Big news from the UK this morning: Vodafone, one of Europe’s biggest mobile operators, has made a formal offer to buy up the assets of Cable & Wireless Worldwide for £1 billion ($1.7 billion), a deal that catapults Vodafone into running its own fixed line network in the UK and specifically will give it a much bigger view to winning enterprise business — a big challenge to BT and a mark of further consolidation in the space.
Cable & Wireless, first founded in the nineteeth century and one of the biggest operators in Europe, has fallen on hard times more recently and has run through three chief executives since a restructuring in 2010.
The deal will make Vodafone the UK’s second-largest operator, with £7 billion ($10.5 billion) in annual revenue. → Read More
Vodaphone and Canonical today announced the Vodacom “Webbook”, the fruit of a joint effort to develop a low-cost mobile computing solution for South Africa. Most of the specs are about what you’d expect for such a device, with one extremely interesting twist: it’s powered by a Freescale IMX 51 processor (Cortex A8) CPU in order to lower cost and power consumption. This represents the first mainstream consumer Linux distribution built for the ARM platform. → Read More
Vodafone. It’s a brand that most folks here in the states would, at first pass, almost certainly chalk up as “that one European company that puts their name on a bunch of football soccer jerseys” — that is, if they recognized it at all.
And yet, Vodafone is essentially the biggest wireless carrier in the world. They’re the top carrier by revenues, and second to only China Mobile by subscribers. Oh, and they own 45% of Verizon. In other words, they’re kind of a big deal — and now they’re lookin’ to get in on some of that Silicon Valley action.
This evening, Vodafone is opening the doors to the Vodafone Xone (the sign store ran out of Z’s, so they just rolled with it.) Xone is a brand new research and development center in Redwood City which will serve as, amongst other things, a means of assessing potential investments for their Vodafone Ventures group. → Read More
The European Commission yesterday granted French entertainment and telecommunication services conglomerate Vivendi approval for its acquisition of Vodafone’s 44% stake in SFR, the company announced this morning. The transaction, which is valued at 7.95 billion euros (roughly $11.5 billion), should be completed in the next few days.
Vivendi will then own 100 percent of SFR, a French mobile phone and Internet services company with over 20 million customers and more than 12,6 billion euros in revenue for 2010. → Read More
Emerging markets need the Internet. Whether they’re looking up commodity prices or contacting loved ones overseas, users in developing countries like South Africa and Ghana need a way to get online and this unique device from Vodafone looks like a logical and quite elegant way to do just that. The device is a keyboard with a standard set of RCA cables sprouting out of the back. You plug it into any TV, new or old, and turn it on. Instantly you have 2G or 3G access to an Opera Mini browser, locally relevant news, as well as games, a dictionary, and a text editor. Instead of a PC, a user would plug this in and use it as necessary, downloading data at 90% compression. → Read More
I was in Amsterdam late last week to sit on the jury for Vodafone’s Mobile Clicks startup competition, and I saw four genuinely great fledgling companies strut their stuff.
In the end, plastic card-killing startup Cardmobili came out victorious – they won both the €100,000 1st place prize and the public voting award – more on them below.
Runner-up and winner of €50,000 was the UK’s RouletteCricket, a so-called ‘2nd screen gaming’ service provider that gives fans a new way to engage with cricket games. → Read More
I was in Amsterdam late last week to sit on the jury for Vodafone’s Mobile Clicks startup competition, and I saw four genuinely great fledgling companies strut their stuff.
In the end, plastic card-killing startup Cardmobili came out victorious – they won both the €100,000 1st place prize and the public voting award – more on them below.
Runner-up and winner of €50,000 was the UK’s RouletteCricket, a so-called ‘2nd screen gaming’ service provider that gives fans a new way to engage with cricket games. → Read More
Vodafone has announced the four finalists of its Mobile Clicks competition to find the best mobile Internet start-ups based in either Spain, The Netherlands, Portugal or the UK. The shortlist includes startups working on field-worker remote reporting; mobile loyalty cards; mobile application “lifecycle management” and so-called ‘2nd screen’ gaming, where you interact with your mobile in conjunction with watching sport through a different medium, such as TV or in person. → Read More
Vodafone has launched Mobile Clicks 2010, a competition to identify and reward innovative mobile Internet startups. Now in its third year, the competition will be open to any fledgling mobile Web startup – provided your market is The Netherlands, Portugal or the UK.
Vodafone has set aside a prize fund of €150,000 (2/3 of which will go to the overall winner, the remaining €50,000 to the runner-up), based on these five criteria: originality, creativity and innovation; technical and operational feasibility; economic and financial viability; value to end-users; and the quality of the management team.
Startups can apply here until midnight, August 22nd, 2010. → Read More
You can’t blame Vodafone for wanting developers to jump on its mobile platform, and a good old-fashioned developer competition with cold hard cash up for grabs is as good a way as any.
Yet I’m not sure a slideshow widget for Flickr is quite the winner they had in mind when they decided to launch the Vodafone App Star competition and put €1m of prize money behind it.
But that’s exactly how it’s tuned out. → Read More
We’re not always convinced by the developer initiatives of mobile operators but we can’t argue with a good old fashioned mobile app competition when there’s cold hard cash up for grabs.
