3G TD-SCDMA network coverage is rolling out in China, and the country’s (and the world’s) largest operator, China Mobile Communications Corporation (CMCC), is opening a ‘Mobile Market’ application superstore for its products and services.

Details of these and other developments were discussed in a recent meeting between Lu Xiangdong, CMCC executive vice president; Hatim Tyabji, Bytemobile executive chairman; and other senior executives of both companies at CMCC headquarters in Beijing. Bytemobile and Alcatel Shanghai Bell (ASB) have been awarded Phase 1 of the CMCC Web Gateway project, which will enable open web browsing from mobile handsets on the operator’s TD-SCDMA network.

Mr. Lu indicated that TD-SCDMA coverage is now up to 230 cities, and 50 million subscribers are projected by 2011. CMCC will soon launch 36 different models of TD-SCDMA handsets into the market.

CMCC’s one-stop shopping outlet will showcase the mobile Internet for Chinese consumers with personalized services such as search, navigation, games, video, music, ringtones, and wallpapers, as well as mobile enterprise applications for Chinese corporations. In this context, Mr. Lu stressed the importance of localized R&D and recognized Bytemobile’s recent opening of a development center to serve the specific needs of the Chinese market.

As of March 31, 2009, CMCC reported a subscriber base of 477.2 million, having added 19.9 million new customers during the first quarter.

-Jaishree Subramania

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I am pleased to announce two exciting new initiatives in Bytemobile Product Development. We believe that these initiatives will accelerate our momentum in China and advance our efforts to ‘green’ the mobile internet industry.

China Development Center
We have established our fifth development center – after Patras, Belfast, Champaign, and Mountain View – in Beijing. China is the world’s largest market for mobile services, and we are rapidly penetrating the provincial operating companies of China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom (see John Cole’s blog post on the China Mobile Web Gateway project). Given the growth of our customer base and the singular requirements of the market, it is only logical that China would be the next destination for the expansion of our global engineering team.

The new development center will focus initially on three areas:

• Customization of our products to meet local market requirements and support mobile devices used in China
• Localization of our product interfaces in Chinese languages
• Custom engineering to respond to customer requests with unique solutions

Our first priority is the adaptation of our products to local handsets. Therefore, our first engineer in China – who started last week – is focused on handset profiling and customization. Until now, we have performed this function in our handset laboratory in Patras. With the launch of our team in China, we will be more efficient and better able to meet local demand. We are also working closely with partners in the region to outsource parts of the process under the direction of the local team. As customer demand increases, we will ramp up the team to scale and manage the workload.

Our next priority will be custom solutions engineering in China. To date, we have performed this function in Patras and outsourced to key partners in Greece. The new center in Beijing will enable us to anticipate and respond to the local market and continue to drive our thought leadership throughout the region. We are actively recruiting solutions engineering candidates in the area and are also seeking candidates with a combination of global and local experience.

Green Network Platform
Greening the Mobile Internet and White Space Innovation are two strategic programs that we have launched in the last year. They intersect in a new research and development project designed to dramatically expand the capacity of the Unison Mobile Internet Platform and make a significant contribution to the sustainability of our customers’ network environments.

We launched the project – appropriately named ‘Fusion’ – on April 1, the day after general availability of the new Unison release. Our goal is to reduce our customers’ hardware requirements as they deploy and scale Bytemobile applications in their networks. The Unison platform is already the most scalable mobile internet gateway in the industry. However, Bytemobile has never rested on its laurels and isn’t about to start now. Rather than targeting incremental improvement, we aspire to the seemingly impossible: a ‘quantum leap’ increase in system capacity, which would yield a proportionate decrease in power, cooling and rack space requirements – and therefore in overall data delivery costs.

Because this is a white space innovation project, there are no limitations on methodology. We will evaluate technical solutions ranging from software changes to new operating systems to custom hardware.

Project Fusion will provide a useful model for white space innovation projects of the future. The ‘greening’ of the Unison platform will further enhance our strategic value to customers as they implement environmental responsibility in their network operations and service delivery.

Building a Great Company
Both the China Development Center and Project Fusion are ambitious undertakings. As such, they are consistent with Bytemobile’s history of global market and technological leadership. They also support our plans to continue building a great company that fundamentally changes the shape of its industry through innovation and localization.

-Chris Koopmans

Image use courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/dongbin/3296818794/ under Creative Commons attribution license.

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As we watch the battle that continues among the different operating systems – Symbian, Windows Mobile, RIM, Palm, Android, and now Apple – and we mull over the rivalry between WiMAX and LTE, are we are getting ready to see the most interesting competition of all – ‘The War of Mobile App Stores’?

The power of the mobile application is well understood. It’s no longer just a ringtone, a wallpaper or a game. Mobile apps have grabbed the attention of consumers and their dollars. A new study from In-Stat projects that the number of mobile app store users will quadruple in the next five years. Already, mobile apps have demonstrated their value as a catalyst for growth in  data services and revenue for carriers.

“The mobile Internet has finally taken off. Now we need to cope with the traffic,” said IDC analyst Scott Ellison.

With its early success, Apple currently leads the app store race. Research In Motion just launched its own app store this week. The handset brands are all building their app stores –Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, et al. Microsoft is expected to launch its applications marketplace later this year. Adobe Systems plans to build a similar marketplace for applications that run on mass-market devices.

However, let’s not forget the most important players of all – the carriers. Around the world, they are delivering value-added services with their app stores while adding value to off-portal traffic.

Everyone is lining up – carriers, handset makers and software companies. On the supply side, the application developers need to gamble and make a few choices. Will carriers ensure that consumers are the ultimate winners?

-Jaishree Subramania

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A few months ago, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and Bytemobile partnered on a survey of more than 230 executives from the mobile ecosystem in order to assess how wireless network operators and other service providers plan to navigate the economic downturn, while continuing to drive mobile data growth.

This week, Mobile Entertainment published an article by Bytemobile’s own Graham Carey, marketing director for EMEA. In the article, Carey discusses the current state of the mobile internet industry and provides a forward-looking perspective on the future of data services based on the results of the EIU-Bytemobile study.

Read the entire article here:
http://www.mobile-ent.biz/features/143/Data-services-will-save-mobile-from-the-downturn.

-Stacey Infantino

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