| Thoughts from the Conference Chair |  Last weeks Management World Asia, held in the Singapore Raffles Convention Center, was the second year of this increasingly successful event. In a year of global recession it was encouraging to see that this event grew by ~10% and provided a vibrant place for our members and potential members to learn, discuss and debate, network and do business.
The keynote presentation from Telenor was an eye-opener. Although a Norwegian company, it has over 70million subscribers in Asia and has just launched a new operator in India which could add a huge number of subscribers to this already large presence. What was particularly interesting was the whole area of mobile banking. Telenor have purchased a bank to address the fact that while in many of these countries there is 70% mobile penetration, there is only 7% banking penetration. Their subscribers find themselves using their mobile phone credit to enable trading, and having an in-house bank is a very interesting form of vertical integration. Mobile banking was revisited later in the day by Netcracker who gave an overview of the rapid progress being made in Japan in using near-field technology to enable mobile payment for diverse small purchases such as train tickets and soft drinks.
Mobile advertising was also a big topic at the both the keynote sessions and in the general conference presentations. Blyk presented a great overview of the potential of mobile advertising, specifically based on a very sophisticated form of customer profile driven advertising. Later in the event, Dialog in Sri Lanka, gave a very compelling presentation about how to get mobile advertising going, without any major investment, but rather through leveraging their existing SMS/MMS capabilities. The key for both opportunities was in viewing advertising as content, rather than as an imposition on the person receiving the promotion.....Read more from Martin Creaner.
The second day featured three modules: Strategies for Monetizing Content; Driving Profitability through Charging & Revenue Assurance and Successful IT & Operational Transformation. The opening presentation by Dr Randolph Nikutta from Deutsche Telekom Labs stressed the value of content and how it could be delivered over ‘three screens’. This was followed by informative presentations by Adina Ostrovsky from Amdocs on operator realization of assets and Joe Hogan from Openet in a joint presentation with Benoit Hanssen of 3 Indonesia on Content Monetization and the importance of policy management in NGNs.
Charging models took centre stage in the second session with considerable coverage by Infosys on hybrid models combining pre- and post-paid functionality to one customer. Many of the presentations also stressed how important it was for operators to become more involved with the TMF initiatives and contribute via their own unique experiences. HP in a joint presentation with China Telecoms stressed the value of customer information to boost the customer experience......Read more from Tony Poulos.
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![[Open Quote]](/sdata/content/icons/quote_open.png) Management World Asia is an opportunity to network with a unique group of service providers that would not normally come to Europe or America events. Asia has some unique challenges and requires a different set of solutions to those that would be traditionally deployed in Europe or the US. So this event is a unique opportunity to have a good discussion on this with the SP's based in Asia and one that I would encourage suppliers to undertake who believe they want a footprint in this market.![[Close Quote]](/sdata/content/icons/quote_closed.png) | | – Michael Lawrey, Executive Director, Telstra |
| The forum has been well organized in both administration & the quality of the speeches made by the respective speakers. | | – Joseph Tye, Senior Manager, Starhub |
![[Open Quote]](http://www.tmforum.org/sdata/content/icons/quote_open.png) The experience of attending TM Forum's Management World Asia was great. The good mixture of content presented shows that the organizers did excellent planning and organizing.![[Close Quote]](http://www.tmforum.org/sdata/content/icons/quote_closed.png) | | – Kian Peow, Manager, Starhub |
| A very informative event with some great networking opportunities | – Steven C Hopcraft, Chief Technical Officer, True Corporation
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These video first appeared on the Telecom Channel
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