Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Smarter smart phones spell opportunity

We posted a while back on the untapped potential of mobile phones for business communications. Dan Gilmor today reports on an Intel announcement for a "Smart Chip" that could offer True Global Roaming:

"Intel has announced a new chip (Mercury News) that can send and receive signals from a variety of wireless devices -- 'part of the quest to create phones that could roam across different types of networks in any part of the world.'


There will be a big market for this kind of thing (and Intel's far from alone in this arena), becuase of all the different mobile standards. My GSM phone only works in some places, inside and outside the U.S.; I'd like it to work wherever I go.


The true holy grail will come with mesh networks that create themselves on the fly and use Internet backbones for long haul traffic, not requiring the control-freakish mobile carriers' networks at all. Not holding my breath."


(Via Dan Gillmor's blog.)

The potential for being able to roam freely across all of Asia, including Korea and Japan, and, we hope, to switch seamlessly between wi-fi and mobile networks, opens up all sorts of new potential for information products. Tapping more actively into the innovative stream of mobile business that has been developed in Korea would be a boon for everybody....not least the Korean developers.

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