Market leader in Ireland looks to strategic development

zamano, a leading provider of mobile data services, has today announced the commencement of dealings of its Ordinary Shares on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) of the London Stock Exchange.

According to zamano, the placing has raised 6m euros for the company which, it says, will enable the delivery the three primary strategic objectives of further strategic acquisitions, increased investment in new technology, and expansion into new territories.

Established in 2000 to take advantage of a growing demand for mobile services, zamano is now said to be a market leader in Ireland, has a strong presence in the UK, and commenced trading in Australia in early 2006. 

Since its establishment, zamano has invested significantly in the development of a mobile messaging platform and suite of applications.  Using this platform, the company promotes and distributes its services directly to consumers (B2C) and also facilitates commerce between businesses, brands and their end-users (B2B).  zamano believes that this ‘hybrid’ model is a significant advantage in its sector. 

According to zamano, the B2B business accounts for approximately 65% of overall company revenues. Approximately 35% of revenues are generated by mobile content and interactive services in the B2C business. Interactive services include competitions, quizzes, horoscopes, chat and dating.  zamano believes that strong future growth prospects exist for both the B2B and B2C businesses.
According to Juniper Research, the global market for mobile content is predicted to be worth $11bn in 2006, and is expected to grow to $50bn by 2011.

Commenting on the listing, John O’Shea, Managing Director, said: “Solid investor support for our listing on AIM is a strong endorsement of our achievements to date and demonstrates their confidence in our strategy going forward. All the staff at zamano have worked hard and shown tremendous commitment in reaching this point; together we look forward to the future with confidence and optimism.”

Rod Matthews, Non Executive Chairman, added: “We are delighted by the positive response from quality institutional investors to the fund raising.  This reflects the strength of zamano’s management, record-to-date and position in the rapidly expanding mobile content marketplace. Having successfully completed this phase of zamano’s development, we are now well positioned to deliver superior shareholder returns by continuing to implement our strategy.” 

Vodafone UK has ditched Jamba as a supplier of mobile music services and centralized its music platform and associated content with Musiwave, a previous partner for full track downloads.

The operator will sell music and related content under the banner of a song or band, rather than within “silo” product categories, according to Albin Serviant, Senior Director Marketing at Musiwave.
Serviant said that there is now a perception amongst operators that they risk having too much content spread across their portals, and that they need to make the browsing and discovery process a lot simpler. Serviant said that the “transformation ratio” of the “dynamic content store” is about a 30% increase so far in terms of visits to purchases made.
“The mobile screen is small and internal teams are fighting to get the hotspots on the home page – and this is where the bulk of downloads come from. We have to make it much easier for the operator to manage and for the end user to access content.
A dynamic music store means that instead of browsing by silos of ringtone, smart-tone, ringback tone, full track etc etc, the user can browse by artist and track — and receive the full inventory of content around that track or artist,” Serviant said.
Further parts of the platform are a basic recommendation tool, as well as content programming system that keeps content as fresh as possible, making the site look different to a user with each visit.
“We believe that the partnership between Vodafone and Musiwave is significant since it heralds a shift in the way consumers think about and buy mobile content – focusing on their favorite artist, instead of content types,” said Al Russell, head of content services and advanced messaging, Vodafone UK.
“Keeping the mobile content purchasing experience relatively simple and user-friendly is also key to ensure that users complete purchases and are satisfied. We believe Musiwave’s comprehensive online music portal is ideal for Vodafone’s customers, since it focuses on simplicity and usability.”
The total market for full track mobile music would be worth about $560 million, Serviant said. Although that represents double digit growth, the rate of growth has slowed this year, and Serviant attributes that “mainly to user experience” problems

Sony Ericsson has said it intends to buy the Symbian user interface software company UIQ Technology, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Symbian. UIQ Technology, which uses Symbian OS, licenses the UIQ user interface and application development platform to mobile phone vendors worldwide.

When is a phone not a phone?

