Tag: gsma

  • GSMA Announces Winners Of The 2013 Global Mobile Awards

    The GSMA today announced the winners of the 18th Annual Global Mobile awards, held at the Mobile World Congress 2013 in  Barcelona. The winners were honoured in an afternoon ceremony hosted by writer, actor and comedian, David Walliams.

    Walliams entertained nominees and attendees with a comic introduction to the ceremony. He was joined on stage by representatives from sponsors McAfee, Myriad and Telmap, and media partners CNBC, Fortune and Time, who co-presented awards, as well as John Hoffman, CEO, GSMA and members of the judging panel.

    In total, more than 170 independent analysts, journalists, academics and subject matter experts and 13 representatives from mobile operators throughout the world participated in the judging of the 2013 awards.

    The winners of the 2013 Global Mobile Awards are:

    Best Mobile Health Product or Service
    MIPsoft for BlindSquare

    Best Mobile Education or Learning Product or Service
    Mobilink for SMS Based Literacy program

    Best Mobile Product or Service for Automotive
    BMW i, MINI, Sixt and Vodafone Group for DriveNow Premium Car Sharing

    Best NFC /Mobile Money Product or Service
    Etisalat for Flous – The Etisalat Commerce Programme

    Best Mobile Publishing Product or Service
    Ver Se Innovation for NewsHunt

    Best Mobile Innovation for 'Smart Cities'
    Streetline for Parker

    Best Mobile Enabled Consumer Electronics Device
    Samsung Electronics for Samsung GALAXY Camera

    Best Enterprise Mobile Service
    Mobilelron for Version 5 Complete Enterprise Persona

    Best Consumer Mobile Service
    Comviva for Mahindra Comviva's mobiquity™ MFS platform powering mTicketing service for Bangladesh Railways

    Best Advertising or Marketing on Mobile
    McCann Worldgroup (Hong Kong) for Chok! Chok! Chok!

    Best Network Product or Solution for Serving Customers
    NTT DOCOMO for Hanashite Hon'yaku, world's first automatic voice translation service

    Best Product, Initiative or Service in Emerging Markets
    Ericsson for Amazon Connection– a digital inclusion program in the Amazon

    GSMA mWomen Best Mobile Product or Service for Women in Emerging Markets
    Asiacell for Almas Line

    Best Use of Mobile in Emergency or Humanitarian Situations
    Vodafone Foundation for Vodafone Instant Network

    The Green Mobile Award
    Indus Towers for Green Sites Project

    Best Mobile App for Consumers
    Facebook

    Best Mobile App for Enterprise
    Evernote

    Judges Choice – Best Overall Mobile App
    Waze

    Most Innovative Mobile App
    McCann Worldgroup (Hong Kong) for Chok! Chok! Chok!

    Smartphone Application Challenge
    AT&T for Application Resource Optimizer (ARO)

    Best Application using Network APIs
    Bharti Airtel Limited for my airtel app

    Best Smartphone
    Samsung Galaxy S3

    Best Feature phone or entry level phone
    Nokia Asha 305

    Device Manufacturer of the Year
    Samsung

    Best Mobile Tablet
    Google and Asus for Nexus 7

    Best Mobile Infrastructure
    Samsung Electronics for Smart LTE Networks

    Best Mobile Technology Breakthrough
    Accuris Networks for AccuROAM Wi-Fi: Making Wi-Fi a carrier driven extension of GSM for Offload and Roaming

    Best Cloud Based Technology for Mobile
    Jasper Wireless cloud-based connected devices platform for machine-to-machine (M2M) and consumer electronics

    Best Mobile Safeguard & Security Products and Services
    AdaptiveMobile and Syniverse for Messaging Trust

    Outstanding LTE Contribution
    SK Telecom for 4G LTE with PETA Solution

    Outstanding Overall Mobile Technology – The CTO's choice
    Samsung Electronics for Smart LTE Networks

    Spectrum for Mobile Broadband Award
    Government of New Zealand

    Mobile for Development Award
    U.S. Agency for International Development

    m-Government Award
    Government of Moldova

    "Through these awards, we are proud to shine the light on the mobile industry's many innovators and leaders, from all corners of the world," said John Hoffman, CEO, GSMA Ltd. "This year's new categories reflected the industry's reach into many new sectors and we received more than 600 high-quality entries from across the mobile ecosystem. We would like to congratulate all Global Mobile Awards winners and thank the many hundreds of companies and organisations that support these awards by entering each year."

  • GSMA Opens Brand App Challenge for Mobile World Congress 2011

    The GSMA today announced that it is now accepting entries for its Brand App Challenge, a competition in which mobile application developers create “brand apps” for a select group of global consumer brands. Winners will be named at the GSMA Mobile World Congress, which will be held 14-17 February, 2011 in Barcelona.