Enter Vodafone’s AppStar, which today announced the regional winners in its Europe-wide competition, each of whom have already bagged €25,000. They’ll now go head-to-head against the seven other country winners in a public vote to decide the overall winner of the competition and claim a total prize of €100,000. Not bad for writing a few lines of code. (I’m joking, of course.) → Read More
[UK] Brits can now get their hands on Google’s so-called ‘superphone’ for an upfront cost of “free”. Kinda.
Available from today for pre-order on Vodafone UK, the Android-powered Google Nexus One can be had for £35 per-month on a 2 year contract, including a bundle of minutes and texts, and the much needed 1GB monthly data allowance — this is a Google Phone after all (see TechCrunch review). There are a number of other tariffs available too. Customers who pre-order can expect deliveries to go out on April 30th. → Read More
[UK] The location-based social networking space is about as competitive as they get right now – though it’s still relatively early days – but Foursquare appears to be executing particularly well.
It certainly has the mind share of the press, which should trickle down to end-users, and today the New York-based startup has announced a tie-in with Vodafone UK, currently the number two mobile network in the UK, behind O2 and ahead of Orange (although that’s about to change once Orange completes its merger with T-Mobile).
The result of which is that the service will be placed ‘on-deck’, meaning that the mobile carrier is giving Foursquare a push through its own portal/app store – Vodafone MyWeb or Vodafone Live! on older handsets – as well as providing a short code to receive a link via SMS (text “FOURSQUARE” to 97886). → Read More
[UK] In case you weren’t already convinced by the level of pent up demand for an alternative to O2′s iPhone monopoly in the UK, more evidence comes from Vodafone today. The mobile operator has begun selling the iPhone 3G and 3GS, including shipping 50,000 units to customers who have pre-ordered.
That’s a pretty healthy number for Day One but it doesn’t look quite so impressive when compared to the number of pre-orders – 65,000 – that Orange is said to have clocked up in its first few days after announcing it would offer the device. It’s likely that Vodafone, initially at least, has been impacted by Orange breaking O2′s monopoly first and, perhaps crucially, in time for the holiday season. Especially since there is little to distinguish all three offerings price-wise. Apple still commands an unprecedented amount of control over the iPhone brand and pricing. The retail monopoly has been broken by the supply monopoly remains nicely intact. → Read More
[UK] Vodafone will bring the iPhone 3G and 3GS to its UK network from January 14. You can pre-order the iPhone from today, with the 8GB iPhone 3G free on a £35 post paid plan. There will be unlimited texts on consumer price plans or unlimited calls to landlines for businesses.
Vodafone says it’s been preparing its network for “over a year” for the likely assault on its data networks.
However, iPhone customers will be offered up to 1GB of mobile data as part of their price plans – which contrasts with O2′s unlimited data plans.
Customers will also be able to use BT Openzone Wi-Fi networks. → Read More
This year’s Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition was a battle between Dutch and UK startups with 3 finalists from either side of the Channel. The prize money was ramped up to €150,000 this year so it was all to play for in the fight between the cloggies and the rosbifs. The prize was awarded based on a combination of votes from the public, Mobile Monday members and an expert jury. The jury gave the finalists a hard time on stage (in particular Rummble and MyNameisE) with most questions focusing on the money. → Read More
Vodafone today launched Vodafone 360 (its replacement for Vodafone Live) which brings together mobile phone contacts, social networking accounts, email, IM, etc. so they can be accessed seamlessly on phone or PC. It currently covers Facebook, Live Messenger and Google Talk. Twitter will be added soon. Vodafone has also added a range of new apps, games, music and mapping services as part of the launch and a 360 shop where content and apps can be purchased. 360 will be downloadable to 100 different mobile phones in Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the UK as well as being pre-installed on a some new 360 handsets from Samsung to be launched by the end of the year. Finally, 360 will be available to non-Vodafone customers as long as they have a suitable phone. → Read More
Vodafone, the world’s largest cellular operator, is thinking about buying T-Mobile UK, making the giant even bigger. The plan is under scrutiny right now as it would essentially create a massive Euro-monopoly on the cellular front. Vodafone declined to comment. But people familiar with the situation said the company was examining the case for making an offer for T-Mobile UK, or setting up a joint venture. In February, Vodafone and Hutchison Whampoa, the Hong Kong conglomerate, announced plans to combine their Australian mobile businesses. → Read More
That’s right, folks. Earlier today, Vodafone Spain officially launched the highly anticipated HTC Magic (con Google, for you Español speaking readers). While it may not be got for free (read: 139€ for the phone on the cheapest plan w/ mandatory 18 month contract) like its UK sibling (expected to launch in early May), the real point is that it is here, now (in Spain at least). I’d have filled the rest of this post with witty Spanish jokes, but that would require me to know more Spanish than “siesta” and “fiesta.” Salud! → Read More
If we are to believe this Vodafone ad (and who are we to doubt the Internet), the European carrier will be the exclusive provider of HTC‘s next Android phone, the Magic. The phone does somewhat resemble early spy shots so we could be looking at the real deal, folks. → Read More
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