The GSMA announced the winners of the coveted Global Mobile Awards at the 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This year the new two-part format comprised an afternoon awards presentation hosted by writer, actor and self-confessed technophile Stephen Fry, followed by an evening celebration party where winners were entertained with a showcase set from one of the world’s most famous and successful bands, Duran Duran.

“A remarkable 500 entries from across the global mobile ecosystem were submitted this year, all of an extremely high calibre, and the winners should be incredibly proud of their achievements,” said Rob Conway, CEO and Member of the Board, GSMA. “The demand for new ways to use mobile technology continues to evolve and accelerate at a breathtaking speed, and it is genuinely inspiring to see such inventive thinking and exciting ideas showcased at Mobile World Congress.”

The awards presentation included the winners of 19 categories, covering Mobile Marketing and Advertising, Best Mobile Contribution to Social and Economic Development, the Green Mobile Awards, Mobile Personality of the Year, Mobile Innovation and Mobile Entertainment and at the evening event two highlight awards were presented, the Best Mobile Handset and the Chairman’s Award for outstanding contribution to the growth and success of the mobile industry.

The GSMA, which represents the interests of the worldwide mobile communications industry, and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, a charity that supports women entrepreneurs today published ‘Women and Mobile: A Global Opportunity’.

The report, the first detailed global study of its kind, attempts to understand the nature of women mobile subscribers in low and middle-income countries such as Kenya and India, and highlights the barriers facing women’s adoption of mobile technologies. It also shows that, by extending the benefits of mobile phone ownership to more women, a host of social and economic goals can be advanced. The report reveals for the first time the extent of the gender gap in mobile usage in many low and middle-income countries. It shows that a woman in a low or middle-income country is 21% less likely to own a mobile phone than a man. Closing this gender gap would bring the benefits of mobile phones to an additional 300 million women, empowering and enabling them to stay better connected with family and friends, improving their safety, and helping them obtain paid work, in line with the third UN Millennium Development Goal on gender equality. The mobile phone as documented in the report is an effective productivity and development tool which creates education, health, employment, banking and business opportunities.

15 February 2010, Barcelona: The GSMA today announced it has adopted the work of the One Voice Initiative* to drive the global mobile industry towards a standard way of delivering voice and messaging services for Long-Term Evolution (LTE). The GSMA’s Voice over LTE (VoLTE) initiative has the backing of more than 40 organisations from across the mobile ecosystem, including many of the world’s leading mobile operators, handset manufacturers and equipment vendors, all of whom support the principle of a single, IMS-based voice solution for next-generation Mobile Broadband networks.

15 February 2010, Barcelona: The GSMA today announced several important updates to its Embedded Mobile initiative, a programme to accelerate the global adoption of wireless connectivity in a wide range of devices in key vertical markets such as consumer electronics, healthcare, automotive and utilities. First, the GSMA has published a set of industry guidelines to reduce design complexity and fragmentation, to in turn deliver cost-effective modules for the embedded mobile market. In a second development, the GSMA has announced a partnership with the Continua Health Alliance, a non-profit, open industry organisation of healthcare and technology companies, to promote innovation and drive the use of embedded mobile solutions in healthcare. Finally, the GSMA has announced the winners of its Embedded Mobile Competition, for the best device and the best end-to-end service.

15 February 2010, Barcelona: Twenty-four leading telecommunications operators have formed the Wholesale Applications Community, an alliance to build an open platform that delivers applications to all mobile phone users. América Móvil, AT&T, Bharti Airtel, China Mobile, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, KT, mobilkom austria group, MTN Group, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Orascom Telecom, Softbank Mobile, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telenor Group, TeliaSonera, SingTel, SK Telecom, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, VimpelCom, Vodafone and Wind are committed to create an ecosystem for the development and distribution of mobile and internet applications irrespective of device or technology. Together, these operators have access to over three billion customers around the world. The GSMA and three of the world’s largest device manufacturers – LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson – also support this initiative. The Wholesale Applications Community aims to unite a fragmented marketplace and create an open industry platform that benefits everybody – from applications developers and network operators to mobile phone users themselves. The alliance’s stated goal is to create a wholesale applications ecosystem that – from day one – will establish a simple route to market for developers to deliver the latest innovative applications and services to the widest possible base of customers around the world.Leer más

15 February 2010, Barcelona: The GSMA today reported significant progress with its Rich Communication Suite (RCS) initiative, a service that provides mobile operators with a feature-rich portfolio of interoperable communication services, enabling customers to access a wide range of advanced messaging applications direct from their handset’s contact list. The initiative is now supported by more than 90 leading organisations from across the mobile industry and has gained considerable momentum across a number of areas, including the launch of a pilot in Japan with five leading operators; the delivery of the RCS Release 3 specifications*; the winners of the GSMA’s DevChallenge competition; and demonstrations of RCS at the Mobile World Congress.

“The pilot in Japan and the momentum we are seeing sends out a clear message on the market potential and the willingness of mobile operators to launch next-generation multimedia services,” said Michael O’Hara, Chief Marketing Officer at the GSMA. “Users want to be able to access and share rich content between their mobile phones and their PCs, and RCS enables this through a variety of interoperable and feature-rich applications. In Japan especially, where mobile messaging is very popular, RCS will offer a value-added communications tool to consumers already used to innovative services.”

15 February 2010, Barcelona: Today the GSMA, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Telefónica, and Visa, together with Giesecke & Devrient, Ingenico, ITN International and La Caixa, announced the arrival of contactless mobile payments at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year. The companies unveiled the result of months of collaboration and have brought the first ever SIM-based NFC payments pilot to Mobile World Congress.

The participating companies have provided more than 400 NFC handsets to guests for use at the Congress. The Samsung Star NFC handsets contain Telefónica SIM cards from O2 pre-loaded with €60 airtime credit as well as a La Caixa Visa Mobile Payment Application. Participants can use their NFC phones to pay for food and drink up to a value of €75 at over 30 merchant locations around the Congress.

“It is a fantastic achievement to bring a full payment trial to Mobile World Congress and a testament to the hard work of the partners that this cross-industry collaboration has worked so well,” said Michael O’Hara, Chief Marketing Officer at the GSMA. “Mobile operators have been requesting SIM-based NFC handsets for some time now and it’s great to see such progress in this area. Now that the handsets are coming, we can expect to see a number of commercial launches of mobile SIM-based NFC services this year.”

28 January 2010, Barcelona: The GSMA today revealed exciting new developments in its inaugural App Planet event being held at the 2010 Mobile World Congress. The GSMA announced that Google and Motorola will each hold application developer conferences (ADC) within App Planet, bringing the total number of individual ADCs at Mobile World Congress to six. The GSMA also announced that it is partnering with Berkeley Mobile International Collaborative to launch the global “University Mobile Challenge”, a competition designed to spur mobile application development and innovation at the university level. Leer más