Answer, when it’s being previewed at the Symbain Smartphone Expo.
Although Symbian itself produced two press releases welcoming the launch of handsets from LG and Samsung (both built on Symbian OS 9.0 and Series 60 UI) the companies themselves took a more hands-off approach to the handsets.
An LG spokeperson said that the LG JoY was not actually an handset as such. It’s more a name given to a “prototype” that’s a work in progress.
And Samsung itself produced no details of its handset, and it has no official release or details on the handset.
Symbian, though, perhaps keen to have something concrete to announce,had obviously received clearance from the companies concerned and ceo Nigel Clifford was waving a few around at his press briefing and during his conference keynote speech.
New smartphones at decent price points are crucial to Symbian, as it seeks to convince those in and outside the industry that not only are smartphones the future of computing, but that the Symbian OS represents the future of smartphones. 
Clifford said that in five years’ time 30% of phones sold would be smartphones, and of those 50% will be shipped to “leapfrog economies” – those countries which will leap straight over the fixed PC stage to mobile computing use. Other drivers for smartphone use would be the social networking generation.

Musiwave to provide packaged music content through user-friendly portal

Openwave subsidiary, Musiwave, a provider of mobile music entertainment services to operators and media companies worldwide, has announced it will supply Vodafone UK’s hosted music services for music video downloads as well as music and video ringtones and artist wallpapers on Vodafone live!

Musiwave says it has launched the initial phase of its services for Vodafone UK and will be releasing several phases across WAP and web to deliver a “user friendly and integrated music portal”.

According to Musiwave, specialised content programming tools will enable users to access the latest content through a ‘comprehensive’ mobile music portal, with songs updated daily and determined by the latest charts results and radio airplay. The Musiwave service will also remember the preferences of a returning customer and will recommend additional products that relate to the customer’s previous purchases.

The Vodafone music store is said to be “extremely user friendly”, simplifying the user experience by ensuring that customers minimize the number of ‘clicks’ needed to access content. Musiwave says that users will no longer browse by categories such as ringtones, wallpapers, video or full tracks, but by artist and song.

For example, customers can click on the latest track from their favorite artist, and access all available content for the artist including full track music downloads. This process makes it easier to cross-sell between various types of digital content related to a single artist, says Musiwave.

The service will provide access to a large catalog of music content licensed from all the major and independent record labels including V2, Beggars, Pias, Sanctuary, Zebralution and Ministry of Sound.

“Smart operators like Vodafone are looking to provide the most personalized experience for their customers, and one of the biggest obstacles they face is that there are so many things to promote. As a result, customers can feel confused and overwhelmed when looking to purchase mobile content,” said Guillaume Decugis, vice president and general manager, Musiwave. “Our dynamic content store is therefore key – it provides customers with a simple, unified view, letting them choose the content products they want for each artist and track, rather than forcing the customer to search in silo channels to find the content they want.”

“We believe that the partnership between Vodafone and Musiwave is significant since it heralds a shift in the way consumers think about and buy mobile content – focusing on their favorite artist, instead of content types,” said Al Russell, head of content services and advanced messaging, Vodafone UK. “Keeping the mobile content purchasing experience relatively simple and user-friendly is also key to ensure that users complete purchases and are satisfied. We believe Musiwave’s comprehensive online music portal is ideal for Vodafone’s customers, since it focuses on simplicity and usability.”

Musiwave provides mobile music entertainment services to more than 35 mobile operators in 25 countries including Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefonica, Orange, SFR and Amena.

And accounts for 10% of all singles sales

Just a year after launching its music download service in anger, 3 UK says it now has 10% of the entire UK singles market – physical and digital combined.

Graeme Oxby, marketing director of 3 UK, said that the mobile company was now so important to music companies that it had the potential to break acts, purely by promoting them on its music site. He also said that when the music industry allows video downloads to be included in its chart information, the company would be able to claim a 20% slice of the UK singles market.

As well as market leadership in mobile music, the company was also number one in mobile gaming, mobile TV and entertainment, Oxby claimed,

Other recent multimedia launches have seen similar success, he added said. Just ten weeks after launching a free MSN Messenger for mobile service, the company has seen 100 million messages carried on its network. And it has also seen 30 million Yahoo! For mobile searches in the same period of time.

“That’s 130 million extra transactions on the network,” Oxby commented. Although these services are free (albeit limited to 200 messages free messages a day for prepay users), Oxby and his ceo Bob Fuller told Mobile Europe that the advantage in such an approach is increased customer loyalty, reduced churn, and increased cross promotional opportunities with fixed internet companies and services.

The company also claimed that its user-generated communities, Kink Kommunity and See Me TV, were generating great usage numbers.

