Telco VAS decline, the key role of telco APIs & the coining of a new term W2P

Telco is an industry facing transformation, basic services being cash-cows with high margins as voice and SMS, and lately broadband, are becoming commodities in a fierce competitive market. Most of telco customers are contracting plans with a number of minutes, SMS and data enough for their needs at very low prices.

Value Added Services (VAS) being perceived as the next stream of revenues are not properly implemented by telcos. We could read this week about the VAS revenue declining.

What is happening? Well, too many things at a time:

• Telco enablers as Voice and SMS for VAS being exploded more successfully by companies creating REST API to use the communications enablers as they are costume to work with social networka and internet tools APIs. Companies as Tropo, Twilio, Plivo make easier to use telco enablers than the own telcos.

• New communication enablers beyond voice and SMS as rich messaging are being pioneered and led by amazing "over the top" companies as Whatsapp, Line, WeChat (Tencent) harming telcos in 2 ways: commoditizing the enhanced messaging as being offered for free or just for a small annual fee, and capturing new VAS market share (virtual goods, B2C, etc).

• Service providers (carriers) are not properly adapted to the new times: years to deploy a new technology is not an acceptable period, waiting to the perfect standards with all the features defined is not how now service cycles work. RCS (Rich Communication Services)/joyn had to be deployed years ago and just right now it is taking off slowly.

• Fortunately telcos realize about the potential of APIs and they are giving steps in the right direction launching developer portals as Telekom Developer Garden, AT&T Developer Program, Telefonica Bluevia and others. They are understanding finally that Parlay is not API for developers, developers needs web APIs (REST, SOAP).  Unfortunately the new communication enablers are not usually launched with API to try to generate non person-to-person communication use case from day 1.

• It is difficult for the carriers to work at the start-up pace required if they don't learn to work with start-up's and it would mean to use their investing arms to fund interesting companies creating stuff useful for telco transformation, paying fairly for trials...and avoid screwing up innovators :-(

• Also, incumbent vendors, the so-called NEVs, may also try to cooperate with small vendors with complementary stuff to jointly help telcos to adapt. Obvious? NO, we suffered first hand how NEVs tend to promise to offer "very soon" what small innovative vendors are doing and keep telcos (as they are more customed to work with NEVs) waiting and waiting and wasting time and time is money.

All above is the cocktail that could make telcos irrelevant in the VAS if they can not adapt properly soon, as sooner the better. Which are the keys? Telcos commercialized universal communication enablers, known user experiences that properly combined can be as Lego pieces to create services. APIs are the telco Lego. 

What can be built with that Lego? Whatever thing, communication is not about people only, or between machines only, communications is between people, services as customer care bots, machines, home sensors, etc. Today, the concept of A2P/P2A (application-to-person / person-to-application) coined for VAS using SMS is too small. 

A new term may be coined W2P/P2W (person-to-whatever thing, whatever thing-to-person) and messaging, RCS may be the enabler being the HUB of those type communications, with the benefit of not facing learning curve, chatting is chatting, sending files is sending files.  

Thanks to telco APIs and semantic technologies (a hot topic) telcos may take benefit from the texting trend and become the relevant player making easy to connect the world, not a bit level but at service level: people with customer care bots or agents (B2C communications), people with their home sensors, people with social games & new smart advertisement, people with info services with just the same tool, the same user experience. 
Too, this common user experience thanks to the APIs will be available in all the screens (web, TV), telco should not be only tied to "phone-type" devices.

Long life to the W2P coin!

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 :-)

Solaiemes view about economic downturn

After reading carefully the opinion of important VC's (Sequoia and Altos Ventures) about economic downturn impacting start-ups vs new opportunities, we prepared a ppt to explain from our perspective, the start-up focused in technology perspective. We think perhaps now it is time for big companies with cut budgets to focus in innovation opportunities, and start-ups are the best choice for that :-)

Our experience at the European Venture Contest

Solaiemes attended last Wednesday to Pamplona's semifinal of the European Venture Context, where the 30 semifinalist start-ups presented their projects to a group of experts and VCs competing for the 3 finalist postion for final round in Barcelona. The event was hosted by Caja Navarra , as usual with an excelent organization that enabled a perfect enviroment for networking.
Awarded as Finalist companies where:

• Trovit
• Hybrid Nanoclay
  
• Nuubo
  

They all will have the chance to defend their initiatives in Barcelona. Congratulations and good luck in the final round for all them. Their presentations were impressive.
Solaiemes did no so bad. We where ranked 9th and this possitions gives us the opportunity to present our project in the European Venture Summit that will take place in Dusseldorf on 1&2 December 2008.

