NeoMedia Technologies, Inc (NEOM)

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DD: Sleazy Scambuy again given credit for our tech in 'The Financial Times.'

Reference paragraph bolded.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/b30ab490-5030-11da-bbd7-0000779e2340,ft_acl=,s01=1.html



All ringing, all dancing

By Ben Hunt

Published: November 11 2005 11:55 | Last updated: November 11 2005 11:55


Do you remember your first mobile phone? If you bought it in the mid-1980s, you probably do, as it’s likely you’re still having treatment for the back problems caused by carrying it around. In the very earliest days of cellular communications, the average handset was about the size of a Fiat Panda, and you needed a trailer to haul around the battery.

A decade later, as phones were beginning to deserve the prefix “mobile”, you probably had a “candy bar” phone - from Nokia, Motorola or Sony Ericsson, more than likely - with a rudimentary grey screen and a standard black fascia.

Mine was made by Philips, a candy bar so chunky that it would have caused instant obesity had I chosen to eat it. If I’d had a couple of thousand of them, I could have built a house.

I had cause to remember it recently while at the launch of the Serene, a phone built in partnership by Samsung, a company that’s fast establishing a reputation for mobile phone excellence, and Bang & Olufsen, which is better known for its high-end televisions and audio systems.

The Serene is a bold experiment. It doesn’t look much like a mobile phone. Its curvaceous, sleek, black exterior (with an anodised aluminium hinge no less) screams B&O. But open it up and there’s a circular dial reminiscent of vintage landline handsets and a simple but crystal clear split-screen display - the twist being that the designers have turned convention on its head, with the dial on the upper shell and the screen below. This, according to the press release, “is the best way to hold a small mobile telephone comfortably”. Those convinced by this can buy the Serene for a mere £600.

As Kitae Lee, president of Samsung’s telecommunications business, handed the Serene to me for inspection, my thoughts flashed back to the Philips brick. For all of its clunky awfulness, at the time it was a technological miracle. Just imagine, you could walk down the street and make a call! Sit on the train and make a call! “I’m on the train!” you could say.

But few making their first cellular calls could have envisaged a £600 handset that’s as much objet d’art as it is a telephone with sufficient memory and processing power to store and play a dozen albums, and record moving images. Or that Nokia would become the world’s leading manufacturer (by volume) of cameras.

And in place of that chunky candy bar, there has been an explosion in shapes, sizes, colour, materials and functions. We now have sophisticated handsets with sliding fascias, and all manner of handheld devices with full internet connection and e-mail capability. A quick glance through the most recent Carphone Warehouse marketing magazine reveals a phone for each and every taste. Some are pink; others have flowers on them; one has stainless steel casing; two carry the iconic Walkman tag; cheaper models still resemble the monocolour phones of the mid-1990s, while another comes with the option of a package that turns it into a satellite navigation tool.

“Manufacturers had been trying to take one colour, one design and one form to as many people as possible to save the unit cost, but people’s requirements are becoming diversified,” says Simon Hahm, vice-president and general manager for Europe of LG Electronics’ communications division. “Ladies are raising their voices. They want a phone matching their dress, shoes and handbag. So now manufacturers are making different mobile phones for ladies, teenagers and the elderly.”

At the same time phones are growing both smaller and bigger. Motorola shook up the industry with a wafer-thin model you could lose in your jeans while others are big enough to include a full qwerty keyboard.

In many European markets, there are more handsets than people, which not only suggests that a lot of us own and use two or more phones, but that we are buying new ones in vast quantities. So once you have finished fondly reminiscing about that Motorola StarTac you had 10 years ago, ask yourself: with the options available, what do you want from your next phone? And what might the one you buy in 10 years’ time be able to do?

Whatever else it might be, it’ll still be a phone, according to Jan Wareby, executive vice-president and head of sales and marketing at Sony Ericsson. “Even when we look at the market of advanced consumers who are interested in the latest features and functionality, from our point of view our products are phones, and the success of the business, whatever type of functionality you put in, rests on whether it works as a phone,” he says.

This may sound obvious, but it strikes at the very heart of the debate about what, and how many, gadgets people will carry with them in the future. The BlackBerry, for example, has built an untouchable reputation for its mobile e-mail service, but has recently been criticised for the quality of its voice connection forcing many users to carry two devices.

And for all the gold struck by Apple with its iPods; and for all the success of digital cameras in all but eradicating magnetic tape devices, their tens of millions of sales pale by contrast to the billion-plus mobiles in circulation worldwide.

