BT Fusion and Orange Unik
May 31st, 2007Some interesting facts & figures from this morning’s UMA webcast done jointly by Kineto & Orange.
France Telecom has an installed base of 4.8m LiveBox gateways (mostly in France), and has >140k Unik subscriptions & has sold >200k phones (also mostly in France). Current run rate sounds like around 25k phones a month.
Have to say I’m surprised by the statistic that 15-20% of calls involve a handover - much higher than I’d have anticipated, although there’s a possibility of self-selection here: I imagine the proposition is much more attractive to people who use their phones at home a lot. It could also be they’ve tuned the LiveBox WiFi to a smaller range & so there’s some occasional accidental handovers to the macro network.
By contrast BT is reported to have (still) only around 40k Fusion users, although it’s a bit opaque about whether that’s acccounts or phones. It has an installed base of “more than 1m” Home Hubs (I think it also said the same thing at end-2006, so I’d guess the number is a fair bit more by now).
Interestingly, although BT is being castigated for its slow growth, it looks like the penetration of dual-mode into homes with operator-provided gateways is broadly similar -around 3-4% (ie 140k against 4m LiveBox in markets where Unik has launched).
I’ve been saying for a while that UMA-based dualmode is only really an option when sold in conjunction with an operator’s home gateway, in order to minimise costs of support & complexity of configuration, as well as enabling better QoS. It will be interesting to see if T-Mobile’s promised full launch in the US will work around this and run over anyone’s box/connection - as well as whether it incurs the wrath of Net Neutrality issues for running it’s mobile service “across someone else’s broadband”.
One other thing occurred to me - I think that the French aren’t quite as voracious as the British in demanding the latest, most expensive, flashiest phones (ideally subsidised down to £zero). This could mean that Orange has had an easier time than BT in pushing the early unsexy, low-end UMA phones. Unik also has more attractive pricing, reflecting France’s hugely competitive voice marketplace, and can offer free on-net calls to other Orange mobiles (incurring no net interconnect costs obviously), which BT cannot match in the UK.
Imagine
May 31st, 2007“Imagine that when you shopped online for a digital camera, you could see whether anyone you knew already owned it and ask them what they thought. Imagine that when you searched for a concert ticket you could learn if friends were headed to the same show.
Or that you knew which sites - or what news stories - people you trust found useful and which they disliked. Or maybe you could find out where all your friends and relatives are, right now (at least those who want to be found).”
I just imagine how this would be misused…
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The very next future of advertising
May 31st, 2007If video is indeed the most important type of user generated content today, and we have entered the monetization phase of the new web, then the gold rush fever surrounding video ads is not a surprise. But what is the right way of doing this?
The right way is going to be whoever manages to deliver ads in a format that does not annoy consumers. A repeat of what Google did with text ads, but in video, is going unlock huge advertising spending and shift even more of it online. Will this be Google or some other company? We do not know yet, but Google has already spent a whooping $1.65B on YouTube, so it will fight this battle hard. In this post we look at what different companies are doing today and consider the ingredients of a successful solution, using AdWords as a model.
Read/Write Web
And the very next future of advertising company is the one man marketing.
And the very next future of middleman in the advertising world is something PayPerPost like.
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P2P the new kind of distribution
May 31st, 2007Hollywood produces the content and P2P is the new kind of distribution.
The kind people like most: the FREE kind.
The more bandwidth and broadband available, the more the distribution changes hands.
But how long will it last?
As long as there is no other way to produce content.
A good alternative is YouTube or YouTubes like.
People begin to take to liking this new way of producing content and we are getting better.
I do not talk of the value, I talk of the quality.
The value of course reflects the cultural level of the audience, but in that they are not so much different from the paid content.
A mass market product cannot be a high level product.
If you have to please the majority, than you have to reflect the needs of the majority.
And people usually do not like education, that is something boring and difficult to understand.
People are lazy and getting lazier every day.
Once our grandmothers cooked for days and today cooking is putting something in the microwave.
