The Telco 2.0 team will be at the 2012 GSMA Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona in force - let us know if you’d like to meet. Here are the seven good reasons why we’ll be there:

1. Networking. Apart from our own brainstorms, MWC is one of the few places where we can meet most of our key clients as well as new innovators. This year we’ve partnered with European Leaders on a ‘Hot Topics’ evening networking event on Monday 27th February, where our latest analysis on M-Commerce and OTT-player impacts on Voice and Messaging will stimulate two panel discussions comprising senior execs from Foursquare, Groupon, Vimplecom, Telefonica, Skype, Visa, Telenor and others. There will be over 250 invitation-only guests for the event.

2. Keynote speeches. In the last two years, the keynote speeches have been made by Google and Microsoft (see How Google’s Chief Magician Stole the Show and Microsoft CEO fails to land all punches, but…). It is always fascinating to see which CEO pulls off the best performance and the biggest story, although Facebook looks like this year’s major new face (see below). We’ll also be interested to hear about the progress on NFC, what the US telcos say about LTE and all the other important ‘Three Letter Acronyms’. We’ll be analyzing and reporting back as usual.

3. Facing up to Facebook (and Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.). Bret Taylor of Facebook may temporarily take the spotlight as a keynote live speaker, but we’re pretty sure that he’ll be eclipsed within minutes by Telco 2.0’s Chief Strategist, Chris Barraclough, who’ll be interviewed by our friends over at Mobile World Live TV in the post speech analysis. Chris was one of the authors of our extremely popular Strategy Report “Dealing with the ‘Disruptors’: Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft/Skype and Amazon”, and also the article “Facebook: really ‘worth’ $30 billion max - $100 billion is hype”. We’re also be talking privately to a number of our clients on this topic, so please let us know if you’d like to meet us on this too.

Continue reading "Mobile World Congress 2012: seven good reasons to go " »

Posted at 4:17 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 and European Leaders are running the ‘Hot Topics Mobile’ senior panel and networking event at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) on the 27th February 2012 at the Hotel Omm, Barcelona.

At this invitation only event, 250 thought leaders of the mobile industry will talk to a select group of wireless influencers about what’s on their mind, stimulated by the latest Telco 2.0 analysis.

• Debate topic #1 Mobile Communications - Is Facebook the Future? Panellists: Dennis Crowley - Foursquare, Co-Founder; Joachim Horn - Tele2 AB, Group CTIO; Rob Conway - VimpleCom (Former CEO GSMA); Andreas Bernstrom - Rebtel, CEO; Dave Williams - Stoke, CTO; Rick Osterloh - Skype, Vice President - Product Management & Design; Tom Christian Gotschalksen - Telenor, SVP Global Services.


• Debate topic #2 Mobile Commerce - Changing the way we shop. Pannellists: Ghassan Hasbani - STC, CEO - International; Neil Montefiore - StarHub, CEO; Bill Gajda - Visa Mobile, Global Head; Michael Shim - Groupon, VP Mobile Partnerships; Shaun Gregory - Telefonica Digital, Director of Advertising; Pieter Knook - Serial Board Advisor (ex Microsoft & Vodafone).

This is an invitation ONLY event: to express an interest please email contact@stlpartners.com or call us on +44 (0) 207 247 5003. As a preview, there’s a highlights video below from the MWC Hot Topics Party 2011…

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 / European Leaders 'Hot Topics Mobile' @ MWC 27th Feb" »

Posted at 2:48 PM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: Smartphone Q4s: Apple, Samsung, Nokia, AT&T
• Broadband Connectivity: Verizon, AT&T, TWC Q4s: fibre and cable beating VDSL soundly
• Google: Wallet chief quits, troubled fibre project, privacy row, search criticised, chromebooks don’t sell
• Customer Data: O2 tells everyone your phone number, Facebook IPO watch
• Technology Disruptions: Must-read - are we risking a repeat of the 1986 Internet congestion collapse?
• The Sixth Bullet: Why can’t you have the MWC agenda in your calendar?

