sylvie barak

A consortium of Bharti Airtel, Cisco, and Servion today announced their foray into the Indian hosted Contact Center services market – valued at $50 million – with the launch of Hosted Contact Center (HCC) services.

The success and profitability of the mobile Internet all hinges on the level of personalization and intelligence it can achieve, according to Amdocs’ director for market development and strategy, Michael Breen.

Every year since the World Cup in 2006, companies have been proclaiming that ‘this year will be the year for mobile TV.’ Yet despite the optimism, Mobile TV doesn’t really seem to have taken the world by storm.

It has apparently been a very good year for Chinese telecom equipment and network provider ZTE. The Chinese firm announced not only had it leapfrogged rival Alcatel Lucent to become the world’s number two fixed broadband infrastructure provider, but also that it had just won a lucrative passive optical network (PON) equipment deal with China Telekom and will partner with Telekom Malaysia

French network operator Bouygues Telecom has selected Bluestreak Technologies Inc’s Flash based MachBlue platform to power the next generation interface of Bouygues’ Bbox IPTV.

Skype believes we are all living in a web of connected devices in an app centric world where phones are no longer phones, but little computers in our pockets.

The World Cup has kicked off and S.Korea is still in the game having scored two goals against Greece on Saturday. But while Korea is scoring on the soccer pitch, its mobile firms are having to play a tough game of defense at home.

Operators should spend more time thinking about that value added service commonly known as voice, according to Bryan Davies, director of marketing Alcatel Lucent, speaking today at CommunicAsia.

You’ve heard of the iPhone, but have you heard of the Y-Phone? Internet portal Yahoo announced at CommunicAsia today that it had teamed up with Alcatel to release a phone dubbed the Alcatel One Touch, with bundled Yahoo content and software the firm hopes will attract mobile internet adopters in Indonesia and other emerging markets throughout Asia.

Speaking at the MEF forum at CommunicAsia Singapore on Tuesday, Amrish Kacker a partner and head of the Asia Pacific office of Analysys Mason predicted apps and app stores still had a world of growth in front of them, especially if apps began coming to mid and low range phones in future.

India’s Bharti Airtel today gave social networking a voice with the official unveiling of Airtel Blog – which it describes as a “unique voice-blogging service.”

The global trade body of mobile media, the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF), sees some clear mobile trends emerging in 2010, including the increasing demand for multiplatform delivery, more data heavy services, micro-payments for content, operator enabled services and rather a lot more.

Big shows are all about emerging industry trends and CommunicAsia in Singapore this week is no exception, with a number of mobile and wireless fads and fashions on the horizon. Of all the hype, however, no trend is so great or prevalent as the mobile video phenomenon, taking Asia and the world by storm.

Starbucks to offer unlimited free Wi-Fi at 6700 US locations starting July 1st announced CEO Howard Schultz today in New York at Wired’s Business Conference “Disruptive by Design.”

Despite the well-publicized spat between Apple and Google, mobile advertising company Smaato’s monthly metrics shows that Symbian devices continue to dominate the US mobile advertising market.

Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) purchased 95% of Infotel Broadband Services Private Ltd for 48,000 crore ($1 billion) on Friday. Earlier that same day, Infotel was announced as the sole winner of a pan-India broadband wireless access (BWA) license for 12,848 crore ($3 billion).

We bring you the roundup of all the important news before the weekend begins

Japanese Nikkei Business Daily reported Friday that Fujitsu Ltd and Toshiba Corp are in the final stages of talks to merge their mobile phone businesses. The combined operation would become Japan’s second largest handset maker after Sharp Corp.

In remarks to Chicago’s Executives Club on Wednesday, CEO of Motorola’s Mobile Devices and home business division Sanjay Jha announced another monster iPhone killer to be available by Christmas.

Short on cash after the latest 3G spectrum auction in India, second place Reliance Communications is looking to shore up assets by approving the sale of a minority stake of up to 26% to investors. Unnamed sources suggest Dubai’s Emirates Telecommunications Corp (known as Etisalat) may buy the shares for $4 billion.

Telecommunications leaders from China and Taiwan met in Beijing on Wednesday and agreed to jointly standardize on Android, WiMax, and TD-LTE (Time-Division Long Term Evolution) among other accords.

Satnav software maker Telmap is a company that clearly knows which direction it’s going in. The privately held white label mapping and navigation firm has recently been undergoing a strategy shift, transforming itself from a subscription company into one offering LBS (location-based services) to operators like the Orange FT Group, Vodafone, Vodacom, SFR, O2, Telefonica, AOL, Pelephone, Carphone Warehouse and more.

Separating work from personal life is certainly something most people would advocate, but when it comes to one’s mobile phone, it isn’t always easy to make the break.