and control is required. These applications are increasingly complex, involving the integration of complementary mobile and service optimisation technologies with existing legacy systems; technologies which are new to most IT departments. Hence, as this survey has indicated, IT buyers are worried that both their own inexperience and that of their suppliers will hamper success."

Sumair Dutta, Strategic Service Management Analyst at Aberdeen Group confirmed how this survey reflected some of his observations on mobility: "Organisations with field service operations in particular are still looking to make investments in mobility despite tough economic times. This is because greater mobility can make these companies more productive. In fact, we have found that companies that are able to adopt a best practice approach can improve productivity by nearly 20 percent. So it's quite worrying to see how mobility is being held back by a lack of experience on the part of both IT departments and suppliers in general."

The survey of 200 IT directors from organisations with over 1000 employees was conducted by Vanson Bourne.

Vodafone Portugal has successfully completed a Mobile Broadband Experience Management pilot based on Carrier IQ's architecture and is moving it into operation. According to Carrier IQ, the new technology will enable Vodafone Portugal to offer a highly optimized and personalized Customer Care experience by allowing an accelerated problem identification and resolution. It is also claimed to give Vodafone Portugal the ability to make pinpoint accurate network planning and investment decisions based on the true end-customer experience.

"Our goal is to have the most satisfied customers in the industry and so, offering the best mobile broadband service is naturally on the top of our priorities," said José Oliveira, Operations Director for Vodafone Portugal. "The Carrier IQ's Mobile Broadband Experience Management solution provides a unique and valuable perspective of the customer's true experience helping us to better address our customers' needs." Jose Oliveira continued, "We believe that this solution will further increase Vodafone Portugal's customer satisfaction and loyalty and it will also help improving efficiency on our investment decision making."

"We are excited to work with Vodafone Portugal who has consistently pioneered many innovative customer and service solutions in the Mobile industry" said Mark Quinlivan, CEO of Carrier IQ. "Our technology works with both mobile broadband devices as well as mobile phones and for the first time allows the mobile operators to understand the end-customer's true experience. It is critical to offer a service that is high quality from both a data network and customer experience perspective." Quinlivan went on to say, "Innovative operators such as Vodafone Portugal continue to stay out ahead of their competitors by offering highly tuned network and services based on per subscriber Mobile Broadband Experience Management as well as a markedly improved Customer Care experience."

ShoZu, the social media hub, today announced the availability of its mobile application for download in the new OVI Store by Nokia, offering millions of Nokia device users around the world the option of two-way interactivity with a variety of social networking sites.

The ShoZu app for the OVI Store provides two-way interactivity with a number of social networking sites, including real-time status updates and uploading high-resolution images and video. Other benefits include: uploading via Wi-Fi (for devices supporting Wi-Fi) for free and fast service; automatically continuing uploads in the event of service disruptions; and reducing download size to save users money if their data plan isn't unlimited.

Users can download ShoZu's mobile social media hub application for a one-off fee of €7 for the life of the Nokia handset, in line with Nokia's commercial arrangement with content providers for the OVI Store. For those Symbian Series 60 users already using the application, ShoZu recommends they backup the application when they reset their device's firmware so they don't incur a fee to download the service again.

"It's now easier than ever for the millions of Nokia users to communicate with their favorite online communities, blogs and social networks, whether they're uploading photos, blogging or using other social media features to keep up with their online social life," said Chris Wade, Chairman and CEO of ShoZu. "Our goal is to make it as convenient as possible for consumers to find and pay for our apps. Leveraging the OVI Store is part of that strategy."

The service is initially available on all Series 60 Version 3 devices and the Nokia 5800 with support for the N97 device coming soon.

Damovo UK, an enterprise ICT solutions and service provider, and Agito Networks, a specialist in solutions for enterprise mobility, today announced a partnership agreement to deliver the latest fixed mobile convergence (FMC) and mobile Unified Communications (UC) capabilities to enterprise customers.

Under the terms of the agreement, Damovo will integrate Agito Network's  RoamAnywhere Mobility Router product as part of its overall enterprise FMC solution offering.  Damovo claims its offering solves the key mobility challenges that today's enterprises are facing, including: poor in-building mobile coverage, escalating mobile call costs, lack of IT control and visibility over mobile usage and lack of integration between the enterprise PBX and mobile devices.  By utilising existing WLAN networks and extending enterprise PBX and Unified Communications functionality onto dual-mode handsets (smartphones), productivity can improve and mobile costs can be significantly reduced by routing calls over the WLAN network and allowing calls to seamlessly transition between WLAN and mobile networks.

