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  • Tight Competition for Biz-News.com Product of the Year Awards

    Contenders for the Biz-News.com Product of the Year Award are on a tight struggle to obtain the leading amount of votes for the 2009 Awards.

    The awards are people’s choice; users are being called upon to express their consumer experiences during 2009.

    What Smartphone device or service worked for you best? Which would you recommend to your friends and colleagues?

    Let us know and award them a vote by filling this form.

    Currently the top contenders are:

    • Mobile Mentor 1:1 mentoring session by Mobile Mentor
    • BlueWatchDog by SECU4
    • Roambi by MeLLmo
    • Nokia N900 by Nokia
    • BOLT Browser by Bitstream

    You can vote for them or nominate your personal favourite.

    If you have more than one nomination for "Best Product" you can make multiple submissions – but you can only vote once for any product.

    Voting closes on the 15th of February!

    May the best be rewarded.

  • Interview with Anna Chagnon, CEO of Bitstream, the Maker of BOLT Mobile Browser

    Global mobile communications software and technology giants Bitstream see the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa as a perfect platform to expand its influence in Africa and beyond.

    Nigeria is currently Africa’s biggest user of Bitstream’s flagship product – BOLT mobile browser – and once the football extravaganza hits the continent in June and July, the impact should be felt far and wide, says award-winning Anna Chagnon, CEO of Bitstream, in an interview with Smartphone.Biz-News.com

    “Africa is a very interesting market for BOLT. Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa have been in the top 20 countries for BOLT usage, and Nigeria is typically in the top 10. Nigeria is the eighth largest country in the world and is modernizing itself quickly,” said Chagnon, named 2009 Best Executive in the Stevie Wards for Women in Business.

    Anna Chagnon

    “With respect to the World Cup, we absolutely believe BOLT will have an impact for fans. As we have seen in other parts of the world in other major sporting, political or cultural events, people turn to their mobile phones for instantaneous information and news.

    “No other platform aside from mobile offers this ability to connect from wherever a person is and retrieve the information one wants. We have also seen that sport related content is among the most popular, so we fully expect that BOLT will play a role at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, the 2011 World Cup of Cricket in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and many others,” said Chagnon.

    Nigeria Vision 2020

    The Nigerian government has put in place a plan called “Nigeria Vision
    2020”, which aims to put a large percentage of its population on the internet by the year 2020. Given that internet infrastructure and the computers to access it are rather costly, observed Chagnon, mobile has become the access method of choice.

    Nigeria’s telecom market is now larger than South Africa’s.

    The BOLT mobile browser is indeed a hit on the world market as evidenced by the product winning the 2009 Tech Awards Circle and clinching the bronze award for the Best Consumer/SOHO Software.

    And what has been the secret behind the success of this browser?

    “BOLT’s success is predicated on a number of factors, but fundamentally begins with designing an application to address the unmet needs of mobile users around the world. BOLT is built to work on the widest number of phones in the market. We estimate that more than three billion phones in the market today could install and use BOLT,” said Chagnon.

    “We began with a set of features we knew would be popular, such as displaying Web pages just as they would appear on a desktop computer, streaming video and quick downloading of content.

    “During our beta testing period, where we had over one million downloads, we created a number of mechanisms (e.g. online forum, Twitter, Facebook, blog comments, etc.) to listen to and interact with our user base. By the time we exited our beta testing period, we had built into BOLT a number of features that were driven directly by users’ input. As a result we’ve seen a sharp increase in downloads – now approaching three million – since the summer because BOLT is the mobile browser that best addresses the market’s needs,” she added.

    Since 1983, its award winning font technologies have been enabling device manufacturers and application developers to render the highest quality text in any language, on any device, at any resolution.

    Mobile User Experience Conference

    Headquartered in Marlborough, the United States and with offices around the world, Bitstream showcased its products at the Mobile User Experience Conference in London in November 2009 and used the occasion to share ideas with other players in the mobile industry.

    “We believe it is important to create the best mobile user experience possible. The Mobile User Experience Conference gave us the ability to learn from our well respected colleagues in the industry the best practices for building an easy-to-use yet robust user interface for BOLT.

    “The user interface of a mobile browser is critically important to individuals who browse the web on mobile devices and we continually strive to improve all facets of it so that BOLT users will have the best mobile browsing experience on the market today,” said Chagnon.

    Bitstream has expertise in font rendering, and its font technologies are used in all forms of consumer electronics, including video games, televisión sets, computers, mobile handsets and more.

