How to add value to content by leveraging telco's REAL strengths

Telecom TV’s new survey explores the future of IPTV. It’s an interesting survey and is quick to do. The link is here.

NB: For each survey you participate in TelecomTV will share the results with you for FREE and donate $1.00 to UNHCR’s charity, Ninemillion.org.

Background: Many Carriers, faced with decreasing voice revenue streams, are looking to IPTV for their next big win. With new opportunities comes risks and challenges; many critics point out that telcos are straying into new and dangerous territory, because in becoming content providers they’re not playing to their key engineering strengths.

What do YOU think is going to happen in this carrier-delivered IP market over the next five years?

Please fill out the survey here. It’s relatively quick, entirely painless and for a good cause.

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Meet JIL; that’s the Joint Innovation Lab, a project worked out between Vodafone and China Mobile that’s meant to establish standards for mobile widgetry. Apart from the obvious point that only telcos could come up with anything like a standards body for widgets, what’s the betting the standard turns out to be a lot like the Nokia Web Runtime?

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 28th April 2008" »

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Another common use of the word “platform” that sometimes confuses people is the way it’s used to describe the technology that goes around individual applications in a computer system. Like Microsoft Windows, Linux, Adobe Flash in the browser, Symbian S60 in a mobile phone, or what have you. IT people spend a lot of time arguing about them, which is probably less stupid than it sounds, because the history of IT has been the history of development platforms.

Continue reading "Another Kind of Platform: Telcos as Development Environments" »

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LAST CHANCE TO JOIN 200 SENIOR EXECS AT THE 4TH TELCO 2.0 EXECUTIVE BRAINSTORM NEXT WEEK (16-17 APRIL, LONDON). ALL PARTICIPANTS GET A FREE COPY OF ONE OF NEW RESEARCH REPORTS. DETAILS HERE.

In Today’s Issue: 60 WAP sites - meh; Tellabs - beware big telcos; Google not buying Skype; Carphone Warehouse joins forces of Righteousness; cars! with periscopes!; Visto on the skids; Yahoo! Other people who searched for Yahoo! also searched for Yes!; unofficial iPhone SDK; cheap iPhones; new Nokia E90 firmware; WiMAX optimism; LTE promises; iClones; dumb terminals for your smartphone; 35 years of mobility

NBC Universal offers a thrilling new content play: “direct access to more than 60 WAP sites on your handset”, no less. We thought you already had “direct access” to considerably more than that. Of course, what they mean is that they’ll yuck up all the menus with ones they want you to visit so they can show you ads. So very 1999-dotcom-boom. Just don’t tell us there’s another bust coming…

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 7th April 2008" »

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In Today’s Issue: Motorola gossip: the demerger cometh; cablecos’ Comcast-Clearwire concert party; HOWTO deploy fibre in NZ?; here’s an answer from San Francisco; Symbian OS platform security is hacked; free WLAN in BA lounges; 3UK is profitable, pigs fly; another MVNO casualty; Virgin Mobile India “not an MVNO”; Miss Bimbo; $20 a month on ringtones; Cuba Movil!; Chinese 3G; really fast stuff; 3G iPhones; another startup-without-money.

Inside gossip at Motorola; someone claims to have been the Richard Kinder figure of their crisis and accuses Ed Zander of working their past CMO to death, and also playing too much golf. Which of these sins is more serious is left as an exercise for the reader. It was also this week that saw Moto finally take our repeated advice. They got rid of the handsets operation, thus leaving it “floating downwards to find its own level”, in the immortal words of Sir Norman Fowler describing the collapse of Sterling.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 31st March 2008" »

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Guest post from Mobile Enterprise CEO Tony Riley:

The first Mobile Advertising and Marketing Awards Conference was held in London on 12th/13th March 2008. The event continued many of the themes from the GSMA’s CMO Forum and the Telco 2.0 program. It added its own unique sound bites enhancing previous debate and also a few new insights into “what the industry is really facing.” Here are a few thoughts from the conference:

Continue reading "Mobile Advertising and Marketing Awards: Roundup" »

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In Today’s Issue: Mobile apps RIP? And are mobile RIAs the killer? Control your private plane with a Nokia N810; or develop for IMS. It’s your choice. NEC pushes “It’s not IMS”. Sprint = Telco USSR? British ISPs; how not to do it. Comcast: much the same. iPhones; hacked again. Hackers deploy platform strategy. Salesforce.com menace rises. Big changes ahead at Telecom Italia. Nokia GPS-tags photos. Virgin Mobile in India. EU “worse than communism”. And cancerogenic BTS doesn’t exist after all.

