CTIA Convention Notebook...

April 6, 2006 |Miscellaneous

Disney showed off its newest mobile phone service at CTIA. The service, which follows Mobile ESPN, will be available nationwide in June, the company said. The company will offer a package of exclusive Disney content to subscribers, including access to Radio Disney, content from Disney Zone and Vault Disney. Disney will sell customizable “themes” for the phones that will include ringtones and wallpapers, the company said. The service will let parents control the numbers their kids can dial and receive calls from. It will also allow parents to track their kids’ locations using GPS technology, Disney said.

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The .mobi domain for mobile phones will open for select registration May 22, registrar Mobile Top Level Domain (mTLD) said Wed. at the CTIA show. “More people have access to an Internet-ready phone than to a PC with Internet access,” mTLD CEO Neil Edwards said, citing research predictions that 1.3 billion people would have Internet-ready mobile devices by 2008. The registrar has issued temporary .mobi names to Newbay, Nokia, TIM, Vodafone and the Weather Channel among others to test its reliability. The GSM Assn., CTIA and the Mobile Mktg. Assn. will help members register their trade and service marks during the sunrise registration period May 22- 29.

Spike TV and Amp'd Mobile will simulcast a live sporting event, they announced this week. The companies said it’s the first live network sports broadcast to mobile devices. Amp'd and Spike TV will broadcast Ultimate Fight Night Live, an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, tonight (Thurs.) at 8 p.m. EST from the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel. The broadcast, which will feature some of the leading ultimate fighters, will be broadcast on Spike TV by cable and satellite, and over Amp'd handsets. Meanwhile, Amp'd mobile will partner with indie music distributor The Orchard, the companies announced Wed. The Amp'd MVNO service will provide music from The Orchard’s 800,000-track catalog, as well as part of its video catalog, some of which the company said hasn’t been released in the U.S.

MSNBC.com will test an ad-subsidized news service for mobile phones, it said Wed. MSNBC.com said the move to broaden its audience will put it ahead of other major U.S. media companies. It’s a 3-month experiment that the company said it hopes to expand into a full service before fall. By paying for the service with short ads, the company hopes to compete with carriers, which charge $10-15 a month for news video updates.

Lucent and IBM announced a partnership on joint IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) technology at CTIA this week. It allows Lucent customers the option of deploying parts of Lucent’s IMS portfolio on the IBM BladeCenter suite of servers. The companies recently announced an effort to develop joint IMS-based solutions to “help accelerate the introduction of new blended services for wireless and wireline carriers.”

Mobile search developer V-Enable launched a service this week that it said will feature mobile information searches in under a sec. with accuracy of over 90%. V-Enable said the technology is aimed at carriers, content providers, and software developers rather than directly at the consumer market.

TV Guide Mobile Entertainment and broadcast software company Roundbox are collaborating on a client and server system for an electronic service guide for mobile TV, the companies said Wed. The service would allow users to navigate various broadcast and unicast networks over a variety of platforms, the companies said. Gemstar-TV Guide, parent company of TV Guide Mobile Entertainment, said the service will capitalize on the company’s long history and access to proprietary content.

Motorola demonstrated its CDMA EVDO solution using a prototype handset for “over-the-air” calls at CTIA this week. The company featured real-time interactive gaming and video/audio streaming applications as well as live VoIP calls over the handset Wed., showcasing its network’s low data latency and high bandwidth.

Nokia’s Services Group unveiled a suite of consultancy services to assist participants in the upcoming FCC auctions of licenses for 1700/2100 MHz and 700 MHz spectrum, it announced this week. The group said its focus would be helping clients form business cases for those bands, including consideration of “service offerings, device types and distribution models, coverage versus capacity requirements, and global technology adaptation rates that would impact how services and devices are rolled out and priced in N. America.”

Sun Microsystems launched a suite of blade servers for telecom customers Wed., which it said offers a choice of processors between Sun’s UltraSparc or Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron processor. Sun said telecom is its largest vertical market, and the new suite is targeted at regular customers like Sony Ericsson and Lucent/Alcatel.

The Mobile DTV Alliance has more than doubled in size since its founding in Jan., the group announced this week. The alliance, which consists of large companies like Microsoft and Intel alongside small companies like Axcera and Modeo, said it will stage a wide array of demonstrations at CTIA this year to highlight the need for broad industry support of DVB-H deployment in N. America.

IP networking firm UTStarcom demonstrated its new line of wireless fixed mobile and broadband solutions at CTIA Wed. UTStarcom also unveiled its compact emergency response communications vehicle for CDMA2000 network coverage in disaster areas.

Verizon Wireless’s V Cast music service now offers over a million songs, the wireless carrier announced at CTIA Wed. The carrier said that gives its users the most choice of any over-the-air music service. It tied the news into a recent announcement by BMI that ring tone sales for 2006 should surpass $600 million.

Mobile content companies WiderThan and Mobile Media Now signed a distribution deal for content delivery in the U.S. and S. Korea, they announced Wed. Mobile Media Now offers sports, automotive and martial arts content. WiderThan has its own music platform.