InfoCom says Asia driving mobile innovations

Oct. 13, 2009 - PRLog -- Manila, Philippines — Asian mobile carriers are frontrunners as of mobile innovative services. Some new, interesting services are based on Near Field Communications (NFC) technology and telematics.

The Malaysian provider Maxis, for instance, introduced a new service called FastTap, allowing subscribers to pay for commercial transactions, parking and toll fees using Visa payWave by waving their enabled phones in front of a contact-less reader. The service uses NFC technology embedded in Nokia 6212 Classic handsets and Visa PayWave readers to transmit data between the two devices. Users need to sign up for a 12 or 24-month contract at Maxis FastTap selected outlets in order to activate the service, which can be used in over 1 800 Visa payWave merchant locations and more than 3 000 Touch ‘n Go points in Malaysia.

Another interesting mobile application is Mobile in Vehicle (MIV), a service introduced by the South Korean carrier SK Telecom. This telematics service enable users to remotely control vehicles using their mobile phone. The main features include vehicle diagnosis and control, vehicle monitoring and tracking in case of theft, route guidance based on real-time information from mobile networks, play music or video on the car radio or TV directly from the mobile phone. SK Telecom expects the communications and automobile convergence service market to reach 10.9 billion euros by 2010 and plans to enter partnerships with car manufacturers worldwide to pre-install the MIV service in vehicles.

Innovations Spotlights by InfoCom also include:
-- Further development of MIV technology and services are due to improve fuel efficiency, create optimal driving environment and wireless networking for vehicles to connect with each other.
- Interesting m-commerce applications, such as Unilever’s trials for coupons using mobile barcodes and mobile broadband services such as Vodafone’s dual delivery (to mobile phones and computers) of DRM free music content.

About this research — This research is available in the Emerging Markets & Products module of InfoCom Knowledge Centre. This module — one of six — gathers InfoCom expertise in researching emerging markets, with a huge amount of indicators and strategic insights on a large number of markets, with the usual InfoCom reliability. Country dashboards for markets like Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Pakistan, Syria, United Arab Emirates and Vietnam are inside. This module includes also strategic insights on innovative and new, emerging products, available from InfoCom research activities, such as mobile TV, eNewspapers, Cloud gaming as many others.

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InfoCom is a market research and consultancy company with almost 20 years experience providing strategic analyses and planning assistance to stakeholders in the telecommunications, IT and multimedia industries.