[Ed: This is the last week that ‘Early Bird’ rates will be available for the New Digital Economics Brainstorm in Silicon Valley on the 27th-28th of March, so book now if you can. After that, our spring EMEA event is in London on the 12th-13th of June. We’ll also be at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the end of February, so let us know if you’d like to meet there - email contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 20 7247 5003 for more on any of the above.]

After last week’s bumper crop of results (Microsoft, Intel, IBM up; Google disappoints; RIM’s two CEOs go), it was another results manic Monday. Apple’s Q4 led the way, almost dripping with success.

“We are very happy to have generated over $17.5 billion in cash flow from operations during the December quarter,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO.

Well, yes.

Continue reading "Joy for Apple, Samsung and Verizon FiOS; pain for AT&T, Google, Nokia and O2 - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:44 PM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: Microsoft, Intel, IBM beat expectations - Windows Phones behind WinMo, though
• Smartphones: Google beats expectations - the wrong way, RIM sacks both CEOs
• Content 2.0: Feds seize Megaupload, SOPA wars are over
• Voice 2.0: DECIX launches open ENUM, Startup watch: Vox.io
• M2M & Embedded Mobile: Vodafone - No.1 in the world for M2M?

[Ed: ‘Early Bird’ rates are still available for the New Digital Economics Brainstorms in Silicon Valley on the 27th-28th of March, and then in London on the 12th-13th of June for our spring EMEA event. Email contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 20 7247 5003 to join us.]

It was a busy results week - and, as Businessweek reports, Microsoft, IBM, and Intel beat the spread. Microsoft did especially well, specifically in sales of Office and XBox products, while Intel’s results showed the company recovering well from supply-chain problems caused by flooding in Thailand and the Japanese earthquake before that.

In fact, Microsoft shares surged ahead, reaching their highest mark since early 2010, as not only sales but also margins improved. iSuppli added to the bullishness by forecasting that the Nokia market share would transition over into Windows Phone. However, although some are very pleased with the numbers of Windows Phone 7 devices logging into Facebook, Nielsen’s fourth quarter scoreboard showed that Windows Mobile devices are still outselling Windows Phone, and neither of them are setting the world alight.

Also, it looks like there’s going to be no Skype integration until next Christmas at least (and in fact there isn’t even a port of the Skype client for WP7 yet). Windows 8 wants to control mobile broadband devices.

But is the very idea of a “PC”, central to Microsoft over the years, challenged? Horace thinks so, with this week’s Chart of the Day.

Continue reading "Results round-up: Microsoft, Intel, IBM up; Google disappoints; RIM's two CEOs go - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:29 PM | Link to this article

Our latest research examines ‘Under-The-Floor’ Players - the strategic threats and opportunities presented by wholesale providers, outsourcers and government-run broadband networks.

The telecoms industry often puts so-called OTT (over-the-top) players like Google and Facebook at the forefront of its concerns, as they pose new competition for services and applications. But what about encroachment of companies “underneath” the telcos, displacing them from their core asset, the network?

To read an extract from the report, please see our research portal here.

Posted at 2:14 PM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: Free Mobile - reaction, excitement, price war
• Google: Upping the ante on social, or the biggest mistake ever?
• Broadband Connectivity: Telenor CEO on the Telco 2.0 challenge
• Technology Disruptions: Intel, Lenovo, Motorola Mobility push x86 chips into mobile
• Social Media: Facebook IPO for late May?

[Ed: ‘Early Bird’ rates are still available for the New Digital Economics Brainstorms in Silicon Valley on the 27th-28th of March, and then in London on the 12th-13th of June for our spring EMEA event. Email contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 20 7247 5003 to join us.]

Benoit Felten reviews the impact of Free Mobile’s launch, pointing out that it implements two of their historic selling points (low prices and simple propositions) but not the third (innovative services), although there is an argument that the heavy use of WLAN offload and femtocells represents an innovative solution on the cost side.

Continue reading "Free Mobile fracas, Google's search error?, and Telenor vs. Facebook - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:05 PM | Link to this article

This chart highlights the serious concerns we’re now seeing for messaging and voice revenues across the telco industry.

