Convergence Conversation

We're delighted to be signing up some excellent 'stimulus speakers' for the upcoming Telco 2.0 events in Los Angeles (27-28 October) and London (9-10 November). Here's a sample:

· Steve McGaw, SVP Corporate Strategy, AT&T
· Georges Penalver, SEVP, Strategy & Development, Orange Group
· Olivier Baujard, Group CTO, Deutsche Telekom
· Albert Hitchcock, Group CIO, Vodafone
· Sean Williams, Managing Director Retail Strategy, BT
· Stephanie Comfort, Chief Strategy Officer, Qwest Communications
· Frank Boulben, CMO, LightSquared
· Von Wright, VP Consumer Marketing, AT&T Mobility
· Joan Fitzgerald, VP TV, Comscore
· Jennifer Byrne, Director, Business Devt, Verizon Wireless
· Stacey Schulman, SVP Ad Sales Research, Turner Entertainment
· Thomas Fellger, CEO, Iconmobile
· Anthony Rose, CTO, Project More...

A couple of weeks ago, we saw a huge furore erupt about the fact that femtocell-offloaded data traffic is sometimes charged against a user's quota, while most WiFi offload traffic is not. AT&T and Vodafone are both among the guilty here.

[A discussion for another day, but I think there's a great business model for someone to work out how to charge back to operators, for their use of *my fixed broadband pipe*, in this scenario, as I become the backhaul service provider].

But beyond the billing argument, there is another tier of discussion about policy. If I use (say) a Vodafone femto over a BT ADSL line, or an AT&T femto via a cable modem, then we essentially have a situation where "policy stacking" occurs. More...

Off go the supposed great and good of the telecom world to meet the newbie government in July, and once again, we could be setting the scene for a lesson we have already learned the hard way in the past to be repeated.

The Americans have just realised that when you leave the telcos to it, you have a lack of competition and innovation, resulting in a digital divide. We in the UK know that when you leave the telcos to it, you have limited competition (i.e. for years they all just flogged exactly the same product), a business-model driven approach to innovation i.e. bugger all in case the shareholders get jittery, and a digital chasm. More...

I suspect we're going to get bombarded with statistics in the next year, along the lines of "Operator X deployed Vendor Y's offload solution, removing Y Terabytes of mobile data traffic from the macro network and saving $ABCm".

It's also struck me that there's going to be a world of pain in actually validating these claims.

On one side, there is the likelihood that the volumes will be over-stated, because they generate incremental, rather than just substitutional traffic. Generally the offload (WiFi or femto) will be faster and cheaper than the macro network, and so it might reasonably be expected that user behaviour will mean that it sees traffic that otherwise *would not have occurred at all* on the macro infrastructure. More...

Telco 2.0 News Review

• Voice & Messaging 2.0: 20% more revenue from 3UK's Skype users
• Technology Disruptions: Cisco's Cius - like an iPad for business
• Online Video: HOWTO serve video to 60 million Brits
• 2-sided Business Models: Softbank pays subscribers to deploy femtocells
• Developer Communities: ALU buys ProgrammableWeb!

[Note from the Telco 2.0 Team: 40 new leading-edge online video presentations on 'Best Practice' Telco 2.0 strategies, case studies and use cases are now available on demand, including:

- CEO BT Wholesale, CEO Ericsson, and CTO Deutsche Telekom on Strategy;
- MIT, Invention Arts, World Economic Forum on the Data Economy;
- Telecom Italia on Augmented Reality and Entertainment Futures;
- AT&T and Oracle on Cloud Services;
- Telenor and Aricent on M2M;
- Nokia Siemens Networks and Buoungiorno on Customer Management;
- O2, Ericsson and Admob on Mobile Advertising;
- plus more on Mobile Money, V

More...

I see that O2 has become the latest operator to clamp down on mobile data usage - and at least has rather better-tiered offerings than AT&T's rather cynical options.

But I'm wondering if operators are making the same mistake as usual - assuming that, on average, people will only use xx% of their allotted quota.

Because I can forsee several scenarios in which people might use all of it, or at least 90.

It would not be very difficult to install an application which tracks your usage and the day on which it expires. Then, there could be the option to:

- wait until near the end of the month, then use any spare capacity to bulk-download and pre-emptively cache sites or content you might want to watch subsequently. More...

This is an open invitation to our readers to join strategy leaders from around the world for Telco 2.0's first 'Best Practice Live!' virtual (online) event being broadcast to 3 timezones on 28-30 June 2010. We've collected some of the best Telco 2.0 strategies, case studies and use cases from around the globe. You can register for FREE here.

As well as the Telco 2.0 analysts, leading industry speakers include:

• Hans Vestberg, President and CEO, Ericsson
• Olivier Baujard, Group CTO, Deutsche Telekom
• Dr Hans Wijayasuriya, CEO, Dialog Group
• Sally Davis, CEO, BT Wholesale
• Prof. More...

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Apple and all it has achieved in design and market creation, as well as the precipitous rise in its market cap, which The Dear Leader recently described as "surreal." I have never encountered a CEO of any company who didn't believe (at least in public) that his/her company was undervalued, so this remark in itself is surreal and has a vague whiff of short-bait about it.

Question:

Of a given group of friends / associates, what is the probability that they will either:

a) Share the same mobile operator
b) Share the same mobile device / OS
c) Share the same Internet social network
d) Share the same interoperable multi-operator / multi-device client & service?

Technology, media and telecommunications marketing practitioners are ready to let go of legacy practices and try something that's potentially more effective. eMarketer reports that social media is now developing a reputation for being valuable -- for customer interaction, brand awareness and lead generation.

In February 2010, for example, inbound online marketing platform HubSpot found Twitter usage could double monthly leads, and Onesource reported in January that business-to-business salespeople were looking to LinkedIn for prospecting.

Moreover, according to virtual events provider Unisfair, social media is now the top emerging channel for sales lead generation among technology marketers that they surveyed in May 2010. More...