Mobile Strategies: Mobile TV, Payments, Roaming, and Location Based Services - Round up for 28th March 2006

Mobile TV, Payments, Roaming, and Location Based Services - Round up for 28th March 2006
A new report from Pyramid Research suggests that Mobile Operators are probably best positioned to take advantage of mobile TV because of their high customer bases but are not the only people who could make this product successful. This is a weaker argument than the one that says Operators are best positioned to sell content from their portals, but 70% of content is still sold off-portal from the likes of Jamba.
More interestingly, Aeon, one of Japan's largest retailers, has announced support for DoCoMo's payment system. This provides proximity based payment embedded into the phone that allows people to pay for products by waving their phone over a scanner. This is the first sign-up from a really large reatailer, and if DoCoMo can make their system take off, then analysts are predicting they could become one of Japan's top four banks as well a highly profitable mobile Operators.
The EU is trying to scrap roaming charges. Although this may not make much sense to many in the UK, the recent example of operators voluntarily scrapping roaming between Northern Ireland and Eire, illustrates the point well: it's not about better deals for holidaymakers, but about people who live close to the border and work in a different country to the one they live in. Clearly it'll have an impact on the operator's revenues, but the trick will be coming up with a compromise that still sees big businesses charges for all their corporate roaming traffic.
Finally, the US is still playing catch-up: Sprint Nextel has launched a location based directory service called Find It. I remember when a comparable product was launched in the Czech Republic in 1999. However, the US service does promise integration with GPS receivers built into the device for emergency service use, so it is likely that this new service may rapidly overtake the usefulness of it predecessors.
Posted by ajit at March 29, 2006 06:56 AM
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