Elderly, hearing impaired people are the new cool generation as a largely untapped business opportunity.

The market is growing each year as people live longer and phone penetration among senior citizens is nowhere near 100 percent.

Companies like Fujitsu want to change that and are tackling the main obstacles that have kept seniors from becoming technophiles -- tiny keypads, sound quality and people just speaking too darn fast.

Emporia Telecom from Austria is one company that has started to design phones for the elderly with larger keypads and simplified usage but Fujitsu promises to go to the heart of the matter, the spoken word, by using a new software in phones that slows down the speed of speech by up to 20 percent -- spreading the sound digitally over longer periods, and filling the breathing gaps.

Recall that WiMax and Long Term Evolution (LTE) are key technologies for operators to cope with surging data traffic from smartphones and laptops with mobile data cards. At the moment, it's a heated fight to become the industry standard.

"It's going to be like VHS-Betamax thing," Stuart Curzon, vice president of Verizon Business unit, told a news conference in Helsinki, Finland. "WiMax has been around for a few years now. If it would've taken off, it would've done it by now."

Verizon itself aims to be one of the first in the world to roll out LTE network starting next year.

Another industry executive, Nokia's sales chief Anssi Vanjoki, also weighed in with a WiMax-Betamax comparison just last month.

“I don’t think the future is very promising [for WiMax]. This is a classic example of industry standards clashing, and somebody comes out as the winner and somebody has to lose. Betamax was there for a long time, but VHS dominated the market. I see exactly the same thing happening here,”  Vanjoki was quoted as saying by the Financial Times.

Earlier this year, Nokia pulled from market its only product using WiMax, an Internet tablet, which was sold only in a couple of places in the United States.

Intel, the father of WiMax, strongly disagrees with Verizon and Nokia -- how about you?

(Photo: Reuters)

In a spurt of generosity, the world's top cellphone maker Nokia plans to pass on to smaller Finland-based firms some 100 ideas for which it has not found any use in its core business, figuring the move could lead to new business opportunities for others.

"The current economic climate is just right for a critical evaluation of intellectual property portfolios and the release of the innovations that are more suitable for others to exploit," Esko Aho, Nokia's Executive Vice President for Corporate Relations and Responsibility and Finland's former prime minister, said.

Some expect Finland's economy to sink about 5 percent this year due to its heavy reliance on exports, and the country is looking desperately for new ideas to boost its economy.

Nokia itself is expected to recover from the market slump faster than its rivals, but it reported its first-ever quarterly pretax loss for the January-March quarter.

The new public-private initiative includes opening access to Finnish state investments for companies involved in the program. So far, some 300 firms have said they are interested in participating. Most of these firms are outside the IT industry -- even a concrete foundry from Tampere, Finland's third largest city, has said it would like to get access to Nokia's bag of ideas.

Nokia's Aho said it would be easy to see additional value from mobile services for the concrete foundry.

"With location-based services they can make sure the concrete is poured down at the right plot," he said, adding that if all goes well, some of the ideas could end up with Nokia in the end anyway.

"It would be easy to see this river flowing also in the other direction," Aho said. "It could well be that some idea lead to the situation where the result can later be added to Nokia's offering."

Smart thinking, right?

"The touch has tipped, and drawing messaging is where touch leads," said Welsh.

It could also create the next money-spinner for mobile operators, for whom text messages are still the key data revenue generator in 2009.

To promote drawing on phones, Welsh -- whose mobile paintings have been downloaded some 500,000 times from Nokia's mobile-sharing service Mosh -- is planning a drawing tour across Britain, to visit art venues, universities, schools and nightclubs.

"Fine art drawing and painting are drenched in tradition, but all children draw -- as with the transformation that is happening to the rules of photography, the overwhelming majority of people who now take photographs no longer consider themselves photographers," Welsh said.

"One day maybe the use of drawing will change as children grow up with drawing as an instant communication option."

So far there is little that's "instant" in drawn messages -- they have to be downloaded through an Internet browser on the phone or sent as multimedia messages (MMS) from one phone to another.

"Currently, nobody trusts the networks as everyone knows a horror story or two to put them off being adventurous on the web from a mobile, and parts of the world don't have it," Welsh said.

A few years ago MMSs were expected to be the next big thing for mobile operators, but they have gained only a limited following among consumers due to technical glitches and some phones like the iPhone do not even support them.

Welsh, who has used Nokia's Mosh service to study people's interest in drawings on cellphones, says a simplified way of communicating through drawings was needed, and the potential could be surprising.

"A favorite story I heard while talking to many people was of a grandmother in Japan, who had all the usual methods to communicate with her grandchildren and she chose fax, because she could draw and then receive pictures from them," said Welsh.

In addition to touch screen devices Welsh himself uses different technologies for his drawing, pictures in the posting are made with a Nintendo's Wii remote control, which has been linked with Nokia's N95 8GB phone.

Lucent CTO Paul Mankiewich told Reuters it was easier "to network" in the smaller town of Cannes where everybody met in the bars on the boulevard after official opening hours, while in Barcelona, the attendees are spread all over the town. And for some Cannes is still strongly in their mind. Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg noted in his keynote speech Thursday morning noted how many phone companies have launched their new models here in Cannes here in Barcelona, he quickly corrected himself. (Photo: Reuters/Albert Gea)

The mobile phone industry is looking beyond wide area networks, and increasingly this includes Wi-Fi, as this UTStarcom handset makes clear. Photo: Reuters/Tarmo Virki