The c.300+ Telco 2.0 community members we asked in late 2011 across our EMEA and APAC Brainstorms predicted remarkably similar declines, which were also in keeping with our findings in the ‘Dealing with the Disruptors’ report.

While it’s difficult to take these views as a definitive absolute guide to the ultimate revenue impact, many telcos worldwide are starting to see real impacts from so-called ‘Over-The-Top’ (OTT) services, which were unambiguously identified by delegates as the main cause of these predicted drops. One senior participant commented that some telco finance folk would be shocked to see these views so widely held in the industry, although others said that such scenarios were already being considered.

As can be seen above, delegates from our APAC brainstorm feared more for mobile voice revenues than their EMEA counterparts, who were more concerned about messaging revenues. This is in part because a higher proportion of APAC voice revenues are pre-paid and not in-bundle, and the lower smartphone penetrations in the more prevalent emerging markets in APAC compared to EMEA (more on the brainstorms here).

This leads us on to two developments for 2012: we’ll be looking in-depth again at strategies for optimising voice and messaging in 2012 (more on our research agenda here); and members of the Telco 2.0 subscription service can now access slides, charts and reports from the two most recent brainstorms here.

Email contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 20 7247 5003 to find out more about our research or the next brainstorms.

Posted at 4:21 PM | Link to this article

A BlackBerry design concept from 2009 has been leaked and divides opinion at Telco 2.0.

Perhaps the really interesting question is whether the state-of-2009 BlackBerry OS, hardware, and service experience would have benefited that much from more exciting industrial design. After all, a very big chunk of the iPhone’s appeal has been concentrated in the software and in the supporting cast of iTunes features and services.

While other vendors (naming no names) came up with some very complex streaming models, Apple concentrated on keeping your content in sync between different devices and making sure you could get it from any of them to any playback device that might be hanging around. Not many users know what Multicast-DNS Service Discovery is, and a lot of network engineers hate it for various reasons, but they do like having all their stuff on their Mac on their iPhone.

And it’s not as if the Bold 9900 isn’t a pretty handsome chunk of shiny. Is RIM’s real problem service design rather than industrial design?

Posted at 5:27 PM | Link to this article

The web is agog about the launch of Free.fr’s mobile network, long awaited. Om Malik interviews CEO Xavier Niel, and it’s quite impressive how much Telco 2.0 comes up.

“Since it is our own set-top box, we can innovate around it,” he says. “In the U.S., they buy their set-top boxes from other providers.” That’s a mistake and lost opportunity, Niel says and proceeds to outline how pivotal these set-top boxes are for his company and its future.

They’re referring to the Freebox Revolution devices Free pushed out last year. We’ve long been arguing the importance of better CPE, and pointing to Free as a case study of how to do it (they engineer them in house, based on open-source software).

(from here; by)

For example, Free.fr used the set-top box for automatically sharing a portion of one’s broadband connection via Wi-Fi with other Free.fr customers. Over five million set-top boxes means Free.fr has a free Wi-Fi cloud enveloping major cities such as Paris. Even when away from home, you can easily get broadband instead of resorting to an expensive 3G network.

This Free.Fr free Wi-Fi network is going to play a pivotal role in the soon-to-be-launched service, which will be using 42 Mbps HSPA+ technology. The company has built a network of 15,000 macrocells, but those 5 million “nano cells” are going to be the key difference maker, Niel points out.

Free.fr’s newer set-top boxes will have built-in femtocells. On top of that, Free is going to be beefing up its macrocells with high-capacity fiber connections being fed by Iliad’s dark fiber. And when the time comes, he is going to embrace LTE and include that in his network as well. “We will go to wide area network (3G and 2.5G) when we are not in Wi-Fi coverage,” he tells me.

WLAN offload, multiple radio networks, and small cells? Telco 2.0 has been covering this ever since we first encountered FON.

He believes telecoms should charge for access and make money by selling the ID and payment services, not voice and SMS. It’s one of the reasons he loves Square, Jack Dorsey’s payment company, where he is an angel investor. “It is crazy to pay for voice by the minute as voice is so cheap,” he says. Even SMS texting is a lot of money and he finds that crazy. “We are trying to be the cheapest mobile service in France,” he adds. Don’t be surprised to see Google Voice-type services built into the service itself.

