A report from consultancy firm BroadGroup has revealed that the deployment of wireless hotspots in Europe have soared by 67 percent in the six months up to May 2005.
BroadGroup’s research surveyed 122 service providers in 29 countries with the UK triumphing as the hotshot hotspot of Europe, impressively boasting 34 percent of all Wi-Fi hotspots in Europe.
Wi-Fi growth has been spurred on by steadily falling access charges – albeit slowly.
Weekly subscription packages have plummeted at the fastest rate, falling over 62 percent in the first half of this year.
The study discovered that the vast majority of Wi-Fi access is bought on a pay-as-you-go basis rather than via a regular contract, with only a measly 10 percent of all access being through pre-pay deals.
As many a disgruntled transatlantic traveller may tell you, Wi-Fi access in Europe still remains considerably more pricey than the US market, although the report suggests that “price declines are continuing to trend downwards” (I think this means, “prices are going down”).
As the wireless revolution continues, other services designed for mobile workforces are also set to increase.
Industry analysts Berg Insight have predicted that mobile location-based services (LBS) will be worth € 274 million (~US$331 ~ £189) this year, with sales set for super soar-away growth as operators pile on more data-based services.
Some operators are already keen to exploit the burgeoning LBS market, with Vodafone recently introducing their Vodafone Navigator service, turning mobiles into GPS location devices with mapping technology.
A growing demand for fleet management and monitoring dispersed workforces is also expected to boost global LBS take-up.
With a survey that could be described as pointless fluff at best and patronising drivel at worst, Vodafone D2 have trotted out the details of their ‘Women and Mobile Phones’ market research survey.
Neatly half of women use the camera on their phone with 37 percent of respondents citing the provision of Bluetooth for wireless data transfer as important.
For travelling PocketPC users unsure whether to pack away a brolly or load up with the sunscreen lotion, Spb Weather could prove to be an essential tool.
Once installed, it’s simply a case of choosing the cities you want displayed (you can manually add unlisted locations), and then having a fiddle about with all the fun display options lurking in the options dialog.
For travellers, tourists and stay-at-homers with a passing interest in the weather, this is a handy, fun application that adds real value to a Pocket PC. Recommended.
Us in UK-land have long been fans of SMS messaging, with button-pushing Brits banging out 3 million text messages every hour, with 2.5 billions text being sent in January 2005 alone.
GSM operator T-Mobile was particularly chuffed with its performance as its customers belted out a total of 3.6 billion messages during Q1 2005 – that works out at around 67 texts per subscription per month.
Developed by Nick Bradbury, the smart fella responsible for creating the fabulous Homesite (still our fave HTML editor) and the superb Top Style CSS Editor, FeedDemon 1.5 is a powerful RSS aggregation tool.
We found this approach intuitive and fast, although users with small monitors may have to indulge in an orgy of scrolling to view all the content in its default layout.
FeedDemon’s new podcasting tools let news-hungry junkies download audio files and automatically copy them to their iPod (and, notably, other media players) with the bundled FeedStation utility allowing the scheduling of downloads – letting users charge up their iPod with new content while they’re snoozing.
palmOne transmogrifies into Palm, Inc today, following an announcement on May 24 that the company had acquired unencumbered rights to the Palm brand after buying out the share of the brand formerly controlled by PalmSource, Inc.
Palm have a bit of a history with faffing about with their name. palmOne was created in October 2003 when the earlier Palm, Inc. spun off PalmSource and acquired Handspring, Inc.
Research has revealed that two thirds of UK Internet users are deeply unchuffed about having to pay a BT line rental on top of their broadband subscription.
Vonage has demanded ‘Naked DSL’ in the UK, which would enable consumers to independently subscribe to telephone and broadband services and allow users to subscribe to a VoIP service instead of a traditional fixed-line service,
“The broadband infrastructure will support a variety of services, one of which is telephony. Customers should be able to decide what services they want to ‘plug’ into their broadband network in the same way that they choose their electricity provider,” he added.
“We are aware that applications providers that don’t contribute to the cost of building and supporting that ever improving broadband network have little appreciation of the economics involved,” said a BT spokesman. “Our customers, however, do”.
We had a report from a reader today that he’d been … ehm, carrying out tests on his content filtering service. This entailed going to sites with photos of naked bodies – purely to test that the content filter blocked his access to them you understand. One of first sites he went to was the well known UK tabloid, The Sun.
The piece in the Gizmo section of the site and paper features BT’s new model to promote BT Communicator, Michelle Marsh.
It’s been a long time coming, but Orange have finally announced that their Windows Mobile-powered SPV C550 smartphone will go on sale later this month
Songs downloaded through the phone’s Music Player software are DRM-protected, although the built in Fireplayer application will let punters remix their fave tunes into ringtones.
Matthew Kirk, Director of Devices at Orange was ready and willing to spin out the PR schmooze: “Since the launch of the first SPV handset three years ago, Orange has led the development of smartphones and provided its customers with a choice of the latest and most powerful devices. The Orange SPV C500 was the world’s smallest smartphone and today its successor provides the first realistic alternative to carrying around a separate MP3 player, phone and PDA.”
TV advertisers and execs could be heard blubbing into their double tall skinny lattes all over Soho as a new survey revealed that around 90 percent of current users fast-forward through ads.
With more and more consumers buying digital video recorders (DVRs), this could spell disaster for the advertising industry.
Although the technology is still bubbling under the mainstream, BSkyB says about half of new subscribers opt for its Sky+ DVR, and with cable companies selling DVRs that are built into set-top boxes, advertisers are set for a bumpy ride ahead.