AIRCOM International, a UK independent network planning and optimisation consultancy, has been selected by Egypt's largest mobile operator Mobinil, to help plan and implement 3G technology into its existing 2G network. 

Mobinil has purchased the UMTS+HSPA module of the ASSET network planning tool from AIRCOM's ENTERPRISE tool suite, as it seeks to roll out a wide range of 3G services to its customers.  As well as the 3G module of ASSET, AIRCOM delivered 3G technology courses and will also provide a range of training and consultancy services to Mobinil's engineers, to ensure a seamless integration into the network. 

Commenting on the deal, Mahmoud Hatab, Senior Manager, RF Design & Optimisation at Mobinil said: "As part of the Mobinil mission to maintain its position as the leading mobile service provider in Egypt, we partnered with AIRCOM as they were in the best position to help deliver quality 3G services to the market quickly.  Having a great radio planning tool helps us deliver this quality efficiently and it was obvious that ASSET offered the best solution to meet our needs."

ASSET works across multiple technology mobile networks – including WiMAX, HSDPA, 2, 2.5 and 3G – and has been used by Mobinil since 2006 to plan and optimise its existing 2G network. 

"We are delighted to have been selected by Mobinil as it rolls out its 3G network," said Bashar Zako, Regional Managing Director for MENA and India, at AIRCOM International.  "ASSET will be able to generate sophisticated network statistics and reports for Mobinil to ensure the network provides optimum quality and capacity.  Ultimately this will reduce Mobinil's OPEX spend and help to ensure it delivers the best possible quality of service to its customers. 

Deployment of ASSET into the Mobinil network began in April and the tool is currently being used by Mobinil planning and optimisation engineers across Egypt. 

mobilkom austria, and fring, a mobile internet service and community service provider, have jointly launched a partner program for the mobile internet, including mVoIP, instant messaging and more.

Following the adoption of the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) telecommunications standard, fring has developed a dedicated version of its mobile client to support the functionalities of mobilkom austria's service A1 over IP, along with additional popular internet communities. This is said to be a first step of the partner program –  fring plans to expand its portfolio to include additional features of mobilkom austria's A1 over IP, providing a true convergence of residential and mobile SIP telephony, mobile community and mobile internet provision.

Hannes Ametsreiter, CMO mobilkom austria and CMO Telekom Austria TA said, explaining the objectives of the partner program: "Internet services and mobile communications will become increasingly integrated. We were among the first operators to adopt the international SIP standard. Through the partnership with fring we can demonstrate today how the two worlds will merge in the future."

Avi Shechter, fring co-founder and CEO, added: "We are delighted to be working with mobilkom austria, a network operator who is among the first to truly embrace mobile internet communication and communities and build it into their business.  The A1 over IP offering demonstrates mobilkom austria's leadership and the commercial opportunities and rich user benefits available by offering integration into fring's mobile internet community and communication service."

A1 over IP was launched by mobilkom austria in 2007, primarily as a service for the PC, offering customers the possibility to make calls via ‘Voice over IP' using their mobile phone number, accept calls to the phone number on the PC and send and receive text messages on their computer. From the start, instant messaging as well as the presence function, which signals the online availability of all call parties, were elementary components of the service.

Following the launch of the partner program, these functionalities will also be supported by fring, which will continuously expand its portfolio to support all new features of A1 over IP, just as with traditional internet communities. As a result, users of the mobile version of this VoIP application will be able to keep in contact with their friends via the same service as on the PC.

Swanbay Mobile has launched an 'advanced' mobile video application for the Symbian platform, which is claimed to offer Symbian Smartphone users outstanding video quality combined with a simplified user experience.

The application provides full screen video streaming over 3G or WiFi networks, which is said to be made possible through the use of a proprietary video codec that optimises data compression and video quality.

Swanbay says it spent two years developing the Smartphone software, to provide a full media player with integrated browsing. This enables users to navigate the mobile internet and view mobile video all within a single application.

The mobile video application is a white-labeled product that supports customer branding.

Swanbay's first implementation of the product is on the Symbian s60 3rd edition platform which includes the recently launched Nokia N96 handset as well as the popular N95 and N95 8GB.

Mike Kennett, Director of Product Development at Swanbay, said: "We set out to develop a world-class Smartphone video application, and I genuinely think we have achieved that. The application offers the user an amazing video experience on a 3G network through a simple user interface and fantastic video quality."

Swanbay are a mobile video services company enabling broadcasters, Network Operators, content and brand owners to extend their products and services to global audiences, via a cutting-edge mobile video delivery technology.

New research has forecast that over 400 million mobile subscribers worldwide will use their mobile phones for ticketing by 2013. However, the study concluded that trials and pilots are not being implemented into full mobile ticketing services as quickly as expected for several reasons including bar code reading issues, lack of reader infrastructure and availability of Near Field Communications handsets.

The Juniper Research report found that the leading sector will be transport, followed by entertainment and then sporting events. The Far East and China region is leading the market, driven by adoption in Japan particularly amongst rail travellers. In addition airlines are beginning to offer mobile ticket purchasing. Outside the transport segment, the report identified a number of ground-breaking trials and services, such as by cinema chains in India which buys 37% of all movie tickets sold worldwide. In addition a number of football and baseball teams are beginning to offer mobile options for ticket purchase and delivery; however, many venues still require a printed ticket to gain entry.  

Juniper report author Howard Wilcox pointed out: "Mobile ticketing offers exciting new opportunities for ticket issuers to achieve increased sales including targeted last-minute sales campaigns. For example, tickets for the sporting event or movie happening ‘tomorrow' or ‘tonight' could be marketed directly to known fans."

