Between Brackets

Telenet originally a cable company have submitted their wish to buy the fourth available GSM license in Belgium to the BIPT (Belgian Postal & Telecom watchdog). This license was meant to be auctioned some years ago, but no one showed any interest. This has now changed.

The company already offers mobile services to some 67000 customers as an MVNO. Mobistar, the company that got the iPhone deal for Belgium is their partner.

Question is: are Telenet really setting up their own network, or are they putting pressure on Mobistar to extract a better deal in the upcoming talks? Studies have indicated that there’s no space for a fourth mobile operator in Belgium, and Mobistar and Telenet complement each other well. On the other hand, it -still- is a lucrative market. So if Telenet can enter the market without investing too much, that might be an interesting option as well…

More on the subject can be read in this article of the De Tijd (written in Dutch).

Strike the previous post (Base will bring the iPhone to Belgium). They changed the article on De Standaard now saying that it is Mobistar that will bring the iPhone to Belgium.

This sounds more logical to me, because the presence of Base on the business market is limited, and I guess that will be the primary market in Belgium for the iPhone.

Mental note: next time I’ll take a picture of the article as proof

edit: in an open tab I found the overview in which De Standaard did in fact state that it was Base that could sell the iPhone. It doesn’t really matter of course I should’ve checked this first. Lesson learned: check facts first even when it’s a classic newspaper that brings the news…

here’s the image: The wonders of tabbed browsing

Some days ago Admob published its April figures. The highlights are:

• Network ad impressions increased 1.6% (2,595,092,049 for April vs. 2,553,018,899 for March).
• Requests decreased 0.4% (2,854,226,146 for April vs. 2,865,167,969 for March).
• 25.0% of ad requests in the AdMob network worldwide were from Smartphones.
• US requests grew 5.1% April over March to outpace network growth.
• The RAZR V3 and Nokia N70 retained the top device spots in the US and India. The top devices also remained the same in the UK (SonyEricsson K800i), South Africa (Motorola v360), and Indonesia (Nokia 6600).
• The Amoi 8512 – “Three Skype phone” – made its entrance as the number 5 device in the UK with 2.7% of UK traffic.
• The iPhone moved into AdMob’s top 20 devices Worldwide.

Let’s see what this means.

• iPhone users are becoming interesting advertisement targets. But Nokia users are still top targets (certainly in India).
• Mobile ads are becoming a real interesting advertisement option

The third Belgian operator Base will be the first to bring the iPhone to the Belgian market, according to an article in De Standaard online. No dates (unless you consider “sometime in 2008″ a date) or other details are specified.

The American anti-trust authorities gave their go-ahead some time ago, now the European anti-trust authorities also gave their approval.

Thus emerges -if and when TomTom finally takes over Tele Atlas- a giant in the SatNav industry.

Nelie Kroes said that this industry is very important for the consumers and that she is convinced -after the thorough investigation of the anti-trust authorities- that the merger will not impede innovation, nor competition.

Let’s hope she’s right

(more on this in dutch)

Agreed, an airplane is not a place you’d easily associate with silence, but at least you were spared from those chit-chat phone conversations: hi, where are you? …uhuh … What are you doing? …aaah… Me? I’m on the plane. What? No, I said I’m on the plane… ON THE PLANE!! Hello? I’m losing you … Hello? … pffff

Anyway, we all see the advantages of having mobile connectivity on the plane. And Viviane Reding agrees: Pan-European Telecom services, such as in-flight mobile telephony, need a regulatory one-stop shop to operate throughout Europe.

But she also immediately added that:

• “We expect operators to be transparent and innovative in their price offerings”, and
• airlines and operators have “to create the right conditions on board aircraft to ensure that those who want to use in-flight communication services do not disturb other passengers.”

We mobile junkies will be able to get our mobility fix on some airlines as of the second half of 2008.

By the end of the year the 3G iPhone should be generally available to all subscribers of the three major Belgian operators (rumor src).

I’m wondering whether the iPhone is going to make it big in Belgium or whether it will get a spot in the National Museum of Technology real fast?

On one hand it is good that Apple is dropping the Operator exclusivity.
On the other hand, according to some people like Mike Abramsky the iPhone is not considered a premium product in the European market.

I partially agree with the man. One needs other reasons for shelling out a lot of euros or pounds for a device that cannot nearly compete technologically with -say- the N95 (which is less expensive).
Its tactile screen is cool but not handy for everything and let’s face it the iPhone is quite big (certainly for those who wear it in its protective pouch on their belt -limp limp ).

Your typical Blackberry isn’t really a small device either.
Like the iPhone it is more akin to a brick than to a chocolate bar, however many people like it for its functionality and because of the status it gives them.
These people might now go for the iPhone because it is newer and cooler, has a better interface. But then again, typing on an iPhone is not nearly as good an experience as it is on a Blackberry.

The question is: what will most people do? What will young people do?

I hope for it to hit the Belgian market with a lot of trumpet, so it can create a lot of hype and create a lot of traction for mobile internet usage.

So I say: go iPhone, go!

As new devices are announced weekly, the list of devices to be supported for mobile developers grows and grows. Since there is so much difference in the feature sets provided mobie software developers use different approaches:

• target specific (usually high-end platforms, i.e. S60, Windows mobile) with separate native releases
• create a Java-based (J2ME) version and adapt this to the different platforms

Although impressive Java-based clients are being created these days (Opera Mini, Nimbuzz), usability of many Java-based mobile software is still a problem.

Adobe had seen the light some time ago as they had (have?) a good opportunity to become rather dominant on mobile devices with Flash Lite, but they based their software on a cost model that worked prohibitive. Now they have announced (via mocoNews) they will get rid of this, and start offering the Flash Lite client for free. Usability-wise the Flash client on the phone is very good, but the Flash client is limited when it comes to accessing typical mobile features (Bluetooth etc.). For that reason it seems a good move made by Sony Ericsson to announce a combination of Flash with Java for better usability and use of the interesting features handsets offer.

So now it will be up to Adobe to persuade the mobile operators to ship Flash with every device, as downloading on-the-go as we see in the PC world is not yet an established practice and at the moment it is difficult to persuade users starting to download to their handsets.

We wanted to properly mobilize our blog for a long time, and now we finally did it using Andy Moore’s Wordpress plug-in.

This Wordpress plug-in has been around for some time now and has become really easy to install and configure.

It has built-in support for AdMob ads which we also configured on our mobile blog as a test case.

Also, the mobile phone detection works like a breeze. No need to have a special url posted, just send people over to the blog’s main url, the plug-in detects that the url is being served to a mobile device and then serves the mobile version of it.

I was equally impressed by the configuration options of the AdMob ads serving, especially by the possibility to limit the categories of ads you want your users to see (for instance: no adult ads, no gambling). Google ads hasn’t got this option which is really annoying.

Admob also uses the Phone’s type to send targeted Ads. Their administration screens are very well designed and a pleasure to use.

Installing the plug-in, creating an AdMob account and configuring took us under 20 minutes and was real smooth.

It was a pleasure mobilizing this blog