Javier

Carrier's desperation driving IMS ??? Not the best approach ...

Heavy Reading has just published a report on IMS status in carriers. "IMS Deployment Update: Promise & Challenges" (executive summary here). It shows that two perceptions I have already heard elsewhere are really quite widespread:

First (quoting from TMCnet), one of the conclusions from the report's author: "After several years of unvarnished hype, IMS has moved from hero to zero faster than the average telco panacea [...] IMS is a dying issue."

But, strinkingly, operator representatives also admit to be "struggling to find a position in the Web 2.0 world," and that "we don't see any other way to go but IMS."

On one hand we see that there is some perception that IMS is not only going down the hype curve, but actually dying. This is somehow expected. It will take some time to overcome all the issues of an over-hyped, very complex and new technology. And it remains to be seen how different will be what it is now IMS (in specs and drawing boards) from the result of that distillation process.

On the other hand, the carriers are desperate to embrace IMS' promise. But are they adding the non-technical components that are needed to make it a success? I am talking about imagination here. Migrating existing services to IMS will not provide much benefit, market needs imaginative services, but there is no much creativity yet. New services (like PoC) are not launched because of concerns about cannibalisation or revenue erosion ... Why not create new business models (such as PoC person-to-machine / machine-to-person, etc)? Risk is negligible for carriers, and much better than desperation anyway.

Following a long tradition, operators are turning to vendors to provide some "mojo", but incumbents suppliers are also worried about erosion of established businesses. Startups are more likely to provide the innovation the market needs.

GSMA Mobile Innovation Programme. Good Initiative !!!

The GSM Association http://www.gsmworld.com/ recently launched the Mobile Innovation Programme. http://www.mobileinnovation.org/

In their own words:

"The Mobile Innovation Programme has been created by the GSMA in order to showcase and promote the best in mobile innovation. By giving early insight into breakthrough technologies, the Programme will ensure that innovation is broadly aligned with operators' business strategies and end user needs, leading to faster and wider adoption by operators and delivering value for all stakeholders. "

We are happy for these initiatives which help small start-ups to be in touch with carrier, VC and analysts.

In our business development meetings with infrastructure vendors and carriers we detected "blocking issues" with IMS deployment, no ecosystem of application available implies IMS deployment delay and IMS deployment delay makes no available for commercial services IMS based mobile solutions being developed by innovation focused small-size companies.

Hope this kind of initiatives help to put together Carriers, hard infrastructure providers and applications vendors to speed up mobility innovation adoption. Solaiemes says THANKS GSMA :-)

Start-up. Analysts, VC and focus !!!

After several posts regarding technology and mobility trends we come back to post about the start-upping road.
The subject today is how to face the "rules of VC and analysts". When Venture Capital people or just possible customers/analysts visit our website or read our BP they say:

..."you have to many products/solutions" ..."you should focus in one thing"

Even when asking for advice using social networks as LinkedIn we notice a lot of people sharing this view: "it is needed a very sharp defined focus"

http://www.linkedin.com/answers/startups-small-businesses/starting-up/STR_STP/59851-6076999

It is hard to explain that our product is Mobility, (know-how and technology for mobility). To create more mobility use cases we build some technology and to make easier other existing mobile cases we build some other technology, and to help carriers, MVNO's and other companies to extend mobility we offer consultancy....

And ALL is our product, SOLAIEMES product is MOBILITY !!!

I understood the "rules" coming from VC firms are based on their experience and we respect that, but when reading BPs we should abstract the "idea" from the implementations, our "idea" needs several legs, but the idea is ONE.

juan mateu :-)