The government of Myanmar, formally known as Burma, is planning to issue telecommunication license to four operators (two local operators and two foreign operators) by the first half of 2013.

"If 3G will only be here for a short while, we would rather skip the generation and put our money where the future is," the country manager of Essar Telecom, Kenya, Madhur Taneja said. Operating under the brand "yu," the telco is the only one out of the four tier-one mobile carriers which has yet to offer 3G services.

It has been widely commented on that NFC is now happening (at last) - but how widespread is this mood of optimism?  I have lost count of the number of times friends have asked me "What can I do with my new phone?  It's got NFC but I don't know what to do with it?"

This TechCrunch column about the differences between B2C and B2B start-ups reminded me of one issue that I’ve been pondering lately, as part of our mobile application storefronts research. (Yes, I rather dogmatically keep calling them app or application storefronts and not simply “app stores”, just to distinct the term from Apple’s, eh, app store. And yes, it’s a mouthful and I sometimes do feel quite apologetic about it.) Very much the same difference – the lesser opportunity for going viral if you’re a B2B player, and the correspondingly greater need to invest in sales and marketing – applies to enterprise mobile apps in comparison to their consumer-facing counterparts. A large part of this bottleneck is related to the discovery loop of the apps, and specifically in the sense that enterprise apps still lack proper go-to marketplaces to distribute them. The consumer apps tend to have it much easier, since they can benefit from the halo effect that comes from all those eyeballs that are drawn to browse App Store (sic), Google Play, and the others.

The IPv4 – IPv6 debate has almost exclusively focused on when the internet addresses will actually run out. Vendors and technical standards organizations have done most of the groundwork to facilitate a smooth transition. Further than that however, many businesses have not really thought about the implications of this transition. And they should be because the transition will not be automatic. For enterprise security especially, action is necessary. In fact, failure to act will leave the corporate network vulnerable to all kinds of malware and cyber threats. 

In the middle of last year, this market research company published a report (RR-TWEEN-12) on top-end smartphones suggesting a possible new segmentation within the mobile device market. Phablets, or larger-than-usual smartphones, are those measuring between 4.6 and 6.5 inches diagonally across the touchscreen. Some may point back to Dell's attempt at a larger smartphone, the Dell Streak. Most people, however, will consider Samsung's mammoth Galaxy Note to have been the first successful phablet device. Despite its success, upon the Note's release, many people criticized its bulging dimensions and believed that only travelling businesspeople/professionals and artistic/designer types would be drawn to the new device.

For much of 2011 and 2012, it looked like mobile carriers were just the utility companies for the Web 2.0 economy. Apple with Siri, Google with its mapping and search capabilities, Facebook with its social networking clout… but we are now starting to see carriers fight back. The first time I started to hear about this possible reality was from the CEO of Korea’s Uplus 4G mobile carrier, Sangchui LEE, who talked about 4G enabling “rich media mash-ups” in mid-2012. More recently, AT&T held a Developer Summit at CES and it certainly seems AT&T is keen to get to that new rich media mash-up reality.

The embers of the heated WCIT ITR negotiation last month have barely cooled and yet they are being fanned once more with anti-ITU sentiment. I came across the De-fund the ITU campaign, accompanied by a US petition to reduce USG direct funding of the ITU from $11M to $22k. Far be it from me to deny William EW’s right to petition his government, or the US’s to adjust funding as it sees fit, but some of the statements in his campaign’s website are so misguided that US readers would be ill-advised to sign this petition without doing some further research into the allegations.

DISH Network Corporation, the North American direct satellite broadcaster, has put a recent spanner (“wrench” in American English) in the works for Sprint's acquisition of the remaining 49.6% of Clearwire, the U.S. wholesale 4G LTE and retail WiMAX service provider. Will it succeed?

My Contactless Experience Thus Far