Monthly Archives: August 2010

Mobile Payments: There’s a big difference between developed and developing markets

With respect to mobile payments the critical differences between developed and developing markets is the presence of a mature banking / payments infrastructure and the 700% greater penetration of credit / debit cards compared to mobile phones. Examining the struggles mobile payments have had in developed markets: Mobipay is a mobile payment mechanism that allows […]

Business Case for Opening The Network

I came across this old presentation today on the business case for operators to open their network, shown below, some of the material is over 4 years old, especially on developer needs.  Yet operators continue to ask developers what they need and developers provide the same answers, perhaps operators continue to ask in hope of […]

The Tools for Understanding the Customer: Business Intelligence

This weblog has referred many times to the potential of operators to understand their customers given their role as network provider.  In this article I go a little deeper into the technology behind that statement, business intelligence. Business Intelligence (BI) refers to software techniques used in spotting, extracting, and analyzing business data, such as sales […]

T-Mobile’s Latest Customer Service Failure

My experiences with being a customer of a mobile operator have not been as good as most of my other service provider experiences.  There is a significant gap between what we say and do as an industry.  I covered T-Mobile’s extortionate billing and their poor customer service experience compared to Amazon.  The last straw came […]

Is QoS Monetizable for Consumer Services?

We’re seeing lots of wishful thinking in the industry around being able to monetize QoS (Quality of Service) for consumer services.  In part its coming from the current LTE (Long Term Evolution) sales push, which has an overly complex set of QoS capabilities given the limitations of the air interface.  As well as the summer […]

Why All the eHealth / mHealth Fuss?

We’ve seen a rash of announcements from operators such as Telefonica and Vodafone (and telecom suppliers for that matter) on their eHealth offers.  So what brought on this sudden interest?  Operators have been providing communication services to the Health sector for many years, what’s different? Firstly, lets start with some definitions, as always without clarity […]

More on the The ITization of Telecoms

Its one of those trends we know is there.  Its been there for decades. However, because the trend is constant it gets ignored, its a bit like boiling frog syndrome – ignoring the small changes until its too late and you’re cooked.  The trend is the ITization of telecoms.  Within the telecoms industry we like […]

The Next Generation On Device Portal – Do it or Drop the Service Provider title

The missed opportunity of the ODP (On Device Portal) has been discussed on this weblog several times.  The fact it took Apple to show the industry how to get it right is an embarrassment.  Apple’s iPhone has redefined the relationships in the mobile ecosystem.  Essentially they have become the service provider and the operator a […]

Apple Facetime Sounds the Death Knell for Upfront Per-Service Charging

Apple Facetime looks like its going to be another in the series of video communication applications that are proving to be more successful than the mobile industry’s attempts at video telephony, which began at the turn of this century and unfortunately have changed little since. Skype was the first video communication service to hit mainstream.  […]

Developer Community / Ingestion Management Taxonomies

I show below a sample of a taxonomy of the operators’ developer communities across consumer applications (e.g. widgets), consumer content (music, ring-tones, caller ring back tones, wallpaper), enterprise applications (e.g. field force automation tools) and enterprise IT (that is having enterprise IT departments build apps for their employees only). As discussed in the “Emerging App […]