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.

eComm Highlights (part II)

Keeping up with the previous two days a fantastic day at eComm at Amsterdam, ideas pouring, challenging audience. Politically incorrect but valid things said on stage, you will never hear that in other events. A bunch of quick notes summarizing the first and last days:

Martin Geddes, BT: "goodbye minutes, welcome moments"
Current voicemail (automatic messages left by IVRs, etc.) ineffective: relies on customer acting, doing + poor user experience + inefficient + unsecure (how to re-authenticate customer call back? how do I know message is from tax agency and not from a fraudster?)
What can be done to e.g. enhance voicemail:
1. use better existing channels (e.g. phweet)
2. insert/update/delete APIs (chargable events) + high definition audio + personalise interactions + smarter containers for messages + add multimodal channels

Sample revenue opportunities for new-think voicemail:
• connect: message informing or asking to contact.
• interact: avoid CRM call by using smart containers (e.g. data in the message avoids the call).
• transact: collect payment on behalf of the enterprise.

James Enck mCapital:
Future is not going to be a repeat of the past. World is not going to be the same.
So ... what do we have to say about all this? Are we a serious industry allocating capital to Kindle, iPhones, etc.?
Greatest value will be found in solving real problems (some of which we haven't found yet): Awareness + engagement + investment + reorientation.

J. Salanave, IDAE: Telecom in 2015: death or bazaar
Future scenario for telcos? Model possible outcomes as a 2x2 matrix:
• Telecom market expanding vs declining-stagnant
• Competition integration model: concentrated-vertical vs fragmented-horizontal
4 possible outocomes
• Silent death: surviving of the fattest, perhaps bailouts from governments and becoming utilities
• Market shakeout: service providers entities mixing device partnerships, spectrum, brands. Probably forced by investors.
• Clash of giants: vertical integration + optimized content + RCS + succeeds.
• Generative bazaar: open model prevails.
Bazaar means do-it-yourself connectivity? No, some entity will be needed to provide interconnection (key aspect) and other services.

Rudolf van der Berg, Logica: "almost everything in telco services is wrong"
Telcos not satisfied being an utility, they see no value being vodafone, they invest in being apple/google/etc.
All telcos offer the same, stuck in a standard value proposition. Telcos fail at innovation.
But ... other approaches are possible and successful in the real marketplace: Free.fr: everything for 30€. How? Keep back-office simple; finances and business cases are simple and transparent, not faked; offer the best product; deny competitors competition on price or capacity. 1000 total staff, 850 staff in call centres.
How to copy free.fr? Accept you work for a telco. Think cool things. Simply billing with single contract + top ups.

G. Leonhard MediaFuturist.com :
Media future: Must transition from ego-system to ecosystem, and, by the way, driven by capitalism, not by goodwill or philanthropy. Price moving from expensive to cheaper (but not cheap enough) to flat rates and bundles. Pricing logic will flip: lower prices, ubiquitous access.
But content pricing and licensing can’t be solved without engaging ISP, advertising, right holders, social networks (recommendations, trend setting). Spotify solved it, paying 0,1 cents per song, but it might become a time bomb if there are no upper caps.

After these 2 last post, we will prepare for coming week a post explaining the view of Solaiemes about the Telecom trends, and the possible scenarios of next decade telco/communication industry, stay tunned, and remember, the debate is open

Jose Recio

eComm Highlights (part I)

I am attending the eComm Europe event in Amsterdam, just amazed by the level of the speakers and the quality and rythm of the 15 minutes keynotes schedule.
Just writting this post (and additional one after the event with final thoughts) just to share some headlines and sentences to think about :-)

VoiceSage:
There are white spaces in the enterprises: communication-enabled services may help to surface them and optimize/monetize/ save costs. An edge perspective allows to surface this data. Simple example: allowing customers to confirm just a bit earlier may have big impacts in resources.

