Nokia today introduced Nokia Money, a new mobile financial service offering consumers with mobile device access to basic financial services. For many consumers, this will be the first time they have had any access to such financial services.

Your telephone may know more about your private life than you do, according to a new study of mobile phone calls. The insight opens the door to mining massive data sets from mobile phone call logs, which should allow researchers to test theories for how relationship networks make or break businesses, shape the flow of information, and even affect the course of epidemics.

A nagging problem for social scientists is the limitation of self-reported survey data. Not only are people expensive to poll, but they are also notoriously error-prone when they try to recall their own behaviors. What researchers would prefer is a record of people’s behaviors that is cheap and accurate. Mobile phone call logs can certainly provide enormous amounts of cheap data. Researchers have used such data to map out people’s social networks, utilizing the duration and frequency of calls between pairs of people as a measure of the intimacy of their relationships. Doing so has revealed patterns of people’s contact with each other both in time and space, which is crucial for modeling everything from gossip to how flu viruses spread across populations.

But how accurately do call patterns reflect the intimacy of relationships? After all, sometimes the closest of friends rarely call each other, while some motor mouths call just about everyone.

To put telephone data to the test, a team led by Nathan Eagle, an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, gave mobile phones to 94 MIT students and faculty members. For 9 months, software on the phones kept track of the volunteers’ location and logged all calls made between these phones. Over the same period, the researchers also gathered social data from the subjects in the traditional way, asking them whether the other subjects were friends, acquaintances, or strangers. Finally, the subjects rated their job satisfaction, which has been shown to strongly correlate with the number of workplace friendships.

Just by analyzing the calling patterns, the researchers could accurately label two people as friends or nonfriends more than 95% of the time. But the results, published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the mobile phone data were better at predicting friendship than the subjects themselves. Thirty-two pairs of subjects switched from calling each other acquaintances to friends in the traditionally gathered survey data. These are most likely new relationships that formed during the course of the study, say the researchers, and they left a clear signal in the mobile phone data. Friends call each other far more often than acquaintances do when they are off-campus and during weekends. The pattern is so distinct that the researchers spotted budding friendships in the phone data months before the people themselves called themselves friends.

Finally, the team compared people’s self-reported job satisfaction with their networks of friendship at their workplaces. Because the mobile phones kept track of people’s proximity to each other, the researchers had a clear measure of people’s daily contact with friends at work, not only through calls but through physical proximity. As predicted, the more contact people had with friends at their workplace, the more highly they rated their job satisfaction. And conversely, the less face-to-face contact people had with friends at work, the less they said they enjoyed it.

The finding that you don’t have to ask people about their relationships–that just looking at the pattern of their phone calls is sufficient–”is very new,” says Brian Uzzi, a social-network scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The next question is whether the new methods for maintaining contact with friends–such as e-mail and social Web sites–are weakening the need for physical proximity to friends. “It’s a face-off between Facebook and face-to-face contact,” he says, and “it looks like face-to-face contact still matters a lot.”

On May 20th, Norway based Telenor completed the acquisition of a 49 per cent stake in Unitech Wireless, a new player in the Indian telecom sector.

Earlier Telenor had acquired a 33.5 percent stake in Unitech Wireless by paying an amount of Rs 1,250 crore. On May 19th, 2009 Telenor paid a second installment of Rs. 1,130 crore to acquire another 15.5 per cent stake.Accordingly, the total stake of Telenor in Unitech Wireless has increased to 49 per cent.

Further, Telenor has also paid an amount of Rs. 240 crore to Unitech Wireless as share application money for issuance of additional equity shares in Unitech Wireless in order to maintain its 49 per cent stake.

Telenor will inject a total of Rs 6,120 crore into Unitech Wireless which will result in its 67.25 per cent shareholding (subject to regulatory approval) in the company.

source: The Economic Times

The mobile value added services are poised to grow by over 65 per cent to touch Rs 8,200 crore by the end of this fiscal from Rs 4,950 crore in the last fiscal, according to an estimate by industry body Assocham.

The high growth is attributed to a rapidly increasing large subscriber base and easy accessibility to the end-users.

Various downloads such as ringtones, bill-related information, contest, exam results and messages received from public services such as banks, railways and airlines earn revenues for the industry. Such revenues will grow and multiply to add volumes to mobile value added services (VAS).

Indian music industry earned more than 35 million dollar from such services which is equivalent to 20 per cent of its total revenue. The total mobile music downloads in Indian markets are valued at 75 million dollars and is expected to grow by 25 per cent in the next year.

SMS interactivity, which has become an integral part of most of TV shows, would become a major source of revenue for the channels.

TV show Indian Idol on Sony got more than 55 million votes via SMS — at a rate of Rs 3 per SMS, that is Rs 16.5 crore. The telecom companies earned Rs 11.5 crore and Sony made Rs 5 crore.

Source: Economic Times

Search Web site Yahoo! has tied up with Idea Cellular to distribute its mobile search service Yahoo!oneSearch in India.  The deal will give Idea Cellular’s 15 million subscribers access to Yahoo!’s oneSearch service via their handsets.

Yahoo!oneSearch is now available in 14 countries around the world.

Link: Yahoo!oneSearch Features  (PDF)
Source:The Financial Express

Smallsurfaces reports an article in The Economist which discusses the financial impact of access to mobile phones for fishermen in Kerala, India.

“This more efficient market benefited everyone. Fishermen’s profits rose by 8% on average and consumer prices fell by 4% on average. Higher profits meant the phones typically paid for themselves within two months. And the benefits are enduring, rather than one-off. All of this, says Mr Jensen, shows the importance of the free flow of information to ensure that markets work efficiently. “Information makes markets work, and markets improve welfare,” he concludes.”

Link: To do with the price of fish

Source: Smallsurfaces