Welcome to the Telco 2.0™ Update, the newsletter of the global Telco 2.0™ Initiative:

1. 2007 Telecom Predictions - Review of the Best
2. Telcos in Advertising - Growth Opportunity?
3. Microsoft - Telco Enemy, Friend...or Lover?
4. New Research - 'Voice & Messaging 2.0' and 'Ad-Funded Services'
5. Personal Communications - Is This What Telcos Really Sell?
6. Meet the Telco 2.0 'Disruptors' - 27-29 March, London

2007 Telecom Predictions - Review of the Best

We’ll leave you to decide. Does a collection of a dozen sets of 2007 telecom predictions make a wise crowd or a demented mob? Anyhow, we’ve had a bit of fun pulling together some of the highlights and lowlights of the analyst, media and blogosphere outlook for 2007. It covers FMC, Why It's Good to Be Cisco, Mobile Search, Wifi vs 3G, Wimax, Government Procurement, and Gordon Gekko, among lots of other things... (More)

Telcos in Advertising - Growth Opportunity?

The subscription-based business models of 'New Wave' telco services (like IPTV and mobile multimedia) are potentially under threat from non-telco players (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, eBay, etc) who use advertising revenue to subsidise their competing services. These players are also starting to offer pure telecoms services as a free or subsidised adjunct to their core business to increase 'stickiness'. But the detailed metrics required for interactive advertising also provides a major opportunity for telcos (fixed and mobile) to create new sources of revenue within the advertising value chain, using their unique assets. The question is where, when, and how...
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Microsoft - Telco Enemy, Friend...or Lover?

Microsoft's success has come from making more functional, more usable, and consistently more affordable products than the entrenched competition. But they struggle to achieve the success you’d expect in the telecom space. As possibly the only IT player with a complete self-sustaining ecosystem around its product set, they could have leapfrogged efforts like Parlay and defined API sets that ISPs and telcos could have used to expose their messaging, billing, and customer services platforms. Telcos are very much in need of a “platform” enabler, but they’re suffering from a “chicken and egg” problem that only someone like Microsoft can break... (More)

New Research - 'Voice & Messaging 2.0' and 'Ad-Funded Services'

We are delighted to be working with the GSM Association on two important research programmes, both looking at new sources of revenue for mobile operators. We will be presenting some of the findings at 3GSM in Barcelona and producing major reports, in addition to a heavily updated edition of the Telco 2.0 Market Study. Click here to take part in the Voice & Messaging online survey, and here to take part in the Ad-Funded Services survey. Participants get a free summary of the results at the end of February. (More)

Personal Communications - Is This What Telcos Really Sell?

Network operators have played with every possible pricing scheme for voice minutes and text messages, and invested in expensive and complex billing and support systems to achieve this. But they've done very little to improve their core voice and messaging products over time. What are the unmet user needs? What's the real role of the phone company in meeting these needs in the future? Users may pay more for privacy, presence and availability features than for metered calls... (More)

Meet the Telco 2.0 'Disruptors' - 27-29 March, London

The 2nd Telco 2.0 Industry Brainstorm on 27-29 March 2007 in London - supported by the GSM Association and many other industry bodies - continues to take shape and bookings coming in thick and fast (thank you!). In addition to the best-practice incumbents, we're inviting the most interesting "disruptor" companies from around the world stimulate the debates on '2.0' practice. This means start-ups who combine not only new technology but also new business tactics. We’ve chosen them because they aren’t just arbitrage plays, but present tangible opportunities for operators who embrace their approaches. Here's an example...

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© STL Partners 2007