Nauiokas Park:
There is nothing wrong with being a dump pipe, capital structures will adapt to be cash flow driven.
Platform and APIs basically selling trust, technical capabilities are a must, but not enough.
Everything as a Service is coming (including banking). Future platforms blending identity + trust + messaging may allow that.

Mangrove:
Major disruptive driver in the last years: Telecom operators displaced to their rightful place in the eco-system: providers of the tubes. Capital models will have to change to adapt to that situation.

VURB:
Peering-up is the best way to cope with climate change, peak oil, financial crisis, ...

RJ Auburn - Voxeo:
To innovators: Get passionate or get out.
Voice is coming out, text is in. Kids and next generation don’t talk on the phone unless they have to, TXT is second nature to them. Communication pace is faster than voice now, customers want instantaneous answers, not wasting time waiting for IVR answers. No money in voice, cost saving in text (permits multitasking, voice not).
Building person to person communication based on bots and mash-ups. What happens with the existing phone applications?: look at IMified. Just use text instead of bots.

Jay Phillips - Voxeo:
If open source is communism … where is the proletarian?
Voice is not the application; it’s the spice to make the soup taste better.
Innovators to build lots of little voice experimental apps to find the right soup.
Voxeo open sourcing SIPMethod !!!

Jan Linden - Global IP Solutions:
H264 SVC codec for the Internet era.

Dean Bubbley - Disruptive Analysis: “LTE hostage of voice?”
IMS is the dead parrot in the Monthy Python sketch. Dead but nailed to the perch of LTE.
Is industry using LTE as the lever to persuade operators to deploy IMS? CS fallback: 2-3 seconds longer setup times (sometimes 8-10 seg, and double that for LTE-LTE calls). Drops data connection !!!. Extra capex in network.
And SMS on LTE? SMS was completely forgotten in LTE until it was too late. Fact is: You need SMS for backoffice operations (configuration, activations, passwords, prepaid top up, etc.) even if you use LTE only for data.

Sten Tamkivi - Skype: “peace, love and pstn”.
Skype processes 100 billion calls a year. Their view is that they are not taking revenue from telecoms, most of Skype minutes would never happen without Skype. 33% Skype calls include video.
Skype is for the people I actually want to talk to (average skype contact list is a single figure number). Somebody told Skype founders it would never happen because people don't have headsets, but people invested in headset to talk with their valued contacts.

To cover global needs, you need something relevant to developed (“peace and love” way of thinking, good voice quality, video, etc.) and emerging (PSTN, bad voice quality doesn’t matter so much, no video needed). Things like a MVNO focused on price and regular quality (long call setup, not very good audio, etc.) can’t be global (may succeed in emerging, but would be niche in
developed).

Voxygen:
Good user experience: calling a service number and directly listening what you wanted (e.g. ticket status, appointment confirmation), with no delay, no input of account, etc.
How much money wasted by couriers checking parcel delivery times, etc.?
Unlock that value !!!

Tomorrow more :-)

Jose Recio, VP Alliances

AVISG Tecnology for Multimodal Interaction explained

When demonstrating the AVISG tecnology for mobile multimodal web interaction (see videos here) customers tell us about how can it be possible, how to synchronize real time voice and mobile web if mobile browsers are not AJAX enabled. The others concern is about the possibility of reusing their IVR/ASR/TTS. Basically the answers are: YES, Solaiemes AVISG can synchronize real time voice and web content with only xhtml capable devices and AVISG can use whatever pre-existing IVR or using cloud IVR's. But in order to explain better our technology and advantadge we just prepared a ppt product sheet to help architects of partners and final customers understand how AVISG can be combined with their offers or cover their needs.

Solaiemes featured in the Moriana Group IMS & RCS Report 2009

Solaiemes has been featured in the vendors appendix of the Moriana Group IMS & RCS Report 2009.
Our vendor profile is included with other 13 companies profiles. We are very happy to see our company profile together big industry players as Intel, Huawei , ZTE among others, and see other 2 companies based in Spain (Almira Labs and Genaker) also listed.
We understood how difficult is entrepreneuring in technology in Spain with limited funding and it could help to boost VC operations when investors realized the important matters are vision and execution rather than company location :-)
Solaiemes aims to contribute with its vision to improve the mobility, convergence and UC, and participated in the last edicion of IMS forum, and believe IMS & RCS could have a key role, you can find our keynote here.