RoamAnywhere is said to be the only network appliance that brings together enterprise WLAN, carrier mobile networks, IP telephony and location technology to mobilise voice and data applications, while remaining agnostic to customers' choice of carrier and equipment vendors.  This provides enterprise customers with low-cost in-building voice coverage, improved visibility and control over mobile usage and better accessibility and improved productivity for mobile workers.  With RoamAnywhere, mobile workers can stay connected to enterprise voice and the applications they need wherever they are.  It intelligently connects users to the best available network (enterprise WiFi, mobile, home wireless broadband, hotspot) with fast and automatic handover as users move between networks. RoamAnywhere also ensures that calls and data sessions are routed over the most cost-effective route.

A further expansion to RoamAnywhere's current support of more than 40 Symbian and Windows Mobile smartphones is the integration with BlackBerry smartphones currently being trialed with an availability date from July 09.  BlackBerry users could previously access only UC and PBX functionality over the cellular network, which negated some features as well as the coverage and cost-saving benefits delivered by utilising WiFi.

Paul Donovan, VP EMEA at Agito Networks stated: "We are pleased to meet these requirements after significant investment and effort over these past two years. We look forward to further penetrating this untapped market of BlackBerry users, and expanding our ability to meet the mobility needs of organisations worldwide."

Paul Butcher, Managing Director of Damovo UK, said: "The current economic climate is forcing a number of organisations to re-evaluate their mobile policies and costs, which is significantly strengthening the business case for FMC. By partnering with Agito Networks we are now providing enterprise customers with an outstanding leading-edge FMC solution which delivers excellent returns in both in terms of pure mobile call cost savings and business efficiency improvements."

Paul Donovan, added: "We are very pleased to be partnering with Damovo, as it has a long heritage in the PBX market and great capabilities in delivering mobile solutions to enterprise clients.  This partnership continues our ongoing strategy of working with a number of key partners in different territories to distribute and implement the next generation of FMC using our RoamAnywhere solution."

Anite, a global specialist in testing technology for the wireless industry, today launched its SAS-Lite network simulation solution. Said to be designed to expand the range of real-world testing options and support rapid product development, SAS-Lite is claimed to offer all the high-end features of Anite's interoperability tool SAS, whilst creating a flexible upgrade path as customers' testing needs grow.

Mobile network operators, terminal and component manufacturers can now debug or prove mobile devices in an environment that is said to offer real-world derived scenarios, applications, benchmarking and performance testing, as well as in-depth signalling analysis. Unique to Anite is claimed to be the ability to create operator based test scenarios or import data taken from network measurement tools, such as Nemo Outdoor.

SAS-Lite is said to be designed to save time and money demanded by live network trials by building testing scenarios and scripts in a controlled and repeatable laboratory environment that reduce test times by 50%. Anite also claims that customers can save further by taking advantage of SAS-Lite's ability to execute playback scripts autonomously using Anite's comprehensive script campaign management and terminal control tools, which reduce the need for field trials further.

SAS-Lite is available in single- or dual-cell emulator configurations with each cell covering the 3GPP GERAN and UTRAN standards as well as HSPA+. Modular upgrades are said to enable easy, cost-effective expansion to other technologies, such as Long Term Evolution (LTE).

"In today's tough economic climate, our customers are keen to deliver the maximum return on their investments without compromising quality or time to market," said Paul Beaver, 3GPP Director, Anite. SAS-Lite helps our customers to achieve their goals by giving them access to the high-end application features of our premium SAS product in a choice of two simple packages. The boom in applications and performance testing, driven by the success of smartphones and mobile broadband, makes SAS-Lite the ideal choice for fast, cost-effective product tests."

Ipadio, provider of a service which allows anyone to use any phone to speak live to the web, and Spinvox, a specialist in voice to content messaging, have announced SpinVox's first Android application, which will generate discoverable and searchable text direct from an Ipadio call.

Ipadio's Android application uses SpinVox to generate the text for the titles, tags and a transcript to sit alongside the audio broadcast.  Users can also choose to integrate the service with their other social media accounts, such as Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Blogger and others.

