I never thought I would write those words, but there it is. Just a few years ago, Nokia was lapping its competitors. Now it’s exiting. How evanescent is market leadership in ICTs? Beleaguered Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia will sell its mobile phone unit to US group Microsoft for 5.
Causation is a central concern of science. In closed systems such as those found in Chemistry and Physics, this is generally not too difficult. In open systems such those that we work on (i.e., telecom use) it is a tremendously difficult problem because multiple factors are at work at the same time and interacting with each other and with the phenomenon we’re trying to establish the cause for.
Writing a piece on the technological challenges that had to be overcome to increase connectivity in the 49 least developed countries (LDCs) recently, I was struck by how many words I devoted to electricity, both on the need for keeping down the costs of network equipment and for powering handsets. In the old days, we assumed that the footprint of the electricity network was larger than that of the telecom network; now it is the other way around. What is interesting is that the trigger for getting the USD 80 solar generator in the story below was the phone: For Sara Ruto, the desperate yearning for electricity began last year with the purchase of her first cellphone, a lifeline for receiving small money transfers, contacting relatives in the city or checking chicken prices at the nearest market. Charging the phone was no simple matter in this farming village far from Kenya’s electric grid. Every week, Ms.
It was impossible not to notice the dramatic changes in the mobile handset market in the past few years, with new brands coming up and putting pressure on the old warhorses. Who was responsible? Vijay Govindarajan gives the credit to MediaTek in his guest blog at Harvard Business Review. Both Vijay and MediaTek are worth keeping an eye on. MediaTek’s strategists and engineers figured out a way to design a much less expensive phone system.
We’ve been saying that the screen in the hand will win over the screen on the desk for sometime. So it is with pleasure that we note the big boys are coming to the same position. Chattertrap has already caught the eye of Li Ka-shing, a Chinese billionaire who has invested in Facebook and the music-streaming service Spotify. Mr. Li recently led a $1.