The Telco 2.0 team is supporting an interesting afternoon seminar next Wed (25th June) run by Convergys called “Telecoms & Media - The Retail Imperative”. It’s taking place from 2-7pm inside St Pauls Cathedral in London, in the spectacular Wren Suite. There’s no cost to come but places are limited to senior execs from telco operators and media companies, and there are a very few places left now. More info and registration details here.

Telco 2.0 will be sharing some new analysis. Convergys will be sharing their experience from retail sectors. The whole event is intimate and highly interactive.

Posted at 7:18 PM | Link to this article

The UK’s Broadband Stakeholder Group is having an event in London next Monday, and it looks like it could get quite Telco 2.0. They’re going to launch two new research reports, one on the ‘social and economic value of next-generation broadband’, and one on ‘models for efficient public sector investment’. There’s an impressive lineup of speakers including:
* Ashley Highfield, Director, New Media and Technology, BBC
* Kees Rovers, President and CEO, Close the Gap, Neunen
* Kip Meek, Chairman of the Broadband Stakeholder Group
* Francesco Caio, Head of UK Govt’s independent review on next gen b’band
* Steve Robertson, CEO, Openreach
* Anna Bradley, Chair, Ofcom Consumer Panel
* Richard Allan, Government Affairs Director, Europe, Cisco
* Damian Tambini, London School of Economics
* Rachel Clark, Director, Broadcasting and Content, BERR
The agenda is here (pdf); look out for some other friends of Telco 2.0 there, such as Benoit Felten and Andrew Bud, and you might even run into some of the Telco 2.0 team themselves.

Claire Landau, T 020 7331 2036, E claire.landau@intellectuk.org

Posted at 4:18 PM | Link to this article

We’d strongly recommend to all telco-media-tech strategists worldwide the GSMA’s Mobile Innovation Marketplace event on 3-4 June in Atlanta, USA. The GSMA has unquestionably the best pulling power on senior mobile execs (see list below), and their new events team has really shown that it can do a lot more than the (still) mighty Mobile World Congress (those at the Mobile Money Summit in Cairo last week will certainly agree).

There’s a 30% discount to readers of the Telco 2.0 blog. Just use the code MIMFOFZ when registering here.

Telco 2.0’s MD will be among the speakers, who include: Ralph de la Vega - CEO, AT&T Mobility; Michael Joseph - CEO, Safaricom (Vodafone Kenya); Tom Wheeler - Managing Director, Core Capital (former President of CTIA); Torbjorn Nilsson - Chief Advisor to the CEO, Ericsson; Ted Matsumoto - CSO, Softbank (fastest growing mobile operator in Japan); Mauro Sentinelli - CEO of Telecom Italia Mobile and Member of the Board of Telecom Italia; David Christopher - CMO, AT&T Mobility; Patrick Gauthier - Senior Vice President, Innovation, Visa (manages Visa’s corporate VC program); Will Hodgman - CEO, M:Metrics; John Giere - CMO of Alcatel-Lucent; Christina Domecq — CEO, Spinvox.

Here are some more details:
· The Mobile Innovation Marketplace Americas boasts an agenda with an extraordinary level of executive participation from a diversity of regions and industries. It is not common in North American telecom circles to find so much perspective from overseas, and the level of thought leadership will be unique
· The agenda also includes pitch presentations from 15 emerging growth technologies to a judging panel comprised of executives from AT&T, SKT, TIM, Belgacom, Intel Capital, Microsoft, and Orange. Two companies will emerge from the Marketplace as “best in show” and win a trip to compete in the Mobile Innovation Finals at the 2009 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. www.mobileinnovation.us

Posted at 2:39 PM | Link to this article

We’ve been delighted by the effort the speakers are putting in to their ‘stimulus presentations’ for the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm this week in London.

One or two have had their drafts sent back covered in red ink, but most have followed the detailed briefing, looking to bring new, fresh and relevant insights to help the brainstorm really hum. It’s now a mouth-watering line up and the event will be packed to the rafters.

To supplement the formal content we have some interesting start-upweb/telecoms ‘mashup’ companies demo-ing their wares too. Below is a list of some of them covering ‘Vocal IM’, ‘Single Sign On’, ‘Video Ringtones’, ‘SMS Management’, ‘Embedded Online Voice’, ‘Social Phonebook’, ‘Hosted Voice Messaging’:

Continue reading "Stimulus for Telco 2.0 Brainstorm, MashUp Demos" »

Posted at 7:10 PM | Link to this article

We’re delighted to be partnering with mashup* demo. They will being bringing their usual high energy buzz to Telco 2.0 event on the 17th April. The closing date for mash-up developers to submit demo proposals is 20th March, please send an email to demo@mashupevent.com with a 100 word description should you want to be considered.

There are 2 types we’re interested in:
1.) Those that support generic business processes surrounding the purchase, provisioning and payment of any good or service; 2.) Those that support delivery of a specific telecoms-related product or service to the user.

For #1, the processes to cover include: Identifying and authenticating customers; Advertising, Marketing Services & Business Intelligence; E-Commerce Sales; Telco-enabled Order Fulfilment (on-line, voice) - e.g. software or music downloads, Telco-enabled Order Fulfilment (offline) - e.g. parcel delivery, Telco enabled/managed Billing & Collections; Electronic/on-line Content Delivery - principally content delivery caches, rights management; Customer service and support.

