6.24.2004

 Toshiba Develops Tiny Fuel Cell for MP3 Players
Related Topics: Mobile Video — Comments (0)

(via Ringtonia) Toshiba has developed a prototype fuel cell, about the size of a thumb, which can replace conventional batteries in an MP3 digital audio player. The fuel cell, which uses DMFC (direct methanol fuel cell) technology, also can be used in wireless headsets for cell phones

Major European cell phone carriers Orange and T-Mobile Europe will soon require that downloadable games and other data sold to their subscribers meet quality standards set by Sun Microsystems and several major handset makers.
Orange and T-Mobile Europe, which combined have 96 million subscribers, are the first carriers to commit to Sun’s Java Verified program, which certifies software programs to ensure that they’ll run on different companies’ mobile phones.

In Sweden, telecom operator Telia’s mobile customers will be able to receive the live broadcasts of SVT, the Swedish public service television company, from the Summer Olympics in Athens. Telia will also offer subscribers a news archive packed with information in text, image and video clip form, and a subscription service to the latest Olympic game news via SMS or MMS.
Telia will provide all these Olympic services free of charge to its mobile customers. Live broadcasts require a 3G-enabled handset

Spanish Telefonica Moviles has launched FanTESStic, an interactive series with real actors created exclusively for MMS. The series was imagined by Endemol and produced in Holland using blue screen / photoshop.

Mobile-phone software developer Digital Chocolate, based in San Mateo, CA, has acquired Sumea, a Finnish developer and publisher of games for mobile phones. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Trip Hawkins, founder and CEO of Digital Chocolate, who founded the company last December, previously founded and built computer and entertainment system gaming company Electronic Arts. The merged company will have more than 110 distribution partners in more than 53 countries.
More details here…

Rolling Stone ringtones service is being launched by Dwango North America, on AT&T Wireless, Cingular and Nextel across a variety of wireless handsets. Dwango expects to launch the service through additional carriers in the coming weeks.
Dwango is licensed to offer the Rolling Stone Ringtones service through a partnership with RealNetworks and Wenner Media, publisher of Rolling Stone.
Related: Rolling Stone To Launch Ringtones Brand

Qualcomm is arming itself to deliver 3D audio quality to multimedia wireless devices, thanks to a new licensing deal it has forced with QSound. Qualcomm plans to integrate QSound’s technology into select Mobile Station Modem chipsets.
More details here…

Reaxion, a developer and publisher of mobile games, has acquired Russian development company 3SYM for an undisclosed sum. 3SYM specializes in development on BREW, Symbian and J2ME platforms and will add new multi-player and strategy game expertise to Reaxion’s existing portfolio.
More details here….

Thanks to the releases of Ogg Vorbis Controller, a plugin for Symbian’s Multimedia Framework, its now possible to use Ogg Music files on your 6600 phone.
Ogg Vorbis Controller allows the decoding and playing back of Ogg Vorbis compressed audio files.

Mobile Dreams Factory, a Spanish based company specialized in mobile applications and services have launched the Euro2004 java tracker.
The application allows access to real time comments of the running football matches, headlines and news updated every 10 minutes, the possibility of making daily bets through a SMS Premium service integrated in the application. It also permits subscriptions SMS and MMS alerts and kick views upon the players of each national selection in the championship.
The Euro2004 Tracker has been launched with two Spanish operators: Telefonica Movistar and Amena. The contents of the application are provided by Marca, the leading Spanish sports journal, with more than 2.5 millions readers and 400,000 papers sold per day.

VeriSign, which bought out Europe’s largest wireless content mediation company Jamba in May, will roll out its newly purchased wireless content provider service in North America possibly later this year, according to Reuters.
The Jamba service will start in North America later in 2004 or early in 2005, but will be expanded first to Asia this year and will be offered in Latin America early next year.
VeriSign is in talks with numerous U.S. companies to use the Jamba content, including one of the three largest wireless operators, two long-distance phone carriers and several smaller, regional wireless companies. As in Europe, VeriSign expects to offer Jamba as a “white label” service to the carriers, meaning it would carry the phone company’s name but VeriSign would receive a fee per transaction.
Related: VeriSign to Acquire German Content Mobile Provider Jamba in $273M Deal

Softbank Corp has obtained an official license in Japan and begun an experiment on a new telecommunications system that can be used for 3G cell phone services…

Mobile users in Norway can now watch TV on their phones, courtesy of the public broadcaster NRK. The service from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation allows people to watch television on their mobiles 24 hours a day.
Alongside the live streaming, people can pick more specialised content such as a news bulletin every hour and a Top Gear style motoring show.
The technology behind the video content has been developed by Norwegian firm RubberDuck Media Lab.

