Big fishes, small fishes, who eats who?

We are just facing the decisive time regarding the boost of mobility. Till now, carriers considered themshelves the big fishes, owners of the market,
and able to eat the small fishes at any moment. But that is becoming increasingly unclear. Once extended the mobile data, with a fixed monthly
fee for data, external service providers (basically internet-style service providers) pay more attention to mobility. Till now, in mobility they were small fishes, very limited by the walled garden carrier model, but that is changing.
Internet (and HW) companies such as Google, Skype, Apple/iTunes are seeing increasingly capable devices and affordable mobile data prices as their opportunity. In mobility they can be considered small fishes, but they are really big fishes overall, and not only big, also fast swimmers.
Application marketplaces where revenues from apps are shared between providers and the marketplace owners are constraining possible carrier value added solutions based revenue, and even in the case of "loved by users" devices, they are forced to share their data revenue with the manufacturer :-) It is clear that the big fish is not so big, the small fish is not so small, or even being smaller their strategy is better.

Could the carriers avoid becoming a mere dumb pipe, what they consider a defeat? Yes, but....
The internet-style boost of mobility has weaknesses: apps, device fragmentation, no common use model, the target of users is not the whole mobile user. Carriers can offer rich solutions based on common services, easy to learn and compatible with most devices, they can offer the next
generation of SMS model (you learn one service, and you can do very different things). Carriers still have services not properly "squeezed" to get juicy value added services, VideoCall/VideoShare, Push to Talk, and right now RCS (Rich Communication Suite) are, properly combined, an incredible framework to build mobile solutions on.
Then, the operators have not been defeated yet, but they need perhaps to be smaller but faster, in the modern world speed and time to market are more important than sheer size.

Obviously carriers can try to block protocols, but the generalized use of mobile data is changing the mind of regulators, and they are more keen on supporting mobile net neutrality.

The lessons learnt from internet says that Skype becomes long distance minutes leader, succesful VoIP providers leading the integration of voice with apps (Voxeo, Ifbyphone, Twilio, etc), Google Voice becoming a real alternative. In mobility the device fragmentation offer an opportunity to carriers, the only ones who have the capability and the goal to offer new possibilities to mid and low tier users, and monetize that.

The future of carriers still depends on themshelves, but only for a little while, they have to move faster and offer their alternative, boosting the mobility based on common mobile services being used by 3rd party ecosystem to deliver use cases based on them.

Created company profile at dotopen.com

We just created our profile in dotopen.com, a database/social network of companies, organization, ngo's, networking companies, start-ups related with mobility and communications.
Sometimes it is a bit hard to fullfill complete profiles, and in this case it takes some time but it worths. We like the profile, the info you can edit is complete, you can describe your product/service lines as projects and you can embed in the media tab your best slideshare ppt's or youtube demos.
We strongly advice start-ups to join dotopen.com and share info, we can find partners when sinergies are possible.
You can also "follow" other members activity (pure social media) and rate the companies, a good point to get some feedback :-)
And carriers, investors, journalist, don't be shy, join also and start the conversation :-)

Explaining RCS, will RCS become the killer enabler?

We just made a presentation using the minimalist Lawrence Lessig style. It's about the need of simplifying communication tools for mobile and unified communication and at the same time provide rich experience and the possibility of interaction with everybody and "everything" as your social media profiles and your providers customer care.
For us RCS, Rich Communication Suite is "THE ENABLER", we are working to enrich their potential use cases and want to help to RCS to be understood, adopted by carriers and have the people accepting and using as a "natural" rich communication method in the next future.