Have downloadable mobile applications died the death, to be replaced by a Web-based future? Former Palm and Apple exec Michael Mace thinks so; Carlo Longino agrees. The argument is that the diversity of possible platforms, the difficulty telcos (especially) and vendors have relating to the developer world, and the restrictive terms of business they apply, have rendered it just too difficult for a real developer ecosystem to emerge. Meanwhile, the surge in things like Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe AIR, and JavaFX means that the richness of applications that run in a browser is beginning to challenge what you can achieve reasonably quickly in a native application. This is a significant change in the balance of power between the Web 2.0 players and telcos, since you don’t need a special (telco-issued) digital certificate or pre-installation for web applications.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 3rd March 2008" »

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150 representatives from across the global mobile marketing value chain gathered for a brainstorm at The CMO [Chief Marketing Officers] Forum at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona two and a bit weeks ago. The focus was “Mobile as a True Marketing Channel - Realising the Opportunity”. Lots of others tried to get in, but it was strictly invitation-only. Telco 2.0 facilitated the event using our ‘Mindshare’ interactive tools and presented some new research. It’s interesting to compare the output from this event (below) with the Telco 2.0/GSMA Digital Marketing & Advertising Summit in October (output here).

For those who weren’t in Barcelona, or couldn’t get past the bouncers on the door, here’s what happened:

Continue reading "Highlights of the CMO Forum at Mobile World Congress" »

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The price of a marginal voice minute is falling all over the world. A basic access bundle of voice, messages and data is becoming the norm in many markets. That bundle offers an ever-larger, or even unlimited, amount of traffic. At the same time, there’s a dramatic explosion of new kinds of voice going on — embedded in games, mobile VoIP, IM clients growing a voice capability, web-based click-to-call, extensions to enterprise VoIP systems — and none of them are by default inside the telco.

In case you missed it the first time, here are the results from our Broadband Business Models survey on this score:

The message is simple: non-operator voice-enabled application are going to grow very fast. That’s not our opinion, but that of you and your peers. (Our opinion is that the numbers are a little aggressive, but not by much. It may take a 2-3 extra years. Still, contrast mobile in 2008 with 1998 to see how dramatically the world can change.)

If you’re a phone company, and you’re still on Plan A of selling large buckets of voice minutes, it doesn’t look like a very attractive future. At the moment, telco voice is still just about growing in volume, although margins are often vanishingly tiny on fixed line, and falling fast on mobile.

So what could we do about that? The Telco 2.0 way is to divide up your bulk product, and re-package it and distribute it in new ways. We’re going to use dating as an example of how to do it.

Continue reading "Re-packaging voice minutes to raise margins" »

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So everyone else has done their 3GSM…sorry…Mobile World Congress round-up posts; what did Telco 2.0 think was cool? As you’ll no doubt guess, it wasn’t the shiny gadgets that got us; even at MWC, the anti-shiny goggles all Telco 2.0 team members get issued still block them out. It was a very serious conference this year; we think it may have been the first to get serious about the kinds of communication and enterprise-focused activities that will eventually make serious money for carriers. We broke them down by themes…

Continue reading "Telco 2.0's Private Mobile World Congress" »

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This year, we’re focusing on seven themes in the industry; Investment and Market Valuations, Disruptive Threats, Two-Sided Business Models (a key theme in the forthcoming Platforms report), Adjacent Markets, Core Products and End-User Needs, and of course Regulation. So these news posts will be centred around these concerns.

