Business Trends

Qatar fuel Additive Company (QAFAC) signed a License agreement with Qatar e-Government to start benefiting from its electronic governmental services.

For the mobile operator, topping up prepaid accounts by SMS has several benefits. It is a lower-cost method of adding credit than vouchers, by about 10-15%.

More than a year after the widespread launch of MMS services, operators remain reluctant to divulge too much information about the MMS traffic they carry on their networks. Vodafone, for example, released details of Java downloads by its live! subscribers in July, but stayed silent on MMS traffic.

Mobile operators are almost exclusively selling MMS-capable devices with color screens, many with built-in cameras. By year-end, 23% of all mobile phones in Europe will be MMS-capable and more than 55 million are expected to have built-in cameras. These statistics show a strong and growing base of MMS-capable phones.

Linux siphoned market share from UNIX in the relational database management system (RDBMS) market, a niche that grew 158 percent from $116 million in new license revenue in 2002 to nearly $300 million in 2003.

An Arthur D. Little/Exane report, Mobile Operators: Leaders Hit Back, has cast doubt on whether MMS will develop as an additional market to SMS. ADL/Exane cites the poor performance of Vodafone Japan's Sha-Mail service, an MMS equivalent, as one reason MMS is unlikely to generate messaging and revenue volumes for cellcos similar to those experienced with SMS.