Monday 26 October 2009

Comes With Music sees very limited adoption

Music Ally recently published on its blog figures for Nokia Comes With Music adoption. A grand total of 107,000 users worldwide. In the UK after 12 months the total figure was a disappointing 33,000. Hardly tearing up trees but spectacular success compare with Italy where after 6 months in service there were only 691 users.

Mind you, given my experience of using CWM (yes, I am/was a user), I am not terrifically surprised. If the word of mouth reflects the user-friendliness (or lack of it) of the service then it's hardly surprising that people aren't signing up in their droves. Sounds too good to be true? With that clunky DRM, it is.

Ericsson estimates 1GB = €1

Apologies for the radio silence over the last 2 weeks. I've been on vacation in Jordan, which was spectacular. No mobile broadband-related anecdotes I'm afraid as I didn't go anywhere near any broadband connections for the whole time I was there. Clearly the mobile phone is absolutely critical to businesses there though. It was quite surreal sitting in the desert at Wadi Rum listening to the Bedouin guides taking calls from people wanting to book themselves onto tours. Anyway, I disgress.

The interesting thing that I missed during my absence was this report from Ericsson on the cost of deploying mobile broadband. The long and short of it is that they reckon that it costs less than €1 to provide 1GB of data. Obviously there's a whole host of assumptions in there. If you're interested, take a look at the original document. This clearly has implications for pricing of mobile broadband. My assumption was that MNOs were getting pretty close to marginal cost as it is. Looks like they have quite some way to go yet.

Friday 9 October 2009

Gym babes: the iPhone killer app

Couldn't help but laugh when I saw this. Gym babes! It's the killer app for the iPhone.

Thursday 1 October 2009

Ranking countries by Broadband Leadership

Fascinating report put out by the Said Business School and Cisco looking at which countries are ready for the broadband future and which...ahem...aren't. South Korea beat last year's leader Japan into second place. Sweden, Switzerland and Netherlands are Europe's leaders. Yokohama, Nagoya and (curiously) Vilnius, Lithuania were the top 3 cities. Check out the report. Makes for interesting reading.