New Ad Campaign by Idea Mobile

Idea Cellular has launched a new campaign in the What an Idea Sirji series. The aim is to boost the Idea VAS. The concept is to promote the use of value added services so that people depend less on paper and help the environment. It is a campaign that will also help other mobile service providers.

The campaign has been developed by Lowe, the creative agency of Idea. The campaign has featured brand ambassador Abhishek Bachchan. The idea is to convince mobile users to make use of the Value Added Services for tasks like reading newspapers, generating and paying bills and a whole lot of other tasks.

Abhishek Bachchan plays the role of tree that has been agonized due to the rampant misuse of the environment. He is conveying the message of going green. If most users decide to change over to mobile applications it will save a lot of paper.

Popularity: 16% [?]

MTS launches mobile internet service in Pune

MTS, the mobile services brand of Sistema Shyam Teleservices Ltd, on Monday launched its mobile internet service in Pune.

With this launch, the internet service MBlaze will be available in 24 towns in the country, including Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bengaluru, MTS said in a statement.

As per the scheme, MTS subscribers in Pune, which is the 11th telecom circle in the country, can get pre-paid high speed data service from Rs2,999 onwards.

Moreover, as an introductory offer subscribers can download 15 GB of data, worth Rs1,500, for free for the first month. No roaming surcharges will be levied while using the MTS network.

Voice services will also be available in Pune and rest of Maharashtra from this month, the statement added.

MTS has over three million telecom subscribers in India and more than 100 million subscribers worldwide.

Vsevolod Rozanov, president and chief executive officer of Sistema Shyam Teleservices said, ” We are committed to enlarge the presence of MTS in urban India, and our presence in Pune, the IT/ITES and education hub of India, reflects this commitment. “

Popularity: 14% [?]

Mozilla to launch web browser for cellphones

Mozilla, the world’s second-largest Internet browser firm, is all set to release its Firefox web browser Fennec for mobile phones next year, in order to compete with existing rivals including Opera Mini, Safari, Chrome, Nokia, Netfront and Internet Explorer for mobile. The war for browser market share is set to be shifted to the mobile market, experts say.

Globally, on the mobile front, Opera commands the largest market share—about 26%, followed by Safari (22%), Nokia web browser (19%) and iTouch (10%). Other web browsers which may face competition from Fennec will be Netfront, Android, Blackberry and Sony PSP.

However, on desktops Mozilla’s Firefox browser commands a global market share of about 25%. Internet Explorer, commands a majority share of almost 63% while Safari has a market share of about 5%. In India, however, Opera is the clear leader on the mobile with a market share of 63%, followed by Nokia at 26%.

The statistics may change next year as Firefox launches Fennec. On the desktop side Firefox has already captured a market share of 30% in India after Microsoft’s Internet explorer which has a market share of 50%.

Indian market is also quick to adopt new technologies. It’s evident from the fact that relatively new Chrome already has a share of about 11% in India, compared to 5%, globally.

Firefox mobile is expected to be available for most open environments like Android, Nokia’s Maemo, Symbian and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. Apple’s Safari for iPhones will however be in safe territory as Fennec may not be available on iPhone.

Fennec is expected to include touchscreen support, pop-up blockers with a tabbrowsing interface. Mozilla’s Fennec may also be available for desktops based on Windows and Linux, but the prime focus of it will be the mobile phone, for which it will be optimised.

The earlier browser wars were fought from 1995 onwards when Internet Explorer made Netscape vanish from the marketplace by its sheer dominance in operating systems. The years following 2000 saw erosion of IE’s market share by Google, Opera and Firefox and extinction of Netscape Navigator.

Microsoft has still got the largest market share on desktops. But mobile phones being a generally non monopolistic environment may see more upheaval.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Google plans big mobile announcement

SEARCH ENGINE BEHEMOTH Google has told hacks to clear their calendars for January 5.

Apparently the outfit wants to hold a briefing about “Android” but is not saying much more.

Word on the street is that Google will announce its own brand smartphone and various software packages that will be available on it and to work with it.

The rumour mill has already turned up word of a “Nexus One” smartphone which, if it is right, will be flogged unlocked for $530 and under a two year contract for $180.

January 5th’s press conference date already tallies with an earlier leak that said that Google would begin selling its own phone on that date.

According Google’s press invitation, the company will hold a press conference at 10am in California on January 5, with “demonstrations” scheduled between 11:30am and 1pm. Which means it will be unlikely to be talking about an Android Roadmap or something esoteric.

Popularity: 9% [?]

New Twitter Mobile Interface Launched

Twitter has introduced a new mobile interface for its site, which will offer Twitter web-like experience covering all the features to the mobile interface. The interface is designed to be compatible with all the OS including iPhone, Android.

The new Twitter Mobile Interface will offer a ‘look and feel’ experience to the Twitter users. The interface is designed to work for BlackBerry browsers except certain features, which won’t work well because of the absence of some of the features in the interface. The users can access the application from http://mobile.twitter.com.

According to the sources, the new interface is designed to replace the existing m.twitter.com. The users can get utmost benefit if they use the application on webkit based mobile browsers.

The latest Twitter application offers three useful buttons like Reply, Retweet and Favorite to provide timely updates. Also, the user can use Home, Mentions, Favs (Favorite), and Msgs options to search for the details. There is the search box to go through the popular trends. Similarly, the user can make the best use of an option put there, which can be helpful to turn off the images to provide a faster reloading of data.

The new mobile interface has a More button instead of the traditional Previous and Forward options to give flexibility to the user. There is a New Update button in iPhone-iPod Touch sets to give a character count.

