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Content Tagged with yahoo! + mobile
Can You Hear Me Now? Not So Well In SF, LA & NY
If you are a resident of one of the major US metros - Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco - then there is a good chance you have a love-hate relationship with your mobile carrier. You love your phone, when on rare occasions the calls don’t drop off. And rest of the time you experience mobile rage.
Apparently, there are some places in the US where the phone experience is actually pretty good. The Nielsen Company’s Nielsen Mobile service has released a report that reveals the Top 10 Cities with best voice coverage and wireless data connections. They are not necessarily the same. We put it in a nice handy map for quick referral. No NY, SF, and LA don’t make the list.
Cities with top ten voice networks averaged a 99.2% successful call rate; on average, 0.3% of all calls in these cities were dropped. Among the cities with top ranked 3G data networks, the average download speed for a 4 megabyte (MB) file was 727 kbps—an increase of more than 100 kbps over the top market average measured during the second half of 2006. Nielsen defines a “successful call” as one established and maintained for at least two minutes.
In 2008 when industry is espousing a wireless broadband future, completing and maintaining a phone call for at least 2-minutes is seen as an achievement.. go figure!
Why the GPS Party Is About to End
SiRF Technology (SIRF), a San Jose, Calif.-based maker of GPS chips, this morning said it was cutting jobs and trying to restructure its business due to softening consumer demand. Already the worst performing tech stock for the year, shares of SiRF nosedived in early trading this morning.
“SiRF experienced greater-than-expected softness in product demand from its customers, especially in the PND, or Personal Navigation Devices market,” the company said in a press release.
SiRF is the canary in the GPS coal mine. In other words, the GPS device market has hit the skids and we should expect more bad news, and more dominoes to tumble. Why? Look at SiRF’s customers: Tom Tom, Magellan, NAVIGON, Sony and European white-label GPS maker, Binatone. If the macroeconomic trends are putting a damper on SiRF and its chip-buying posse, it isn’t hard to extrapolate and see trouble for Garmin as well.
Looking further out onto the horizon, I think the standalone GPS device market is going to get cannibalized by mobile phones, which are getting increasingly sophisticated when it comes to personal navigation functionality. GPS devices were among the hottest-selling consumer items this past holiday season, with sales up 214 percent and revenues up 488 percent, respectively, year-over-year.
Indian Cell Population: 246 Million and Counting
The Indian cell-phone boom isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. Indian mobile operators are adding around 8 million new subscribers a month; February’s tally of 8.46 million brings the total to 246 million, making the country second only to China. Sure the ARPUs are low compared to those in the West, but I find it amazing how quickly the market has grown. I remember going there in 2004 and being amazed by the mobile frenzy. At the time, there were 34 million subscribers and hopes of hitting the 100 million-subscriber mark. They are clearly way past that. I wonder, how long can this growth continue? What is the natural limit to the market? Any theories, people? [via Unstrung]
[from bushwald] Yahoo joins the mobile SDK bandwagon at CES
iPhone Interface in JavaScript
David Cann has mocked up an iPhone interface in JavaScript using Yahoo! UI.
His example is just a wrapper around Digg, but you can download the interface and put in your own application.
iPhone Interface in JavaScript
David Cann has mocked up an iPhone interface in JavaScript using Yahoo! UI.
His example is just a wrapper around Digg, but you can download the interface and put in your own application.
