Business news for Fri, 28 Mar 2008 & with word phone. 18 news.

Remuneration committee took premium rate phone scandal into account when awarding the chairman a bonus amounting to 117% of his salary

Before he called it quits for the week, Comcast CTO Tony Werner got on the phone with me for one more round of damage control. He’d read my previous post. So when I thanked him for the opportunity, he was...

Telecoms power to the people Cuba has announced that its citizens will within the next few days be able to avail themselves of unrestricted use of mobile phones - the latest liberalisation move by Raul Castro who recently lifted a ban on sales of a raft of consumer goodies including PCs and TVs.…

Kenyans lined up in their thousands to subscribe to the eagerly awaited share sale of Safaricom, a mobile phone operator part-owned by Vodafone that is set to be the biggest listed company in east Africa

Valued at Euro 35 billion, Nokia is the world's fifth most valuable brand, after Coca Cola, Microsoft, IBM and General Electric. With annual turnover at 3.6 billion euro, India contributed nearly seven per cent to Nokia's total global revenues of 51 billion euro in 2007. Nokia has invested $ 210 million for setting up a manufacturing facility in Tamil Nadu and the Indian facility is 1 of the best among 9 Nokia factories. It has estimated 100mn new phone subscribers in India.

BEIJING - China's main mobile phone company said Friday it will launch trial service of the homegrown Chinese next-generation standard next week, possibly moving the huge market closer to the long-anticipated rollout of new services.

The Kenyan government launches a share flotation of the country's largest mobile phone network Safaricom.

The head of the top US phone company AT&T Inc said that they are having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India.

CHINA Mobile Communications Corp will launch its 3G TD-SCDMA service on April 1, the company declared this morning. People can subscribe to the service, starting with a mobile number of 157, and enjoy half price telephone calls, China Mobile Communications Corp, the parent of Hong Kong-listed China Mobile Ltd, said. ZTE Corp, Samsung Electronics Co, LG Electronics Inc, Lenovo Group Ltd, Hisense Electric Co and Guangzhou New Postcom Equipment Manufacturing Co are among the first batch of mobile phone makers whose handsets have qualified for the service, according to a report by Sina.com today. China, the world's largest mobile-phone market, with 565.2 million users at the end of February, in 1997 began developing the time division synchronous code division multiple access, or TD-SCDMA, technology. TD-SCDMA as is one of three standards chosen by the Chinese government to be used for 3G services other than CDMA2000 and WCDMA.

[Telecom] The carrier will likely integrate the marketing message for services into a broader campaign focused on giving subscribers choices around music. Similar campaigns have been built on messaging blasts, emails, features on the Web site, and sponsorships and promotions. "We do a lot of integrated marketing," says Mark Nagel, director of product marketing for ATandT. "So when you open a box with the new Samsung Slim, you'll see special offers around getting free songs on the phone."

As rates for the service rise, a panel will debate a bill to eliminate costs charged by phone and cable companies offering voice-over-Internet service. In California, where celebrities, billionaires and the rest of us prize a little privacy at home, the price of going unlisted is going up, big-time.

A consumer group says firms are too cozy with student and alumni organizations and use questionable tactics. Aggressive peddling of credit cards has become pervasive on college campuses, with students pursued via mailings, phone calls and on-campus pitches that often use school organizations to break down resistance, a consumer group said Thursday after a survey of students.

Canadian communications regulators approved the 51.7 billion Canadian dollar ($50.9 billion) buyout of BCE, the country’s biggest phone provider, and set conditions that require the carrier to remain Canadian controlled. One of the six criteria requires Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan to appoint six directors, instead of the five proposed. The pension plan and its United States partners agreed to modify the original deal to appease the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which had expressed concerns that BCE might end up being controlled by United States investors. That proposal did not go far enough, the agency said in its decision. Deborah Allan, a spokeswoman for the pension plan, said the pension fund was reviewing the conditions and had no further comment.

MOBILE phone retailer Crazy John's is to compensate customers who were misled by its "free" or "$0" handset ad campaign, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) says.

It is a scenario rarely seen in today's technology market: Cellphone customers wander into any store, pick any device from a shelf, and connect it to any wireless network - one as open as the Internet.

Carlyle's 2005 purchase of Hawaiian Telcom has turned out to be a money drain for Carlyle and a headache for the customers of the phone company.

AT&T, the largest US mobile network operator, plans to launch a live mobile phone TV service in May based on Qualcomm's MediaFlo technology and separate network...

Mobile phone network 3UK overcame regulatory price cuts to deliver its first underlying profits in 2007 - and wrote off the cost of acquiring customers from which it no longer expects to make pro