The Moriana Group (from it own about) specializes in the telecom service layer and next generation networks. Our focus is on: Service Delivery Platforms, Next Generation OSS/BSS, Convergent Charging and Billing, IMS, FMC, VoIP, WiMAX, IPTV, Triple Play Mobile Commerce and Advertising and other key technologies and services. Their mission is to help network operators and service providers to transform their business models, service offerings and network infrastructure to create new revenue streams and to meet the challenges of the competitive Telecom market and the growing pressure from Internet and Web 2.0 players.

Latest Solaiemes Company Profile presentation.

In this company executive summary presentation we explain: "the problem" we are trying to solve, our approach, what is different and is a real enhancement, our aimed business model, and our portfolio and real use cases applications.

If you are interested in see the demos visit http://www.youtube.com/solaiemes
Feedback, comments, suggestions, more than welcomed.

RCS DevChallenge...carriers aiming a new paradigm?

The GSMA launched a new competition, the RCS DevChallenge trying to boost mobile and pc solutions based on RCS specifications.
Rich Communication Suite is perhaps the last chance of carriers to keep a key role (not exclusive) in the solutions based communication market and avoid to become finally a mere dumb pipe.
The idea is about combining a lot of experiences around the address book, allowing to combined voice call with additional media sharing possibilities (audio files, live videoshare, instant messaging, etc).
The powerful Presence feature (IETF, 3GPP and OMA specs) is enabling a lot of rich "use cases always on" not being intrusive. Then Social Media interaction, CRM info from your suppliers, user generated content and distribution can be "re-invented" using a common interface, the RCS client. A compatible multi-platform RCS client, backed from powerful data core and IMS, coming as a native feature even in low-mid tier handsets, with API's to create clients and extensions (as app or web based) for personal computers will make RCS as successful as SMS.
a) most of devices enabled
b) a common interface being used for a lot of different use cases (no laziness to learn how to use, little effort, lots of possibilities).
We hope carriers take RCS seriously and forget their traditional trial/deploying times and push the accelerator. Solutions based on particular apps, not always multi-platform are being launched everyday, app-stores being opened...are not the win-win-win scenario. If services are not compatible for all types of users making difficult to arrive to critical mass of users, and when most of users reject the idea of installing an application and learn it for each communication experience they want to try.

The paradigm of "only carrier owned" services was not successful, carriers can not think and flawless execute all the use cases.
The opposite paradigm based on mere dumb pipe carriers and a ecosystem of applications with no standards and compability (the current one) is not being successful, it is not including the most of users.
A new paradigm is needed. It will be relying on both approaches, openness and also standarized enablers being shared to develope use cases on the top.

Of course, Solaiemes backs RCS, we will participate in the contest, our vision from the beginning was about communication services, using standard features, considering IMS as a very good enablers and being our first product, LIVESERVE, using combination services (videoshare).

Carriers, we look forward your feedback and positive collaboration.

1 or 2 Cameras ? that's the question

Everybody knows how one of the most promising features of 3G technology, the videocall was not successful. Carriers, with initial limited 3G capacity launched low profile the videocall, it was more related to say "we have videocall" rather than "videocall is powerful, use it". Initial prices were too high and the person to person videocall is not really "the killer application".
A lot of services can be deployed using Videocall, IVVR (video IVR), user generated content for enterprise use cases, online journalism, multimedia blogging, law enforcement use cases and also social media interaction. But the initial "not correct promotion" just discouraged solution developers from innovating based on mobile video. The point is that as videocall/videoShare was not being used, right now, in order to reduce the cost of the handsets, the 3G devices are missing the front camera, not only useful for videocall/IMS_videoshare features but also for well known applications being ported to mobile.
When mobile bandwidth & stability capacity is ok, and some carriers (as 3G in UK) are welcoming 3rd Party VoIP/ToIP communication applications as Skype, now it is time to reconsider that the front camera is really a need, not only to use properly videocall and IMS videoshare, but also be used in traditional full multimedia and UC conceived applications.
In our opinions it makes no sense to add megapixels to the main camera, (not usefull when the device has not the zooming and optics of a photo-camera device) and remove from the design the front camera.
Just a mere example, when using a mobile to live broadcast a breaking new, the online journalist will need to appear him/herself during moments, and later...be streaming what is happening.

