BT's 90 Day Cycles Startle People

BT now operates on 90-day development cycles for applications, including the time needed to prepare a business case, says Dave Axam, BT director of transformation. In some cases, as you would suspect, more than a single cycle might be required for a single project.

But that sort of speed seemed to startle many delegates at the MetaSwitch Forum, many of whom are independent telcos, rural cooperatives, competitive local exchange carriers, cable companies and other associated with those ecosystems.

But Axam says BT is serious about that sort of adaptation to a world running "at Google speed." He was given the assignment of launching voice over IP for BT "in three months." Axam says he discovered early on that Session Initiation Protocol is a bit like English--one has to know which variant of the dialect is being used--and that has taught BT much about the pitfalls of relying exclusively on such "standards."

All of that seemed to provoke some anxiety on the part of delegates, who may well have been wondering how well they'll fare in a world that requires innovation at that sort of speed, with the relationships and assets such speed would seem to require. BT, after all, created a developer community, a software development kit, feedback, response and interaction capabilities as part of the overall effort.

"But one of the hardest things is the commercial wrap," says Axam. That means the ability to intgrate new applications, many with some sort of tie to the Web, with the rest of BT's services.

One delegate, who seemed to agree with the characterization of where things were headed, nevertheless expressed the obvious point that "I don't think we are going to be putting together third-party developer groups" to do this sort of thing.

Anxiety? Yes, for many reasons. The integration of Web with telephony, the increasing importance of software-mediated experiences, the growing technological complexity of the business overall and the different assets required, may well be disadvantages for whole classes of competitors, even as the trends favor larger, wealthier companies.

All of that simply creates new opportunities for aggregators of applications, though. Still, as another delegate put it, "I'm not sure how comfortable I am with putting my widget on an iGoogle page."

But that might be a more viable avenue than trying to "force" customers to a service provider portal, as beneficial as that might be for the service provider.

Qwest Readies 20 Mbps Access Service

Qwest appears to be very close to launching a 20 Mbps downstream, 896 kbps upstream access service called Qwest Connect Platinum, available on a "naked" basis without the requirement for buying a voice line at the same time, and costing $109.99 a month.

The consumer portal now seems to be working just fine, so enter your street address or phone number, if you use landline service and are a Qwest customer, to find out what sorts of speeds really are available at your location. In my case, for example, my connection back to the central office appears to be long enough as to preclude getting 20 Mbps. About 5 Mbps is all Qwest actually can deliver to my location in Denver.

And Qwest does not seem to among those service providers who want to "throttle" use of bandwidth, as the Qwest Web site emphasizes using the service for "watching full-length movies online, multi-player Internet games, multitasking with multiple Internet applications and networking computers.

Signing a two-year contract locks in that price "for life."

It's Still All About Wireless and Wireline...

Despite gaining 148,000 net new U-verse TV customers in the most-recent quarter, and total net video connections of 264,000, including DirecTV and Dish Network accounts. Broadband access revenues were up 13.2 percent year over year.

Total high-speed Internet connections, which include DSL and satellite broadband services, increased by 491,000, and AT&T ended the quarter with 14.6 million broadband connections, up 13.9 percent over the year-earlier period.

However, AT&T’s wireline disconnect rate for the quarter of 10 percent, compared to 9.4 percent probably is the highest in that company's history.

Broadband someday will represent a bigger percentage of total revenue. But right now, the only services that can really "move the needle" for a company this large is wireless and wireline voice accounts.

AT&T: Different Quarter, Same Story

Once again, wireless drove performance during AT&T's most recent quarter. Revenue grew a healthy 22 percent in the first quarter, but wireline voice service revenue fell 7.1 percent to $9.7 billion, while wireless revenue increased 17.1 percent to $10.6 billion. Data revenue grew six percent to $6.2 billion. Slower data growth will be a problem if wireless does not continue its upward climb.

IP-Based Surveillance Market: Take a Look

The market for IP-based video surveillance equipment grew about 50 percent in 2007, say researchers at MultiMedia Intelligence. It's a new market, so equipment sales will not knock your socks off: $500 million worldwide. But that's a comparative growth rate 400 percent higher than for traditional cameras and other gear to support video surveillance. And IP gear tends to be smaller and cheaper, so more equipment is bought, even at lower aggregate sales volumes.

The important thing to note is that many of those cameras are connected to live monitoring centers. That's another IP trunking revenue stream.

