Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Nokia Corp. (NOK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (1752)	11/29/2001 12:41:16 PM
From: Eric L	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9255

re: Vulture Central on The Beast and the Bluetoothless Sendo Stinger Z100 Barmy Army circles waggons against Nokia ... >> Microsoft Dispatches Phone OEMS To Knife Bluetooth Andrew Orlowski 24/11/2001 If you live outside the UK you probably haven't heard of Sendo, the upstart British cellphone manfacturer which, after the fashion of Atari, has adopted an Oriental name, even though its roots are firmly Arthur-Whitebread Occidental. It's based in Birmingham, Warwickshire, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the 260-strong company is worth keeping tabs on for several reasons, primarily because it's the first to appreciate the Dell-ification of the mobile phone business. Sendo, which was founded by grand fromages defecting from Motorola and Philips only two years ago, has anticipated the shifts in the handset market as it turns into a commodity business, and has cut its cloth accordingly. It's also had the nous to invest in its own software, so its pile-em-high, cheap and cheerful voice handsets don't look like the kind of mass produced PC clones that stay determinedly unsold in PC superstores. But where you really should be interested is in Sendo's role as the vanguard of Microsoft's Stinger smartphone initiative. The Beast has a 15 per cent stake in Sendo, which in London today dropped the latest details of its Stinger-based Z100 phone. The spec sheet is awesome, bar one omission which we'll come to in a moment. The Sendo Z100 will be a triband GSM/GPRS (4 down, 1up) phone, with USB, a speakerphone, and a 176x220 64k colour screen. A MIDP-compliant JVM, which Microsoft itself can't supply, and an adaptor for MMC and SD cards. It's fabulous, and will beat Symbian devices to market by several months. What more could you want? Um, well what about Bluetooth? Bluetooth is only available as an accessory, and the phone won't come with a Bluetooth chipset. Why not, we wondered? Because it's crap, said Sendo co-founder Hugh Brogan (in so many words). What he actually said was: "It spoils the experience," he said. "Everybody inteprets the specification differently. We're going for interoperability and it wasn't that we couldn't make Bluetooth work, but the user experience with Bluetooth is poor." It also adds cost and weight to the phone, he added. We asked if Microsoft had actually offered a mature Bluetooth stack as an option to Sendo. Hugh didn't answer, but he reckoned there was no such thing as a mature Bluetooth stack anyway. Hmmm. Puppets "We're not Microsoft puppets," Brogan told El Reg. Half of the software in the Z100 was Sendo's, and half was Microsoft's, and The Beast's long-standing antipathy towards Bluetooth had in no way, absolutely not, influenced Sendo in its decision ot refrain from including Bluetooth in the device itself. Microsoft has a long-history of trying to derail Bluetooth, either in the SIG's standards committee, or in public. For very good, selfish reasons; as a network of interoperable Bluetooth devices shifts the centre of gravity for electronic transactions away from the cumbersome desktop PC, and into your hand, forever. And if you had a desktop PC monopoly, you'd be doing your best to kill Bluetooth, too. But this encapsulates quite neatly the problems and opportunities that a Microsoft phone OEM faces. It doesn't really matter how keenly an OEM signs up to the proposition. Microsoft essentially doesn't need to win the smartphone war. It only needs to draw - and to prevent the Nokias of the world from winning. For a draw is as good as a win if it can continue to funnel consumers through the desktop PC franchise, rather than through phones or other handheld devices. But as a phone OEM it can't exactly fill you with confidence when your primary system software supplier has so little interest in seeing the platform succeed, can it? We asked Brogan if he was tempted by the Nokia platform offering that the Finns announced at Comdex, which gives licensees the source code to produce a knock-off Nokia clone. Why, he retorted, would consumers buy either of the two if they were offered side-by-side? Because um, we ventured, because Nokia makes great phones? And because it's a trusted phone brand? Pah. Hugh sincerely believes that Microsoft can produce a better phone than Nokia. Maybe, maybe he's right. Users can place their own bets, and in six months we'll be able to compare the two, and see who has the better judgement. ® << - Eric -

