July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The mobile operating system market share numbers are in for Kantar Worldpanel’s last quarter, and the numbers are shocking.

Not the Android and iOS numbers: Steady but unspectacular growth for Android and gradual but not catastrophic drops for Apple are pretty much in line with expectations.

But the BlackBerry and Windows Phone numbers are dramatic changes from the same quarter a year ago. Windows Phone looks to be finally taking off, with 52 percent growth in December, January, and February of this year compared to the same three months in 2012. And BlackBerry is falling of a sales cliff, with an 81 percent plunge in sales.

Source: Kantar WorldPanel

Smartphone sales by operating system – U.S.

The big kahuna, of course, is Android.

Google’s Android now owns more than half of U.S. smartphone sales, with 51.2 percent market share. That’s up from 45.4 percent in the quarter a year ago. Meanwhile, iOS is holding fairly steady at number two, with 43.5 percent, down slightly from last year’s 47 percent.

What’s interesting about the Windows numbers, even though they are on a much smaller installed base, is that Windows Phone is currently the fastest-growing mobile phone platform. At 4.1 percent of mobile operating system market share, Microsoft still has a very long ways to go, and growth rates could start to slow as it piles up share. But the numbers have to be encouraging for Redmond as it is finally gaining traction in a market that it once appeared to have completely lost.

And the international numbers contain pockets of even more good news, such as Italy, where Windows Phone now makes up 13.1 percent of new phone sales.

Apple’s mobile offerings are strongest with the two largest U.S. carriers, AT&T and Verizon. Both sell a majority of iOS smartphones, with AT&T selling 68.4 percent iOS versus 20.8 percent Android, and Verizon selling 55.1 percent iOS versus 43.4 percent Android.

Meanwhile, Samsung is continuing to expand its Android leadership, taking away market share from competitors LG and HTC:

“Of those who changed their phone over the last year to a Samsung smartphone, 19 percent had previously owned a Samsung feature phone, 15 percent owned a HTC smartphone, 14 percent owned an LG feature phone, 10 percent owned a Samsung smartphone, and 9 percent owned a BlackBerry,” said Kantar Worldpanel analyst Mary-Ann Parlato. “It’s apparent that Samsung is successful at capturing users from across the competitor set and not just gaining from their own loyalists.”

Kantar Worldpanel is the largest continuous consumer research mobile phone panel in the world, and conducts more than 240,000 interviews per year in the U.S. alone to determine what consumers are buying and using.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Someone, somewhere, has gotta be missing a bandwagon.

A day after a make-cell-phone-unlocking-legal petition at WhiteHouse.gov received a you go, girl from the Obama administration, senators are pouring out of the bureaucratic woodwork and tripping over each others’ thousand-dollar heels to put a bill together, get it on the floor, and pass it.

It’s almost as if they think this could be popular, or something.

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) — no, I’m not swearing, she’s just a Dem from Minnie — wants to get rid of the ban on unlocking cellphones. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) wants to legalize cellphone unlocking, and Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Jared Polis (D-CO) said they’d support such a bill. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) is already working hard on a bill, saying that “it is a freedom issue.”

Life, liberty, and my MOFO MObile PHOne, baby. That’s America!

Saddly, all were beaten to the punch by long-suspected brown-noser and probable former teacher’s pet Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), according to Hillicon Valley, with a bill titled the Wireless Device Independence Act. (It’s like the movie, except the phone blows up, not the White House. But only if the carrier doesn’t allow unlocking.)

All good fun aside, it’s wonderful to see our elected representatives doing something for the people. And laughable to see how quickly they jump on a populist measure that most of them probably heard about approximately five minutes ago.

I guess it’s all in a good cause.

photo credit: gfpeck via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

BARCELONA — 1.7 billion people got a new mobile phone handset last year. What happens to the old ones? Ten million of them have been reused and renewed by eRecyclingCorps. “If subsidies are the drugs of the mobile industry, then incentivized device recycling is the methadone,” says CEO Dave Edmondson from the Mobile World Congress. 

“Those 1.7 billion phones will retain one-third of their value 24 months into their future. That is 100 billion dollars worth of economic value that we are allowing customers to walk into the shop with, walk out with, and then put in a drawer.” Edmondson contends that only 1 percent of handsets worldwide and 1o percent in the U.S. are recycled or reused. 

ERecyclingCorps works with five out of the top seven U.S. mobile operators to offer consumers discounts on a new phone or payment plan when they trade in their old device. My slightly battered 2-year-old Samsung Galaxy SII, for example, is worth around $100. “Unincentivized recycling doesn’t work, ” says Edmondson. “Customers intuitively know that the device they just made a phone call on has some value, even if they don’t know how to monetize it.” The company’s oldest customer — Sprint =- has publicly stated that for every 10 new phones it sells, four are traded in. By 2017, Sprint’s CEO wants to increase that to nine out of 10.

