Hot Spot

UPDATE

The phone DID NOT KILL the worker. Police now say that a fellow worker  attempted to cover up a death.

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We’ve all heard of exploding phone batteries and the supposed dangers health dangers of wireless transmissions. But this is the first time I’ve heard of a death allegedly caused by a mobile phone.

Your mobile phone, it turns out, could kill you. As in literally burn you to death.

There has been a news report that a South Korean quarry worker has been found dead with a burning mobile phone stuck to his chest.

The man, a quarry worker, was probably working alone when the incident took place.

The scene was right out of a horror movie. A witness was quoted as saying “He was lying on the ground and his mobile phone was still burning so I had to put the fire out.” He was taken to the hospital with the melted mobile phone stuck to his chest.

From the picture that accompanies the Reuters story, it’s not possible to determine what brand of phone is involved in this tragic incident.

But I would stop keeping that phone in shirt pockets until we get more information.

It’s official. TimeDotCom has accepted the offer from DiGi to take up TimeDotCom’s 3G spectrum in return for DiGi shares worth around RM650 million.

TimeDotCom was controversially given the nod over DiGi when the licenses were given in early 2006. To get the license, TimeDotCom paid only RM50 million at that time. It then famously sat tight and failed to take any concrete steps to launch their 3G services, though it was supposed to submit and follow a detailed business plan to the MCMC as part of the requirements.

The acceptance of the offer from DiGi means that TimeDotCom will make a clean profit of around RM600 million by essentially doing nothing.

It looks like yet another Malaysian rent seeker has hit paydirt.

It must be painful for DiGi to do this and it certainly doesn’t look good for this country too. DiGi must be regretting its decision not to submit a bid for 3G during the first round of bidding back in 2002 when Maxis and Celcom got their licenses.

Sure, it could have been worse for DiGi if it had instead been forced to buy a stake in debt ridden TimeDotCom as widely speculated earlier. That would have meant exposure to some RM2 billion in debts. But still RM600 million is big money. If it had been given the license originally, this RM600 million would probably have been used to put up the infrastructure and launch the service by now.

The other three telcos, Maxis, Celcom and UMobile (MITV) paid RM50 million each for their licenses. Would it not have been possible instead for the relevant Ministry to take the spectrum back from TimeDotCom for non launch of services and assign it to DiGI?

As I speculated earlier, DiGi has managed to get what it needs from TimeDotCom without having to also take up unwanted baggage.

After two years of being in denial, DiGi has finally accepted the inevitable and offered to basically rent TimeDotCom’s 3G spectrum until 2018. The rental price is RM654.5 million which will be satisfied by issuing new DiGi shares which means that no money will change hands immediately. The first press statements do not state if TimeDotCom must hold on to the shares for any set period of time.

Telenor will also have to reduce its shareholding to below 50% and it will be doing that through a book-building process. TimeDotCom has been invited to participate in that exercise too which I take to mean that it can, if it wishes too, take up more DiGi shares.

The plus side for DiGi is that it finally gets a 3G license which will allow it to compete on equal footing with the other three telcos. Even more significantly, it won’t be saddled with non-core businesses which would have been the case if it had been made to buy a stake in TimeDotCom. Now it won’t have to worry about holding TimeDotCom shares and the huge debts it is carrying.

For TimeDotCom, it can finally earn some revenue from its 3G license. If it holds on to its DiGi stake, there is a possibility of earning much more than RM645 million. That stake could become a significant earner and that might enable it to build capital for its other ventures.

DiGi however is well behind Maxis and Celcom and will need time to get its 3G infrastructure in place. It should only be slightly behind UMobile which is on course to launch its 3G services later this year or early next year.

I, for one, am glad that this long drawn episode is finally over. Two years have been wasted unnecessarily.

The move I believe that will dramatically change the mobile industry has finally been confirmed. Google will be leading an alliance that will develop a new mobile operating system.

I didn’t get excited at all when Apple announced the iPhone. Sure, it is a cool phone and it breaks new ground in user friendliness and intuitiveness. But these are featurs that other handset manufacturers can duplicate or beat over time. Also, Apple has never been comfortable working with outside developers and I am not confident at all about their recent move to open up the iPhone operating system to outside developers. One must remember that at the launch of iPhone, Steve Jobs said that Apple was not opening up the OS to third party developers because they may end up spoiling the OS with unstable applications. It’s clear then that the move by Apple to now open up the OS is simply in response to the widely anticipated announcement by Google.

On the other hand, the Google OS, Android, is something to really look forward to. If you look at the Internet, all the copolest applications have come out of open source and I am certain that the move by the Open Handset Alliance will bring that same innovation to mobile phone screens.

Imagine being able to make the mobile phone screen look exactly the way you want. Imagine seeing cool new social networking and internet applications available on mobile phones without paying for them through telcos.

The incumbents now have a worthy challenger.

The saga of Telenor’s stake in DiGi has been a frustrating one but thankfully, it should be over by year end.

To recap, Telenor has to bring down its stake in DiGi from 61% to a maximum of 49% by year end to meet government regulations on shareholdings by foreign companies.

It’s been delayed by at least one year but this time round, the government has stood firm and refused any extensions.