Despite everything, it looks like Sprint is going ahead with the big WiMAX rollout; launch is scheduled for mid-April, and a gaggle of new contracts have been issued to hardware vendors like ZyXEL. The mob that is the Apple fanbase is working itself up over the thought that this year’s Macworld might see the launch of a WiMAX-capable device of some sort — apparently they’ve got ad banners reading “There’s something in the air”. There’s conclusive evidence for you.

However, it’s true that Sprint is looking at bundling WiMAX connectivity with devices, just as it wraps EV-DO data in the price of the Amazon Kindle (“In Amazon, book reads you!”), so perhaps there’s something in it. Meanwhile, China Mobile doesn’t want the iPhone.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 14th January 2008" »

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BT strikes in the set-top box market; they’re the first to ship Xbox360 consoles as IPTV endpoints. And there’s more; BT Vision gets an “on-screen magazine” based on the same single platform. We’ve often said that the fixed-line world doesn’t get user equipment, and that this creates interesting opportunities; BT has just leapt right on it. See our case study on Iliad’s Freebox in the Broadband Business Models report.

PS: we’re trying out a new format for Ring! Ring!…

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 7th January 2008" »

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Telco 2.0 Strategy

Structural separation? We don’t need no stinkin’ separation! So says Belgacom…

Telco 2.0 Comment: They built a VDSL network, and now their competitors want to play. Belgacom of course claims they took the risk and therefore should reap the rewards; but the biggest competitor is the company that laid the fibre already everywhere else, and now wants to offer unbundled service in the rest of the country. Will profits come from pleasing customers, or regulators?

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 17th December" »

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We recently gave readers of this blog a summary of the key highlights from the Advertising and Marketing Summit at the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in October, run in partnership with the GSMA. This post seeks to build on the last one and give further insight into why Advertising should be interesting to operators: not because it will fill the gap created by declining voice and messaging revenues alone, but because it represents an entrée into other lucrative areas.

Let’s look at what was covered at the Advertising and Marketing Summit in a bit more detail:

Customers: “Why aren’t you doing more?”

We kicked off the day with three potential customers of Telco advertising services:

1. Nick Strauss, Senior Planner, Mather Advertising - ‘The Brand’
2. Sunil Gunderia, VP Mobile EMEA, Walt Disney Internet Group - ‘The Content Provider’
3. Richard Wheaton, Managing Director, Neo@Ogilvy - ‘The Media Buyer’

Continue reading "Advertising: The Telco Trojan Horse" »

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Following our very popular post on Nokia, a useful introductory presentation and video from the recent Nokia World event describing Ovi can be found here. We believe Ovi is a very important industry development…

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In Today’s Issue: Asia goes crazy for network sharing, plastic fibre, fixed-line videocalls (yes, really), Opera Mini conquers all, make a widget and win a Nokia N95, UMA gadget with 2GB storage, data centre heists, iFlop, BlackBerry WiFi on a plane, Nokia threatens UGC boom, new torrent tracker tech terror, free music, ads in P2P movies, and Telco 2.0 Recommends…

Broadband Connectivity

Vodafone, Bharti, Idea in monster network sharing deal.

Telco 2.0 Comment: Shared, structurally separated, and community-owned infrastructure is a major industry trend in responding to the broadband incentive problem. This deal is especially interesting due to its sheer size; India is getting a giant shared mobile infrastructure operator, which will probably draw in other carriers.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 10th December" »

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In Today’s Issue: 3.3bn Mobiles, Open VZW, 3UK sues the world, Peter Erskine spends more time with his money, another WiMAX outbreak, Japanese data prices tumble, Dutch fibre prices untumble a tad, Saudi Mobily buys huge IP network, Vodafone and Telefonica and adverts, Lithuanian and Brazilian IPTV, rapid withdrawal from Iraq, Nokia’s cool tools, sinister stalkerware from Google, and Telco 2.0 Recommends: the best of the blogs.

Telco 2.0 Strategy

3.3bn mobile subscribers worldwide…

Telco 2.0 Comment: And that’s still only 50 per cent world penetration. The big question is now just how close to the world adult population it’s possible to push; is more than 75 per cent achievable?

