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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Biddle who wrote (32976)	2/28/2003 6:04:01 PM
From: 100cfm	Respond to of 196630

This is the response I got to an email I sent to IR of Cingular regarding the rumor of them getting a quote on swapping their network to CDMA. Since we made the decision to go to GSM we have not looked back and are confident that we have made the right decision. We do not have any RFPs out for CDMA equipment. Jeff Cannon Investor Relations Cingular Wireless (404) 236-5486 office (404) 236-6565 fax

To: John Biddle who wrote (32976)	3/1/2003 2:06:30 PM
From: John Biddle	Respond to of 196630

Air of optimism and new technology at 3GSM By Mike Grenville, CEO, 160Characters Association mike@160characters.org m-travel.com CANNES, France — With 26,000 attendees nearly 600 vendors at the 3GSM World Congress last week, it was hard for it not to make an impression. Just making sense of what was where and happening when was the first challenge for such a large event with 576 vendors from 35 countries, spanning five halls and 25,000 square meters. Add to this 26,000 attendees made up from 4,500 Congress delegates and 21,500 exhibition visitors, from 154 countries (140 countries in 2002), and 665 members of the press, plus 260 conference speakers all adding up to a lot going on and vying for attention. Apart from size, the thing that impressed me most was the general air of optimism in the air. The exhibition alley ways were filled with visitors eager to find out what was hot and not. Although many of the stands had streaming video to mobile displayed in various flavours, a number of the conference speakers expressed reservations about the new technology. David Muir from FutureOgilvy reminded the audience that "one should never underestimate how long it will take consumers to change their behaviour." Another speaker highlighted the fact that in spite of the MMS having launched, there were still fundamental problems of interoperability for handsets and operators that need to be solved soon. Mike Whittaker from the BBC Technology said that "it will be 18 months to two years before we will be able to see beyond launch products to what people actually use 3G for." He also questioned whether MMS networks would be able to scale to handle inbound TV responses with the infrastructure built for P2P usage. "It is vital to set consumer expectations correctly, so that we take them with us," he warned, "otherwise if we hype too much we will disappoint and will have created another waplash." "Who will educate the consumers" was a theme picked up by other speakers. The biggest challenge is how to get the consumers to educate each other and for that services had to work out of the box — something we are a way away from yet. A panel of VCs complained that they were still seeing immature business plans needing sales through operators. What they were looking for instead was "such a wall of content that operators have to talk to you." As well as the huge exhibition, many companies opted by boats moored in the harbour. One VC commented that "many of the boats won't be there next year as they were probably using up their last VC money to pay for them." However this seems unlikely when you see that for the most part the companies with boats were the likes of Intel, Toshiba, Handspring. In fact for the first year the boats were on both sides of the harbour. Winner of the biggest boat stakes was Siemens with large cruise liner repainted in their colours moored in the bay. Bringing the whole event to a close a group of journalists brought a much needed sense of humour by claiming to be UMTS inspectors looking for WCDs - Weapons of Cash Destruction - but had only been able to find a few traces at the show as evidenced by the lack of invites to decent lunches and the curled up sandwiches available to journalists in the press room! They had however seen some examples of dirty UMTS - mobile porn! They kept hearing that we need to stop selling technology and from asking vendors at the show they could confirm that most were not selling technology. Russian mobile billing company CBoss should get the prize - with a team of nubile young Russian dancers performing on its stand it regularly attracted a large crowd but the complete lack of literature on the stand meant that many came away wondering what it was that they were trying to sell! There were quite a few companies selling various Location Based Services — though I'm still not sure how much consumers want them. My winner of the 'released at last' product goes to Kodak for its photo print machine that enables photo printing from Bluetooth mobiles, camera memory cards, etc. The most interesting new product for me was the Personal Mobile Gateway PMG. It is a credit card size device that handles the mobile communication from a range of other devices — phone, camera, PDA, laptop etc that communicate with it by Bluetooth. One of the benefits is that producing the actual user devices becomes considerably cheaper and easier for them to communicate. IXI says that major operators and manufacturers have already embraced the PMG concept and benefits. Partners who are producing compatible devices include Sanyo and Seiko. With operators planning to introduce IXI-enabled products to the market in 2H 2003, PMG is one to watch. ------------------------------------------------- Mike Grenville, the author of this article, is the CEO and founder of the 160 Characters Association, based in the UK. It is a not-for-profit membership association for mobile messaging professionals. ----- I pitched this idea on this thread many moons ago. It will be interesting how it pans out in the marketplace. For more on the device, see infosync.no and ixi.com