Au24 has a new website

Its still evolving so please check back frequently for new content, and looking forward to your comments and suggestions.

Interpreting the Nexus One – Recon for GOOG’s long term Internet experience market share “total war” with AAPL and MSFT

I switched from a Blackberry to an Android phone about two months ago – and found it a great improvement. I’d compare the switch to maybe a Windows PC to an Apple in the late 90s, but that would be ignoring the clear leader in smart phone innovation over the last years, Apple itself, which is gearing up to launch its Slate to great fanfare shortly. The Android OS poses a reasonable competitor to the iPhone, and clearly much “smarter” than a Blackberry. The main repercussion of going Android, is that users will be fully tied in with Google’s complimentary software universe. Mobile integration with Google Calendar, Gmail, GoogleVoice, and even YouTube make using these services vastly more compelling than stand alone PC web apps.

My personal interpretation is that this move is an experiment, upping the ante on the Android strategy bet, and possibly a harbinger of M&A activities. What does Google get by reselling an HTC phone directly for a comparable price that T-mobile sells similar HTC phones already ?

1. the obvious point: ability to optimize the user experience and speeding up the development cycles by asserting (more but hardly total) control over processors, hardware and components independent of manufacturer and network operator’s own priorities.

2. if that is successful in boosting interest in the OS, then it can be seen as an experiment with vertical integration, i.e. the acquisition of a device hardware company and/or wireless broadband /network services operations (perhaps connecting Google’s interest in open access for 700 MHz spectrum). Per the New York times, Motorola Co-CEO Jha commented: “I think the Nexus One is a good phone; I think the Droid is a good phone,” … Mr. Jha appeared to embrace Google’s plan to market phones directly to consumers. “I see this potentially as an expansion of the marketplace.”

Internet Telephony Winter conference schedule announced

The conference schedule for the  Internet Telephony Expo in Miami, January 20-22, 2010 has just been announced, Registration is now open

I’m looking forward to moderating  two extremely interesting sessions:

“Rich Services – to be delivered “ 1/20/2010, 9:00-9:45am / Service Provider Track

The world of communications is migrating to IP-based technology to enable the delivery of new multimedia services. For those involved in delivering content and entertainment-based services, this technological change demands a fundamental new paradigm of federation-based, all-IP scalable interconnect. These new services will enormously disrupt current communication and telephony business models.  This session will address how service providers, from mobile to CSOs, can address this shift, reduce transit charges, and enable the introduction of new, rich multi-modal, real-time communications services.

And

“The Mobile Video Revolution” – 1/22/2010, 9:30-10:15am/ Video Communications Track

Mobile video telephony is about more than just the ability to watch movies on the handset or make 3G video calls. And it’s not just something to consider for the future; many operators are generating revenue from video telephony services today. For businesses and service providers alike, mobile video will prove a vital tool for generating revenue. This presentation will provide a full overview of the various video telephony opportunities in mobile: from consumer-based services like video ringback tones and entertainment services, to next generation business applications, such as video blogging and conferencing.

Internationalized Domain Names

ICANN just announced a big step in their ongoing IDN efforts, with plans to enable the registration and use of Internet domain names based on non-Latin alphabets and characters.    A complex undertaking, more than half of the world’s 1.6 Billion Internet users native languages use non-Latin alphabets, characters or symbols, including  Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Cyrillic.  Interesting to see how Brand Managers as well as Domainers react to this coming Continental shift in web addressing.  Expect a race to register thousands of “premium” domain names,  for example the Perso-Arabic script equivalent of  www.farsi.com which sold for over $70,000 in August 2009.

Social Network Overload

Many of the free social networks are now showing signs of overload on a regular basis.  Not surprising as they are now serving  heavy corporate and business users, for whom outages are not a semi-welcome break from their over-sharing friends, but a potential loss of revenue and commercial readiness.   The demand for paid industrial strength commercial user accounts appears ripe.

Free Voice; Bill & Keep?

I think Om Malik is very on target in his recent summation of the state of the voice industry, republished on BusinessWeek online.  With the  US wireless biggies finally conceding  weakly justified defenses to mobile VoIP apps,  it appears to be a major milestone in the 15 year slog towards the “death of distance. ”    Its nearly to the stage , where just about everyone in the industry views voice as a commodity and gear their business models towards value added applications built around free voice and  flat rate broadband plans.

Interestingly, Malik goes to the next step to briefly reference the implied  business and technology drivers for voice peering , stopping short of the drivers for multi-lateral vs. private interconnection approaches.  After helping guide XConnect for its first three years when peering was rarely discussed in public outside of 8:00 AM conference sessions on day 2 for an audience that barely outnumbered the panel;  its nice to see the theme of Free Voice and Peering written in the same keystrokes.

VON in Miami Beach

The rebirth of the VON show, eagerly awaited, took place last week.  The VON saga has been widely covered, but do want to say that Mike Saxby, Rick Martin, Khali Henderson, Leez May and team did a great job.  The quality of the panels and reporting, as well as the behind the scenes management was excellent.

The panel I moderated; “Flying Blind: Navigating the International Wholesale Voice Market” featured Chris Lengyel, Director of Product Management at iBasis, Vanessa Matamoros, VP Sales for Latin America at Arbinet and Andriy Zhylenko, CTO of PortaOne.   Andriy argued that there is still a good business case in 2009 for entering into the Wholesale marketplace, but pointed out that margins were often extremely low, even averaging 1% in some markets, which underscored the need for vigilant fraud protection and proactive billing management. He made the practical suggestion that carriers ought to standardize rate change sheets using a web-based technology rather than emailing .xls files back and forth.  Sounds a bit like Arbinet I thought as Vanessa dived into their systems for managing trading, codes, billing and settlement.   Chris amusingly pointed out that within iBasis any route with margins in the 1% zone would be termed “Toxic Minutes” and made a strong case for outsourcing the International wholesale equation for overall cost savings and route quality.  The complexities and risks of the business all seemed to tip the scale away from service providers developing large carrier services departments at this stage of the game, and towards outsourcing these functions to dedicated outfits such as Arbinet and iBasis.