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 3rd December" »

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An instructive summary of a recent presentation by one of AT&T’s Group Presidents, Ralph de la Vega, covering IPTV and the broader transformation of his company here.

De la Vega’s track record is near perfect. The way he re-built Cingular and merged it with the old AT&T Wireless is a text book example of how to do a mega-merger with different technologies (GSM & TDMA), especially when we have the not-so-smooth comparison of Sprint and Nextel so clear in the memory banks.

For Telco 2.0 watchers the key quote from his talk is this:

De la Vega sees the industry as focusing on three points to push the entertainment industry into the 21st century. Content needs to be accessible on all three screens, it needs to be high definition, and it needs to be high quality. “The new TV is not something we can do alone.” “AT&T 2.0,” as de la Vega described it to chuckles and sighs from the audience, “is looking for partners.”

We wonder whether IPTV, as currently architected by Microsoft and deployed by AT&T into the home via DSL, is the answer. We are much bigger fans of either a) the evolving BSkyB solution or b) the Verizon FiOS solution (ie broadcast on a fibre wavelength) with IP-based solutions for the long tail (perhaps over a dedicated VLAN).

We await with interest AT&T’s next big strategic move which we predict will be the purchase of either DirectTV or EchoStar. Note: if they buy DirectTV (a customer of NDS) watch the rollout of the BSkyB solution across the States….

More on the links between AT&T and BSkyB here, and on Sky’s approach to broadband here.

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We had a very fruitful discussion at the recent Digital Advertising & Marketing Summit we ran with the GSMA. Over 80 people attended from across Telco, Content and Media Industries with some enlightening presentations from future customers (Mather Advertising, Disney, Ogilvy); operators (Vodafone, Orascom); partner service providers (Yahoo!); trade bodies (Mobile Entertainment Forum, GSM Association, Mobile Marketing Association) and vendor partners (Infospace, Mobile Enterprise, Openet, Infospace and Alcatel-Lucent).

The full write up of the day - including all the brainstorming output and voting - will be made available shortly to participants but there were a few recurrent themes that I can share with you here:

1. Advertising is a great opportunity because it opens up a new revenue stream from a new set of customers by allowing operators to be a platfom in a 2-sided market. It therefore can contribute to the decline in core revenues and is strategically important.
2. No it isn’t, just look at the exec summary of STL Partners report Telcos’ Role in the Advertising Value Chain - the global advertising industry is only 25% the size of the Telco industry. Even if operators captured everything, there is no way advertising is going to fill the hole in core voice and messaging revenues. In fact, it isn’t work getting out of bed for.
3. But Advertising is a great opportunity because it opens up a new revenue stream from a new set of customers by allowing operators to be a platfom in a 2-sided market …

Round and round and round. Several in the room advocating Advertising as the silver bullet and others dismissing it and pointing to the lack of REAL acitvity from the operator community as testament to their perception of the size of the opportunity.

So is this Argument Resolvable?

Continue reading "Forget Mobile Advertising...Think Bigger" »

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One of the most interesting companies that took part in October’s Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm is VoiceSage, a small Irish firm that develops innovative enterprise applications using telco services. This was a major theme of the event - if you want MySpace for monkeys on LG Prada phones, or the nth twist on music downloads, you’ll be fine asking Vodafone or Sprint, but if you ask anyone who gets Telco 2.0, they’re probably working on something for business users.

There is a very good reason for this; compared to telecoms, most of the trades that conventional wisdom thinks will provide growth and margin in the future are tiny. Telcos could completely crush the ad business - eat every ad agency in the world - and notice only a minor blip in their revenues. The telecoms industry could take over Hollywood and barely feel the bump, like some grey-suited monster lumbering over the Los Angeles canyons. For an encore, they could crush their way up the coast to San Francisco and eat the computer game industry. And it still might not be enough.

Continue reading "VoiceSage and the business of...business" »

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CDRs - Call Detail Records, the database entities that permit telcos to bill their users - are getting a bad press at the moment with the latest revelations about US networks’ willingness to let the NSA dig through their databases without getting warrants or accepting any other quaint legal restrictions.

