Sunday, August 24, 2008

NTT: one of the biggest IMS & PoC deployment so far

Over the last years NTT has deployed more than 30 million of PoC handsets in its advanced 3G FOMA network. The service was launched as "PushTalk" in late 2005. Now, 30 million handsets is a small fraction of the market but a significant number compared to the tiny deployments made so far.

Service relies on NEC IMS core, technical details are not clear, but we can safely bet this is the biggest mobile IMS deployment so far. PoC or PTT are terms not mentioned by NTT, perhaps they are using a proprietary, IMS-based, protocol.

The basic service includes group calls up to 5 participants, for larger groups an additional service must be contracted (PushTalk Plus), aimed at enterprises. Service is billed per push (0,03€ per push) and there is a flat rate (Kake-Hodai) service for 6,45€ per month.
PushTalk Plus service, including group calls up to 20 members, is 12,9€ per month.

And a very interesting detail: Service is activated by default in every handset for every subscriber. I don't know the reason for that, but one very important consequence: you needn't to know in advance if the person you want to call has the service or not: everybody "is in the service". And the person receiving the call will probably answer back. This scheme encourages service spreading from a small number of knowledgeable users to the rest. From my point of view, this is much better than waiting for the subscribers to ask for activation, or trying to communicate with other subscribers only to find that they are not subscribed.

Japan is a very innovative market, we are looking forward to reading some data about service usage, would that be a test of things to come?

Friday, August 8, 2008

web2.0 interacting with Solaiemes team is easy !

We encourage our readers, clients, partners, to follow up our communication channels (website, blog, twitter) and even make the next step, a real interaction, commenting our posts or twits, recommending our channles, linking us when posting about a relevant matter for you, your personal or corporate blogs.
We think mutual feedback is important to improve, and the web 2.0 tools make really easy and quick to provide feedback, ask questions to get a very quick answer, etc.

Currently we have the next averages:

1-2 monthly updates of the website (PR or new product/demo)
2-3 blog monthly posts
1-2 daily twits

We want to double our communication averages with answers, required posts, open questions to other technologyst or "connected people". Please, help us :-) recommended step, follow us at twitter, we will announcing there new post, PR, new products and day by day activities.

We also welcome initiatives as
http://mundotwitter.blogspot.com/

a initiative to register a Twitter Brand Index for spanish companies, by Marc Cortés, the promoter. Thanks Marc for adding us :-)

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Innovation Directors, a needed real role for telcos and big companies

Hi, after some posts talking about Solaiemes news or technology we post today about innovation deployment. As entrepreneurs creating new technologies able to deliver innovative use cases for telcos, banks, media companies we are discouraging from the unclear entry-door to explain our products/services.
Carriers and huge companies operating mature markets, fully competitive, have little space for ARPU increases other than new services people consider good to pay for them.
A lot of good ideas come generally from little start-ups, and all the big companies make some marketing movements about how they promote the ecosystem, but sadly, often, basically this actions are only for press relase purposes and not pursue a real collaboration and deployment of innovation.
Most of innovation managers in big companies are not managing budget, and their task is basically prospection but with no capability (even their efforts to scalate opportunities). At the other hand, some innovation directors with direct budget responsability are executives promoted to that position because it was the "director" position vacancy and not because they are interested in innovation. The last one, with more conservative aproach likely will spend de budget buying reports to market research analyst and paying a lot of money to a big consultancy company to make some kind of innovation that it is not their real focus.
In a lot of international events as GSMA mobile congresses (MWC, Asia Mobile) panelists from carriers talk a lot about promoting ecosystem but they have no time to visit start-up booths. Please, the success of your companies depends of innovation difficult to be created internally or coming from big suppliers, looking what we are doing is helping yourselves to improve your business.
Hope head-hunter leader firms will be helping to recruit former entrepreneurs, understanding from the other side, how innovation could be placed in a fast track inside large company in a win-win scheme helping ecosystem to grow faster.
Fortunately, we detect some exceptions is some media company or banks with innovating style people managing the innovation functions but carriers should improve :-)