Research Center

In Japan earlier this year NTT Docomo announced a partnership with local organic-foods retailer Radishbo-ya. At first glance a mobile operator selling organic vegetables seems like an odd move, but Docomo is predicting that its entry into eight new vertical markets — media content, aggregation platforms, safety and security, healthcare, ecology, M2M (machine-to-machine communications), finance, and commerce — will net an additional one trillion yen in revenue, or roughly $10.7 billion, by 2015.... More Info

From pinball machines and Super Mario Bros. Nintendo cartridges to PC role-playing games and now wildly popular tablet and smartphone franchises, gaming has come a long way.... More Info

While revenue growth and, more critically, margins have been slowing or have even stalled for traditional voice and text services, business services provide a bright spot for providers, showing the most potential for growth in an otherwise economically gloomy telecom market.... More Info

In this day and age books, cars, utilities — even your grandma, if you think about it — are all hooked up to “the Internet of Things.” Evidence of the exploding number of devices and uses for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications presents itself everywhere you look, with streetlights, traffic signals, tollbooths, and vending machines all receiving a digital makeover via real-time connectivity. Essentially every imaginable function of society is merging with some sort of communications network.... More Info

Location confers powerful advantages, and no one understands this better than bricks-and-mortar retail chains. Choosing where to put a new store can be such a big differentiator that many companies, particularly Starbucks and Walgreens, guard their site-selection processes like trade secrets.... More Info