The VON conference concluded with a Keynote by Christopher Dean, the extremely sharp Chief Strategy Officer of Skype. Mid-way through he transitioned into Skype’s plans to integrate the Channel into their applications, which was fitting since his speech was also the kick-off for sister show Channel Partners.  Among many interesting points, Christopher made the case that while Skype is estimated to account for 8% of the overall International voice market, it has not cannibalized the legacy minutes to the extent many had speculated in years past but rather grew the overall pie, i.e. that voice utilization when reduced to free or next to free follows the “price elasticity of demand” principles.  This resonated with me, since as a Skype user I have on several occasions managed to forgo transatlantic flights and contribute effectively to full-day meetings via a string of hour-plus free Skype calls.

This brings us back to one of the most important sessions in my opinion which was “HD Voice: the future of VoIP.”  Jeff Rodman, Founder and CTO of Polycom,  Alan Percy, of Audio Codes and William Bumbernick of Alteva.   Jeff is a visionary and when he claimed in his presentation that any enterprise phone system purchased today that didn’t support HD would be obsolete in five years my ears perked up.  Yes this is a sales pitch, but in a world of 1% wholesale margins, free voice and unmetered broadband – its seems inevitable that the communications industry will turn its marketing focus on consumer and business applications for high definition audio and video telephony.

Revesoft

Broadview Networks

Ron Pass, Sales Director for ReveSoft enjoying South Beach

ifbyphone

Entertainment disintermediation

First of all, I don’t watch a lot of TV, I even owned a “Kill Your TV” t-shirt in the late 80’s.   But that was twenty years ago, and like many others in the “Great Recession” I am now paying some programming company $60 a month for 3000000 mostly useless stations and wondering “why?”

My personal $60 went for the last four years to a direct broadcast satellite network with annual revenues of $20.4 Billion.  Another smaller chunk went to NetFlix.

I mulled over the factors:  sheer channel overload, parental concerns about programming quality, and costs, and decided to make some changes:

Results:

• The direct broadcast sat network didn’t let me go easy.  - $60
• Netflix unchanged at +$12/month
• Roku box – one time +$99 purchase
• Digital Amplified Antenna –  one time +$20

The Roku + Netflix had to be one of my most gratifying consumer experiences in years. It allowed me to fully take advantage of the on-demand IP video options, streaming a library of thousands of movies and documentaries for the same $12 a month. Throw in the antenna for my HD TV and I can waste some valuable time watching the HD stations for early morning and late night TV news, for free and at better quality rates than DTV.

There are billions at stake, where will they flow as content is just another App?

What are you selling?

Fortune Magazine via the CNN Money website just posted some content on the “Dumbest moments in Business 2009 – mid-year edition” which revived as #2, the notoriously unsuccessful Tropicana rebranding campaign.

“Tropicana drinkers, it turns out, are as passionate about packaging as they are about pulp. That’s why they rebelled when parent company PepsiCo and consultancy Arnell overhauled the juice line’s packaging in January as part of a $35 million branding campaign called “Squeeze.”  Tropicana fans said the simplicity of the new design reminded them of store-brand generics. And who wants to be mistaken for a generic consumer? Within a month, the public’s flogging by e-mail, phone, and blogs forced PepsiCo to bring back the old straw-in-an-orange cartons. Other parts of the campaign remain, but PepsiCo will probably think twice before it tries updating this icon again. “

I recall going into the shopping center where I do my own grocery runs, and facing a huge wall of the new white Tropicana containers with the muted orange design. It looked nice. But others were  looking at it as well with some apparent confusion.  Was anyone missing the old packaging? Unlikely.  What was missing was CLEAR product differentiation WITHIN the brand.   People are very finicky about their juice.  Some people have kids who won’t drink pulpy juice. Others want pulp.  There are bigger issues in life I know, but Tropicana spent $35 Million on a product rebrand that made it very hard to differentiate between varieties.  That was the issue in my opinion, had absolutely nothing to do with confusing a “premium” brand with a generic  brand, and even less than consumers alleged “deep emotional bond” for the old packaging.

What does OJ have to do with tech?  The same issues are rampant in tech marketing.  How many companies aggressively market around industry keywords that are overused, undefined, and unclear?  Or attempt to remain relevant by wrapping their old products in new buzzwords?

Conclusion:   Be conscious of your audience.  Strive to be clear and efficient about what your product IS and DOES, or risk confused customers leaving it on the virtual shelf long after expiration.

Memorial Day

After a very relaxing long weekend, I came across Carol Wilson’s report in Telephony Online today about the death of a State Dept. official / Telecom Consultant, Mr. Terry Barnish in an attack on an automobile convoy outside Fallujah, Iraq.  On Memorial Day in the US, we remember the heroism of those lost in war; those past but also particularly the past eight years of ongoing combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Although I was unfamiliar with Mr. Barnish prior to this article, I found it moving to read how “(h)e was energized by the progress they were making ….He was just home three weeks ago, and he was talking about some of the things the Iraqis are doing, how they are leapfrogging us in terms of technology for things like how to prevent car theft, or how parents can monitor their children.”  May technology only find peaceful applications.