Where are we on the Mobile Internet ?

State of the Mobile InternetAlmost every year in various kinds of year-ahead predictions about Indian internet, you can find one about mobile internet. So why would 2013 be different?

If we look at the latest Gartner Hype Cycle, mobile internet has already climbed to the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’ and been on its way to mainstream adoption in less than two years. Three years into 3G initiation, operators, platform servicers, hardware providers and content producers have finally accumulated enough users and resources to kick start the entire value chain in 2012 as shown below

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Airtel QoS Improved Considerably

High scores indicate better QoS, and so 5 is the best QoS and 1 is the worst. Airtel seems to have recovered some ground in the quarter ending September 2012 by plugging its loopholes in customer support quality, which was the main reason for its weaker performance in the previous two quarters. Based on TRAI’s … Read more

Mobile /IM Social Media Grows Faster in China

Before the mobile OS and smartphones were full-fledged, applications on mobile were mostly migrations from desktop version or complementary access to existing online services. However, we believe contact-list-based multi-media instant messaging application has potential to become the killer app in the 3G mobile internet age, similar to what SMS has done in the 2G era. The apps feature intuitive UI that enable users to communicate in voice, pictures and video messages in real time with minimal data consumption. Recent exponential growth of Tencent Weixin, Xiaomi Miliao in China and KakaoTalk in Korea are triggering transformational changes in people’s daily communication.

Multi-media messaging could help people manage

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Indian Telecom M&A Policy ensures no new entrant at low costs

Along with the one-time spectrum charges, the Cabinet also approved the M&A policy. This policy suggests that if the acquiring company holds spectrum against the entry fee paid, then the resultant entity would have to pay to the Government the difference between the auction-determined price and the entry fee paid earlier.

This key policy move eliminates

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Cost Saving for Apple to Choose ARM over Intel i5/i7 for MacBooks

ARM Chips Savings over Intel for AppleIntel charges around $120-140 for each i5/i7 chipset used in Apple’s MacBook portfolio. Intel generates a gross margin of over 60% on each of these chipsets. This contrasts with ARM based chipset costs of around $15-30, with a mid 40% gross margin. It is possible, therefore, that Apple is keen to reduce the price point of its MacBook portfolio by transitioning away from Intel. It may be that Apple does not believe that Intel’s roadmap aligns with its own requirements, resulting in Apple either having to use an under-powered chipset or overpay for a more capable one. We believe this missalignment in incentives between the companies will continue to push Apple to take more
control of its own hardware.

Intel does have a line of lower priced chipsets (the Clovertrail range) that is based on the x86 platform and is priced at around $40. We expect many of

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Apple Product Roadmap – Power efficiency favors ARM over x86

ARM chipsets are more efficient than x86 when using equal geometries, making ARM chipset less reliant on smaller geometries to sustain efficiency improvements. ARM’s main weakness has been processing power, but this should be addressed by the move to 64 bit processing in late 2013 as shown in the ARM performance roadmap in the figure below.

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TIBCO – Transition in Core Service Oriented Architecture

TIBCO Transitioning from SOATIBCO is a leading provider of infrastructure and middleware software, with its origins in providing a real-time information bus or backbone that has enabled operations such as Wall Street trading floors to integrate systems and data to provide real-time flow of stock quotes and news items.

The company has significantly expanded its market opportunities by growing its stack of software technology to broaden the number of vertical markets that are addressed by the platform as well as adding layers of technology that enable it to expand beyond the IT department as the primary market to line-of-business managers who see the benefits for operational decision making.

As its traditional market has matured, management has shown good vision in repositioning the company to enhance growth and stay relevant in the

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Japanese Telcos Encourage Customers to Migrate to 4G / LTE

4G LTE Phones in JapanThe Japan telecom sector has continued to outperform over the past few months mainly because of 1) firm results driven by smartphone expansion, 2) declining concern about price wars as mobile operators encouraged their users to migrate to LTE with higher tariff offerings, and 3) the inflow of funds into domestic defensive stocks. In particular, Softbank and KDDI showed stronger share price performance due to good fundamentals and increasing expectations for iPhone5, which would accelerate their subscriber acquisition pace/market share gain.

LTE with higher tariff and more efficient network will be positive

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Microsoft Windows – What’s up with PCs and tablets?

Microsoft - Tablets vs PC Growth in 2013Traditional PC units (desktop and notebooks/netbooks) are in secular decline, consistent with most investor expectations that have observed the cannibalization of this market by smartphones and tablets over the past several years and the data points over the past two quarters that point to not only slower growth but an actual decline in unit sales year over year. Many of us still have a notebook, but we just don’t use it as much since we adopted a smartphone to function like a BlackBerry and an iPad to take notes and access email and content on the web.

There are things we still need a notebook for, so we bring it along when we know we need it, but we don’t upgrade as quickly as we used to (and we don’t drop it as often),

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Do Tablet Users Really Care about Microsoft Office ?

Microsoft Office for TabletsWe think many users do not care about Office functionality; their needs are for content consumption and ability to access the internet and note-taking. Where there is a need for greater functionality in content creation, Office should be an important lever to anchor productivity users to the Windows platform. The desire to have one device instead of carrying both a tablet and a notebook (also a smartphone of course) would work to Microsoft’s advantage, particularly if Apple is predominately selling the 8 inch iPad mini, where the screen is more limiting as a productivity device.

We expect Microsoft to leverage the collaboration capabilities of Office 2013 by putting the ability to read and edit an Office document on the iPad in 2013 and maybe on Android as well, but not the full functionality of Office that would have greater cannibalization potential to Windows. To increase the ability to share documents, this is important to be cross-platform, particularly if the other platforms are measured in hundreds of millions of users.

Microsoft has already made available a limited

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