No such thing as a free lunch
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out that if you are offered anything for nothing these days there has to be a catch. You know it, I know it, everybody knows it – you just don’t get anything for nothing, period. And so it goes with social networking. Lured like lemmings [...]
Billions in big business as Barcelona beats blues
Like many suffering from post-MWC fatigue, I am trying to piece together how an event of this magnitude manages to keep bucking trends. The GSMA flagship is astounding not only in its size and intensity, it also generates billions of dollars of business for suppliers and Barcelona. But why? It really was no fun cramming [...]
Regulator bashing – Is there an app for that?
You know it’s a ‘slow news’ year at the Mobile World Congress when the operators start ganging up on the regulators. Oh yes, regulator bashing reached new heights in Barcelona with almost every CEO, whether in keynote or panel sessions, dropping hints and more, that life would be a lot easier if one of the [...]
Feeling insecure? Therapy won’t help.
Hackers have had a big week. US claims that the Chinese military is allegedly hacking into US corporations and actively enticing the country’s best hackers to join up is one thing, but when hackers try to break into Facebook, that’s a real national emergency. Don’t get me wrong, they are both serious issues, but the [...]
Walls collapse in the home of walled-gardens
The three major Japanese mobile-phone service providers in the home of ‘walled-gardens’ are making their smartphone content offerings available to rival companies’ customers as they focus more on content services, the Nikkei reported this week. That may not seem such a bad idea but in such a fiercely competitive market, content has been a highly [...]
Google pays Apple $1bn – network operators get ?
Surprise, surprise! Google pays Apple $1 billion per annum to make sure it is the default search engine on all those millions of iOS devices out there. Money for jam you might say? After all, what other search engine could Apple promote as their default? Oh yes, there’s Bing, but that belongs to the other [...]
Telstra throttles, world watches
Newspapers in Australia report that Telstra is making a bold move to ‘throttle’ or slow the speed at which its ADSL customers download content through peer-to-peer (P2P) networks in peak periods as part of a trial. TM Forum members present at Management World in Dublin in 2011 and Singapore in 2012 will not be surprised at this [...]
Living in a lead-lined cave
Ovum’s latest survey into consumer concerns about privacy and use of personal data may just be the tip of the iceberg. As more disclosures of data collection and storage become public knowledge, the backlash may throw many organizations that rely on the sale of this data into disarray. In the last two weeks, The Insider has [...]
Big data, big deal?
I have to admit to being one of the unconvinced that big data was anything more than just a fancy name for data analytics and business intelligence (BI) or a great excuse for suppliers to sell more software and boxes. However, after two days at TM Forum’s Big Data Analytics Summit in Amsterdam I have been shocked [...]
Facebook gets voice, telcos go mute
It might just be time for CSPs worldwide to get serious, really serious about the threat to the traditional revenues from the likes of Skype, Facebook, Google and another thousand or so messaging and VOIP players nibbling away at their core revenues. Nothing, it appears, is sacred in the rush for OTT players to offer [...]