| May 2010 - The Insider -
This week I attended a conference in Singapore devoted to mobile financial services. So what you may ask? Well, when I asked some speakers if anything had changed in three years they admitted, very little. Sure, we have those amazing success stories emanating from Africa about the banking of ‘the great un-banked’ and the awesome payment transfer systems that some Asian operators have introduced but, in general, revenues from mobile financial transactions have eluded most. I’m talking here about mBanking... -
Firstly, I must apologize for not writing anything for a whole week, but there is good reason. I’ve been at two remarkable events and I have been talking to industry people almost non-stop in that time just trying to get a feel for where we are heading as the telecommunications industry as a whole and, more specifically, in terms of managing and maintaining revenue. TM Forum’s Management World in Nice was a real eye-opener. The RM Summit was jam-packed with presentations from all quarters and the... -
How would you feel if someone was sitting outside your house and tracking details of your Wi-Fi IP address and your usage and recording the details, for no plausible reason? Would you consider it a breach of your privacy or an accepted risk of using wireless technology in the home? If it’s the former then you will be in sync with privacy organizations in Australia who were perturbed to discover that Google was doing just this whilst undertaking its already controversial Street View project. Along... -
Air travel just got a whole lot worse! Telecom NZ XT customers were told today that they now have access to in-flight mobile services en-route to selected international destinations around the world. That includes making and receiving calls, SMS and email access. As if air travel wasn’t impersonal enough, now we will have to listen to phones ringing and people talking loudly all the way there and back. We have barely established mobile phone etiquette in public places who knows what will happen on... -
If you have been following my revenue management blogs over the last two years you will notice a recurring theme highlighting the massive damage to CSPs and the industry as a whole from news articles on 'Bill Shock'. The latest one really does 'take the cake' in terms of stupidity and lack of the most basic controls in the offending mobile operator. The latest 'victim' (as the newspapers now call them) is no less than a Member of Parliament that has been affected, and you... -
Great Britain went to the polls yesterday and today it is waking up to what looks like being a hung parliament. It may take days or even weeks for negotiations to form a coalition government to be completed. At worst, the Queen may have to exercise her powers and call for another general election. However, that is not the only big story to come out of the election. In many polling booths around the country the unexpected high turnout of voters caught polling booth electoral officers completely off... -
Any country wanting to embark on a National Broadband Network (NBN) project would be well advised to take a close look at the Australian experience - and learn from it. Even though the story is not complete the book should be a best-seller. Governments have traditionally had to front the large capital projects to build roads, railways, dams, power stations, pipelines and power grids and in the past they did the same for telecommunications networks. It has become quite a trend over the last forty... -
I'm sure you've heard of Steve Jobs but I wonder if you've ever heard of Charles Stross. Last week his name came up twice in dispatches, firstly from my TM Forum colleague, Josh Goldfein, and secondly in a TelecomAsia article written by my good friend and global technology editor, John Tanner. So what, you ask? Well, Mr Stross, a prolific author based in Edinburgh, has pieced together Mr Job's master plan not only for Apple but for the IT and communications industry as a whole, and...
| | Paid Advertisement
| | |  | | Copyright © 1988-2012, TeleManagement Forum. All Rights Reserved | | | | | |
| |
|