To: elmatador who wrote (1752)	12/5/2001 7:30:01 PM
From: Eric L	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9255

re: No Microsoft in Liberty Alliance Proprietary or Bust. >> AOL Joins Liberty Alliance to Build Net Standards Peter Henderson Reuters The world's largest Internet service provider, AOL, said on Tuesday it had joined Sun Microsystems Inc., Nokia and others in the Liberty Alliance of companies hammering out standards to make the Web safer and easier to use. The AOL Time Warner Inc. unit challenged Microsoft Corp., which has dismissed Liberty and forged ahead with its own .NET program and Passport systems, to join the group which wants to let users securely log in once to shop and travel through affiliated sites. Liberty includes a slew of major traditional and online companies, from General Motors Corp. to Cisco Systems Inc. and Sony Corp, and the alliance plans to release its first set of standards some time next year. The intention is to build a system so that different companies could compete to store a user's data, ranging from lists of interests to credit card numbers, and provide it to participating Web and network sites in the expanding Web, including wireless phones, for instance. For that to work well, there must be broad agreement on the standards, which makes AOL's joining significant, although critics have said the broad group founded in September may have trouble agreeing on common technological denominators. ``Because Liberty Alliance is not a centrally controlled system, AOL and other companies can continue to enhance their existing authentication and identity services and develop new services,'' American Online Chairman and Chief Executive Barry Schuler said in a statement. AOL encouraged Microsoft to join Liberty, an AOL spokesman added. ``If they did so we think it would be a potentially significant step away from their past efforts to leverage their monopoly and control this new space,'' he added. Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer poured cold water on those hopes last month when he said he thought ``the Sun thing has absolutely no probability of mattering,'' and has said others could join Microsoft's program. Jonathan Schwartz, chief strategy officer at Sun, which competes with Microsoft with its Java Web-building language and computers that run a non-Microsoft operating system, said credit card and payment companies might consider joining the alliance, which would soon publish a road map. Liberty intends to agree on standards rather than develop technology, which member companies already running authentication systems could tweak to bring into compliance, he said. << - Eric -

To: elmatador who wrote (1752)	12/5/2001 8:43:09 PM
From: Eric L	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9255

re: Strategy Analytics on Latin America Growth I never thought much of Strategy Analytics but their view of Central and Latin American (CALA) market growth is below. EMC forecasted the identical region this way (much more aggressively) based on October 2001 based on their actual figures to end June 2001. Millions of subs 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 Americas 63.6 92.7 132.5 170.6 202.2 226.4 EMC is looking a little too aggressive. >> Latin American Market Will Top Us$51 Billion In Revenues By 2006 Strategy Analytics As subscriber growth slows in Europe and shortly the US, conventional wisdom has been to look east for new markets to conquer. However, a new Strategy Analytics report concludes that looking west also opens up new avenues of exploration and growth. "The Central and Latin American (CALA) market has been growing consistently over recent years. Although the region is not immune from the global slowdown seen elsewhere, and is undergoing its own economic tribulations, there is still significant demand for services with subscribers passing 85M this year" commented Sara Harris, Senior Industry Analyst in the Global Wireless Practice. 3G licensing starts in the CALA region next year, and Strategy Analytics predicts that subscriber numbers will grow to over 164m in 2006, with revenues set to reach $51 billion in that same year. The Growth Trajectory 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 Subscribers(Mil) 86 101 116 134 150 164 MoU / month 89 81 81 79 80 81 $ARPU / month 40 37 35 36 37 37 Prepaid is a huge driving factor in the market accounting for over 50% of users. "The CALA region, like other prepaid dominated markets, is facing strong pressures to improve profitability. Improving economies of scale will become even more critical for operators. Therefore, Strategy Analytics predicts more consolidation of TDMA operators in Brazil and CDMA operators in Mexico in the short term," noted David Kerr, Vice President of the Global Wireless Practice. - Eric -