"Ipadio has grasped the opportunity to work with SpinVox API, producing  the first app to use our voice-to-text capabilities on Android.  The desire to get converted phone blogs onto the Internet quickly and easily has been growing for a while now. Together, we're helping people bypass their mobile keyboard and communicate in the moment by using their voice.  By automatically converting their voice-to-text, SpinVox then helps that content be quickly and easily searched, filed, or forwarded," said Christina Domecq, co-founder and CEO, SpinVox.

Dr Mark K Smith, ipadio CEO, explains, "With the new application, people will be able to call ipadio whilst on the road and see the converted text appear in search results before getting back to the office.  Voice-to-text conversion has been top of the list of requirements for our serious business users, so we are delighted to announce this development.  In addition to the Android application, we are working on other applications and, of course, on making SpinVox conversion available to people using our live service from any phone."

Ipadio LIVE! remains accessible to any user on any phone to broadcast live to the Internet.

Ipadio's commercial service introduces workflow process (moderation, group access and distribution, save to database), additional in-call functionality (in-call polling, "call push") to meet each company's exact requirement. SpinVox conversion will become an integral part of the service.

OpenTrust, a global provider of open and secure IT Ecosystems, has today announced full support for mobile authentication for smartphones. The OpenTrust IT Trust and Security platform is now fully compatible with the latest mobile devices, including the Apple iPhone.

The latest development will allow OpenTrust customers to manage digital identities held on the most popular smart phones. Mobile employees can then use their smart phones, equipped with Digital IDs, to remotely and automatically authenticate themselves to corporate networks.

OpenTrust Mobile turns smart phones into trusted devices, used by trusted users and managed using OpenTrust Digital Identities. OpenTrust Mobile provides several ways to enrol and manage credentials and security profiles remotely on smartphones through SMS notification. OpenTrust Mobile features profile-based configuration possibilities, making it straightforward to grant different levels of network access to different user populations.

"Phones are one of many end user platforms we are targeting," said Sherley Brothier, VP R&D, at OpenTrust. "In line with our core mission of building trusted ecosystems, it is important that our authentication offering supports all users, all networks and all devices, in particular mobile ones."

OpenTrust Mobile is currently compatible with the latest OS offering from Apple, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile. Work is currently underway to also support Google Android.

Nokia Siemens Networks and Vodafone say they have successfully tested a new antenna technology designed to reduce carbon emissions and improve the cost efficiency of mobile phone networks for operators. The tests, carried out through the recently announced Nokia Siemens Networks Innovation Centre (NICE) initiative between the two companies, is said to mark the first time that an integrated Active Antenna solution has been used on a commercial mobile WCDMA telecommunications network.

Nokia Siemens Networks Active Antenna incorporates elements of the base station within the antenna, reducing the footprint of base stations and lowering power consumption. The solution is capable of supporting multiple standards, such as GSM, WCDMA and LTE, and has been developed in accordance with the industry's Single RAN specification, which Vodafone has also played a key role in developing.

"We see Active Antennas as the next logical step in base station site evolution, where the trend is to move RF parts closer to the antenna. Nokia Siemens Networks is a leader in Active Antenna technology, helping operators reduce CAPEX and OPEX with its innovative solutions" said Tommi Uitto, head of Wireless Access Product Management at Nokia Siemens Networks.

Active Antenna technology has the potential to support operators by enhancing network performance and increasing the flexibility of deployment while creating opportunities to lower OPEX through reducing site rental, maintenance and energy costs.

"Vodafone is committed to driving innovation throughout its operations and working closely with its vendor community to enhance the quality of our customers' experience, while identifying opportunities for greater cost efficiencies" said Fergal Kelly, Director of Access Networks, Vodafone Group.

The Active Antenna solution is targeted at operators rolling out new 3G or LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks or enhancing their existing 3G networks, as well as for those markets planning to re-farm current GSM band to make space for WCDMA/LTE. For the demonstration of voice and data calls over the Active Antenna system, Nokia Siemens Networks provided the uB900 Antenna Embedded Radio from its partner Ubidyne integrated to be part of a Flexi Base Station system. Vodafone provided access to its commercial network in Italy where the engineering team successfully performed the joint technology assessment.

The demonstration is the first project to be generated through the NICE initiative between Vodafone and Nokia Siemens Networks, based in Madrid, Spain and created for the purpose of joint innovation around new concepts, products and architectures.

Bango, a mobile payment and analytics company, has today announced Wi-Fi enabled operator billing for smartphones.

