A report out this week from UK telecoms researcher Informa Telecoms and Media predicts that sales of Google’s Android will overtake Apple’s iPhone by 2012. If it happens this will be the second revolution that Apple has started where it has failed to sell an architecture because it wanted to provide all the hardware. Informa reckons that open source systems will be crucial to the growth of mobile platforms and also says that smartphone sales overtook notebooks for the first time in 2008, reaching 162 million units.
Mobile chip maker MediaTek has changed its mind about its market being down and says that it will have 8% to 13% growth for the coming year, a big turnaround from a fall of a similar size, which it expected. It says that rising demand for its handset chips in mainland China, plus stimulus measures where Chinese homes get a subsidies on household appliances, have made the difference.
The European Commission has decided that Microsoft no longer needs a full time, in-house monitoring presence or Trustee after its 2004 anti-trust decision. The internal monitor was there to ensure that Microsoft shared operating system interface information with rivals. A trustee is no longer needed full time inside the company, which can now be watched from outside.
Informa also says this week that Mobile Content and Services will generate $340 billion in end-user service revenues by 2013. This is up from $183 billion last year. The two biggest revenue earners for 2008 were mobile messaging and mobile Internet. The report says that in future off portal content will become increasingly important.
Sirius XM Radio said that the deal that it cut to keep it from the arms of Dish Networks, but which drove it into the arms of Liberty Media, is now closed. Mel Karmazin, CEO at Sirius said, ‘These transactions resolve all of the uncertainty surrounding the company.’ Liberty has given loans and bought fresh debt totaling some $530 million and in the process has ended up with 40% of the company.
Silicon Alley Insider says in a report which cites Bernstein’s Craig Moffett, that the US has pay TV in some 80 million homes and this is a rise of 1.5 million more homes than in 2007. We find those numbers pretty low, what with 68 million homes taking cable (our figures) and 30 million taking satellite DTH, plus IPTV now accounting for 3 million homes, but clearly there must be a considerable overlap of homes taking more than one of these, or the number would be 101 million, about 10 million short of the total number of homes in the US. We understand that the recession has eliminated very few pay TV homes, while the digital switchover has added a considerable number. We’d be interested to see what it falls to next year. Because fall it will once switchover has finally been completed in June.
UK and Israeli conditional access firm NDS said this week that it has a contract at Teleclub a pay TV operator in Switzerland for its Videoguard conditional access technology. Given that rival Nagravision comes out of Switzerland we’re not surprised to hear this is the first customer win for NDS there. Teleclub has 80,000 digital cable subscribers across Switzerland.
The Korean Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) has issued what’s called a Case Examiner’s Report which lists anti-trust allegations against US chipmaker Qualcomm. The allegations suggest that Qualcomm has offered rebates and discounts to chipset customers in a manner that might not be considered legal in Korea, and the case has been going on for a while now, since 2006. It’s not precisely clear what Qualcomm is accused of, but there are suggestions that it was bundling a multimedia system into its chips which could have been provided by a local supplier and using discounts to ensure customers bought the Qualcomm version of the software. Qualcomm now gets a chance to answer the allegations and then the KFTC will declare remedies ‘ ways of putting the matter right.
Small French video hardware specialist Anevia will work with euronews, a European news channel, in partnership, to deliver the channel to the hotels and corporate market. Euronews goes to 253 million households in 142 countries and offers a choice of 8 languages – French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic or English – and Anevia will design a system to distribute multiple language versions via ADSL, over digital media and on TV platforms in the hotels, while only taking up enough bandwidth for a single channel.
There are various US news reports saying that Major League Baseball is behind the creation of the The Sports Coalition to block illegal live sports being stolen using P2P technology. The National Football League, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League and the National Collegiate Athletic Association are all in on it together with Walt Disney, News Corp and NBC Universal. Some European sports bodies may also join and presumably the Coalition will pursue technical and legal ways to stop this last bastion of mostly unpirated content.
I suppose we all intuitively knew this but Nielsen Media Research says it’s official, more people talk to each other via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networks than use plain old email. If you, like me, were one of the first in the email generation, this is disorientating and weird, because most of us oldsters didn’t even know you could communicate on social networks. Some 67% of online users spend time on social networks, compared to 65% who use e-mail to communicate. Search engines are the most popular online activity used by 86% percent of online users.