Orange plans to bring 'HD Voice' calls to UK next year: "We've had some indication that Orange planned to expand its 'HD Voice' technology beyond the hot testbed of Moldova sometime in the coming year, and it looks like the carrier is now starting to get a bit more specific about when the UK will finally have an alternative to standard definition calls. Apparently, Orange will begin trials of the new and improved, 3G-facilitated service early in the new year, and fully roll it out along with a 'range of handsets' before the end of the year.

AT&T is latest to end Tiger Woods sponsorship: "AT&T Inc. said Thursday it would no longer sponsor Tiger Woods, joining Accenture in dropping support for the golfer after numerous allegations of infidelities."

Ten gadgets that defined the decade: "

As 2009 winds down and we try to come up with new and clever ways of referring to the early years of this century, there's really only one thing left to do: declare our ten favorite gadgets of the aughts and show them off in chronological order. It's arguable that if this wasn't the decade of gadgets, it was certainly a decade shaped by gadgets -- one which saw the birth of a new kind of connectedness. In just ten years time, gadgets have touched almost every aspect of our daily lives, and personal technology has come into its own in a way never before seen. It's a decade that's been marked the ubiquity of the internet, the downfall of the desktop, and the series finale of Friends, but we've boiled it down to the ten devices we've loved the most and worked the hardest over the past ten years. We even had some of our friends in the tech community chime in with their picks on what they thought was the gadget or tech of the decade -- so join us for a look back at the best (gadget) years ever!
Continue reading Ten gadgets that defined the decade

Ten gadgets that defined the decade originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments"

2009 Year in Review: Android gains mainstream acceptance: "
The news: At the beginning of 2009, there was one Android handset on the market, the T-Mobile G1. By the end of the year, Google's mobile platform could stake a claim to being the most talked-about, buzz-worthy smartphone platform--and the one poised to grow the fastest in 2010. How did it get to that point?

I could write an entire book on successfully managing a sales team, but I will fit just a few pointers into this one post.

One thing you need to keep in mind is ,that many forget about in business, that the people you work with are like another family.  If you think about it, you give minimally 8 hours of your day to your business.  Some simple math tells us that if you sleep 8 hours a day, work 8 hours a day , and have 8 hours of personal family time each day.....you are spending at least half of your conscious time at work.  This doesn't include personal errands, work calls, and travel.  In the world of retail, 8 hours is not really truth.

If you have been in the wireless business for while you know that it changes at a rapid pace.  One of the most important things we can do is KEEP LEARNING every day.  We need to all make sure that we keep up on industry changes and follow new trends for our customers.  KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.


Here are some of my favorites that I read each day.  Let me know your favorites!

Palm Updates webOS to 1.3.5 (Phone Scoop): "Palm Updates webOS to 1.3.5

News Item Related News Comments

posted Yesterday, 10:30 PM � by Rich Brome

Palm today released a system software update for the Palm Pre and Pixi for Sprint. The new version of webOS significantly improves the downloading and storage of apps, supporting multiple simultaneous app downloads, downloads in the background, and control over downloads in progress.

This is a great article I read at Engadget Mobile, one of my favorite sites.  

By Chris Ziegler  posted Dec 28th 2009 3:00PM

Feature

The year is 1999. Bill Clinton is the President of the United States, gas is 94 cents a gallon, Bondi Blue iMacs are a staple in dorm rooms across the country, and Microsoft is trying to bring the desktop Windows experience to the pocket, pushing its Palm-size PC concept (after Palm had quashed the original "Palm PC" branding) on a world still feeling jilted by the failures of the Apple Newton. 3Com subsidiary Palm and its heavyweight licensee Handspring have figured out something interesting about the still-nascent PDA market, though: people like simplicity. If an electronic organizer does what it says it's going to do, keeps your information in sync with your PC, runs for forever and a day on a single set of batteries, and does it all with a minimum of fuss, people will buy. It's an exciting, challenging, and rapidly-changing era in the mobile business.

A few years ago, I was in charge of sales training for a pretty large indirect dealer.  I had the pleasure of training 100's of salespeople throughout my years and its probably some of the greatest times I would have in my career.    Besides the in-store training that was mandatory, classrooms were beneficial to getting new sales people started off right. My classes were known for being easy to understand and they promoted class interaction.