A Chinese media company, Shanghai Media Group, will provide Alcatel’s Chinese flagship company, Alcatel Shanghai Bell, with access to 11 channels of television programming, including news, entertainment and finance.
SMG has TV channels serving Chinese communities in Japan, Australia and other countries around the world.
More details here…

Wireless streaming player XSVoice long with has developed a wireless service for Nextel Communications Inc. that allows NASCAR fans to listen to live radio communications between drivers and their teams during races.
The service, FanScan In-Car Audio, offers access to team communications for nine featured drivers for each race. From those nine, subscribers can change which one to hear throughout the race. The service is $4.99 per race or $9.99 per month.
More details here…

In UK, that is…Elle and Sugar publisher Hachette Filipacchi has launched a complete overhaul of its mobile strategy that will see the launch of mobile services such as m-commerce.
The company has appointed Flytxt to handle mobile marketing for its UK portfolio of nine magazines and is out to tender for a supplier to launch and run WAP services.

muvee Technologies has announced muveeStyles, themed templates for automatically creating video messages on a mobile phone. muvee allows phone users to quickly and easily convert long video clips in short, fun video clips suitable for sending via MMS.
More details here…

Andrew Bud, the high-profile CEO of mobile messaging company mBlox has stepped down and the company has appointed a news CEO. The release linked here spins it, so I am not sure what the real reason was. Anyway, Gary Cuccio has been appointed the new CEO. He will divide his time between mBlox’s London, UK and San Francisco, USA offices.
mBlox merged with US company Mobilesys in June 2003, raising $8m of venture capital in the process.

And why am I mentioning it here? Hold on. Let’s get to the news first…Coinstar, the supermarket coin machines company, has launched a pilot program in the greater Seattle area that lets consumers convert spare coins into Starbucks Cards. When converting coins, consumers can choose to have the money placed on a Starbucks Card instead of receiving cash. Coinstar will not charge its 8.9 percent user fee for the Starbucks Card service
Now, Coinstar is in the process of adding prepaid wireless, Truth Master Card and ringtone services to some of its machines. Voila, a new way to hawk content services…

They figured? As regular readers will know, companies such as Disney and Time Warner are considering if they should provide full mobile phone services with help from existing network operators.
a branded Disney or ESPN sports service could work, he said. Focusing on specific consumers such as sports fans could help increase customer loyalty and make marketing and customer service more efficient, Wadsworth said.

Tower Records Japan’s mobile content arm, Tower Mobile, is to sell truetones from UK independent signed artists across Japan, following a deal between the Association of Independent Music (AIM) and Japanese mobile content provider Crosswarp.
The agreement, negotiated by AIM’s new media arm Musicindie, covers music from a wide range of artists including Basement Jaxx, Cornershop, Badly Drawn Boy, Coldcut, Ty, Laika and Mr Scruff as well as classics from the likes of Cocteau Twins, Gary Numan, Buzzcocks, Echo And The Bunnymen, Soft Cell and Sid Vicious .
Music files will be distributed over NTT DoCoMo’s network in AAC format. KDDI will initially distribute files as MP3s but may change to AAC as well. Vodafone’s truetone service is set to launch over summer.

I’ll be speaking as part of webcast panel discussion this Thursday, on monetizing RSS feeds and issues faced by the media/publishers…it is a complimentary webcast, so tune in….
Agenda:
Overview: How are Weblogs and RSS changing the publishing world?
The challenges publishers face
Weblogs as a publishing medium: For example: How to monetize such sparse content entries that come with Weblogs
Full content feeds: what are the copyright issues?
The different challenges for B2C and B2B publishers
Advertising models: Keywords v. contextual advertising
Metrics
What is the future?
Check out the details here…

Don Logan, chairman of Time Warner’s media and communications group, said the company is exploring possible deals with cell phone providers to add their services to its bundle of cable, data and voice products.
The move, he cautioned, is in its preliminary stages. “We’re talking to all the players now,” he said, but did not provide specifics.
From the details, it seems like TW would go in for being an MVNO…an AOL-branded phone service? Or a People-magazine branded one?

Europe’s largest mobile telecommunications network operators have launched a new company aimed at developing standards to accelerate customer take-up of mobile data services. The company, based on “Open Mobile Terminal Platform“, will be called OMTP Limited, and based in London.
The founding members of this initiative are mmO2, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, SMART Communications, Telefonica Moviles, TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile), T-Mobile and Vodafone. Amena, Hutchinson/3, KPN, One Austria, SFR and Telenor have expressed interest to join.
A plethora of user interfaces for mobile data services, which include wireless Internet, picture messaging and mobile e-mail, currently exist. The new alliance will look to pressure handset makers and mobile software developers to guarantee compatibility with industry standards.
The company will also look to improve interoperability between second- and third-generation handsets and is initially likely to support operating systems for mobile phones based on the Java programming language.
If you ask me, it sounds like a pressure group to browbeat handset manufacturers to comply to common standards, which is not necesarily a bad thing…

UK telecom operator Orange’s customers will soon be able to download full-length music to mobile phones via the company’s Music Player service.
The service will be provided by Chaoticom, a provider of mobile music-download solutions, and will be exclusive to Orange for 12 months.
It launches on July 1, and allows users to download full-length tracks from a constantly updated list of the latest tunes and listen to them without the need for any extra devices, says the company.

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Adjusting from print to online was challenging enough. Now here comes Social Media, which are changing your world even faster. Come to BlogOn 2004 at UC Berkeley July 22-3.

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