China latest 3G subs

China 3G Subscribers reaching 159 Million.

April 2012 new 3G subs
China Unicom: +2.9M
China Mobile: +2.3M
China TeleCom: +2.0M

Link

Mobile payment challenges

Saw quite a bit of news on the mobile payment front the past couple of weeks. AT&T, VZN and TMO form a new venture called ISIS. According to a blogger for WSJ, there are still significant challenges.

Merchant fees paid on credit-, debit-, and charge card transaction totalled $62 billion last year. The bulk of that goes back to banks issuing credit and debit cards. Phone companies are not likely to take credit risk involved in issuing cards. So Visa and MasterCard are most vulnerable to competition. They both generated $7 billion in total US revenue last year. Adding NFC tags a $200 reader to the merchants according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's estimate.

4G opportunities

There are new application models will be emerged or enhanced with the 4G deployment. Noticeable is VZN and ATT's 700MHz deployment. In addition, 4G (LTE) has the following advantages: High Peak Rate, Low Latency, Spectral Efficiency (5Mhz to 20 Mhz).

source: link

Video cost per wireless technology

An interesting analysis of cost of delivering video technology over 3G vs 4G.

The journey of an app and its developer.

Source: link

Barcode scanning way up

According to this blog, ScanBuy published an very interesting usage report. Barcode scanning is up 700% from the beginning of this year. 1D and 2D split of all code scanned. Surprisingly, Android took the top OS (wonder if it is just their app has more download in the Android platform).

80% of the US smartphone users indicated that they like to scan barcodes.

Their report can be found here.

AdMob chief quits Google

Omar Hamoui started out to build a cell phone photo sharing social site. Then he realized the business had too high customer acquisition cost. He also realized that the advertising cost was the main factor. He then went out to create a solution to aggregate the ad for mobile. Within 3 years, adMob became a multi-million business and the eventual acquisition by Google. A good read and interview with the ex-CEO is here. In the article, he and another early employee shared some learn lessons during the process.

Giayee?

Found this chinese OEM/ODM through LinkedIn. Android handset experience. 80 engineers located in ShenZhen.

Wonder how many of this type of companies are there in China? The barrier to entry for making a handset like this is so low that a lot of them can easily create a device in less than 6 months with no more than 20-30 ppl. I believe the differentiators will be focused on software in the near term. How many of these will eventually survive the shape up.... time will tell.