When a customer walks into a shop using eRecycling’s system, they are asked a few simple question about their old phone: Does it power on? Does it have a good LCD? Is there anything broken? The answers are combined with the model type to calculate a trade-in price.

Old phones are shipped to a central facility where the data is erased and they are tested to see if they can be reused. If components are damaged, the device is given a new keyboard, screen, or camera. Finally an upgraded OS and operator-specific software is installed. Phones whose parts cannot be reused are broken down so the raw materials can be recycled. But the company estimates that 80 percent of incoming devices are reused as is or renewed.

There is no agreed definition for what constitutes a refurbished phone. ERecyclingCorps has teamed up with 20 other companies to define precise standards for what it calls a renewed phone. Every time the user moves the slider up and down on a sliding phone, for example, you get wear and tear on the ribbon cable. As long as it works, most refurbishers will not replace it but to qualify as a renewed phone the ribbon must be upgraded since it is a potential point of failure.

So where do the renewed phones end up? Surprisingly, 50 percent of them as resold within the U.S. as insurance replacements, for prepaid programs or used by operators to acquire new customers at a lower subsidy cost. Feature phones often go to sub-Saharan Africa while smartphones are more likely to end up in the hands of an Indian or Chinese urbanite who could never afford a new iPhone. 

Although eRecyclingCorps is a relatively new company (it was founded in 2009), its management team could not be more different from the typical starry-eyed young startup founder. It’s populated by battle-hardened mobile industry veterans, most of whom have held senior posts at mobile operators and device manufacturers, which is not to say that they are not idealists.

“The mobile industry has grown from nothing to a trillion dollar business in 30 years by focusing on the front, ” argues Edmondson.”What’s the next network upgrade? What’s the new application? Nobody looks at the backend, which is creating the largest environmental mess in the history of the world. How many companies at Mobile World Congress are talking about that?”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With streaming media websites like Netflix and iTunes virtually wiping out Main Street’s DVD rental stores, Dish Network has found an alternative use for Blockbuster, the chain it acquired last year.

Blockbuster revealed today that it will begin stocking mobile phones, as well as DVDs, in its brick-and-mortar stores around the country. The phones are already available for purchase online.

Is it just me, or are Blockbuster store sightings more difficult to scout out than a Spotted Owl? Dish has already closed about half of the 1,700 Blockbuster stores it acquired when it bought the company out of bankruptcy.

For Dish, the announcement is a long-time coming. Executives announced their intention to sell mobile phones from Blockbuster stores when the acquisition was finalized in April, 2011.

Dish reportedly plans to begin selling mobile phones out of stores under the name “Blockbuster Mobile.” Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile and other carriers have already signed on as partners. According to Bloomberg, the move may be a prelude to Dish launching its own mobile phone service — it is already looking for potential partners.

Dish recently acquired numerous wireless airwaves, and is awaiting word from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about how it can use them.

Mobile phone image // violetkaipa, Shutterstock

Apple

During the day, Apple’s stock price rose, fell and then rose dramatically again. In the last hour of trading, Apple shot ahead of Exxon, which saw a similar pattern during the day. And during the last moments of trading, Apple fell behind.

Just three weeks ago, Exxon had a $60 billion value advantage over Apple. But after the financial markets crashed, that changed rapidly. Exxon closed today’s trading at a value of  $348.32 billion, while Apple closed at $346.74 billion. It might take another day of trading, but Apple’s progress on this front has been steady, and it’s very likely to surpass Exxon very soon.

If the changeover happens, it is indeed a changing of the guard. While Exxon represents the age of oil and the industrial revolution, Apple represents the future. It is the company that has successfully bridged both the computer revolution that just ended and the mobile revolution that is just getting under way. That is why shareholders have rewarded it so handsomely, and why they are likely flocking to the company’s stock as a haven at a time of uncertainty.

It reminds me of the prophetic comment of W. J. “Jerry” Sanders III, the founder of chip maker Advanced Micro Devices. A long time ago, at the dawn of the electronic age, Sanders said, “We’re the oil of the eighties.”

If you think about it that way, this day was bound to come. Oil is the lifeblood of physical goods. But chips became valuable because of the intellectual property contained within them. Soon enough, as Intel began selling faster and faster microprocessors for personal computers, the chips became more valuable than if they had been made out of gold. Apple was one of the prime beneficiaries of the age of powerful computer chips, helping to launch the personal computing revolution in the 1970s.

But the company did what few technology companies were able to do. During the transition from one era to another, Apple stayed relevant. Companies such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard have accomplished this feat, but they have not benefited as much as Apple in the newest age that is upon us, the age of mobile computing.