But at Telco 2.0 yesterday, we heard how CDRs might actually empower the users in a Telco 2.0 future. Keith Wallington of mobile SIP insurgents Truphone suggested that “in the future, this will be bigger than mobile number portability”. Wallington proposed the ability to have calls routed intelligently depending on your preferences and the patterns of use revealed by network data. And this brings us right to his point.

If all your contextual services depend on the contrail of signalling data you leave behind in the operator network, the ability to take that information with you when you churn is going to be crucial. Perhaps we need a right to claim our data; however, the really important point is as always the practical implementation of such a thing, just as it was with number portability.

So, of course, are the legal and privacy problems; the incentives for the operator to implement a platform for interesting contextual services are all about the clever things the operator could do with the data, but the strongest protections for user privacy essentially rule this out. If the user data, for example, was encrypted with a key the user controlled, the user could grant access to it for each service they wanted. But the operators will insist on being able to analyse the data themselves; or they probably won’t do it.

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No O’Reilly ETel for you!

Telco 2.0 Comment: You’ll just have to come to Telco 2.0 instead. We designed it specifically as a reaction against the kind of conferences where all you remember is the delegate bag — although ETel wasn’t among them and will be missed.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Monday News Analysis, 15th October" »

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We are delighted to have Frank Boulben, New Business Development Director, Vodafone Group speaking at the Digital Advertising and Marketing Summit next week to update us on the vision the company has for mobile advertising and the steps they are taking to realise this.

Recently, we were also lucky enough to interview Burkhard Leimbrock, Director Vodafone MediaSolutions! about the new unit set up to support the advertising effort in Germany. We sent Burkhard a list of questions by email (so they could be vetted by the PR department) and his responses are below - lots of interesting stuff but also tantilisingly brief in some respects! This Unit is one of Vodafone Group’s many experiments in mobile advertising and marketing. It will be interesting to see how this capabilitiy is developed and whether or not it will eventually serve the wider Group.

Telco 2.0: What is the purpose of the new MediaSolutions Group within Vodafone?

VMS: We have laid this out in our website which says:

Vodafone MediaSolutions! handles all of Vodafone D2 GmbH’s ad marketing and commercial partnership integration business.
Join forces with Vodafone MediaSolutions! to reach attractive mobile, online and offline target audiences in the Vodafone/Arcor MediaNetwork!.
You can count on us and our marketing partner Gruner + Jahr EMS to provide you with competent advice and support for the development and implementation of innovative, integrated campaigns and partner concepts.
[Ed: The website also has some interesting stats about Vodafone’s German operations: “The Vodafone live! mobile platform has 3.8 million unique users and generates 490 million page views per month. It is by far the most successful mobile phone portal in Germany. On our online portals (www.arcor.de, www.vodafone.de , www.vodafonelive.de ) generate a total of over 400 million page views every month, providing access to 3.5 million users which we’ll be happy to arrange for you.”
Also, buried on the website is the Vodafone rate cards with pricing details for their on-line portal and, if you navigate on the menu on the right, more details on their Digital TV and Mobile offerings.]

Continue reading "Interview with Vodafone's new MediaSolutions! Group" »

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The Times recently interviewed Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone. The Newbury empire once held ambitions of global hegemony as the biggest, baddest vertically integrated telco of them all. In a more pragmatic era, they’ve been working on getting the basics of business right, with their own glasnost and perestroika programmes to re-invigorate the mobile operator model.

Sarin’s remarks are consistent with the strategic move Vodafone is making into a new phase of its business. In the last year or so they have moved away from being simply a really big mobile network operator. He says he wants Vodafone to become a “total communications company”. In pursuit of this, they’ve been investing in fixed-line DSL and PSTN activities, either as a reseller (as in the UK) or by buying up assets (as with the acquisition of Tele2), or just by integrating more closely with their once forgotten fixed assets (as with Arcor in Germany), .