    Developers will compete by creating customised mobile apps for the participating brand sponsors based on the objectives and guidance provided by the individual brands. The apps will address a wide range of mobile operating systems including Android, Apple iOS, BlackBerry OS 6, HP webOS, Symbian and Windows Phone 7.

    "The Brand App Challenge will create networking and business opportunities which benefit the brands, application developers and the broader mobile ecosystem,” said Michael O’Hara, chief marketing officer at the GSMA. “This competition taps the creativity and capabilities of the mobile application developer community to address brand and industry challenges.”

    Developers can sign up for the Brand App Challenge via an online portal and then upload a brief video demonstrating their proposed brand app. Each brand will select five finalists who will then compete to become the ultimate winner for the respective brands.

    Submissions for the Brand App Challenge will be accepted until 10 January and the finalists will be named approximately one month before Mobile World Congress 2011. The Brand App Challenge winners will be announced as part of the Mobile World Congress conference programme and will receive cash awards for their winning efforts.

    The Brand App Challenge is an integral element of App Planet, the GSMA’s developer-focused programme at Mobile World Congress. Working with App Planet ADC partners such as Google, Nokia, Palm, RIM and Samsung, as well as with its Macworld Mobile partner IDG Expo, the GSMA will target hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide to encourage participation in the Brand App Challenge.

  • Digital Dividend Spectrum and Mobile Broadband in South East Europe

    Serbian Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Society has driven an initiative to develop a unified approach to the allocation of ‘digital dividend’ spectrum – the spectrum that will be freed up by the switchover from analogue to digital TV – in South East Europe.

    The Ministry hosted a Ministerial Summit on the digital dividend in Belgrade attended by regulatory bodies and government delegations from states in South Eastern Europe including Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Turkey.

    GSMA, that represents the interests of the worldwide mobile communications industry, said it applauds all governments’ actions to establish a harmonized approach to spectrum allocation in South East Europe.

    “The region of South East Europe lies on the borders of the European Union and achieving harmonised use of spectrum is important to the growth of the telecoms market and the wider economic well-being of the countries in it,” said Martin Whitehead, Director of GSMA Europe.

    “A cohesive regional approach from EU member states and their neighbours in South East Europe will maximise the affordability of telecommunications services in the area. We are delighted that Minister Matic and the Serbian Ministry have taken a lead on this issue by bringing together key nations from across the region to discuss and encourage a unified approach to spectrum harmonisation,” he added.

    GSMA informed that the objective of the meeting was to discuss how best to maximise the economic and social benefits promised by the digital dividend in South East Europe. Allocating some of the digital dividend to Mobile Broadband will increase Internet penetration and have a significant positive economic impact by driving innovation, job creation, productivity and competitiveness.

    However, harmonisation of the spectrum on a regional basis is needed to drive down handset and network equipment costs and make Mobile Broadband affordable to consumers.

    The unprecedented amount of spectrum that will be freed up in the switchover from analogue to digital terrestrial TV is known as the Digital Dividend. The Digital Dividend spectrum is located between 200 MHz and 1GHz. This spectrum band offers an excellent balance between transmission capacity and distance coverage.

    If just 25%, or around 100MHz, of the spectrum currently used by analogue TV (470 – 862 MHz) was re-allocated to mobile communications, the mobile industry could dramatically speed up the rollout of broadband communications and increase coverage.

    Because of its good signal propagation characteristics, less infrastructure is required to provide wider mobile coverage, meaning that communications services can be provided in rural areas at lower cost.

    This is of core importance in South East Europe where population density is typically lower than in other parts of Europe. The region’s position on the borders of the EU also makes coordination between states more complex and the high number of multiple border issues threatens to complicate coordination further.

    Harmonisation of digital dividend spectrum throughout Europe is an important element in the greater spectrum debate, as the mobile industry currently faces an urgent need for more spectrum to accommodate significant increases in Mobile Broadband usage.

    Extending coverage to rural areas and ensuring that the ‘digital divide’ between town and country is lowered is also a vital element of EU policy. Work on the digital dividend must continue to ensure universal connectivity.

    According to GSMA, the mobile industry needs around 100 MHz because:

    • Economic studies show that about 100MHz gives the optimum trade-off in Europe
    • It is in line with MEPs’ ITRE report
    • It leaves broadcasters with the spectrum they need to offer more content (75% of the resource)
    • This spectrum needs to be harmonised as much as possible to control cross-border interference and reduce terminal costs – separate national bandplans destroy value
    • LTE needs wider bandwidths to offer mobile broadband data rates (2 x 20 MHz for up to 100 Mb/s downlink) that consumers want, efficiently
    • Spectrum allocation needs to accommodate multiple operators to promote competition
    • More may be needed in some markets on a national basis, which may happen at different times in different markets

    What can be done to attain 100 MHz?

