The Stampede For Social Network Dollars Intensifies writes Diane Mermigas The race to monetize and leverage the power of social networks is turning into a stampede, as evidenced by Microsoft’s recently renewed efforts to acquire Facebook in the wake of…

On Monday, digital travel guide publisher Schmap will launch the public beta of its solution for the iPhone.

The iPhone offering will incorporate the company's City Guides along with a Local Search service and a new iPhone-specific Rotate 'n Map feature (see image) that automatically updates your map when the iPhone is turned sideways.

Check it out at http://www.schmap.com/iphone … and if you want to try it out before the official beta launch on Monday the 12th, just go to www.schmap.com on your iPhone and enter access code 724627.

Just in case you had any doubts that the Samsung Instinct was targeting the iPhone directly, marketing company M80 recently released a video comparing the Instinct's GPS functionality with that of the iPhone.

And that's just one of a series the company has launched on Sprint's Web site, where they've posted the helpful tag line “Watch the Instinct defeat the iPhone” - just in case you didn't already get the idea…

There's one problem with the whole campaign, though, as Gizmodo's Mark Wilson notes. “The problem isn't that the Instinct is necessarily a bad phone, or that Sprint is a worse service than AT&T,” he writes. “It's that Sprint's series of commercials will cost the company $100 million to promote a message that will most probably be a moot point in one month if/when Apple announces their 3G iPhone…”

I am revamping the opengardens blogroll. Happy to add any good blogs or recommendations. The OpenGardens blog is ranked at 7 out of 10 at google page rank - so will do good for your google ratings.

I am also looking to link to blogs from all over the world based on criteria below especially from India, Chinese language/Japanese/Korean/German language/Spanish language and europe even if they are not in English

Criteria
The blog must be mobile /wireless/web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 related
It must have good content
It must be consistent ie not an ocassional post in a month
I especailly welcome global blogs (even if they are not in English)

kind rgds
Ajit

Wireless camps prep fresh 4G battle: The International Telecommunication Union, Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) ‘s recent call for candidates for the next-generation IMT-Advanced mobile broadband technologies has spurred competing standards groups into action. Even though the technical requirements are not yet finalized for IMT-Advanced — that’s ITU-speak for 4G — the WiMax folks at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) and the LTE folks at the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) are already hard at work on their proposals.

» Can the Clearwire coalition save 4G WiMax?: It has faced criticism as an unreliable and untested technology, and not only from promoters of the rival HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access) and LTE (Long-Term Evolution) technologies. Earlier this year, Garth Freeman, the CEO of Australian WiMax operator Buzz Broadband, described his experience with the technology as a “disaster” and cited problems such as latency, jitter, and poor indoor service. While WiMax equipment vendor Airspan claimed that Buzz Broadband’s poor WiMax experience was due more to the company cutting corners in its deployment than to the technology itself, Freeman’s anti-WiMax tirade generated unwelcome negative publicity at a time when the technology experienced delays

Why Intel’s betting its chips on 4G: At first blush, it sounds as if Intel’s throwing good money after bad. After all, why pay $1 billion to join a consortium which has “squabble-fest” written all over it? 4G has been a slow train coming and the latest attempt by Sprint and Clearwire to speed the transition could easily fall hostage to all the big egos with seats on the board. Lest we forget, Sprint and Clearwire went their separate ways last November, only months after announcing plans for a Wi-Fi partnership.

Have been traveling all this week. From Memphis to Seattle to leaving for Pasadena in a little bit. Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum is organizing the event on advertising tomorrow.
Online Advertising - Getting Up Close and Personal: How will new avenues for advertising influence the buying decisions of consumer?
Tim Cadogan, CEO OpenX, former SVP of Global […]

Sweden has concluded their auction of 2.6 GHz spectrum by the National Post and Telecom Agency (PTS). Auctioning 190 MHz in the in the 2.6 GHz band raised a total of SEK 2.1 billion (USD 346 million).
Five companies won licenses. Intel Capital acquired one block of 50 MHz TDD spectrum for USD 26.2 million. […]

From arstechnica

“Our goal is to act less like a traditional manufacturer, and more like an internet company,” Kallasvuo told his shareholders. “Companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft are not our traditional competitors, but they are major forces that must be reckoned with. Make no mistake: We are taking on these challenges seriously and aggressively.”