See Me TV, which pays contributors to the site if their clips are watched enough, is generating 1.25 million downloads a month, and the operator is making some substantial payouts to users. “There are some people out there paying their mortgages through this thing,” Oxby said. Kink has 52,000 subscribers generating about 350,000 messages a month.

Mobile TV content from ITV and other areas has also proved that people will pay to watch TV on their mobiles, Oxby said.

Sales figures

Although he refused to break out exact numbers, Fuller said that the company’s multimedia revenues were about half of GCap Media’s annual revenues, which we reckon makes 3 UK’s non-voice and text revenues about £110 million annually.

Fuller also said that about 25% of the company’s revenues were non-voice. As voice does about £1 billion a year for 3UK, that means total non-voice revenues of around £320 million. With multimedia accounting for (we think) £110 million of that, then we may be able to deduce that SMS income accounts for the remaining £220 million or so.

Fuller and Oxby reckoned that the operator was now far enough ahead of its competitors in understanding mobile retail and content that it could sustain its number one position in video, music, gaming and TV for months to come.

The company is also moving to a more direct sales model, and reckons that by the end of the year it will be able to generate about half its sales directly, from about a third at the moment. It says that having a suitable number of its own shops gives it a unique chance to showcase its content and multimedia offerings within the stores.

Private Mobile Networks, the company spun out of Teleware to provide low power “local” GSM services using GSM guardband frequencies, has become the first of the recently-licensed companies to announce its plans.

The company has developed a solution based on network selection prioritisation on the SIM. When a phone containing a PMN SIM is turned on, it will first look to authenticate against its “home” low power network. If the local network is not available then the SIM will register the user with the macro cellular network, routing calls that way.

But calls will not be handed over if a user walks from one “zone” to the next. In other words, if you are making a call in your office, get in your car and drive away the call will drop and you will have to re-dial to start again.

PMN’s play is that it is integrating the pico-cellular coverage from infrastructure supplier ip.access with its own SIP/IP platform, meaning that it can add SIP applications and functionality to calls made from mobiles whilst in an office or campus environment. An example of the application might be call recording, currently impossible in an enterprise environment for mobile phones, as well as conferencing.

“It’s the SIP/IP implementation that’s unique,” Teleware director of marketing Lesley Hansen said.

Hansen also told Mobile Europe that PMN has signed an MVNO deal with Isle of Man based Cloud Nine allowing it to provide roaming access back to the PMN eXchange, its call routing and mobile switching platform. Using the least cost routing platform for roaming could cut call costs by 60%, she claimed.

PMN has seven pilot companies trailing the service, Hansen said, and she expected all of them to become full customers in time. PMN also hopes to attract the interest of mobile operators who could piggy back on its SIP implementation to encourage FMC adoption and increase in-building coverage.

As PMN paid much more than other companies for its license (£1 million versus £50,000 in the lowest instance) it is understandably keen to be the first to market. Especially as likely competitors in the low power range includes the likes of BT, as well as competitive FMC solutions based on different technologies.

Seeks $7.5 billion damages in PTC share ownership dispute

Vivendi has taken its long-running battle with T-Mobile, and its ex-joint venture partner Elektrim, up a level by filing a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) complaint in federal court in the State of Washington, which, if it is successful, could see T-Mobile paying Vivendi $7.5 billion.

Vivendi is claiming that T-Mobile has stolen its $2.5 billion investment in Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa (PTC), through a pattern of fraud and racketeering. It is also claiming that by using US communications infrastructure to plan and enact the alleged conspiracy, there have been offences committed within the US, making the Seattle filing relevant.

Named in the complaint are T-Mobile USA, Inc., T-Mobile Deutschland Gmbh, Deutsche Telekom AG and Mr. Zygmunt Solorz-Zak, who controls Elektrim S.A, which is Vivendi’s joint-venture partner for its investment in PTC.

Jean-Bernard Lévy, Chairman and ceo of the company, said today that T-Mobile had “induced” Elektrim to “betray us, to help T-Mobile take over Vivendi’s $2.5 billion investment in PTC.