There have been all kinds of speculations but the most persistent have been that Telenor will sell its stake to Timedotcom and thus be able to make use of the 3G license that TimeDotCom has and which DiGi covets.

So far, to me, it has played out like a shotgun wedding scenario. DiGi obviously wants the 3G license but it is not interested in taking up the other loss making businesses of TimeDotCom. Khazanah Nasional wants to get rid of the TomeDotCom shares it is stuck with and thus is betting that DiGi will bite the bullet and enter into a forced marriage with Timedotcom.

Well, that’s the way it seemed until recently. Timedotcom shares went all the way to RM1.40 on this speculation while DiGi share price dropped as thedeadline neared.

However, it appears that the reluctant bridegroom might yet get away. After Telenor’s officials met Dato’ Seri Lim Keng Yaik recently, the share price movements of DiGi and Timedotcom have shown very interesting movements.

A few days after that meeting, DiGi’s share price started to move upwards. Timedotcom on the other hand has steadily moved south. Here are share price movements taken from TheStar’s Biz website that shows these clear trends. Look at what happens after 10 September when Telenor officials met Dr Lim Keng Yaik.

I’m wondering, and I must stress that this is pure speculation here, if a different deal has been struck.

Could it be possible that Telenor might either sell its stake in DiGi to Khazanah directly or some other local party with Timedotcom shares not being part of this deal? Maybe, the government has blinked and Timedotcom, which has not done anything with its 3G license thus far, will give back the license so that DiGi might get the license directly.

Timedotcom has a sort of compensation because it has been given the chance to wire up the IDR investment region.

It sure looks like a nice solution except perhaps for long suffering Timedotcom shareholders.

Whatever it is, I want the issue settled one way or another so that DiGi can start providing 3G services to its subscribers.

Last weekend I got a tantalising preview of the LG Viewty cameraphone when I attended the 2^nd anniversary dinner of the LensaMalaysia photography community (www.lensamalaysia.com)

Apparently, this was the first time the phone was being shown in Asia. It was certainly a bold step by LG to put the phone before a crowd of serious photographers, most of whom came armed with their multi megapixels huge SLR cameras.

LG even when one step forward by making available 10 units of the phone for LensaMalaysia members to try out and provide feedback. These phones will be given to selected members to use for a few days later this month.

So, what did I think of the phone?

From the little that I saw, I think LG has a winner in this phone. The Viewty, aside from its odd model name, is a serious piece of photography equipment made in the guise of a mobile phone.

The phone comes with specifications that put digital cameras to shame. The Korean executive who spoke at the dinner said that LG made this model in response to feedback from the surveys it carried out. They must have because it’s got what I would wish for in a cameraphone.

Of course it has the obligatory touch features made so popular by the iPhone. The 3” screen is gorgeous and serves as a huge image finder. There’s no keypad, only call and end call buttons. Beyond that, users will rely on the touchscreen. There’s also HSDPA and other vital connectivity stuff on the phone.

But it is in the camera department that it really shines out.

It’s got manual focus and an image stabilizer. Video features are equally impressive. It can capture video at a stunning 120 frames per second which translates into super clear playback later. Another interesting feature sure to delight the Net Generation folks is automatic uploading to YouTube.

Suffice to say that I am impressed. Who needs an iPhone or for that matter the Nokia N95 now that the Viewty is coming? Even the Sony Ericsson K850 5MP phone expected around the same time is going to have a torrid time against the LG Viewty.

For more Viewty and other phone stuff, check out our website here

MITV’s 3G network, the launch of which is imminent, will be known as umobile.
I am very interested to see how it intends to win in a very lacklustre 3G environment.

All the same, good luck to them. I hope they manage to shake up the industry.

I was browsing the mobileworld website when a Google Adsense ad caught my eye.

………….

Who Says?

Since it was a Celcom ad and the subject was about service which I am very passionate about, I clicked on the Google ad.

Here’s what I got

Go figure!

UPDATE

I tried the link again a few hours later and it’s finally working.

First it was one, then rumours surfaced of three licenses. But no one really expected 4 WIMAX licenses to be given out today. But once again, the unexpected hapened and 4 licenses were awarded.

Three of the winners (Green Packet, YTL-e and Redtone) were always among the front-runners. Note: all three of them won through their subsidiary companies.

Though no one expected them to win, it’s worth noting that Maxis, Celcom, DiGi and MiTV submitted bids but did not win. Nasioncom too lost out in the race.

The suprise winner was Asiaspace Dotcom. This company, in 2003, won a contract for the building of telecommunications towers for common sharing by the telcos.

It also appears to own a license for sattelite broadcasting services issued by MCMC too.

Asiaspace Dotcom is headed by Abdul Ghani Abdullah

It’s going to be achallenge for these companies to cover 20% of the population by year end as MCMC asked for in its statement today.

Wimax is such a new technology that I wonder if hardware availability is going to be an issue.

The MCMC has awarded 4 WIMAX licenses today.

3 licenses are for West Malaysia and the winners are Bizsurf (M) S/B, MIB COMM S/B and Asiaspace Dotcom S/B. The first 2 are linked to YTL-e and Green Packet respectively.

Over in East Malaysia, a license has been given to Redtone-CNX Broadban S/B

After a delay of more than 6 months, this brings to a conclusion a long drawn out exercise that saw 15 companies applying for the license.