ATLANTA—Atlanta-based Air2Web, whose Mobile Internet Platform lets companies extend enterprise applications to any wireless device, has closed a $20 million round of venture-capital financing and expects an additional $5 million later this month, the company said Oct. 9.Participants in this third round of funding...
BEIJING—The Japanese electronics company Kyocera and China Zhenhua (Group) Technologies signed an agreement to set up a joint venture to produce mobile-phone handsets in China's southwestern Guizhou province.Registered capital will be US$14.89 million, of which Kyocera holds 70 percent. The company plans to manufacture...
TOKYO, Japan—Phone vendor Mitsubishi Electric said it is pulling out of the cell-phone business in the United States as well as closing its sales offices all over North America.Sharp, however, said it may begin manufacturing mobile phones for other companies with a view to...
BEIJING—Japan's Hitachi is negotiating with China's Hisense Group to set up a mobile handset manufacturing joint venture in China in the second half of the year. In September last year, Hitachi already agreed to provide technology to the Hisense Group.Japanese competitors Matsushita and Mitsubishi...
While Nokia Corp. is the hands-down leader for mobile handsets shipped in the United States, the handset giant only holds a 7-percent market share for CDMA phones sold in the country last year, according to the recently released Gartner-Dataquest Full Year 2000 report.Nokia holds...
As a counterfoil to a slackening economy, chip makers are striking up alliances, shrinking their product sizes and paring down prices to differentiate themselves in the face of layoffs, reduced spending and plant shutdowns.Some of the alliances are between NEC Corp. and Taiwanese Semiconductor...
TOKYO-Amid harsh competition among mobile carriers, Japanese cellular handsets have been evolving rapidly. Most handsets currently used are light, tiny, fashionable and smart. Internet-ready capabilities and color screens are almost standard functions.NTT DoCoMo is selling only i-mode-enabled handsets, all J-Phone's handsets have color screens...
Major hardware and software vendors are teaming up to reinforce their strengths and shore up their weaknesses as the wireless industry marches to the third-generation of Internet services.Involved in marriages and talks of marriages are Nokia Corp., Lucent Technologies Inc., Nortel Networks, Mitsubishi Electric...
Monopoly claims on Microsoft Corp. might go out the window in the wireless space as major vendors, developers and operators expect to leverage both the software giant's .NET and Java 2 Enterprise Edition platforms for third-generation Web services, according to industry watchers."The evolution to...
WASHINGTON-While the wireless industry steadfastly maintains the safety of cell phones, top mobile-phone manufacturers during the past decade have quietly sought-and received-patents to reduce the kind of radiation absorbed by the human head that some research suggests could be linked to brain cancer and...
As wireless technologies wax stronger in the market, established wireline corporations such as IBM Corp., Cisco Systems and Microsoft Corp. are learning to leverage both divisions as a fruitful business model.The corporations have been churning out a series of products and solutions ranking them...
Top players in both the vendor and carrier space are pitching in to advance GAIT-GSM ANSI Interoperability Team-a new network standard that fuses TDMA and GSM technologies to enhance roaming, preserve TDMA and serve as an interim solution in the sojourn to the third-generation...
BUCHAREST, Romania-Streaming video is a technology that is often mentioned in conjunction with third-generation (3G) networks, but users may see its possibilities sooner than 3G network rollouts.Streaming media is the ability to receive video alerts, wireless games, short video clips, and news and sports...
Siemens AG is eliminating 6,100 jobs from its mobile handset and network operations. The German telecom equipment and handset company, which shied away from offering its earnings picture for the second half of the year, said 2,600 jobs would be cut from the mobile-handset...
The alliance between Sony Corp. of Japan and L.M. Ericsson of Sweden is giving the two companies hope they have a chance to trump Nokia Corp. as the supreme player in the mobile- phone market. But similar alliances in the past have been failures.After...
Sony of Japan is holding talks with Sweden's L.M. Ericsson on merging their handset divisions, hinting at what some analysts perceive as a possible trend in the industry.Both companies recoiled from revealing details on the talks, a deal from which would promise to leverage...
Microsoft Corp. threw its rather large hat in the wireless arena at last week's 3GSM World Congress, announcing plans to launch software aimed at multimedia-enabled phones that leverage its Windows-based software.Microsoft said the smart phone platform, code named "Stinger," is built on a version...
Streaming content onto wireless devices seems like a perfect match of technology. Without the hard drive space required to download and save large files, streaming content to wireless devices is a good way for wireless customers to experience large data files.PacketVideo Corp. has jumped...
NEW YORK-Borrowing the vernacular of a traffic engineer, a financier compared the current capital market conditions for telecommunications companies to rush-hour congestion, but observed that the tie-up looks like it is slowly beginning to clear.Investors still are sorting out a host of concerns that...
Like the harmony of opposites, caution and adventure characterize the journey to the wide-scale rollout of GPRS. Vendors are playing starry-eyed idealists while operators are avoiding a possible precipice on board the chief migration vehicle: handsets.In view of their contrasting attitudes, operators' low blood pressure...
DENVER, United States-Like the harmony of opposites, caution and adventure characterize the journey to the wide-scale rollout of General Packet Radio Service (GPRS). Vendors are playing starry-eyed idealists, while operators are avoiding a possible precipice on board the chief migration vehicle: handsets.In view of their...
Band-XStephen Beynon was hired as Band-X's new chief executive officer. He was previously in a management position in the data and business services division of Cable & Wireless Optus.ElectrofuelPatrick R. McCool was appointed the vice president of sales for Electrofuel Inc. He was previously...
NEW YORK-Tokyo-based Mitsubishi Materials Corp. has established offices here to prepare for a 2001 commercial launch of its SWIFTcomm data platform, which it believes is a low-cost challenger to third-generation wireless services.SWIFTcomm, which stands for Smart Wireless Internet Field Teamwork Communications, will permit error-free...
NEW YORK-Mobileum, a Pleasanton, Calif., start-up, has filed for nine patents and received $45 million in first-round venture funding for its system to simplify communications between corporate enterprises and their mobile workers.The company's software platform approach to linking corporate intranets with their employees' wireless...