Once they did a lot of manual work, now we have a lot of machines working as manuals.
Once they walked and today we drive.
It is not that once they were better, they just had less.
The problem is that with this lack of physical exercise you would expect an increase of brain exercise.
Nothing of that kind.
Lazy in the body, lazy in the spirit.
We have come to the easy and free society.
But one day WE ALL will have to pay the bill.
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New worm in Skype Chat!
May 31st, 2007Language is the way to a culture.
May 31st, 2007What about learning Italian?
What about being able to know one of the oldest culture of the World?
What about living in the wonderful and active city of Milano?
What about a full immersion in History?
All this and much more is what the italian courses in Italy will offer.
Italian is not an easy language, and to learn to speak it the correct way (perfection is something it’s difficult to find even among Italians)you need good and trained teachers.
This is what you will find in the Accademia di Milano.
All their language courses fit the Common European Framework, the Council of Europe guidelines. The classes are small with an average of six students, to maximize proficiency.
The Accademia di Italiano is one of the best italian language schools in Italy .
So, if you plan to follow italian language courses in Italy you will hardly find a better place.
This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.
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Building tomorrow’s world…
May 31st, 2007“We are at the early stage of building tomorrow’s world. All I can do is talk vision right now - “
Everybody, always once in his life is “at the early stage to build tomorrow’s world”.
Being it doing something good and innovative or something the opposite.
That is our fate, unless we decide to survive doing nothing, which is not even possible…
Where does the bread come from?
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Surfing the Net you can fish a date with a Celebrity
May 31st, 2007Yes, a date with a HOT Hollywood celeb.
What do you have to do to give it a try?
Go to Free videos at GoFish.com
Submit one or more videos.
Each celebrity will give users 3 calls-to-actions to guide their video submissions in hopes of scoring the date. The more videos you submit, the better your chances are of winning.
How to win?
The problem is NOT knowing what it takes to win, Mirelly Taylor (yes the one who has appeared on movies such as Kiss Me Again and Serving Sara and television shows including “Las Vegas”, “Punk’d”, and “Numb3rs”) clearly says how her date should be.
The problem is ACTUALLY being the way SHE wants.
Something close to Mr. Perfection.
The bad thing is that few men are so perfect, the good thing is that it is enough to pretend to be that way.
The moment she will realize you are not, it will be too late.
You will already be on the dreamed of, looked for, sought of, DATE.
So, what you have to do:
1) Collect some good ideas about a video or more.
2) You can easily get them looking at other people’s work. That is what I usually do anyhow.
3) Make the video as best as you can or nearly to.
4) Go to the website and submit it.
5) Beginning to hope.
Honestly you do not have many chances.
She IS beautiful, interesting, famous.
The goal is shared by many (and, let’s be honest, may be better than you).
But you are there to live out LOUD, to try it HARD, to make it YOUR WAY.
By the way, who cares if you do not win?
In principle the nice part of it all is DREAMING.
Seduce a Celeb will run on GoFish.com over the next 14 weeks ( You have enough time to create something good).
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Jajah get the T-mobile deal
May 30th, 2007Internet Neutrality
May 30th, 2007“Despite the urge to hold providers accountable for such activities, the ISP community has been remarkably
successful in maintaining a position of neutrality, the digital successor, in spirit and often in fact, to
the common carrier phone company.
Adopting this approach has required strict adherence to a cardinal rule often referred to as “network
neutrality.” This principle holds that ISPs transport bits of data without discrimination, preference, or
regard for content.
The network neutrality principle has served ISPs, internet firms and internet users well. It has enabled
ISPs to plausibly argue that they function much like common carriers and therefore should be exempt from
liability for the content that passes through their systems.”
The neutrality was more a way to get more customers than a way of seeing the Internet.
And now, when the customers are there and they contributed to make the Internet a global power as it is, they see the convenience in discriminating the users in base of the use they do of the broadband lines.
But they easily forget that the number makes the revenue and if the customer won’t find the content he is looking for, the Internet will stop to have the appeal it has now, including the cheap calls.