According to Bango, while mobile operator payments deliver significantly more successful transactions than traditional payment methods, mobile content revenues have been impacted by the increasing popularity of smartphones, such as Blackberry and iPhone. Because the devices can connect to the web through Wi-Fi, operator billing that normally relies on traffic coming through operator gateways, becomes unavailable, making it difficult for consumers to buy content.

In response, Bango says it has developed a technology that delivers the optimal operator on-bill payment experience to every mobile phone, even when consumers connect through Wi-Fi. Bango's new Wi-Fi on-bill payment delivers the highest conversion rates and enables both operators and content providers to capture revenue from this growing segment of their customer base.

"We have worked hard to make the content buying experience both easy and trusted by opening up our on-bill payment services to our customers.  An increasing proportion of subscribers are choosing Wi-Fi connectivity at home or in specific locations to augment our 3G connectivity," said Mike Short, VP of Telefonica Europe. "This innovation by Bango, one of our accredited payment intermediaries with Payforit, brings the benefits of tried and trusted operator billing to subscribers, even when they connect over Wi-Fi."

"Over 25% of our customers have a Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone and an increasing number are using Wi-Fi for the faster connection speeds on offer – and now they can buy the same way as everyone else," said Steve Crawford, Operations Director of the mobile e-book and audio book company GoSpoken.com. "By using Bango to deliver a consistent operator payment experience to all our customers we have seen a marked increase in sales. Conversion rates using operator billing are much higher than using other methods and easier for our consumers. No other billing solution lets our smartphone customers simply click to pay."

"An increasing number of our customers are using smartphones and connect via Wi-Fi to access mobile content," said Mark Curtis, CEO of Flirtomatic. "With the new Bango Payment technology we can now give them the speed and convenience of familiar operator billing which helps greatly to increase our potential revenue."    

Previously, smartphone users were redirected to credit card payment instead of placing charges on their phone bill, leading to lost sales and lower conversion rates. Many marketers selling content and services exclude smartphone users from their ad campaigns due to their inability to effectively monetize users. According to Nokia's VP of product management, George Linardos, operator billing immediately increases sales by 70%, making this a significantly more attractive marketplace.

"At Bango we strive to offer the most advanced technology to promote the best possible mobile web experience," said Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango. "Only Bango has the ability to provide smartphone users with consistent, easy, click-to-pay billing across Wi-Fi and operator connections. This new service gives the highest possible conversion rate for the content provider, resulting in additional revenue from end users."

A new report from Ovum is said to reveal activity in mobile payment services – and more broadly mobile money services – is accelerating in many emerging markets.

The report, 'Mobile money in emerging markets', says the market is still in its infancy, yet it has the potential to become a mass-market service, penetrating one-third of all mobile users in emerging markets in five years' time. However, much will hinge on how well the industry addresses various market barriers, and its ability to nurture user demand with clear, simple and attractive propositions, it claims.

The mobile money market has accelerated in the last two years in emerging markets, mostly in more mature markets.

"The success of Vodafone's Kenya subsidiary Safaricom with its mobile money service M-Pesa has underlined the potential for mobile money services," says Angel Dobardziev, Emerging Markets practice leader and co-author of the report. Yet, despite more than 100 launches of mobile money services by both service providers and banks globally the marketremains in a fragile state with few well-established services.

Whilst there is a range of alternative scenarios, Ovum predicts that the most likely one will be a market where service penetration reaches between 30% and 40% of the emerging market's mobile users in 2014. Where the industry resolves the market barriers more quickly than envisaged, an optimistic scenario is possible where strong user demand propels mobile money services to penetrate between 60% and 70% of the mobile users in the emerging market by 2014.

One of the key factors influencing market uptake of mobile money services, says Ovum, is the relatively low penetration of access to financial services compared to higher (and fast-growing) penetration of mobile services. Service providers along with banks will need to target unbanked and connected customers as they are the key demand driver for the market today, says the report. 

"Recruitment, training, incentivising and support of networks of mobile money agents will be key to service providers' mobile money strategies, particularly when it comes to targeting unbanked customers", says Dobardziev. "Without access to an extensive distribution network for the users to deposit and withdraw cash as they make use of the service, users will be prevented from making the most of the service."

In order to ensure early user disappointments do not extinguish the market, services providers must get the basics of the service right. "This means not losing sight of the fact that telecoms and banking have very different volume, size, margin and error tolerances on their core transactions. As the two worlds draw closer with mobile banking, this will mean a different mindset and approach to service provision, reliability and security," Dobardziev concludes.