ID, personal data, and mobile payments as services to upstream customers? And better voice and messaging? You heard it here first.

The really big question is whether the cost savings from providing so much connectivity via the Freeboxes will be enough for Free to keep its promises on price. Then we’ll see whether there really is more to the disruption than just another round of commoditisation. And if so, Free will again be a world example of Telco 2.0 best practice.

Posted at 4:47 PM | Link to this article

• Technology Disruptions: CES - another push for smart TV, more DISH/VZW rumours
• Online Video: UK Netflix is go for launch, pricing above Lovefilm’s
• Smartphone Roundup: Apple loves Flash storage, Samsung Q4 - impressive or just soft numbers?
• Strategy & Finance: Vodafone announces a new partnership strategy, Free.fr mobile launch
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Cisco quietly exits consumer telepresence

[Ed: ‘Early Bird’ rates are available for the New Digital Economics Brainstorms in Silicon Valley on the 27th-28th of March, and then in London on the 12th-13th of June for our spring EMEA event. Email contact@stlpartners.com or call +44 (0) 20 7247 5003 to join us.]

It’s CES week, and expectations are high because early sales numbers for Christmas are depressing. Overall consumer electronics sales, according to NPD, were down 5.9% year on year. The bright spots were “streaming devices” (like Roku and friends), home cinema kit, and flat-panel TVs, while everything else suffered and devices whose functions are integrated in the iPhone suffered disproportionately.

TV innovation was a big theme this week. Lenovo showed a 55 inch TV running Android 4.0 on a 1.5GHz dual-core CPU. (A dual-core TV?) It also has a built-in 5 megapixel camera to support face recognition. There are those of us who remember stories about East German TV sets that supposedly contained a CCTV camera so the local Party representative could check you were watching the TV you were supposed to be watching…

Continue reading "Smart TV@CES, Netflix, Samsung's Q4 No.s and Apple's odd forecasts - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:17 AM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 News Review

• Year in Review: Reviews of 2011, reviewed
• Content 2.0: Top 10 pirated films, UltraViolet review, Akamai-Cotendo fallout
• Broadband Connectivity: IMS brings VZW LTE to its knees
• RIM: Crisis club’s co-CEOs cut own wages to C$1
• Technology Disruptions: Karsten Nohl and the massive GSM security breach. Again

It’s the first Telco 2.0 News Review of 2011, and as a result, we thought we’d begin with a review of reviews of 2011. Mashable thought the defining feature of 2011 was big companies reversing big decisions, with the social media contributing to the trend by creating an enormous fuss. The Register needed two reviews to cover a year packed with news, and concluded that the biggest stories all involved the question of who controls your data, from Facebook to the Google FTC inquiry and the great phone-hacking scandal.

Continue reading "2011 in Review, Reviewed: Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 1:04 PM | Link to this article

• Advertising & Attention: Apple backtracks on iAds business model (plus Apple news)
• M-Commerce 2.0: 70% of Indian e-commerce is COD, 30% fails
• Online Video & Content: Would Verizon really buy Netflix? Also, designing the BBC iPlayer app
• Patent Wars: BT sues Google
• Telco Core Services: AT&T-T-Mobile deal thoroughly dead
• Telco 2.0 Themes: Cloud: keeping Netflix flying, Voice: the future of the PSTN

[Ed: STL Partners would like to wish all our readers a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year, and we hope to see you at one of our events next year. New Digital Economics is coming to Silicon Valley again on the 27th-28th of March, and then we pull into London again on the 12th-13th of June for our spring EMEA event.]

Apple backtracks on their iAds platforms’ controversial business model. You may remember that iAds was intended to be a high-concept, high-touch, but mostly high margin magazine ad service by contrast to Google’s micro-advertising model, and Apple expected the advertisers to commit to buying at least $1 million of ads as the entry ticket. Further, Apple also wanted to keep the pay-per-click model and charge for every touch. It was always going to be interesting to see if this would work, and by extension, whether the whole idea of the iPad as a luxury magazine format for big brands made sense.