    Allocation of the digital dividend is a national prerogative, meaning that Member States of the European Union are entitled to manage the freed up spectrum according to their national interests, provided that they are in line with the decision taken within the International Telecom Union (ITU). The Member States are likely to be bound also by a spectrum management framework, as set out at the European level, in order to guarantee benefits that stem from a minimum common denominator of spectrum allocation.

    According to GSMA, these benefits include the possibility of harmonized frequencies, the balanced allocation of spectrum between the different service providers, and the avoidance of interference within the boundaries of the European Union. Overall, this would lead to faster, cheaper and better services with an increased possibility for content enhancement and interoperability of devices (e.g. Mobile TV).

  • HiT Barcelona: Can Mobile Operators' New Openness Change Lose-Lose to Win-Win?

    Mobile operators are finally ditching proprietary operator APIs – so-called "Walled Gardens" – and moving towards exposing network intelligence to third parties.

    Next week’s HiT Barcelona: World Innovation Summit in Barcelona will be discussing the need for open networks in order to engage with the growing community of application developers.

    Representatives from the developer, operator and Internet communities are taking part in a panel discussion to develop the most effective approach for the GSMA’s One API initiative.

    Among them is Michael Crossey, chief marketing officer at Aepona, who spoke to smartphone.biz-news about some of the issues that will be coming under the spotlight.

    Mobile network operators seem to have done their utmost to prevent developers from innovating on the mobile Web.

    They have created barriers by using proprietary APIs – and contractual differences have limited the creation of cross-operator web applications.

    Equally, developers have been barred from accessing rich network capabilities such as authentication, seamless charging, location assistance, push messaging and connection awareness.

    This has undoubtedly been a lose-lose situation for both operators and developers.

    That is changing and according to Michael Crossey, chief marketing officer at Aepona, the whole mobile industry theme has moved towards one of openness in the past year.

    He told smartphone.biz-news that the main catalyst for this has been Apple’s desire to make it easy for developers to create applications for the iPhone by providing them with tools and a route to market for their apps.

    Michael Crossey, CMO at Aepona

    "This has sparked off a flurry of activity in the industry, with a lot of operators and other handset manufacturers announcing open strategies to help them tap into the activity of the developer community worldwide," he said.

    This is a marked change in tactic for carriers, whose expressions of interest in working with developers in the past have been superficial at best.

    "The reality has been that, while they welcomed creative thinking, they wanted to cherry-pick the best apps for themselves and bring them into their own networks to sell," said Crossey.

    This, obviously, hasn’t been in the best interests of developers and everyone from Google to the "two men in a garage" set-ups have found ways of getting around the networks.

    That realisation has finally hit operators, forcing them to "evolve their thinking", according to Crossey.

    Last Bastion Crumbling

    He said this has meant that the mobile operators "last bastion" – opening core network capabilities to developers – is crumbling.

    "Historically there has been a lot of resistance to that," he said. "But they are realising that unless they collaborate, they will get by-passed.

    "They look at the fixed-line world, where operators have lost the battle against over the top providers, and they are determined not to let that happen to them.

    "They realise that if they collaborate rather than close the networks, they can contribute to the process."

    It is widely accepted that one way to do this is to standardise API’s and interfaces within and across operator networks.

    The GSMA is leading the charge to adopt this approach – principally through its One API initiative, phase 2 of which has just been launched.

    Crossey said this strategy is seen as necessary because even if every operator opens its network, developers will still have problems because of the different approaches each carrier adopts.

    This would be both on the technical side and on the commercial one, because every operator’s interface is different – be that with regard to terms and conditions, payment methods, business models etc.

    Huge Breakthrough

    By creating a cross-operator API, Crossey said it is hoped the fragmentation that would otherwise exist between operators will be reduced.

    The GSMA is also proposing a common commercial framework to give developers a market for their apps.

    "The operator can be assured that if it complies with One API, this will be portable between operators – this is a huge breakthrough for operators and developers," he said.

    "If there is fragmentation, the whole ecosystem does not reach critical mass and the addressable market is not big enough.

    "If there is a single set of APIs, the internet model has shown that the developer community is huge."

    Operators may, understandably, be reluctant to embrace One API because of concerns that it would restrict them from differentiating their services from a competitor’s.

    However, Crossey said the technology means that it is possible to do both – have an API model for "commonplace" services such as messaging while still being able to differentiate on, say, video and multi-media capabilities because a particular operator has invested heavily in IMS technology.