    “We have worked hard to innovate and create new technologies that display crisp text on even the smallest screens. Since some of our competitors in different industry sectors have reached out to us to use our technologies for rendering fonts on their software, we believe we’re impacting the ability to make reading easier in digital content.

    “Our expertise in rendering fonts has led to innovations in rendering graphics and images too. Perhaps the biggest compliment we’ve received for BOLT – one we’ve received in numerous product reviews – is that it is able to deliver the most faithful rendering of Web pages and graphics than any other browser in our class. As a fundamental element in browsing, achúrate page rendering is more important than any other feature, including speed and we see other companies trying to follow our lead in this regard,” said Chagnon.

    BOLT 1.6 Availability

    In December 2009, Bitstream announced the availability of BOLT 1.6, "the most fully-featured mobile browser available for mobile phones of all types."

    BOLT 1.6 outscores competing mobile browsers earning a perfect 100 percent on the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test. The Acid3 test, created to help browser vendors ensure proper support for Web standards in their products, tests Web 2.0 dynamic Web applications and visual rendering, including Web fonts.

    According to Bitstreams, for all mobile data networks that support it, BOLT 1.6 now offers full socket-based connectivity which can increase the page rendering speed of BOLT by as much as 15 percent.

  • Voxbone: Revenue Rises 60 Percent, Network Traffic More Than Doubles in 2009

    Despite one of the worst global economic recessions in decades, Voxbone, a provider of IP network services, "saw another year of substantial growth in revenue, network traffic and new customers in 200", the company informed today.

    According to Voxbone, 2009 revenue was up 60 percent over the prior year, and minutes of use for inbound traffic grew 110 percent to 1.5 billion. In addition, Voxbone attracted more than 150 new customers to its base of service providers, multinational corporations, call center operators, conference call providers and others in the IP industry.

    Voxbone provides these customers with direct-inward-dial (DID) and iNum numbers for local presence in foreign markets while enabling them to deploy new advanced services via backbone dedicated to voice-origination services.

    Demand from conferencing providers, mobile VoIP providers, Web and telephony integrations, and enterprise customers accounted for much of Voxbone’s 2009 growth.

    Businesses’ global expansion, transition from the PSTN to IP, and deployment of high-definition voice and video services helped drive growth for the company.

    Voxbone reported it has assigned 18 million iNum numbers – global phone numbers with the “area code for Earth” – since introducing the service in November 2008.

    The company plans to make SMS services available through iNum and increase interoperability with mobile operators in 2010.

    Rod Ullens, Voxbone CEO, said, “What makes us different, and one of the main reasons for our success, is that Voxbone has been built from the beginning with an unusual mix of software expertise, a passion for open-source, deep understanding of telecom infrastructure and widespread global presence; we’re now in 49 countries.”

  • iVdopia Launches Talk2Me Mobile Advertising Solution

    iVdopia, the advertising technology company, has just introduced Talk2Me ads solution and claims that for the first time, mobile advertisers can customize interactive actions in video ads that include customized social features, which allows for the sharing of ads on Facebook or Twitter.

    iVdopia is an ad network and platform for the iPhone to enable both application developers and advertisers to simultaneously monetize their applications.

    With Talk2Me, users can engage with their favorite brands on their iPhone as they take advantage of iVdopia’s Share Respond Interact interface, which is customizable and has an extensible architecture that gives marketers possibilities to share ads (through various social networks), respond (by calling, sending an SMS text, emailing or filling out a short form) and interact (e.g. with the advertiser’s In-App WAP site).

    “Instead of giving users just one way to engage with the brand, this provides them with an unprecedented range of options – leading to much greater user engagement and response,” said Srikanth Kakani, co-founder of iVdopia.

    “Our knowledge and experience in brand advertising, both online and with mobile devices, now comes with a social networking option to connect advertisers with customers in the most engaging, immediate and personal ways possible.”

    iVdopia was pioneering media and video advertising on smartphones through Pre-App video, In-App video and social networking options on the iPhone.

  • ABI Research: 4G Mobile Consumer Service Revenue Will Exceed $70 Billion in 2014

    As 4G network deployments gather momentum, a substantial 22% of device subscription revenues will come from suites of operator-branded premium services.

    Total 4G mobile consumer service revenue – including mobile internet services – will grow rapidly to exceed $70 billion worldwide in 2014, says ABI Research.