When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, it flipped the world on its head, giving chip makers a new priority. Not only did they have to create powerful computing devices, they also had to make them power efficient so they could run in mobile devices with good battery lives. Apple also launched the age of mobile apps with its App Store and it revived tablet computing with last year’s launch of the iPad.

So if anyone asks why Apple is valued so much more than its rivals, that’s your answer. Anybody can come up with a hit product in the age of digital goods. But to do that consistently, decade after decade, that’s something special.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Handing off a call between a mobile phone and a land line is a pretty big pain for mobile workers. When you get home from a car trip, you have to tell your caller to dial you on your land line.

But Plantronics has figured a way to get around that problem. Today, the company is marking its 50th anniversary by introducing a series of communications headsets, including one that solves the above-mentioned problem with a smart way to hand off calls.

The Savi 700 series is a headset that allows a users to manage calls coming in from a PC (such as a voice-over-internet protocol call) a desk phone or a mobile phone. You can wear the headset that works with an Intellistand, (short for intelligent stand), talking wirelessly via a DECT land-line phone with a 300-foot wireless range. You can use the same headset to connect via Bluetooth to a mobile phone. You can seamlessly switch between all three types of calls as needed.

The new offerings include the Savi 700 series, the Savi 440, Blackwire 435, and the CS500 series. They’re aimed at marrying smart technology with elegant design.

Plantronics is releasing its unified communications tool kit, which helps tie together phone platforms based on Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft and IBM designs. The Savi 700 series is priced from $379 to $399, depending on the style of headset. It will be available in June.

Plantronics has 3,000 employees. Its rivals include GN.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Chinese mobile phone manufacturer Umeox just introduced one of its latest models, the V206, with little fanfare at the MEDPI tradeshow in Monaco. But the V206 is no ordinary phone; it’s a low-cost, ruggedized and waterproof handset powered entirely by sunlight.

The V206 is just one of a new generation of low cost, solar-powered phones that use technology from Dutch company Intivation. Intivation’s SunBoost chip makes it practical and cost-effective to charge small devices like mobile phones via the sun.

A single solar cell of the size that fits onto a phone does not produce enough voltage to charge the phone’s battery. The traditional solution is to use multiple, smaller cells in series, each of which boosts the voltage. This approach has several disadvantages, including sub-optimal performance when some of the cells are shaded, the higher cost of manufacturing multiple cells, and the fact that multiple cells have higher levels of defects that affect performance. SunBoost is a boost converter that amplifies the output voltage from the 0.3-0.6V produced by a single solar cell up to the 1.2-3.7V required to charge the battery. The SunBoost chip also has integrated Maximum Power Point tracking (MPPT), which automatically adapts to light intensity and ambient temperature to ensure that the solar cell operates at close to its maximum effectiveness in all conditions.

While the trend for mobile phones in developed countries is towards more expensive and power-hungry handsets, 1.6 billion people in the developing world don’t have access to a regular electricity supply. Not only is the electricity grid in many emerging markets unreliable, it’s also expensive, with consumers spending 15-20% of their incomes on it. If there is no local power, phone owners have to walk to the nearest town or pay inflated prices to a mobile charging vendor to charge their phone. According to Intivation, allowing customers to charge their phones from the sun boosts ARPU (revenue per customer) by 10-15% in semi-rural areas. Many African countries have more than six peak sun hours per day, making them ideal for solar-charging. Large parts of Asia and Latin America also get more than 4 peak hours per day.

The cost for the solar cell, modified battery, SunBoost chip, and related engineering is under $10 per phone. Mobile carriers don’t subsidize handsets in emerging markets, so it’s vital that the price point is low.Intivation’s Marketing Director Rik Wuts says that the “sweet spot” for a mobile phone in these markets is around $20.

Vodafone added its first solar-powered handset (which uses SunBoost) in its Spring 2010 global portfolio. The Vodafone 247, manufactured by ZTE, generates enough energy from one hour of sunlight to power 20 minutes of talk time from a 20cm2 solar cell. Intivation estimates that an average low-ARPU user should not need more than two hours of charging a day. Since these phones are targeted at particular emerging markets, they often have distinctive features adapted to that market. The ZTE S316, for example, includes an LED torch, a vital necessity in African countries with unreliable power supplies. This model is now being sold via EcoNet in Zimbabwe and MTN in Sudan, bringing the number of African countries using SunBoost-enabled phones to 13 since the first phone was introduced less than a year ago. Phones including SunBoost are now being sold in a total of 17 countries.

Intivation was established in 2003 in Amsterdam, has 20 employees and is privately funded.

Don’t miss MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. The theme: “The year of the superphone and who will profit.” Now expanded to two days, MobileBeat 2010 will take place on July 12-13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Register now. Tickets are going quickly. For complete conference details, or to apply for the MobileBeat Startup Competition, click here.