Handango Inc. announced an expansion of its distribution deal with Best Buy Co. Inc. that will see the big-box retailer selling smartphone applications through its in-store Mobile Genie system.Best Buy Mobile customers will be offered a catalog of business and enterprise applications for BlackBerry,...
Best Buy Co. Inc. has recently taken a deeper step into the wireless industry. The retailer sells 90 different handsets from nine different carriers in its stores and recently began opening standalone Best Buy Mobile stores. The company also completed a mobile life survey...
The wireless industry is clearly a money-making field and everyone's trying to get their hands on a piece of it, especially big box retailers. Establishments such as Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Circuit City and Radio Shack have been acting as third-party retailers for carriers...
PlayPhone Inc. notched its fourth and final major record label, securing a deal to distribute mastertones from Universal Music Group.A division of Vivendi, UMG claims nearly 20 subsidiary labels and artists such as 50 Cent, Kanye West, Mariah Carey, The Killers and U2. PlayPhone...
Best Buy is surely hoping to give its digital-music business a boost with last week's acquisition of Napster Inc. But what it might mean for mobile music is far from clear.The big-box retailer agreed to pay $121 million for the once-iconic song distributor and...
Best Buy Co. Inc. moved more aggressively into the content-distribution arena, agreeing to pay $121 million to pick up the subscription-based online and mobile music company Napster.The big-box retailer said it will pay $2.65 per share in cash for Napster and its 700,000 subscribers....
Apple Inc. and AT&T Mobility just added nearly another 1,000 retail outlets for the iPhone 3G by hooking up with big-box retailer Best Buy. That's likely to gin up iPhone sales, boost AT&T Mobility's fortunes and probably anger some of AT&T Mobility's other independent...
A couple years ago, starting your very own mobile virtual network operations company was a sizzling hot idea and everybody was trying to cash in. But now, two years and a slue of MVNO closings later, the idea has fizzled. With the shut downs...
LAS VEGAS - The growing importance of wireless in the general telecom space was evident during this morning's keynote session at the NXTcomm08 trade show here, as AT&T Inc. chief Randall Stephenson referred to the recently introduced Apple Inc. 3G iPhone numerous times in...
Disaster reliefVerizon Wireless launched a program designed to make it easy for its customers to donate to disaster relief efforts targeted at China and Myanmar. The program allows postpaid customers to send a text message to the shortcode 4SAVE with the key word "quake"...
The simple banner ad: Those tiny little slivers of real estate on tiny little cellphone screens produce the same level of brand recall as a 30-second television commercial, a Verizon Wireless ad exec said last week. Speaking at a wireless ad conference in Los...
Best Buy Co. Inc. is stepping up its European cellphone business to the tune of $2.14 billion.The big-box U.S. retailer said it will acquire a 50% stake in The Carphone Warehouse Group plc's mobile retail operations, creating a joint project that will launch Best...
Sprint Nextel Corp. said nothing substantial about its WiMAX plans yesterday and instead fell back on a new touchscreen device as the biggest news to share with a room packed full of invited press and analysts.There's no doubt the company and its new chief,...
If you think you're seeing Bluetooth headset advertisements everywhere, offering a bewildering array of styles and functionality from innumerable companies, you're spot on. The growth of mobile multimedia - driven in part by a shift in emphasis by network operators' pursuit of data-related revenues...
Once-beleaguered RadioShack Corp. - which sells wireless devices and services for AT&T Mobility and Sprint Nextel Corp., as well as a handful of prepaid providers - saw its stock soar more than 22% after reporting a rise in net income for the fourth quarter...
Once-beleaguered RadioShack Corp. - which sells wireless devices and services for AT&T Mobility and Sprint Nextel Corp., as well as a handful of prepaid providers - saw its stock soar more than 22% today after reporting a rise in net income for the fourth...
Editor's Note: Welcome to On the Margins, a feature for RCR Wireless News' new weekly e-mail service, Mobile Content and Culture. Every week, the RCR Wireless News staff considers events in the wider business world and how they could affect the wireless industry. --Peer-to-peer...
Just in time for the holiday shopping season, tween-focused mobile virtual network operator kajeet Inc. announced a new line-up of handsets as well as an expanded retail effort. The MVNO's new handsets include the Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. m300, an $80 phone available in...
With music and imaging an increasing aspect of mobile phones' feature sets-the engines driving network operators' ARPU growth-more than 50% of this year's $32 billion in worldwide accessory revenue will come from multimedia-related memory cards, headsets and data connection kits, according to data from...
"There are so many channels of distribution in the U.S. market," said Mark Howell, Co-COO Brightpoint Inc., President Americas, the world's largest independent distributor of handsets. Indeed, Howell should know, he oversees the distribution of cellphones from coast to coast, and provides products to...
It was loud and frequent complaints-"I'd rather make a trip to the dentist than shop for a wireless phone"-that ultimately led to the creation of Best Buy Mobile, a joint venture between the mammoth U.S. electronics retailer and European cellphone vendor Carphone Warehouse. In...
Amp'd Mobile Inc. blamed its rapid growth, back-office systems and collection problems as the reasons for its need to reorganize under Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and said that nearly half of its youthful customer base were not paying their bills by early 2007, according to...
Best Buy Co. Inc. has expanded its mobile retail experiment, bringing on additional wireless-only retail locations beyond the initial test market in New York City.Best Buy Mobile started out with 13 stand-alone and store-within-a-store locations in the New York metro area, and now plans...
Editor's Note: Welcome to our Monday feature, Analyst Angle. We've collected a group of the industry's leading analysts to give their outlook on the hot topics in the wireless industry. In the coming weeks look for columns from Compete's Miro Kazakoff, Jupiter Research's Julie...