    According to ABI Research practice director Philip Solis, “Operators of 4G networks will refuse to be marginalized as ‘dumb data pipe’ service providers. Instead, they will offer suites of ‘smart services’ – some internally developed, others via partnerships with third party suppliers – that will be provided over ‘smart networks’ enabled with all-IP technologies, IMS infrastructure and cloud-based storage.”

    The analysts think these 4G services will be optimized to enable a proliferation of mobile devices, such as smartphones, netbooks and PNDs, and many operators will be offering pooled device subscriptions: one user subscription, many activated devices.

    Internet access service will be the “killer 4G service” – no surprise considering 4G networks are data-only.

    However, a suite of premium services will collectively drive significant consumer adoption, revenues and profits, including location services (such as turn-by-turn directions and POIs), multimedia services (as VoD and P2P video sharing), media broadcast services (pay-per-view TV and digital radio) and gaming services (such as multi-player and augmented reality games).

    ABI Research predicts that these “Web 3.0” services will be integrated with popular Web 2.0 features, such as personalization, community, interactivity, presence, and localization, and will be delivered simultaneously, seamlessly and transparently to ‘three screens’ – PCs, TVs and mobile devices – over the internet, over cable networks, and over wireless networks.

    “Operators will take advantage of this market opportunity by breaking down their walls and building open ecosystems,” says Solis.

    “They will partner with third-party service providers from whom they can license and re-brand services; they’ll work with network and handset OEMs to influence infrastructure and device specs; and they’ll join ecosystem development organizations, such as Alcatel-Lucent’s ng Connect program.”

  • 3CX Announces 3CXPhone 4.0 – a Free Softphone in Smartphone Look

    3CX released a new version of its free VoIP softphone for Windows – 3CXPhone 4.0.

    3CXPhone is a free, SIP-based VoIP phone that allows to use any PC or laptop as a phone. Making calls to any VoIP, mobile or landline number is possible after connecting 3CXPhone to a VOIP provider or to a VoIP PBX. With 3CX Gateway for Skype users can also make and receive calls to Skype numbers.

    3CXPhone allows to choose from several popular phone interfaces (Nokia, iPhone), features multi-line capability (up to 3 lines), ability to transfer calls, calls to disk recording and works with Asterisk and popular VoIP providers.

    It supporst G.711, GSM, iLBC and Speex codecs as well as USB and Plantronics headsets and also features STUN support for NAT/firewall traversal.

    3CXPhone is provided completely free of charge to individuals and organizations including commercial entities (all features, including call transfer, are enabled).

    “The soft-phone is becoming a serious ‘IP phone option’ for businesses. They are easy to manage, save on electricity and administration,” said Nick Galea, 3CX CEO.

    “3CXPhone can easily be configured as a remote extension, allowing users away from the office to easily connect to the corporate phone system. The unique tunnel feature proxies all SIP & RTP traffic over a single port and makes firewall and NAT configuration a breeze. It is also possible to configure it as a remote extension using ‘direct SIP’,” he explained.

  • Skype Names David Gurle to Lead Skype for Business Team

    Skype today announced that it has hired David Gurle as the new General Manager and Vice President of its Skype for Business unit. He replaces Stefan Oberg, who will be leaving Skype in March 2010.

    David Gurle joins Skype from Thomson Reuters, where he served as its Global Head of Collaboration Services and Head of its largest business in Asia, the Sales & Trading Business Division.

    Prior to joining Thomson Reuters, he spent more than three years running Microsoft’s Real Time Communications business, a group that he founded. During this time, he oversaw the development of the company’s collaboration products including NetMeeting, Windows Messenger, Exchange IM, Exchange Conferencing Server, Live Communications Server and Office Communications Server, as well as Microsoft’s acquisition of PlaceWare.

    David Gurle

    Prior to Microsoft, he was Corporate Vice President, Business Alliances at VocalTec, the IP telephony pioneer, where he established and managed partnerships with a number of Tier I telecommunications service providers and hardware vendors, including Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom and Marconi.

    He also spent time at ETSI, France Telecom and started his career at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). David has also co-authored a number of books on VoIP and IP Telephony.

    He graduated ESIGETEL with a Masters of Science degree in Computer Science and Telecommunications.

    "Since its inception, Skype has been used by many entrepreneurs and small businesses to save money on their communications," said David Gurle.

    "Moving forward, our goal is to educate and attract larger organizations that can not only save money by using Skype to communicate, but also increase their organizational productivity and enhance the way they interact with customers around the globe."