    Crossey said that Aepona, as a specialist SDP (service delivery platform) provider, enables the operators make their network capabilities – communications, information and intelligence – available to developers.

    The Web Services-based APIs can then be used to telecom-enable both enterprise business processes and web-based consumer services.

    "We provide a technical platform that allows these capabilities to be exposed to developers in a way that they are familiar with on the internet," he said.

    On the web, developers use APIs to create apps that, for example, use Google maps and mash-up with PayPal or Amazon storage services.

    Crossey said that after preaching the message of openness to operators for a number of years, there has undoubtedly been a definite shift in operators’ willingness to embrace the concept.

    The Belfast, Northern Ireland headquatered company’s products have already been deployed by Tier 1 operators such as France Telecom/Orange, Sprint, Vimpelcom, Bharti Airtel, TELUS, TDC, BT and KPN.

    "We are having many other conversations now about operators using our technology," he said.

    Opening Up Potential

    Aepona is also working with developers to help them bring apps they have created to its operator clients.

    This involves showing developers how they can use network capabilities to greatly enhance their apps for use on the platforms Aepona has installed with operators.

    Crossey said a simple example is explaining that, rather than just relying on GPS data from high-end handsets for an app, developers can be shown that operator networks can provide location data for every handset.

    "So we can increase the addressable market to a huge degree," he said. "But very often the developer is not aware of what can be done."

    A shift towards openness has also to include ensuring developers feel they are sufficiently rewarded for their applications.

    If revenue-share models fail to do this developers will keep finding workarounds and alternatives to leveraging network capabilities.

    For more information on the HiT Barcelona: World Innovation Summit: June 17-19 FIRA Barcelona, click HERE

  • Mobile Operators Risking $5bn Roaming Fraud Bill


    Roaming fraud could cost mobile operators USD $5 billion globally in 2009 because of a failure to implement detection measures.

    That’s the warning from James Stewart, director of fraud product management at MACH and chairman of the roaming sub-group of the GSMA fraud forum.

    He said that many operators around the world have yet to comply with near-real time roaming data exchange (NRTRDE) recommendations – making it likely that fraud will shift to those who are less well protected.

    But he said that carriers could not afford to neglect security measures, even in the current economic situation.

    "Perpetrators of roaming fraud rely on poor operator visibility and slow inter-operator processes to profit at the operators’ expense," said Stewart.

    "Many operators are re-evaluating the use of their existing fraud detection measures, looking for ways to reduce expenditure.

    "Their margins are under pressure from increasing roaming tariff regulation and competition but they cannot afford to increase their exposure to fraud and their subscribers will not accept any disruption to service caused by fraud prevention."

    Stewart said MACH clears two out of every three roaming calls on GSM and CDMA networks and settles more than 60 per cent of global inter-operator wholesale invoice amounts.

    The company has over 300 NRTRDE clients, and a growing Fraud Protection client base that is doubling every six months.

    Stewart said that minimising mobile fraud losses involves the rigorous execution of four key disciplines:

    • timely visibility
    • quick analysis
    • intelligent investigation
    • rapid action
  • Payments made via mobile phone for goods and services will exceed US$300bn globally by 2013






    The value of payments made using mobile phones for everything from music, tickets and games to gifts will increase five-fold over the next five years.
    This is one of the forecasts made by Juniper Research in a region by region analysis which explores how the mobile phone is developing into a payment tool that will be used by more and more people, more and more often in future.
    Not surprisingly, the report concludes that there is a significant opportunity for mobile payment services, systems, software and supporting services to underpin the processing of the spiralling value of payment transactions by 2013.
    Howard Wilcox , the report’s author, noted that retailers need to move quickly to exploit the opportunity presented, and ensure that they maintain ease of use for their customers who are already familiar with web shopping from their PCs.
    “Merchants in North America and Western Europe are just starting to realise the potential of a mobile web presence as a fourth channel to market,” he added.
    “Retailers should be evaluating the benefits of the mobile web, and be mindful of the success of regular ecommerce sites in generating sales.”
    The findings come as the GSMA, the mobile industry’s global trade body, and the European Payments Council, which represents 8,000 banks, announce plans to work together to accelerate the deployment of services that enable consumers to pay for goods and services using their mobile phones.
    Other highlights from the Juniper Research report include:
    * The ticketing segment will be driven by consumer usage on rail, air and bus networks as well as sports and entertainment events. This will represent over 40 per cent of the global transaction value by 2013
    * The top 2 regions (Far East and W. Europe) will represent over 60 per cent of the US$300bn pa global mobile payment gross transaction value by 2013 for digital and physical goods