There’s a clear Telco 2.0 angle here; a key point in Telco 2.0 analysis is that the connectivity is no longer special. Rather, it is becoming a commodity — something easily purchased on the open market by any entrant for a predictable price. Further, its tight coupling with other parts of the value chain is melting away. Therefore, the distinctions between mobile and fixed operators, between networks and virtual network operators, and between telcos or ISPs, content providers, IT service providers, and consumer electronics firms are increasingly irrelevant. What now matters is the assembly of elements from the horizontalised soup into attractive propositions to customers. As we said about France Telecom, this may mean that integrated fixed-mobile telcos have more life in them than you might think. (Our current Survey will help to clarify that point anyway).

Sarin spoke of “mobile plus”, and pointedly mentioned that the company is getting into mobile advertising but would not become a content producer. Could this perhaps signal that Vodafone — traditionally the most telcoish of mobile operators — is thinking of a platform strategy?

Continue reading "Vodafone: A "Total Communications" Company?" »

Posted at 11:47 AM | Link to this article | 1 comment

The 2nd edition of our report on the opportunity for operators in the media and advertising space, Telco’s Role in the Advertising Value Chain, seems to be going down well. We have been inundated with requests for the executive summary and several orders following an interview we did with Jim Cook of the excellent MobiAd News Portal. If you haven’t seen the executive summary of the report and want to, then email us for a copy.

Building on this and in preparation for the Telco 2.0/GSMA ‘Digital Advertising & Marketing Summit’ in October we have recently started discussions with several members of the Mobile Marketing Association’s (MMA) UK Board who have expressed a great deal of interest in a new piece of research which we are planning. For those who aren’t familiar with the MMA, it is an industry forum designed to promote the development of the mobile marketing channel. Where the GSM Association has an operator-centric focus, the MMA has strong representation amongst agencies, advertisers and media buyers: the future customers of a Telco advertising channel.

We spoke to Tony Riley (Mobile Enterprise), Maureen Scott (Openwave), Mark Palmer (Maverick Planet) and Jonathan Bass (Incentivated) about the need for operators and vendors/enablers to better understand the requirements of media buyers so that they can develop appropriate solutions and, where appropriate, work together on relevant industry-wide initiatives.

They all felt that this information would be hugely valuable as the danger at the moment is that the very customers that operators and vendors would like to serve are not able to contribute effectively to the discussions and activities currently taking place. This reinforces the discussions we’ve been having with our brainstorm stimulus speakers from Vodafone et al. So, this is what we plan to do to rectifiy this:

Continue reading "What Media Buyers Want from Telcos: New Research Programme" »

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French ADSL operator Neuf Cegetel has turned platform, recruiting Universal Media as a partner in its new music service.

For €4.99 a month over and above their usual €29.90 triple-play tariff, you can download as many songs as you want from the entirety of Universal’s back catalogue. A less extensive service is free. It’s clear what Neuf Cegetel is up to, right? Facing the usual DSL operator’s struggle to survive incumbent competiton, they’re adding new revenue-generating services that cross-subsidise the ISP operation. And, as usual, one of the simplest ways to do this is through platforms and partners.

Continue reading "Music as DSL Subsidy, and Cuffware" »

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These weekly news roundups are a new Telco 2.0 service; they are meant to focus attention on news items that might not be Telco 2.0-related at first sight, or big enough to warrant a whole post to themselves, but do contain real insight. They are grouped under the categories used in the rest of Telco 2.0.

Digital Youth

When Search Attacks: Participants in a fancy ID-business social network were horrified when a bot used to auto-populate their profiles libelled leading sci-fi author John Scalzi. He’d repeatedly written about disgraced congressman Mark Foley and used the word “paedophile”; guess what the bot decided to put in his “description” field?

Telco 2.0 Comment: Remember, automatic robots and highly personal information are a dangerous mix. If the AOL security breach was farce, this is tragedy, especially as Spock includes a function for users to vote on each other’s reputations.

T-Mobile Tees Up 3G: First 3G device for T-Mobile USA leaked…but the real news is that even without UMTS, data usage ex-SMS is booming.