The communications tool is king - all that remains to be decided is the combination of add-ons that will be welded on to it and whether other devices such as digital cameras and MP3 music players can withstand what seems an inevitable onslaught on their markets.

That clash of devices was made inevitable at the turn of the century, when the wireless communications industry took a multi-billion-dollar gamble that their systems would be more than a mere pipe for carrying conversation. They paid extravagant sums for licences that would give them the radio spectrum to launch 3G, a new “third” generation of services - pictures, video, gaming, instant messaging, e-mail, internet connectivity and everything else bar the kitchen sink - which consumers who would clamour to have and would pay handsomely for. Since then they have paid even more to roll out the necessary infrastructure to support these services.

But so far the public - in Europe and the US at least - has remained distinctly underwhelmed. Ben Wood, mobile telecommunications analyst at research house Gartner, says that while the market for upgraded replacement phones is healthy, so far people are not buying them for reasons that suggest they are about to adopt new services. “They are now such a central part of society, it’s become fashion as much as function - it’s now almost shameworthy to have a clunky brick. It’s almost got to the point that without a cool phone you’re nobody. But as yet none of the reasons beyond its basic function are making people buy phones. One possible exception to that was the colour screen, but cameras, music and these other things have not delivered,” he says.

But Wood, a great enthusiast, perhaps even an obsessive, about the industry (to the extent that he has a personal collection of handsets that he admits runs into the hundreds) says that there is some evidence that the mobile market has reached a point where the multi-purpose multimedia phone is fit for use.

“We are now seeing the emergence of the ‘Swiss army knife’ phones that do everything. And the one out there doing the best job is Sony Ericsson’s Walkman-branded W800 music phone, with a two mega-pixel camera, a cool funky design and a good voice experience in one package,” he says.

What’s particularly clever about the W800 is that from the front it’s clearly a phone, yet viewed from behind it looks like a camera, while the cream and burnt gold finish yells Walkman cool. And - an encouraging sign for the rest of the industry as much as for Sony Ericsson - it is a hit in the shops.

If the W800, and similarly versatile handsets such as Motorola’s Rokr (which features Apple’s excellent iTunes software) can begin to demonstrate that mobile phones are no longer merely phones. They may begin to usher in a whole host of new possibilities.

Technologically, almost anything seems possible.

David Wood, executive vice-president of research at Symbian, an industry-owned software company that builds operating systems on which multimedia smartphones rest, says its customers are demanding more sophisticated software. “They are looking for richer functionality packaged more conveniently - to get more software packed into less hardware,” he says.

And to see the future of this richer functionality, it has become necessary to look to Japan and Korea, markets where the adoption of multimedia services has been more enthusiastic than in the laggard text-message-and-voice cultures of the west.

David Wood has been particularly impressed with technologies from Japan that have the potential to threaten even the humble wallet with extinction. “Japan has done interesting things with what we call ‘near-field communications’. I have previously written about the Selica chips in some handsets in Japan enabling mobile payment for goods. Well, the next thing happening is the Toreca. It is the same chip but has evolved to capture information for products as well as buying them. So, if you are in a shop and want some more information about the CD playing, you wave your phone in front of a sensor and get the details beamed back into your phone.

“Another variant of this is Scanbuy, which uses the camera feature so when in a shop if you take a photo of a barcode it will do a price check by consulting an online database and tell you to buy the item cheaper at another store.”

These technologies already exist and are in commercial operation. Mobile television, too, is beginning to generate a great deal of excitement as it slowly emigrates from Korea and Japan towards Europe - Samsung’s Kitae Lee even speaks confidently about building handsets with satellite reception, a vision that 10 years ago would have conjured images of users wandering around with dishes on their baseball caps. And while television might not be proven commercially, it represents no great technological leap forward any more.

Peering into the future to see what might follow is more difficult, of course. David Wood likens the industry’s future development to a game of chess: only the smallest handful of grandmasters can see more than the next five moves ahead. Jan Wareby admits to having little idea of what the must-have handset of 2015 will look like or do, but says, “it will be obvious with hindsight”.

Simon Hahm is prepared to venture one outlandish guess at least: “If I really knew, I would be delighted. But maybe people will listen to their music through the phone, not through the ear but rather through the hand with their vibrating skeleton.”

If that sounds extreme, think back to your Fiat Panda and try to imagine what your response would have been if someone had told you that one day you’d be using a version of the same device (only about 10 times smaller) to record full colour videos of your children building sandcastles and send them to their grandparents on another continent.

Now that really was far-fetched.