It looks like it doesn’t - Cupertino has cut the minimum buy-in from $1m to $500,000 and then to $400,000, introduced a cap on how much advertisers have to pay in pay-per-click, and sent a lot of employees to their media buying agency to learn about the business. Meanwhile, developers who signed up for in-app advertising are complaining that there’s no money in it, mostly because there aren’t enough ads to fill the inventory.

Continue reading "Apple re-thinks iAd, BT sues Google, and Verizon / Netflix? - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 11:46 AM | Link to this article

In 2011 we’ve really been struck by the ‘can do’ attitude of companies in the Middle East and Asia Pacific regions towards Telco 2.0 strategies, and their desire to leapfrog legacy (Western) business models and technologies. This was highlighted at the New Digital Economics & CSG APAC Executive Brainstorm in Singapore, as were increasing similarities between APAC region business model challenges with those in Europe and America. See furher analysis here.

Posted at 5:35 PM | Link to this article

In this guest post, Jeong Kim, President Bell Labs, looks into the future and discusses the impact of video, sensors, the need for energy efficiency, and cloud services, and asks what form personal communications will take after smartphones. His answer may surprise you.

One hundred years ago, a telephone was a box on a wall. Now it’s a wallet-sized device that captures video, surfs the web, and manages hundreds of applications. Tomorrow you may not always need your own device: the environment around you will offer those personalized capabilities - and more.

Peering into the unknown

At Bell Labs, we research the technologies that will drive the next great innovations. This involves a fair bit of trying to envision the future. Our expertise in key technical areas provides a good guide, but of course, there are still many categories of unknowns.

One such category is known unknowns: knowing, for example, that the current explosion in the use of video on the Internet is straining the capacity of networks, but perhaps not yet knowing which specific technology will provide the best solution. Then there are the unknown unknowns - unknown needs that will be met by unknown technologies. These are among the many reasons why we persistently interact with customers and nourish our research capacity across multiple disciplines of science.

Even so, predicting the future is by no means a sure bet. Five years ago, who would have thought that so many people around the globe would spend so much time on social networks like MySpace and Facebook? And it’s certainly possible that in the next five years, other similarly unanticipated surprises will arise. Nevertheless, we can still identify several key trends likely to shape that future.

Continue reading "President Bell Labs: what's after smartphones?" »

Posted at 12:44 PM | Link to this article

• Strategy & Finance: Android “destroys” Symbian in China; patent war updates
• Broadband Connectivity: Verizon outpaces AT&T - was FTTC a blunder?
• Voice & Messaging 2.0: New Twitter, BlackBerry Conferencing 2.0, Android gets SIP
• Online Video & Content: Google acquires music rights experts
• Telco 2.0 Themes: Google Shipping? Microsoft Azure fights AWS, Verizon denies blocking Google Wallet

[Ed. Now’s a good time to get the dates for the next Brainstorms in the diary: Americas, 27-28 March 2012, Marriott Union Square, San Francisco, and EMEA, 12-13 June 2012, Grange St Pauls Hotel, London.]

Analysys International reckon that Android (and, of course, its growing brood of mutant forkdroids) has “destroyed” Symbian’s once massive market share in China. In Q3 2010, 68% of the Chinese smartphone fleet was running Symbian S60 - now, it’s 58% Android, in a vastly bigger population. Symbian is still at 28% of the market, with Apple on 6%, which is actually behind “others”. Fascinatingly, although the Great Firewall (both as a trade barrier and as a means of censorship) has prevented Google from dominating the Chinese search market, Google’s mobile Linux has proliferated enormously in China. Of course, it’s very doubtful whether any revenue actually redounds to Google’s credit from this, especially in the light of the forkdroid projects which basically replace the Google apps and services in Android with Baidu or QQ’s products.

Continue reading "Android conquers China; Verizon outpaces AT&T; Google buys music rights experts - Telco 2.0 News Review" »

Posted at 12:36 PM | Link to this article