This new mobile interface is expected to lure the techno-freaks, who opt for being logged on from their mobiles.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Airtel brings Twitter via SMS in India

Soon, the Twitter birdie would be chirping, we mean, tweeting on Indian mobile phones through SMS. Bharti Airtel has got into a four week exclusive deal with Twitter to offer update notifications as SMS to Airtel Subscribers. Twitter is a free micro-blogging service that allows users to update their status messages in 140 characters.

Back in 2008, Twitter was available in India through SMS but the notifications service was discontinued due to high costs. Twitter has been raging mania amongst youngsters just like Orkut of yesteryears. The main attraction is the presence of celebrities and known public figures on Twitter.

Airtel bagged an exclusive four weeks deal with Twitter for sending and receiving updates via SMS. Airtel subscribers can try out the Twitter notifications by sending this shortcode SIGNUP to number 53000. Existing Twitter users who wish to link their Airtel Number to Twitter account need to send START to 53000 for activating their device. More details about Twitter on Airtel can be accessed at this exclusive page – http://airtel.in/twitter/.

New users:
Send SIGNUP to 53000

Existing Twitter Users to link their Device to their account:
Send START to 53000

Twitter is accessible through mobile web over Data connection (GPRS). But the question is why only Airtel? In a blog post at Official Twitter Blog, Biz Stone, Twitter Co-founder said, “We worked quickly to establish full SMS service in India with the largest operator because organic growth in the region has been unusually strong and there is huge potential for positive impact.”

At the moment, Twitter notifications via SMS service is available in U.S., UK, Canada, New Zealand and now in India. So, after the four weeks period, other telecom operators would be able to provide Twitter notifications via SMS to users. Till then, Airtel servers would be bombarded to handle the SMS traffic. If you suffer from SMS congestion, please bear with avid Twitter users. That’s all we got to say.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Twitter to introduce live video-tweeting

Twitter users may soon be posting real-time video tweets in addition to text tweets under plans to modernise the site.

The upgrade, which is being discussed by Twitter’s founders, will enable Twitter users to upload brief video snippets to their profiles directly from mobile phones, laptops and other devices.

Third party sites Twiddeo and Tweetube already allow Twitter users to post video tweets but only by creating links to their sites.

Both Twideo and Tweetube have so far failed to gain as much popularity as similar external service Twitpic.

Twitter’s founders hope by adding live video-tweeting it will help boost its prominence as a fashionable social-networking tool again.

In recent weeks both British singer Lily Allen and Hannah Montana actress Miley Cyrus have snubbed the site by closing their Twitter accounts. Allen’s last tweet read: “I am a neo-Luddite, goodbye.”

Some of Britain’s biggest tweeters include Stephen Fry with 810,000 followers, Sarah Brown, the prime minister’s wife, with 840,000 followers, and rock group Coldplay who have more than two million followers. Sarah Brown’s Twitter following is already believed to be five times larger than the entire membership of the Labour party.

Although many tweets describe mundane activities, the site has played a role in news events. Twitter was an active platform for protesters during the Iranian elections and in January, a ferry passenger was the first person to post pictures of people being rescued from an airliner in New York’s Hudson River.

Twitter has also been used as a campaign tool by Barack Obama and British politicians in support of the NHS.

The site has yet to make a profit or find a way of making money but has been valued at £603m. Twitter has 54 million users around the world every month.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Windows Mobile isn’t dead yet

While most of us have written off Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system, beancounters at Isuppli insist that there is life in the thing yet. Isuppli claims that its use in smartphones will nearly triple by 2013.

While it admitted that the Voleware had dropped to third place as the world’s favoured mobile operating system, Isuppli thinks that it will be in use on 67.9 million smartphones in 2013.

It will only be eclipsed by the Symbian OS, which will still be the world’s leader by a long way. The Vole’s OS will have 15 per cent of the market while Symbian will have 47 per cent.

Still this is optimistic considering that another analyst firm, Gartner claims that Microsoft will pull the plug on Windows Mobile next year.

Palm has already announced it will not use the Windows Mobile OS and will concentrate on its WebOS instead.

Motorola wants to focus on the Android OS, although its enterprise MC9500 handset is still using Windows Mobile.

Isuppli analyst Tina Teng said the loss of Palm and doubts about Motorola are only some of the challenges Windows Mobile faces.

But she said that Windows Mobile can remain competitive, mainly because it supports a broad range of widely-used applications.

The Vole is a bit more helpful to customers who want to customise smartphones and supports software integration. Symbian and Android customisers have to invest in add-on software, she added.

LG also just signed up to use Windows Mobile and plans to make 50 Windows Mobile handsets.

When Windows Mobile 7 hits the shops next year it will have an enhanced user interface and browser as well as multitouch controls. This will give it enough legs to catch up, Teng indicated.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Google Launches Mobile Help Forum

Solve your mobile phone related queries. Got a mobile phone query? Now Google will help you solve it. A brand new platform has been initiated in the form of — Google Mobile Help Forum.

The new forum will address all your mobile phone related questions and you can also help others find the answers to queries.

Some of the new features in the forum are :

- Q&A format to help you find answers quickly
- Improved search and integration with the Google Mobile Help Center
- Better spam detection and prevention
- Public recognition of Top Contributors and frequent posters (with more posting privileges as you make your way up)
- Ability to subscribe to ask questions and receive answers via email

So head to the Google forum or subscribe to the RSS feeds and find answers to your queries.

Popularity: 6% [?]