One of the first things I taught them was one of the first things they would ever do on the sales floor....Greet customers.  Doesn't sound that hard does it?  It's not, but you can ruin an entire transaction by not performing this fundamental task correctly.

Image via Wikipedia

Now that we are so mature in the wireless industry when it comes to handsets, a major focus from manufacturers has included accessories.   Any dealer store out there (hopefully) understands the importance of accessories to our customers and how to increase our GP per transaction.  If we offer accessories to our customers each time we can increase our revenue and offer value.  Here are some tips to help you sell accessories in the new year :

The Mobile Mobile is a magnificent and melodious module of merriment -- Engadget: "The Mobile Mobile is a magnificent and melodious module of merriment
By Ross Miller posted Dec 24th 2009 10:12AM

Faced with an agency-wide phone upgrade that left fifty older HTC devices homeless, UK-based Lost Boys International decided to act on instinct in the most natural of ways: by turning each device into a cog in a musical mobile that hangs just inside the entrance of its Brick Lane studio. Even better, all those phones are connected in a way that turns each one into a member of some crazy techno orchestra, the results of which can be seen after the break in an unbelievably fun rendition of a Christmas song you're bound to hear a dozen more times today. If that's not enough, you can also control it live, thanks to a webcam and a flash interface that accepts keyboard commands. LBi Creative Director James Th�ophane has the project chronicled if you want the full details, but more importantly, just make sure you experience the holiday choral after the break."

As you may know by now, I have been on the indirect side of the wireless business for many years now. For those who don’t understand the difference, here is a quick definition:

Direct- Carrier owned and operated sales channels (corporate stores, corporate B2B teams, etc.).

Indirect- Privately owned wireless business that represents the carrier or carriers (carrier store not owned by the carrier, multi-carrier stores, and wholesalers).

Now that we have that out of the way..... The topic today is something I truly hate that Indirect dealers do and this is coming from an indirect guy. This thing burns me up because it’s not good for your business OR your reputation.

Image via Wikipedia

Santa was pretty good to the wireless industry in 2009. Growth came despite a weak economy--and in the higher-ARPU smartphone segment to boot. But as wireless executives ponder about the year, I can't help but believe there are some major things on their wish lists to Santa. So I've taken a scientific guess of what some of the industry's top executives want for Christmas:

Image via Wikipedia

Sprint Nextel appears to be prepping a news blitz in conjunction with the Consumer Electronics Show, to be held in Las Vegas during the first week of next year. The company issued an invitation for media only for a "4G event" Jan. 6 that will feature Sprint CEO Dan Hesse alongside Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn. Although the invitation was relatively short on specifics, it promises an event "showcasing Sprint's 4G leadership."

Image via CrunchBase

2010 is going to be a great year for the wireless industry.  We have such a fast moving business and my belief is that 2010 will be an exciting time for all of us!

Here are some predictions for 2010.  I am going with my gut here based on what we have heard and what we know.  Also some will make you want to call me Captain Obvious.   If I hit on all of them, you can send your congratulatory e-mails to chrisstalker@gmail.com :)

Christmas time is great for the wireless industry especially if you are in a mall location.  But what about those little guys tucked away in centers with low foot traffic?  My answer is "think outside the box"

Make sure there is a game plan on how you will grab sales right now. People will buy the technology but they may not know you even exist.  Here are a couple of small ideas to get you going this holiday season

Today Palm announced the launch of its Ares project. Ares is a browser-based developer environment for webOS. It will allow developers to write applications from a browser rather than desktop-based developer tools. The project had been available to a limited number of developers after being demonstrated in November.

People throw around the word “passion” a lot in the business world. Maybe it gives them a sense of belonging or maybe makes them feel better about what they do every day. To me “passion” is an important facet to my work.


When you have passion for something, it makes work seem …..well…not so much like work. It like the old saying ” If your job is something you love to do, you will never work a day in your life”. I firmly believe this.
 When I started in the industry I was simply a sales guy. Wireless was new to me. Wireless was new to MANY people. The saturation rate in the US was probably around 20% at the time and Im talking 1998 . As I went forward in my career, wireless grew as a passion vs. just another product that I had a quota on moving units.

Image via Wikipedia

In my last article I spoke about how far this industry has come in such a short amount of time. One of the biggest changes has certainly been the smartphone.

