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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A certain product launch in June 2007 shifted the way we thought about mobile devices.  We hoped that our existing smartphones would get a life and become more fun, but we are still searching for something to catch up with the iPhone experience.  The icing on the cake was when Apple started selling applications for the iPhone.  Handset manufacturers supporting the dominant mobile operating systems gradually shifted toward the delivery of compelling mobile experiences on their platforms to meet pent-up demand.

But what about the vast subscriber base that still holds on to simple low-end handsets?  There is a huge opportunity to address this mass market.

Operators globally want a sizzling app store – to enhance their inventory of ringtones and games. They are looking for value-added services that consumers will buy and therefore drive ARPU higher.

Having a standard mall or cloud with mind-blowing apps for any device on any network would meet this need.  The key is simplicity.  What if you had a navigation tool on your screen that let you store and access your favorite applications at any time with only a click or two?  What if you could add, edit and delete applications on the go?  What if you could include social networking sites and interact with them from a mass-market handset?

In other words, simplicity would take the form of a mobile extension of iPhone application functionality down to the cheap cell phone.

That would be my holiday wish for this year.

- Jaishree Subramania

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On October 29, Northern Ireland Minister of Enterprise, Trade and Investment Arlene Foster visited Bytemobile offices in Mountain View, CA as part of a trade mission to the San Francisco Bay Area.  Bytemobile had just announced the opening of a new R&D and customer support center in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  Minister Foster met with Chief Financial Officer Tom Hubbs (in photo) and other members of the management team to discuss the company’s global mobile internet business and plans for the Northern Ireland facility.

- Tod Bottari

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Have you noticed how predictions tend to morph into directions that we could not have imagined when the predictions were made?

Let’s look at the wireless era as the next chapter of the Internet’s ongoing history.  Fast forward 10 years.  What can we expect?   A converged world driven by a global network that proactively delivers services based on our individual needs?  It reminds me of the sci-fi thriller movie, Minority Report.   Holographic hosts greeting us in retail stores; an advertising-saturated society where billboards call out to us personally; biometric retina scans deducting the cost of purchases directly from our bank accounts; newspapers streaming updates right before our eyes, with pages rearranging themselves in real time based on wireless transmissions of the latest news.  Of course, these are all cool technologies.  The personal privacy implications of these technologies are another matter.

In a consumer-driven world, we are drawn to solutions that make our lives easier and enable us to do things faster, whether it’s the way we work, learn, play, or relax.  It’s all about the user experience, and the mobile space is moving rapidly in the consumer’s direction.  The total user experience, highly personalized, will ultimately determine the winners in this market.  The technology will be secondary.  The next generation of mobile devices will be built to deliver the promise of rich multimedia content, integrating wireless capabilities such as 3G, Wi-Fi and WiMAX in low-cost platforms with innovative user interfaces and user-friendly software.  These devices will provide unprecedented levels of computing power, graphics, imaging, and multimedia capabilities in a form factor small enough to fit into our back pocket.

The global mobile opportunity today is very clear: there are approximately 3.5 times as many mobile devices in use as there are PCs, and the wireless handset is becoming a platform for a wide variety of data applications — playing games, watching video, taking and sending pictures, and searching the Internet for information.

Bytemobile focuses on empowering the Mobile Internet.  We deliver solutions that enable network operators to scale network capacity ahead of expected traffic growth and provide a compelling user experience to accelerate mobile data adoption and usage.  View this brief video, featuring Bytemobile CMO Adrian Hall.

- Jaishree Subramania

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