CAPPING A good week for the Irish telecoms industry in Barcelona, NewBay Software won one of the coveted Global Mobile Awards awarded by conference organisers the GSM Association.
NewBay’s LifeCache Social Networking product, which enables operators to integrate services with social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Bebo and Flickr, while allowing users to easily share content on their mobile devices, was named Best Service Delivery Platform.
Nagappan Arunachalam, NewBay’s chief marketing officer, said it was particularly pleasing to win because big players in the technology world such as HP and IBM were now competing in the space.
Although about 40 Irish firms in total attended Mobile World Congress, NewBay was one of 19 to exhibit on the Ireland Pavilion organised by development agency Enterprise Ireland.
Ivan MacDonald, chief executive of Dial2Do, also flew the Tricolour in Barcelona. He said the mood there was far more upbeat than he expected, with plenty of business being done.
Dial2Do announced a partnership with headset and car kit manufacturer SouthWing.
Dial2Do’s software will be used to power the SouthWing Assistant service which enables users to send text messages, send and listen to e-mails, record reminders and interact with social networking services using voice commands.
MacDonald said that in common with other areas of the telecoms business, headset and car kit sales would be down globally this year, but new legislation in California banning the sending of text messages when driving would provide a lift in the US.
Openmind Networks, which sells messaging software to operators, also exhibited on the Enterprise Ireland stand. Chief executive Alex Duncan felt that talk of falling attendance was overplayed and that while some companies limited the number of people they sent to the show, “the people they are sending are more senior”.
Duncan said that while operators were concerned that revenues would fall during the recession, he expects there will be a move towards fixed pricing plans such as those offered in the US.
Another significant trend was the move to launch online stores selling additional software for handsets.
Arunachalam said that while there was a lot of talk about online stores, “most of it is still hype”, with none of the new services coming close to the experience offered by Apple’s iTunes App Store.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/VR3765MFOBH2NMV2QNICYDF67M.png)