  • Acrobits Provides Three New SIP VoIP Operators with the iPhone Apps

    Acrobits, a Czech Republic-based mobile software development company, has just released their latest white label clients for the iPhone: PLFon, TeleSIP and sipcall.

    This comes on the heels of their recent announcement to put renewed focus on creating white label softphones for the iPhone. These SIP VoIP providers are now on even footing with the VoIP giants that already have their own softphone applications on the iPhone.

    The white label clients give the providers access to iPhone customers they might not reach otherwise. Though Acrobits Softphone is compatible with virtually any SIP provider, some customers are more likely to use a provider that has their own softphone.

    “While techies love plaving with different softphones and comparing VoIP operators, your average VoIP user is going to do most of their calling through one provider. Having your own iPhone Softphone application brings you one step closer to convincing customers to give your service a try, rather than one of the other hundreds of VoIP operators that are out there,” says Acrobits.

    Acrobits Softphone, the SIP VoIP phone for the iPhone and iPod Touch, is the flagship product of our company, which is also planning to support Symbian and Windows Mobile phones in the near future.

    Acrobits is already working on Softphone clients for other VoIP operators, including Gizmo5.

    “VoIP service is a highly competitive industry and VoIP usage on mobile devices, especially the iPhone, will play a large part in deciding who tomorrow’s leading VoIP providers are,” says Acrobits.

  • More than Half of Consumers Utilize Mobile Phones for In-Store Holiday Shopping Activities

    A recent Motorola Enterprise Mobility Solutions annual research study of holiday shoppers identified that more than half (51 percent) of consumers across 11 countries used their mobile phones for in-store activities such as comparison shopping and getting peer feedback, product information and coupons.

    Motorola’s analysts think it signals the increasing importance for retailers to adopt mobile shopper technology strategies to remain competitive.

    According to the study, the usage and impact of mobile shopping technologies exploded during the 2009 holiday shopping season. The survey identified that 64 percent of Gen Y (age 18 to 34) shoppers used their mobile phones for in-store shopping-related activities during the holiday season.

    “Retailers, financial service institutions, advertisers and technology vendors are taking advantage of mobile platforms to attract this increasingly technologically savvy generation of shoppers,” says Motorola.

    The company also says all surveyed age-segments cited interest in next-generation retail technologies, 2demonstrating the growing consumer demand for real-time information to make better informed shopping decisions.”

    The research shows that when in-store associates were equipped with mobile technologies, such as two-way radios and handheld mobile computers, surveyed shoppers reported a better experience due to the use of the devices (59 percent and 56 percent respectively).

    Frank Riso, senior director of retail solutions, Motorola Enterprise Mobility Solutions, said, “By utilizing mobile technologies, consumers have become empowered, better informed and more critical shoppers. Retailers need to establish near-term strategies to provide product information, stock availability, discounts and coupons directly to shoppers to help them to remain competitive.”

  • iSuppli: Nexus One Serves as Research Tool for Google

    Google’s new Nexus One smart phone serves as a showcase for the latest version of the Android operating system and will allow the company to gather critical user data for developing new software, according to iSuppli.

    "With a plethora of smart phones based on the Android operating system already on the market, questions have arisen as to why Google would begin selling its own phone equipped with the operating system," said Tina Teng, iSuppli senior analyst for wireless communications.

    "iSuppli believes the Nexus One allows Google to demonstrate all the capabilities of its operating system more effectively than other phones that employ customized versions of Android. The Nexus One also gives Google direct access to end customers, yielding key information on how users interact with applications and utilize data."

    Such information will be pivotal as Android-based phones strive to gain market share in the burgeoning smart phone market. iSuppli predicts global smart phone shipments are set to rise considerably, more than doubling from 181 million in 2009 to 439 million in 2013.

    According to iSuppli, with Google having directed the entire design of the Nexus One, including the hardware, applications and operating system, the phone exemplifies all the capabilities of version 2.1 of Android.

    In contrast, other Android-based phones, such as Motorola’s Droid, have personalized the operating system to suit their own hardware designs and services.

    "The Nexus One will help Google popularize Android by showing what the operating system can really do," Teng said.

    Beyond serving as a technology demonstrator for Android, the Nexus One gives Google direct access to consumers’ use patterns.

    Teng said Google can embed an applet into the Nexus One that can send reports on user behaviors back to a company database for analysis.

    iSuppli believes the Nexus One is a compelling device in terms of functions and capabilities. However, the product will still face significant competitive challenges.

    "Google will have to bundle innovative software with the Nexus One to combat its strongest competitor: Apple’s iPhone," Teng said.