Carriers can still monetize videocall/videoshare when using them for added value use cases and other front camera based apps can help to monetize boost data plans.

Hope carriers and device suppliers reconsider this...WE WANT BOTH CAMERAS !!!

Solaiemes, semi-finalist at Qprize Business Plan competition

Solaiemes has been selected as semi-finalist in the Europe/Israel region of the the global Qualcomm Ventures competition Qprize.
The competition rules set only early stage technology companies (< 1 M u$ in VC investment) could compete with their business plan to try to win convertible notes. The competition itself is a great chance to get awareness, as being shorlisted regional semifinalist means that the investment arm of one of the more innovative global companies as Qualcomm screened your business plan and consider feasible the entrepreneurs ideas and the how to convert them into a profitable business. We will be pitching in the regional semi-final next week, september, the 10th in London. Find here the list of Europe/Israel selected companies for the semi-final:

Solaiemes exhibiting at SIMO Network event

Solaiemes will have a booth during the coming edition of SIMO Network, next 22-24 September in Madrid (at IFEMA exhibition center).
This year SIMO event, with long tradition in Spanish IT market is re-invented, from a large exhibition for everybody, this year it is transformed as a smaller exhibition area, but with a parallel powerful programme of conferences and pannels, focused in professional attendants.
We thank the organization for the free of cost booth as a prize for becoming finalist in past edition of "Premio Vivero" last january.
We will be showcasing our progress in our portfolio and explaining the next step, "cloud-ifying / SaaS-ifying" our offer as we understand what the market is asking for. A good opportunity to meet with partner & customers (and potential new ones) and also investors.
Suggestions, meeting requests, questions, very welcomed.

Update: the PR associated
http://www.simonetwork.com/es/cargarAplicacionSalaPrensa.do?identificador=117

Our view about trending topic: Cloud/SaaS market opportunities & challenges.

In these slides we analyze our view about how IT is being changed with the irruption of Cloud & SaaS technology trends and the opportunities and also challenges it will offer for all players.

Solaiemes adds X+V support to its AVISG product family.

X+V is a nice standard endorsed by the W3C initially developed by Opera and IBM some years ago to bring vocal functionality to web browsers. Among its nice features is to allow to embed
voice content (using VXML 2.0) on XHTML content. This allows to leverage current web applications architecture to bring also vocal and multimodal functionality to voice enabled web browsers.
The Solaiemes approach is to use the AVISG infrastructure to implement X+V using current web browsers that do not have any voice functionality and using current IVR systems. This allows bringing multimodal (web + vocal) interaction to users that just have a simple web browser and a vocal phone (POTS, mobile, SIP, VoIP, widgets enabling VoIP embeded in a webpage, etc). Then, we try to achieve the main objective of X+V standard, to leverage current web application architecture to provide both web and vocal content in a single document. This is done by means of AVISG that splits web content and pushes it to the simple web browser and vocal content and pushes it to the phone channel through a current IVR system.
This fresh approach to X+V greatly leverages current premise and cloud based IVR systems (or if you want it the other way around: leverages current self-customer care web systems) to provide multimodal interaction using simple clients already in place in most users PC Desktops, mobile phones, etc.

Soon, videos with use cases mobile and pc-browser using 3rd party cloud IVRs, stay tunned

by Saúl Labajo