Telco 2.0 Comment: T-Mobile is better known for its open-slather Web’n’Walk tariff in Europe, but how to explain its US data boom? Our theory is that its historic price leadership, going back to the days of Voicestream, captured a demographic that’s now adopting new gadgets and services rapidly. Note that AT&T just got FCC approval for the US’s first HSUPA data card - 2Mbits/s uplink, 7.2 down.

Digital Cities

Wi-Fi…Why? Cali-utopian geeks’ dream of free Wi-Fi everywhere doesn’t work. Maybe they could have a crack at the space elevator instead?

Telco 2.0 Comment: There’s a reason why mobile operators have lots of radio engineers, you know. And billing departments.

Paranoia in the palm of your hand: New Sprint service lets you browse sex offenders’ register from your phone; so you can find a sex offender in a hurry? No, of course, it’s for your peace of mind..

Telco 2.0 Comment: “Checking for local offenders is free…after normal data charges” It’s one way to get those metered bits moving. In Telco 2.0 terms, this is somewhere between Digital Home and Digital Town. Notably, some other carriers offer various security-related services; MTN in South Africa streams your home CCTV camera feeds to your 3G device and texts you if the alarm goes off. At least you can do something about that other than “move house” or “collect angry mob”.

Digital Politics and Regulation

AT&T spotted wielding censor’s scissors! Astonishingly, David “Stupid Network” Isenberg isn’t at all pleased that AT&T’s web music portal censored Pearl Jam being rude about President Bush. Perhaps it says more about AT&T that they’re hoping to make a profit streaming Pearl Jam over the web? Isenberg, again unsurprisingly, thinks this is an argument for network neutrality.

Telco 2.0 Comment: So that’s what they wanted all that IMS gear for! More seriously, as John Waclawsky said, monitoring is the first step to control.

ESPN’s efforts to have fewer customers are a roaring success; the cable-TV sports channel may give up on a scheme to restrict access to its website to customers of ISPs who pay it for the privilege.

Telco 2.0 Comment: The idea was that viewers who couldn’t get to see the videos would complain to their ISP; it could have perhaps been predicted that they would complain to ESPN’s website about not being able to see content on their website. Further, the economics of this are a little strange; there is no pot of gold in the customer ISP world for content providers to get their hands on, quite the opposite with margins tanking all over the world.

Too many zeros; Telekom Malaysia bills subscriber 17 times the GDP of the United States. Sorry, that should be “bills deceased ex-subscriber”…

Telco 2.0 Comment: When you do something often enough, even 99.999% sometimes isn’t enough.

Digital Product Innovation

3UK to offer cheap mobile data; 1GB/month=£10, 7GB/month=£25.

Telco 2.0 Comment: In the future, data transfer will be cheap. Cheaper and cheaper. How will 3 make money from this?

Nokia does identity and social networking: sadly, they call it Mosh. In other awful branding news, will Sprint-Nextel call its WiMAX service XOHM?

Telco 2.0 Comment: I, ah, hope you know what you’re doing with that ad budget.. Seriously, there’s so much interest in SNS these days it’s no surprise Nokia is interested, if only as a research project into user interfaces. It probably helps if your users can pronounce the service..Oh God, they’re actually going to do it…

Posted at 04:21 PM | Link to this article | Add a comment

An SMS message! Who’s it from?

TELCO. (They can be anonymous for now.) Apparently they think I might be travelling to Europe, and therefore that I might want to know about their new roaming rates. Fair enough - that would be some of the contextual messaging stuff the people at Acision/ex-LogicaCMG Telco Products are always talking about, no?

Well, it would if I actually was travelling to Europe. Given that TELCO knows my phone has been in the same cell, near my home address, all day, you’d think they would have thought of this - strikes me that the trainload of phones zooming along the Channel Tunnel Rail Link every 30 minutes or so must show up quite impressively in TELCO’s switching centre as a lot of the same devices sending CC SETUP messages very quickly indeed.