He said that T-Mobile induced Mr Solorz to cross over in the “darkness of night and to join forces” with it. Then the companies had corruptly and physically taken control of the assets, changed the titles of the business in a “sham” board meeting,” falsified the PTC share registry, and then together had gone to a Polish court to endorse their actions, whilst explicitly excluding Vivendi from having any voice at all in the courtroom.

Levy said that Vivendi had tried to reach a negotiated settlement with T-Mobile in the past, and had come close to agreement, only to see the operator walk away at the last minute. On one occasion in summer 2004 Vivendi thought it had succeeded in a deal that would see T-Mobile pay Vivendi $1.3 billion to end the dispute. Indeed, according to Vivendi, Deutsche Telekom’s cfo told Vivendi’s cfo to put the champagne in the fridge. But a few days later Vivendi received a two line letter cancelling negotiations, with no explanations given.

“Why did they do that?” he asked. “Events after that letter led us to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy between DT and Mr Solorz and that’s spelt out on the complaint in the form of the allegations we’ve made and we expect to be able to prove”

Vivendi’s case is that T-Mobile has committed fraud in the US, using US telco facilities, and that that fraud was to take over PTC. Their lawyer  stressed that at the moment these were only allegations, but he believed they were provable.

Under a RICO complaint the compensation due can be three times damages, hence the potential $7.5 billion figure due if Vivendi wins its action.

Mobile Europe is currently waiting for a response from Deutsche Telekom to the most recent allegations.

OSS specialist attracts $219 million bid

Oracle has further underlined its credentials as a serious player in the mobile OSS space with the announcement that it is buying fulfillment software provider MetaSolv for $219.2 million.

Bhaskar Gorti, Oracle Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Communications Global Business Unit, said that adding MetaSolv’s OSS application suite would enable the company to “offer a fully integrated, end-to-end productized solution that will help service providers streamline the ‘campaign to cash’ process, optimize asset lifecycles and accelerate time-to-market of new products and services”.

Consolidation in this area, with a strong focus on service fulfillment, is being led by companies from different areas in the value chain. Amdocs is attacking the area from the billing end, with Oracle coming in with its CRM expertise.

Gorti himself came into the business with Oracle’s purchase of billing software company Portal, while billing company Amdocs has recently added OSS company Cramer, as well as content payment specialist Qpass to its brew.

Gorti alluded to the new businesses being built as operators invest in next generation OSS by saying, “Conventional, customized solutions have proven inefficient, inflexible and costly.  Oracle is putting service providers in control to simplify their infrastructure, deliver more services faster and drive brand loyalty.”

Sales up, but not by much

Third quarter results from Ericsson and Nokia show that mobile network sales continue to grow moderately, fuelled mostly by emerging market needs, and to a lesser extent by mobile broadband demand.

Nokia made 27% more in sales (EUR1.8 billion) from its networks division in the 3rdd quarter 2006 against 3Q 2005, but recorded operating profit for the division down 17%. Mobile phone sales were up 14% year on year for the quarter, and it multimedia division’s sales were up 45%282

Ericsson’s mobile network sales were up 5% quarter on quarter at EUR 3 billion (SEK28 billion), and down 9% on the second quarter of this year. Mobile networks sales are up 8% overall for the first nine months of 2006 compared to 2005. Fixed networks sales are up 121% on the quarter year on year and 138% up on the nine months to date year on year – much of which was accounted for by the Marconi acquisition.

Ericsson’s Western Europe sales were up by 19% compared to the same quarter last year. It said that growth has been primarily driven by strong services sales and high demand for transmission and fixed broadband access. Mobile systems sales were flat, although the company said HSPA, is “gaining traction”.
 
In Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa sales grew by 24% compared to the same quarter last year. Countries in Africa and the Middle East are showing strong growth, primarily in GSM, driven by the need for cost efficient coverage. But there is also a growing demand for mobile broadband, Ericsson said.

Nokia said that most of the growth in its network sales came from emerging markets, and that growth into the fourth quarter would be at a lesser rate than prevous years. Overall, the company expects only moderate growth in the mobile infrastructure market in 2006.

It said it is still on course to begin operating as a merged entity with Siemens Networks in January 2007.

As for handsets, the company says it thinks device volumes across the market will grow by 15% or more in the fourth quarter sequentially, with Nokia holding on to its current market share. Nokia expects the mobile device market volume will be approximately 970 million units in 2006, while its estimate for 2005 was approximately 795 million units.