There are also additional business activities such as warehouse management, vehicle tracking, etc. - things which the end customer doesn’t touch, but which forms part of the supply chain. Overall, this is what we call “communications enabled business processes”.

For #2, it’s what happens to put together the actual user service. For example: Personal communications services (“better telephony”, integration with collaboration tools, etc.), or horizontal activities like: Integration with Web tools; Vertical industry solutions (healthcare, property, utilities, etc.).

More information on mashup* demo activities here:

Continue reading "Mash-Up Demos at Telco 2.0" »

Posted at 10:17 PM | Link to this article

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" »

Posted at 8:36 PM | Link to this article

If you can get over to Mountain View, California for March 12 - 14 we can’t recommend highly enough the Emerging Communications (eComm) Conference 2008. If you use the discount code ‘telco20’ you can also receive 15% off the entry price as a Telco 2.0 reader. With its growing roster of speakers from among the world’s leading thinkers & innovators in telecoms, the organizers aim to “help unleash a ‘gold rush’ of innovation and democratization in the global telecom industry”. The Telco 2.0 team will be there, presenting and supporting. Here’s the focus for what looks like being an important debate on radical innovation:

Telecommunications has been stagnant for too long. For all the talk of advanced services, little have appeared. The rest have near-zero consumer traction; and the Internet space has remained fixated with plain old telephony over IP (VoIP). Yet we are on the brink of a communications gold-rush brought about by open spectrum, open handsets, open platforms and technology advances in positioning, digital identity, data sharing and social networking. Opening keynotes include Google’s Manager of Mobile Platforms, Rich Miner and Skype’s Manager of Audio & Video, Jonathan Christensen. Check it out here.

Posted at 9:31 PM | Link to this article

Telco 2.0 comes to you from the Mobile World Congress … sorry … 3GSM this week; not only were we covering the news but we were part of it, but that’s another story.

A big theme in the news this week was mobile Linux; Orange joined the LiMo Foundation, the outfit Motorola ginned up to boost open-source operating systems on shiny gadgets. Azingo, an Indian software house that markets a LiMo-compliant Linux distribution and developer kit, was showing off some of the unexpected capabilities of the technology.

Specifically, using a Broadcom reference gadget running their system, they were successfully using Nokia S60 widgets on a device that was neither a Nokia nor a Symbian S60 platform; we’re not sure if this is fantastic or scary. Which one depends whether you work in the S60 or Maemo Linux groups at Nokia, presumably.

Continue reading "Ring! Ring! Hot News, 11th February 2008" »

Posted at 7:07 PM | Link to this article

In a crowded schedule there are a few events in Q1 that Telco 2.0 are involved with to varying degrees and which we’d recommend to our readers. They address one or more of our 7 key focus areas for 2008: Market Valuations, Disruptive Threats, Adjacent Markets, Two-Sided Business Models, Core Products and End-User Needs, and Regulation:

1.) The 3rd annual Telecom Finance and Emerging Markets Summit (Renaissance Chancery Court Hotel, London, January 23-25) is an interesting conference and awards event that brings together operator organisations with senior TMT financiers, private equity and venture capital firms, legal counsel, and other professional intermediaries in the sector. This year it will repeat its popular M&A panel to debate the impact of the credit crunch and identify which geographies and technologies will see most growth. Find out more or register here.

2.) The inaugural eComm 2008 (Computer History Museum, March 12-14, Mountain View, California) is run by the most fervent group of communications enthusiasts you are ever likely to meet. It mixes up visionaries, emergent technologies, real-world startups, cutting-edge academic projects, incumbent telecom players, garage based hacks and policy debates to create “the ultimate three-day conversation”. 60+ diverse speakers from companies such as BT, FlickR, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, OpenMoko, Orange, Twitter, Skype, and Yahoo! …and Telco 2.0 (presenting the results of our major market study on new business models). More info/register here (Use the discount code ‘telco20’ to receive 15% off).

3.) CMO Forum, GSMA Mobile World Congress (Monday 11th Feb, Barcelona). A invitation-only event for 150 mobile Chief Marketing Officers. The focus is “Mobile as a True Marketing Channel - Realising the Opportunity” - essentially exploring in-depth the ideas outlined here: ie. how to scale the use of mobile as a medium for content and advertising and much more…We’ve designed the programme and will be facilitating it using our ‘Mindshare’ approach. (To apply for an invitation contact us here)

Continue reading "Key Winter/Spring Events" »

Posted at 11:28 PM | Link to this article

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" »

Posted at 9:00 AM | Link to this article

We’re delighted to release the draft programme for the next Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm (16-17 April 2008, London) here.

More details on this in upcoming posts. Suffice it to say that it builds on the outputs from the last event and our ongoing business models research programme. In particular, at the event, we are looking to clarify a roadmap for achieving the vision we laid out in our recent ‘re-definition of Telco 2.0’ . A wiki will be set up on the event site soon to get as much input from as many people as possible. We are also developing the interactive ‘Mindshare’ format further (based on great feedback from our alumni)…

Posted at 8:58 AM | Link to this article