“When we look at it with the eyes we have now, when regarding pedestrian navigation, map services, digital maps, we are even more excited about the opportunities than when making the decision” to buy Navteq, said Kallasvuo.

Absolutely agree! Very few companies in the existing Telco space are going to dominate the world where the Mobile Internet is the dominant player and Nokia is one of them in my view..

For that matter .. very few existing Telecoms companies are going to survive in my view and there is a lot to be learned form Nokia

I’m very happy to spread the word for this news. Guys behind i2 technologia (Felipe and Luciano) were featured on Forum Nokia as a FN Success Story:

US VoIP provider Vonage reported a first quarter net loss of USD9 million, compared to a loss of USD72 million a year ago. Revenue grew to USD225 million in the three months ended 31 March 2008, up 15% from USD196 million in the first quarter of 2007. Excluding charges, operating income was USD8 million. The company claims its improved performance is due to an increase in subscriber lines and higher average revenue per user (ARPU). Vonage added 30,000 net subscriber lines in the first quarter and had over 2.6 million total lines in service by the begining of April. First quarter monthly ARPU reached USD28.85, up from USD28.19 in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Vonage also announced a new partnership with broadband provider Covad to offer a DSL service to residential and small business customers offering maximum download speeds of 3Mbps to 6Mbps under a new package called Vonage Broadband. Vonage is hoping that the service, which will run on Covad’s DSL network, and enable it to offer a ‘double-play’ package of VoIP phone service and broadband internet access in a single plan, will help boost its number of lines in service. The addition of 30,000 new subscribers in the first quarter of 2008 is down from 56,000 in the previous quarter and well below the 160,000 signed up in the same quarter a year ago. Overall, the company is still losing customers, with a churn rate of 3.3% per month.

The Turkish Telecommunications Board (TK) confirmed yesterday that it is bringing forward the introduction of mobile number portability (MNP) from the planned date of the end of November. TK’s Deputy Chairman Galip Zerey said customers will now be able to take their existing mobile phone numbers with them when they switch service supplier from 13 November. Rivals to Turkey’s leading mobile operator Turkcell have been demanding MNP for some time, and the government’s plans to re-offer 3G licences will have provided an added incentive to accelerate the process. Three UMTS concessions were put up for sale last year but they attracted just one bid from Turkcell, leading the government to cancel the sale saying there was insufficient competition for the process to be legal. Telegeography’s GlobalComms database reports Turkcell is the market leader, with 35.4 million customers and a 57.55% share of the sector by end-2007. The second-placed operator, Vodafone (formerly Telsim) claimed 16.2 million customers, while the newest entrant, Avea, had around ten million users.

T-Mobile USA reported Q1 2008 net income of USD462 million, up from USD315 million a year ago. Operating revenues increased 14% to USD4.57 billion from USD3.99 billion in the first quarter of 2007. The operator passed the 30 million subscriber mark during the quarter adding a total of 981,000 new customers (including newly acquired SunCom subscribers). Average monthly churn fell to 1.7% down from 1.9 % for the same quarter twelve months ago. Average revenue per user (ARPU) dipped slightly to USD51 per month, down USD1 from 2007.
Data services revenues were USD760 million in the quarter, accounting for 16.6% of ARPU. Unlike many other operators, T-Mobile attributed the growth of data revenues to SMS and MMS which reached 33 billion in the first quarter of 2008, compared to 24 billion in the previous quarter and 16 billion a year earlier. The operator claimed its myFaves unlimited rate plan was the main driver behind its messaging growth.

On Wednesday Nokia Seimens Networks (NSN) and mobilkom Austria demonstrated the world’s fastest data call on a mobile device using the vendor’s Internet High Speed Packet Access (I-HSPA) technology. The downlink speed reached a maximum of 10.1Mbps during the trial.
I-HSPA is designed for heavy data transmission and multimedia usage. The ‘flat architecture’ is a new architecture of 3G networks based on W-CDMA technology that allows the base station to be connected directly to the internet and eliminating Service GPRS Support Nodes (SGSNs) and Radio Network Controllers (RNCs).