Also, keep in mind that high-defintion plasma displays are starting to show up in more retail and professional settings than one has seen in the past. Video, in short, is starting to become an immersive medium, not confined to traditional TV screens. That's going to represent lots more opportunities for services, applications and gear.

All those screens have to be installed and configured, for example. That's going to increase the amount of work available to multimedia "home theater" installers, for example. And since some increasing number of those video screens are going to be networked, a new type of application for traditional value added resellers to support as well. That's not to mention video services and bandwidth sales.

Skype Revamps Unlimited Calling Plans

Jim Courtney at Skype Journal says Skype has revamped all of its Skype Pro plans by creating flat rate unlimited (fair use of 10,000 minutes a month) international calling plans covering landline numbers in 35 countries, plus mobile numbers in some countries.

Among the notable changes are the cheaper calling plans for users who call between the United States and Mexico, elimination of connection fees and greater plan simplicity.

The plans do not require a contract. Users can buy plans covering calling to Canada and the United States; Canada, the United States and Mexio; or 32 countries plus Canada, the United States and Mexico.

Users also can upgrade their plans on a temporary basis. All plans include voice mail.

For users in Canada and U.S. the three plans:cost $2.95, $5.95 and $9.95 a month. European user plans cost €2.95 per month for calls within a single country, unlimited calling within 20 European countries for €3.95 per month and unlimited calling to 35 countries for €8.95 a month.

Similar plans are available for users in Asia, Brazil and the rest of the world.

Web TV Passes Legacy TV in Australia

Nielsen Online reports that, for the first time, Australians are spending more time online than they were watching TV. Nielsen Online says users are watching an average of 13.7 hours a week watching Internet TV compared with 13.3 hours of legacy TV.

Roy Morgan claims that the difference is because it used a representative cross-sample of the Australian population, including heavy, medium, light and non-Internet users, while the Nielsen data was based on an online panel that didn't cover all Australians.

UGC: No Business Model?

eMarketer projects that the number of US User-Generated Content creators will rise to 108 million in 2012, from 77 million in 2007.

But, despite the projected growth in the numbers of content creators, the monetization of user-generated media has not materialized, eMarketer suggests.

Retail models have not caught on, either, and advertisers are reluctant to attach their brands to content that is, by its nature, unpredictable, eMarketer says.

Well, what did you expect? Is there a business model, beyond connections, for email or chat or talking? People create because they can, and they want to. Service providers will make some money providing the ability to do so. There might be a bit of advertising for email or chat apps.

But for the most part, user-generated content will not generally lead to a business model for its creators. UGC is not really a "medium." It is communications. Some UGC will be monetized, just as some independent films wind up getting commercial success. It happens. But i won't be common.

iPhone Keyboards, Bigger Screens?

As much as Apple's iPhone has surfaced latent demand for new mobile Web behaviors, the next rounds of development will have to tackle more prosaic issues: proliferating the product line to better address market segments: heavier texters who like keys and larger screens for users who really want to use the device as a notebook substitute.

There is every likelihood, in other words, that the iconic iPhone form factor will diversify, the way iPods have, with models optimized for particular use cases.

Industry sources told Times Online that the device will have a "radically different" appearance to the current device, which has a 4.5 inch screen and slick, aluminium backing. Among the possibilities are flip version, which would enable the screen to be larger, and a sliding model with a regular qwerty keyboard - as opposed to a touchscreen one.

The Financial Times even thinks Apple will within a year or so change distribution deals, abandoning single-carrier franchises as early as June 2009 in the U.S. market and October 2009 in the U.K. market.

That of course likely will lead to a change in revenue streams, from revenue-sharing payments to transactions and Internet advertising. That would be a fairly abrupt shift of income stream, but a necessary step to build greater device handset volumes and ad potential.

More Aggressive Prepaid Mobile Efforts

Prepaid mobile calling offers have gotten more competitive over the past year as the overall market continues to saturate. T-Mobile launched FlexPay, providing prepaid customers the same plans as those currently available to contract subscribers.

Verizon Wireless enhanced its pay-as-you-go INpulse plans by creating lower voice and messaging rates. Boost Mobile, meanwhile, introduced Unlimited by Boost to counter prepaid offers from Leap Wireless and MetroPCS.

As carriers and mobile virtual network operators search for new subscribers, they increasingly are targeting the prepaid customer base. Not only are more carriers launching postpaid-like monthly prepaid plans that include buckets of minutes and value-added features, but they are also extending value-added services to standard prepaid services such as messaging buckets and even unlimited messaging.

