Omnifone, a Swedish company has launched a new mobile music service, MusicStation to take on iPhone and Apple, in Europe and Asia. The network operator friendly service is trying to take advantage of mobile companies’ distrust of Apple and capitalize on the fact that Apple still doesn’t have a carrier partner outside of Europe.

So why should MusicStation win in Europe? One reason is rooted in the way that mobile operators hawk instead of sell phones. In many markets – UK in particular –operators heavily subsidize the sticker price of the phones. It is not uncommon, for instance, for a network operator to give away for free a high-end handset, such as the Nokia N95, if a consumer agrees to sign up for an 18 month contract. That particular phone is worth over $400, still likely to be less expensive than an iPhone.

Network operators have many reasons for balking at subsidizing the iPhone. First, most consumers are likely to load up their iPhones with music via their personal computers – not the airwaves. Second, there is no incentive for them to even try to download over a cellular network since the iPhone – unlike its competitors in Europe and Asia – doesn’t support 3G.

Even better from the operator’s perspective: MusicStation can be a handset’s ‘idle screen’. In other words, the service will be staring users in the face. Tim Hadley at Omnifone (MusicStation’s creator) says network operators will even be able to create a dedicated MusicStation button for their handsets if they wish.

Then there’s the payment mechanism. In the mobile phone world, music sales are heavily targeted at the youth market. The most common form of payment on iTunes is the credit card, but kids don’t have credit cards. With MusicStation, kids pay $3.50 per week for unlimited downloads—and the subscription fee is taken directly from their mobile phone bill. This works whether they have a pre-paid tariff plan, or standard post-paid contract.

Curiously, Omnifone’s Tim Hadley says his company is taking an “Apple-like” approach to rolling out the product. In each territory, Omnifone will leave the job of actually selling the service to its mobile operator-partner.

MusicStation made its debut in Sweden with Telenor, and Omnifone has agreements to go live with 29 other operators in Europe and Asia in the last half of 2007. While Telenor launched with just two handsets – the W880i and Sony Ericsson’s K810i, handsets from Samsung (Z240) and Nokia (N93) are soon to follow. For now, operators plan to ship their handsets with MusicStation’s software pre-installed to avoid the support nightmares that come when consumers self-install.

Omnifone boasts that its software will be pre-installed on 100 million handsets, globally, within 12 months. If that is the case, then could it be that iPhone is just an America-only success? It is an idea with some precedent: for years Palm’s Treo smart phones has sold poorly abroad, but with great success in the US. At least that is what Omnifone is praying for!

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Rok TV has just gone live in the US, and the company is quite likely to make an impact in one of the biggest markets for mobile and television. Rok has been doing particularly well with those mobile network operators who haven’t sunk billions into 3G technology and just want to offer their subscribers access to mobile TV.
The crucial point is that Rok’s service runs over 2.5G whereas all the other are 3G services. This means, the company will compete with MobiTV, one of the companies that has helped prove that there is demand for television-on-mobiles. Only this month the VC firm Oak Investment Partners led a $70 million investment into MobiTV, which says it has struck deals with numerous mobile network operators globally as well as supplying AT&T’s Wi-Fi network.

Elsewhere, while its rivals struggle to make video work over 3G links–and 3.5G connections using say HSDPA — Rok’s compression techniques are good enough to stream a TV channel to an existing handset using 2.5G/GPRS as the carrier. The company has filed some 34 separate claims as part of its overall patent application. ROK already has the patent in the UK (GB 2410817) and has applied for similar patents on a global basis.

Rok is expanding into all the obvious markets. It has signed a deal with Shanghai Dragon Mobile Information Ltd, an approved content supplier for the world’s largest mobile network operator – China Mobile. It has struck similar deals in Taiwan, Turkey, Thailand, South Africa, Brazil and Russia.

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Reports vary as to how long it took Verio to identify the problem initially. Our sources claim the first problem lasted from approximately midnight to 4 pm the next day on Friday 30th June. It certainly does appear that the problem emerged during overnight routine maintenance. According to Verio’s vice president of operations, Craig Pennington, the mysterious bug appeared within the company’s Cisco 6500 series routers which were showing everything to be fine, while denying access to specific British Internet users.

Verio now says … “We have seen a recurrence of the recent connectivity issue in the Verio’s London Datacenter. At this time, the vast majority of users are able to connect to the facility as normal – it appears that the issue is affecting a small subset of users primarily originating from British Telecom ADSL.”

Pennington implied that the fault lay within the Cisco OS employed by Verio’s core routers. Subsequently Verio has stated that its “core routers were rebooted in serial; whilst this helped mitigate the problem temporarily, it did not fix it. We are working with Cisco to resolve the problem, and are currently working to roll out an emergency upgrade to the Cisco IOS operating system on the core routers.” Pennington conceded that Verio was looking at the standard SLAs (Service Level Agreements) signed with major customers and predicted that there may have to be some payments made as a consequence. The company offers a 99 percent uptime guarantee.

The frustrating aspect for Verio’s customers has been a lack of information. Some sites weren’t aware anything was awry until Verio sent an email out at 4.30 p.m. last Friday announcing that the problem had been dealt with. These sites had been advising their own customers that the problem probably lay with the surfer’s browser. Today, those same sites appeared blissfully unaware the situation had re-occurred.

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