DvDand Solutions, LLC

IDC today published a state of the mobile phone industry called the Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker. According to this report, mobile phones shipments continue to see solid 115.3% growth worldwide in Q2, 2008 despite challenging economic conditions worldwide. This is thanks in large part to the smartphone features like GPS, multimedia and touchscreen. Vendors continue to experiment and provide new functionality even in emerging market. Here is a snapshot of the top 5 vendors courtesy of IDC (shipment are in millions of units).

    Vendor        Q208       Q208      Q207       Q207     2Q08/2Q07
                  Shipments  Market    Shipments   Market     Growth
                                       Share                         Share
Nokia                     122.0       39.9%      100.8      38.0%      21.0%
Samsung                  45.7       14.9%        37.4      14.1%      22.2%
Motorola                  28.1         9.2%        35.5      13.4%     -20.8%
LG Electronics         27.7         9.1%        19.1       7.2%       45.0%
Sony Ericsson         24.4         8.0%         24.9       9.4%       -2.0%
Others                      58.1      19.0%         47.7      18.0%      21.8%
Total                       306.0    100.0%       265.4     100.0%     15.3%

US currently has four major mobile phone operators: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile USA and Sprint. Clearly, AT&T and Verizon have built up a huge lead over the other two competitors. And with Sprint leaking customers, consolidation in MVNOs (Virgin Mobile merging with Helio) and resellers switching operators, a la Qwest, it is anybody’s guess how long Sprint will survive as an independent company.

On the other hand, T-Mobile International certainly has a strong presence in Europe and is doing well there, thanks to its Duetche Telekom parent. However, in the US market, it is a different story. T-Mobile USA just passed 30 million customers in first quarter of this year. And this quarter, it has made an aggressive move to get additional revenue from its existing customer base by introducing the $9.99 home phone line. It remains to be seen how it affects it bottom line.

So, is the US market headed to be a duopoly with a distant 3rd operator? I certainly think so. It make take a few years to get there, but certainly expect this scenario to play out. I expect Sprint to be acquired by an international operator like SK Telecom or some other and it will focus its efforts on infrastructure and depend on the MVNOs and smaller players to provide the revenue. I don’t expect Sprint to be acquired by either AT&T or Verizon due to regulatory obstacles. A potential scenario could be that T-Mobile & Sprint merge. That could be interesting, however, the operate on two different platforms, GSM and CDMA respectively. That could pose some challenging integration issues. Another scenario that could happen should Sprint not be acquired, would be either Verizon or AT&T propping it up with some sort of investment, similar to Microsoft’s bailout of Apple. This could provide sufficient competition in the marketplace to keep the regulators and Congress pacified.

ComputerWorld reviewed some cool future mobile phone technology. Nokia is working on a shape-shifting phone that becomes what is most suitable for the task at hand. But, don’t hold your breath to get your hands on this little puppy. It won”t be available for atleast another 7 to 15 years. In the meantime, other developers are working on wearable phones, like the Handphone from the Italian designer Biodomotica. Or take the Packet phone from Turkish designer, which is a centimeter thick and 2″ square with double-clamshell design. The side flaps fold open to reveal a keyboard for typing email. You can read about these and other future technologies here. Also, as I reported earlier, Samsung has developed a haptic phone that provides 22 different feedback to touch.

Bango, the mobile payment company, yesterday announced the launch of Bango Analyticshosted service to track unique site visitors and campaign analysis for mobile sites. According to Bango’s news release, 80% of the 550 mobile website owners Bango surveyed wanted to know unique visitors to their site and 71% wanted to know the effectiveness of their marketing campaign. To address these two requests, and

To provide the highest levels of accuracy, Bango provides two different techniques for capturing mobile metrics – link tracking for campaign analysis and page tracking for site analysis. 

Bango Analytics is a hosted service and is free for up to 100,000 page views per month.

Enterprises thinking of mobilizing some of their staff face many challenges. In the current economic climate, justifying the investment can be a tough sell. In addition to the proliferation of new devices and training issues for users, there are some key issues that need to be addressed.

- Mobile use cases: In case of some solutions like Field Sales and Service Management, Logistics, Delivery Management, the use cases are very well defined and hence easy to implement. as such, these are the first ones to get mobilized and several companies have been doing that for years. However, there are several others where the mobile use cases have to be really thought through and vetted.

- Integration with existing systems: Either mobilizing existing data or capturing data at customer location, enterprises have to integrate and extend the existing systems to support mobility. This typically involves custom development. A number of vendors have developed connectors to popular systems like SAP, Oracle, etc., however, there is some degree of customization required to support the enterprise specific use cases. 

- Security: Another big issue with mobility is the security headache of so many disparate devices trying to access the enterprise data. A lot of effort are ongoing into addressing this with integrated device management solutions. Sybase did announcethe first integrated firewall and anti-virus management solution mobile devices under its Afaria brand of device management solution.

- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): The aforementioned integration and security solutions come at a price which increase the TCO for an enterprise mobility solution. In addition, most of the mobility middleware solutions themselves require a lot of consulting expertise to implement successfully without customization.

- Time to market: Considering all the integration, customization and security resolution, the time to market will be extended. Certainly the prebuilt connectors help speeding the development up, but still the average time to market to get these solutions out are upwards of six months.

With all these challenges, enterprises certainly need to plan their mobility strategy carefully and select the right vendors for their needs.

Now that 1 million iPhone 3G (er, iBrick ) are out in the wild, is Apple laughing to the bank? Certainly, but it is not the reason for that. According to TechCrunch estimate, Apple might have raked in $5 million over the weekend since iPhone was released. Apple has not revealed any numbers. These are just back of the napkin calculation by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch. I am excited and looking forward to Apple’s quarterly results for this quarter. That is when the actual numbers will be revealed. If I were a betting man, I would bet on Apple posting bigger gain in revenue and profits due to the App Store than iPhone 3G.