Carriers have even started selling prepaid customers subsidized handsets, which is something that was unheard of in the industry just 18 months ago.

T-Mobile arguably is the most aggressive of the major carriers in competing with the regional prepaid players. Up to this point AT&T and Verizon Wireless have mostly avoided chasing that customer segment with any vigor.

Broken Internet by 2010?

"We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010,"
Jim Cicconi, AT&T VP, says, in a speech reported by the Financial Times.

"In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today," Cicconi maintains.

He argues that the "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic" will increase 50-fold by 2015.

"Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute," he says, predicting that "video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today."

eBay Considering Skype Sale?

At the CTIA Wireless meeting recently, people were wondering where some of the Google voice guys were. The speculation was that Google was mulling a purchase of Skype.

So now eBay CEO John Donahoe says in the Financial Times that "if the synergies are strong, we'll keep it in our portfolio. If not, we'll reassess it." Any such decision and sale won't come until the end of this year, though.

Skype had revenues of $126 million for the quarter, up 61 percent year over year, and that it added 33 million new registered users, giving it a total of 309 million registered users around the world. eBay indicated it even hopes to make a profit - for the first time - on Skype this year.

The $4.2 billion eBay acquisition of Skype had been to meld Skype into eBay's core auction businesses. So far, that has proven to be a virtually insurmountable problem.

Bubble Bursting Time Again?

Fearing a reprise of the 2000 catastrophe which wrecked hundreds of tech companies, big firms in the sector are hoarding cash. The broader problem is that these firms don't need it. In the last major contraction cycle, it was all the little startups who died when the capital markets slammed shut.

Something like that, but on a lesser scale, is about to happen again. That means the big cash-flush firms will once again have a chance to snap up assets while some of the smaller startups simply vaporize.

Of course, it takes less capital to innovate these days, compared to 2000. But we are in for a winnowing period, nevertheless. I don't think anybody thinks we collectively are in a "bubble" of manic proportions. Wiser heads now prevail just about everywhere.

The similarity is simply that there's lots of innovation, but with a period of capital stringency upon us, many of the innovators won't be able to sustain their development efforts. The lack of access to capital won't kill innovation. Perhaps innovation won't even slow in ways that are industry damaging, overall.

Amazon, eBay and Google were among the notable successes of the late-1990s wave of innovations. One would have a hard time coming up with a similar list of financially-successful firms among the most-recent generation of innovators.

History doesn't necessarily repeat. So we are not seeing an "Internet bubble" all over again. But cycles of capital availability are important. Let the winnowing begin.

Transfer Money Using Your Mobile

Obopay says customers can now use their existing bank accounts to send and receive money using their mobile phones. With Obopay’s mobile money transfer, non-customers can pick up payments without signing up for Obopay.

These innovations make it easier than ever for any bank customer to conveniently send and receive payments from their mobile phones.

By linking an existing checking or saving account — at any American bank — with Obopay, customers can send money directly from and receive money into that account using any mobile phone.

Anyone can pick up money received by having it deposited directly into their existing bank account or by requesting a check, without having to sign up with Obopay.

“Obopay’s mission has always been to provide the best tools possible to conveniently get, send and spend money from any mobile phone,” said Obopay Chief Executive Officer, Carol Realini. “Now we provide it directly from any bank account."

Many new applications just take a while to get traction. Mobile payments seem to be one of them, at least in the U.S. market. Japan has been the model, but over the years there have been significant cultural differences between regions of the world that could affect market adoption.

A decade ago it remained true that Europeans preferred debit cards while Americans preferred credit cards. But as with the text messaging habit, U.S. consumer behavior is starting to resemble that of other regions. Mobile payments still have some ways to go before becoming a natural habit for U.S. users.

80:20 Rule Holds in Rural Markets

Wireless "unlimited" plans exist for one reason: to retain the loyalty of the heaviest users--synonymous in many ways with "best customers." But that same sort of thinking increasingly should be seen in the broadband services and wireline customer business as well.

John Rose, president of the rural telephone trade group OPASTCO, says not only that fiber to the home is coming for rural telcos, but that symmetrical bandwidth is coming as well. But that doesn't mean every customer will buy every service. That's a big change for rural telcos, who are used to nearly universal take rates.

Some providers already are finding that even when triple play services are available, a third of customers only buy voice, a third take video and voice while a third take all three services, he notes.

So even on the wireline side of the house, high-end customers are emerging. So it will be really important for rural telcos to take care of those best customers, Rose says.