CXTech Week 4 2022 News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 4 2022 newsletter is to highlight, with commentary, some of the news stories in CXTech this week. What is CXTech?  The C stands for Connectivity, Communications, Collaboration, Conversation, Customer; X for Experience because that’s what matters; and Tech because the focus is enablers.

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Covered this week:

  • EMnify Raises $57M (€50M)
  • Subspace in 180 Seconds
  • Telavox Acquires eRate
  • CPaaS in Travel & Hospitality
  • In a mature wireless market with TMO way ahead on 5G performance, the focus remains free phones and trade-in deals not 5G
  • Google unveils ‘Topics’ cookie replacement after FLoC flop
  • SentryPeer V1.0.0 from Gavin Henry
  • People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

EMnify Raises $57M (€50M)

EMnify, a TADSummit sponsor in 2015 and IoT company, announced a $57 million Series B investment from London-based growth investor One Peak.

The Berlin-based company will use the new capital to accelerate its global market expansion, with a particular focus on the US, and to further develop and optimize its proprietary cellular IoT technology.

EMnify plans to expand its leadership team and double its headcount in 2022, with a focus on the technology and go-to-market functions in the DACH (Germany (D), Austria (A), and Switzerland (CH)) region and North America.

EMnify equips thousands of customers with secure, reliable, and borderless cellular IoT connectivity for millions of connected devices. The company reported a 2016-21 CAGR of 190% for SIM growth and 77% for revenue growth.

Subspace in 180 Seconds

Davide Petramala has recently joined Subspace (see “People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff section at the end) and posted this neat 3 min video on Subspace. Explaining its global network and value proposition to the programmable communications industry.

Focusing on Subspace GlobalTURN, its a WebRTC delivery network. Backwards compatible with the TURN protocol, GlobalTURN handles traditional TURN NAT traversal functions as well as guaranteeing network performance for all WebRTC traffic with Subspace’s dedicated global fiber-optic network, which is ranked the #10 most interconnected network on the internet. GlobalTURN interacts with WebRTC applications operating like a single TURN instance, abstracting away 100+ physical points of presence worldwide to cut down call-setup times and reduce hair-pinning for deployments as large as 10Tbps.

Telavox Acquires eRate

eRate is a Nordic business enabler with the platforms and agreements needed to become a mobile operator fast track. The company was founded in 2005 with headquarters in Oslo, Norway, and has about 50 employees. eRate enables mobile services for more than 350,000 end users through B2B and B2C customers. eRate were also a TADHack partner.

Telavox is a Nordic UCaaS provider committed to enabling productive, enjoyable communication and collaboration in the workplace. Founded in 2003 and with headquarters in Malmö, Sweden, Telavox currently employs more than 360 employees. The Telavox platform has over 260,000 business seats.

CPaaS in Travel & Hospitality

Business CPaaS solutions like Syniverse’s CPaaS Concierge offer Ready-to-Use platforms optimized for the travel industry that are almost plug-and-play. The critical term is ‘almost,’ it really needs to be plug-and-play, with only configuration required.

In a mature wireless market with TMO way ahead on 5G performance, the focus remains free phones and trade-in deals not 5G

4G remains good enough for most!

The graph below shows the lead TMO has opened up given its favorable spectrum. However, analysts at New Street Research don’t believe AT&T or Verizon will be “materially” affected by the ongoing troubles in the C-band. “The important point for investors is that the marketing competition for 5G services between the three major players can begin in earnest and the dispute did not give T-Mobile an additional edge in that competition,” they wrote this month.

When I review the carrier deal comparison sites the focus is the ‘free’ phones and trade-in deals, Verizon will even take broken phones! 5G is mentioned, as that’s the feature pushed with the free phones, but no relative performance figures. It’s apparently not even a decision criteria given the graph below. AT&T’s Q4 ’21 net postpaid connections was 1.2 million, with a quarterly churn of only 0.76%. Verizon’s was 1,058,000 retail postpaid net additions, with 0.81% churn. TMO’s churn was 1.2%, while net postpaid additions was 1.75M, similar to Q4 2020.

Google unveils ‘Topics’ cookie replacement after FLoC flop

In 2019, Google announced that it would replace cookies in its Chrome browser with FLoC, Federated Learning of Cohorts. The tracking protocol was claimed to be far more anonymized, but still able to yield conversion rates of 95% for every ad dollar spent. The plans were found to be less effective and didn’t pan out, and in July 2021, the company announced that Chrome would continue supporting third party cookies until at least mid-2023.

So now onto “Topics.” The API works by pinpointing 15 baskets out of about 350 “topics” like “Fitness” or “Travel & Transportation,” and is based on three weeks of browsing history (older topics are deleted). Advertisers will be able to see up to three topics per user, one topic from each of the past three weeks, and could then decide whether to show that individual an ad based on the web history. Of course the underlying reason is to force advertisers to work directly with Google under the auspices of consumer privacy.

SentryPeer V1.0.0 from Gavin Henry

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Davide Petramala is now Vice President of Global Sales at Subspace.

Samantha Warren is now Head Of Marketing and Communication at appliedAI Initiative – UnternehmerTUM.

Aleksandra Banduka is now Sales Development Representative Team Lead at Mitto.

Gee Rittenhouse is now Chief Executive Officer at McAfee Enterprise. I’ve known Gee since our time at Lucent.

Janne Timonen is now Partnerships. Finland, Baltics and Russia. at Pexip!

Dimitrije Krunic is now Business Development Manager at Mitto.

Diego García de Paredes Sempere is now Sales Manager Southern Europe – Sinch. Previously with Synchronoss.

Fernando Bastante Pérez is now Product Engineer at iobuilders. I’ve known Diego since his Solaiemes days.

Greg Armshaw is now Sr. Director Strategy at Brightcove.

Adil Ayub is now Director Global Digital Strategy at Manulife Investment Management.

Peter Howells is now Country Manager, Australia & New Zealand at PowerGate Software. I’ve known Peter since his Oracle days.

Recycling old TVs with Don Clarke

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