They’re probably more likely to be heavy mobile users than the general population, too. Similarly, Heathrow Airport is full of people who certainly are travelling to Europe, as well as picocells deployed in the sprawling terminals..there’s surely an opportunity here to put some of the talk about advertising that “users will value” into effect, by targeting devices that have just turned up in those cells.

Posted at 01:08 PM | Link to this article | Add a comment

Sometimes a simple example makes things clear in your mind, particularly when it’s your own money at stake! We’ve a long description of the whole advertising value chain and the telcos’ role in it in our report, and two key operator assets are customer preferences and personal data. Here’s a real world case study of putting that to effect.

I’m selling the flat (US readers: apartment) I bought ten years ago when young, free and single. We’re moving into somewhere twice as big now there are four of us. A nice man came to put up a for sale sign outside last week. In fact, in windy Edinburgh this is an important skill, as signs poking out of buildings are prone to fly away with the next gust. I’d show you a picture, except I’m now 2000km away.

Anyhow, there’s a bit down the bottom to send an SMS message to a short code for more details. Which I duly did, as faithfully recorded by Nokia Lifeblog:

Back come the property details:

Continue reading "Making advertising more personal and actionable" »

Posted at 12:06 PM | Link to this article | 1 comment

We like the hutzbah of the Blyk team. “A new pan-European free mobile operator for young people funded by advertising” sounds good in theory, and we applaud the bravery and boldness of its ambitions. But it breaks the principles for success in this market that we identified in our recent Market Study, and we believe its business model - in its current form - has little hope of success.

Here’s why:

As the company gears up for its summer launch in the UK, the PR machine has kicked into action and management have announced a rash of recent deals:

1. Advertising partnerships with Coca Cola, Buena Vista (Walt Disney), I-Play Mobile Gaming, L’Oreal, Stepstone (on-line recruitment), Yell (directory services) and others
2. A Billing, Customer Care and Partner Management platform agreement using MetraNet from MetraTech
3. An equipment deal with Nokia Siemens
4. An Ad-serving and Customer Profiling platform agreement with First Hop
5. And, of course, a network agreement with Orange

But Do Customers REALLY Want What Blyk Offers?

Continue reading "Mobile Advertising: Is the Future Black for Blyk?" »

Posted at 11:27 AM | Link to this article | 2 comments

Below is our summary analysis from the ‘Telcos in Advertising’ invitation-only workshop at the Telco 2.0 event on 29th March, including key recommendations for the industry. This supported the findings in our Market Study (btw, if you’re a GSMA member or 3GSM exhibitor, you can get a healthy discount on the licence price).

The day after the event we jetted to New York to help the GSMA with their Mobile Entertainment & Advertising Summit and learnt 3 additional things: 1.) Americans are more bullish than Europeans about the ability of mobile operators to generate significant new value in this space in the next 5 years (75% confidence rating vs 50% in Europe), 2.) stimulated by speaker Martin Sorrell (CEO, WPP), that the opportunity is potentially much broader and richer than ‘advertising’ per se - mobile marketing services and mobile-centric commerce, and 3.) this is an exciting new area to work in, and it’s about to scale up and industrialise quickly…Here’s the analysis:

The Benefits Of Mobile (and On-Line) Channels Aren’t Always Obvious To The Advertiser

We kicked off the workshop with a presentation from the new customer group: the advertiser. John Baker, Managing Partner at Ogilvy Interactive, highlighted several of the factors which would drive adoption of the digital and, especially, mobile channels from the advertiser’s perspective:

1. Cost - make it cheap (and simple) to advertise
2. Demonstrate audience growth
3. Illustrate customer responsiveness through this channel - i.e. show a clear ROI to advertisers
4. Be patient! There is a need for cultural change amongst advertisers. John highlighted this as a key barrier from the demand side for on-line and mobile advertising because brand managers and media buyers are measured and rewarded using metrics, such as Customer Reach, which do not easily square with the digital channels (where the focus is on engagement and interactivity).

Responding to these, John then suggested four areas of focus for Telco operators to add value:

Continue reading "Telco 2.0 Event: Advertising Workshop Summary" »