TomTom has released a new sat nav system that tracks petrol and diesel prices in 12,000 fuel stations across the UK and allows users to compare fuel prices in their current location. The new technology is likely to increase competition between neighboring fuel retailers, but will also offer up a number of marketing opportunities that fuel retailers should not ignore.
Although communications service providers are faced with shrinking or flat IT budgets, their core product is becoming a commodity. They have responded with new business strategies, products and partnerships. However, many providers have implemented on an ad hoc basis, rather than establish a comprehensive enterprise content management strategy, thus crippling their cost effectiveness.
BlackBerry maker Research in Motion has announced its first touch-screen smartphone: a 3G device called Storm, which will launch in November 2008 across the US and Europe. The phone is aimed at the consumer sector, but Datamonitor believes that it holds particular appeal for the small and medium enterprise market and will boost Research in Motion's market share in this area.
Digital television adoption in Western Europe and North America will show strong growth over the next two years as consumers demand enhanced features, greater breadth of content and bundled communications offerings. A further key driver of the transition to digital TV will be the switch-off of analog transmission in these regions.
Nuance has announced a new voicemail-to-text service, which utilizes speech recognition technology alongside a team of in-house transcriptionists. PhoneTag and SpinVox already offer similar services and have gained large subscriber bases. Despite increasing competition, however, the market is in its infancy and pricing will help to differentiate vendors.
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