Now the term smartphone can mean different things to different people. To me it means it has the ability to connect you to your world all of the time. By “your world” I mean…. E-mail(personal and corporate), Calendar, Social networking, banking, documents, pictures, blogs, and multiple other applications to make your life easy.

If it doesn’t do all of these things well, its a feature phone. Meaning it has some cool things about it (maybe a touch screen, a picture app, and a keyboard for texting) but its not the “work-horse” that many business-people need.

It's time voice mail threw in the towel.

By Farhad ManjooPosted Friday, May 8, 2009, at 5:25 PM ET

Since March, I've been using Google Voice, the search company's fantastic Web app that gives you a single number to connect all your phones and lets you make rules about who can call which phone when. Voice is packed with many other amazing tricks, but there's one feature that I've come to value above all: The software transcribes voice mail messages into text. Now every time someone leaves me a message, I get it as an e-mail. It's not perfect, of course—Farhad often turns into Bob or Todd. But I'll take it. Voice mail is one of the most inefficient, socially awkward, and least user-friendly means of communication out there, and I'd gladly change my name to Bob, Todd, or Sue if it means never having to sit through a parade of pointless messages ever again.

As we have said before, WES 2009 is not the place for device launches. As much as we wanted to see the BlackBerry Niagara launch, this conference is not about hardware. The major news is BES 5.0, security updates, an alliance with HP as well as the release of RIM’s push API’s to developers.

As Mike Lazaridis took the stage, part of me was hoping that he would talk hardware for just a moment but it wasn’t going to happen. Mike took us through some figures, reflecting on the success of the BlackBerry over the past 10 years. Some measures of success include:

• 10 years of BlackBerry sales.
• 50 million sold, 26 million in this fiscal year alone.
• The BlackBerry has become “mission critical.”

Mike Lazaridis focused his keynote on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) 5.0. The latest updates to BES help organizations make push services work for them more efficiently, and ultimately save organizations costs.

The part I enjoyed most about Mike’s keynote was when he quoted Rove’s ELLB movement almost verbatim. At one point Mike Lazaridis said, “what if you could leave your laptop behind?” This idea truly embodies the direction and vision at RIM. Your mobile device is become so feature rich and powerful, that eventually your laptop will become obsolete.

Mike Lazaridis’ favorite development at RIM? App World. Mike talked about how he started his career as a developer, and the development community is what makes this device so robust. App World is helping developers make more money for their work, and get their apps in front of millions of potential buyers. App World also fosters competition, encouraging developers to make better and cheaper applications.

WES has some great news for developers and enterprise but this conference has moved away from the consumer space. Perhaps device launches are going to be left in the hands of carriers.

Crackberry.com is one of my favorite sites, follow them on twitter updates on the WES 2009 show!

WES 2009 is just about in full swing. The Crack Team is on location in Orlando and we're ready to grab the latest news as it breaks (and if the news is slow, we promise to make some!). In addition to our dedicated WES 2009 page, you can follow the entire team on Twitter for a daily "play-by-play" of the ongoing events.  You can get the Crackberry.com Blog feed (@crackberry) as well as personal updates from Kevin (@crackberrykevin), Adam (@azeis), Bla1ze (@videos4bb) and David (@kasperapd).  If you have anything you'd like to see or just want to show us some love, be sure to shoot us some @ replies so we can help you out. 

provided by Crackberry.com

Pssst. Hey guys. We know all the signs are already pointing to the HTC Magic releasing on T-Mobile, what with FCC pictures, inventory checks and the G1 being on T-Mobile, so for us to say that T-Mobile is going to get the Magic isn't exactly us going out on a limb (more like being captain obvious) but we're getting independent confirmation from a very well-placed source.

So for those waiting patiently for some HTC Magic to T-Mobile news, we've got it on good authority that it is going to happen.

We can't give you the full 100%, rush to your nearest T-Mobile store and plop down cold hard cash for it but it's close--real close. We know that our source is supposed to know these things so we're trusting them. Keep an eye out for now but definitely expect to officially hear about it soon.

provided by androidcentral.com

The way I used to use Google was the same Way everyone did at one point in their lives....web search. With the growing number of products Google keeps launching , I now rely very heavy on their apps. Our customers also rely on these and we can position them to help their communication when tied with their mobile phone. We can help them find more security for their valuable data, find more use for their PDA devices , and believe in the knowledge of their sales people.