However, Wilcox warned that whilst NFC mobile user trial results such as O2 in London and BART in San Francisco have been encouraging, market traction will be determined by the availability of NFC phones and the speed of installation of NFC readers.

TapRoot Systems, a developer of software solutions for the smartphone market, has announced that its "always-with-you" WalkingHotSpot internet connectivity solution is now available to purchase directly from www.walkinghotspot.com. 
 
With a one-time software download to a Wi-Fi enabled smartphone, WalkingHotSpot is said to transform Windows Mobile 6 and S60 3G/Wi-Fi smartphones into "walking" hotspots. Users can securely retrieve e-mails, as well as browse the Internet, on Wi-Fi enabled devices such as laptops and MP3 players.  Wireless subscribers can forget about data cards, cables, dongles and multiple service/hotspot plans, because WalkingHotSpot allows the option of consolidating connectivity subscriptions and expenses into one economical solution.
 
The WalkingHotSpot team is touring Europe this week to introduce this award-winning application. "WalkingHotSpot was launched as a beta-trial earlier this year, and Europe has proven to be one of our top markets," comments Bob Bicksler, CEO of TapRoot Systems. "Combining the proliferation of smartphones in Europe with the mature 3G infrastructure makes a strong user scenario for WalkingHotSpot. We see Europe as a significant market for this application. With WalkingHotSpot, users can feel confident they have a reliable, secure, inexpensive and readily-available internet connection wherever and whenever they need it," Bicksler continues.

Cicero Networks, a provider of communications solutions for fixed mobile convergence and Symbian, the specialist in open operating systems for mobile phones, have today announced a proof-of-concept for voice mobility across multiple networks on FreeWay-Symbian's IP communications architecture on Symbian OS.

Cicero, an active member of the Symbian Partner Network, and Symbian have collaborated to enable Voice Call Continuity (VCC) using the FreeWay communications architecture and CiceroVCC engine. The solution provides seamless in-call handover to enable roaming between circuit switched networks and all-IP based IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) networks including Long Term Evolution (LTE) and WiMAX.

As users move through mobile networks today, calls move seamlessly between cells and the user is unaware that this is happening. As all-IP networks are deployed in the future, mobile phones will need to move seamlessly not only between cells but also between network technologies, and VCC is the technology that will allow them to do this. With VCC, users will remain unaware of network switching during phone calls allowing operators to deploy all-IP networks in a staged manner, by having calls switch seamlessly between all-IP networks and traditional circuit switched (CS) networks.

"As mobile service providers deploy next generation IP-based voice networks, being able to support the old and new is critical", said Jonathan Webb, Principal Product Manager, Symbian "Our collaboration with Cicero demonstrates FreeWay's flexibility in enabling voice mobility across multiple network technologies. This is an important step in future network service delivery development."

"The combination of Symbian FreeWay and CiceroVCC provides handset manufacturers with an easy route to making Symbian mobile phones VCC compliant." said Ross Brennan, CEO Cicero Networks. "Cicero recognises that native voice bearer mobility is a critical requirement for future service delivery".

Palringo, the instant messaging applications for mobile phones, has added live location information to the latest version of its application – Palringo Local.

Said to be accurate to the suburb or even street-level in a city, and to the closest named town in rural areas, Palringo users can opt to display their location alongside their status, for fun, personal, social, business or any other purpose.

Palringo Local goes live today for Microsoft Windows Mobile users, and will be delivered as an automatic update for existing users.  Roll-out will follow for other popular mobile device operating systems – including Symbian OS-based phones, Java, BlackBerry and iPhone – completing before the end of 2008.  Palringo Local for desktop/laptop editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system also goes live from today and will be automatically updated. .

Kerry Ritz, Palringo's CEO, said: "Since the dawn of the mobile phone era, we've all listened into or been part of mobile phone conversations in which the two parties have asked each other where they are – or, with SMS, spent a message establishing those facts.  Now, people won't need to do that; provided someone wishes to 'show' the basic instinct to 'know', even if it doesn't matter, is satisfied."

"But there are also quite practical reasons for showing your location: if you're part of a group all meeting in one place, like a sports team; or you want to know where your delivery drivers are without investing in expensive systems.  Whatever your reason to show your location, now you can," he explained.

Anyone using Palringo Local must specifically opt in to display their location; users can opt in and out at will.  Even opted-in, users retain control over which contacts can see their location.  Location may also be set manually.

The popular instant messaging services with which Palringo integrates are: AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, Gadu-Gadu, ICQ, Jabber and Windows Live.  People can also use Palringo to contact their friends using iChat, Apple's IM application.

Mobile Streams, a global mobile content enabler, has announced the launch of the 'first' solely advertising-funded mobile internet site which provides a range of regularly updated mobile content free of charge to users.

"We think that ad-funded mobile content is an important part of the future mobile marketing and advertising business and have therefore developed technology to support ad-funding into our Vuesia technology platform so that  it can easily be deployed on new sites and services operated by ourselves as well as third party media companies who want to rapidly develop and deploy ad-funded mobile sites," commented Simon Buckingham, CEO of Mobile Streams.

To test the features, Mobile Streams says it has chosen to initially target the savvy adult market by making hundreds of video clips available on the free site Prontube.mobi as consumers are familiar with the concept of advertising based internet sites and the options available through the site banners, links, animated features and buttons.

The site is generated by Mobile Streams' proprietary technology platform, Vuesia. In addition to full, device specific, rendering of the portal's content, Vuesia has the ability to talk to multiple ad vending servers at any one time. Glenn de Smidt, Chief Technology Officer at Mobile Streams added: "Our ad serving technology sets us apart from the competition with our advanced capability to plug several ad servers into Vuesia at once."