As we have said in the past, watching mobile advertising is curiously like being drunk. With revenues already over $5.3 billion and growing so fast that analysts are hurrying to update their guesses, what could possibly go wrong? Informa believe that mobile advertising will be worth $24 billion within five years. Facebook is now immersed in a mobile social experience. Last quarter users spent more time accessing Facebook through their mobiles than through their desktops. The new Facebook Home effectively makes Android phones into social networking devices. And yet. As we have said in the
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In recent months changes to the whole ‘social’ model have been hitting the headlines. Companies have been using Facebook and Twitter or similar platforms to improve the communication between teams. In some cases, the social model is being used to provide better, more creative responses to customers’ problems. Now, it is being used to combat fraud. In essence, implementing social tools helps change a company’s culture. Now, when we walk into work we do not necessarily shed our family, social skin and put on the work armour. We keep our normal self intact. This simple
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Oracle announced today that it will acquire network signalling control and policy management vendor Tekelec for an undisclosed amount. This follows on the heels of Oracle’s acquisition of Acme Packet, which fills a related and overlapping space in what one might loosely call the network intelligence domain. Keep in mind that Oracle has also been very active in SDN – software defined networking – as well. As NetCracker’s Sanjay Mewada recently discussed, intelligence is moving out of the network and into BSS/OSS functions, like SDN and policy management. Signalling management has always been something of the glue
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Despite the many advanced analytics tools coming to market across industries, it turns out that 76 percent of analysts use Microsoft Excel for their “self-serve” analytics projects. This is according to a new, cross-industry survey Lavastorm Analytics has conducted with 600 analytics users, technologists, managers and executives. It’s an overwhelming number, but it shouldn’t be surprising at all. You Can’t Beat the ROI I can say from personal experience that over the years I’ve created literally millions of dollars worth of analytical deliverables with Excel. Especially since 2007, when Microsoft upgraded Excel’s graphical tools and
Read More »A survey by Capacity Media and Subex asked 190 0perators of all sizes, from across the world for their views on wholesale fraud. Whilst the industry tends to focus on retail and consumer issues, there are clearly threats at the wholesale level too. The fraud problem is $6.12 billion, in a market worth $170 billion. Amongst the reasons for the rise in wholesale fraud are difficulties in prosecution and the rise of IP services – ‘increasingly penetrable’ services according to Subex, who identified Point of Sale fraud as a rising threat late last year. Surprisingly, in the
Read More »The history of major IT integration programs is littered with tales of grand plans undone by data migration disasters. It’s said that 70 percent of all major IT integration programs fail to deliver on time, within budget, or at all. Usually failure results because of something to do with data. It’s either too disparate, too inaccurate, too misaligned, too voluminous, or all of the above. Clever approaches to data model mapping and cleansing have helped in some cases, but the industry has long sought an effective antidote to the data migration poison pill. Semantic search
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We are, at last, getting beyond that ‘black and white’ argument concerning the fate of Communications Service Providers (CSPs). They were either going to be ‘dumb pipes’ or ‘value added service providers.’ The consensus was that ‘dumb pipe’ was bad (or not), ‘value added provider’ was good. Now we are beginning to seriously discuss models where ‘partnership,’ ‘openness’ and ‘trust’ are the key words. If we are to achieve the IBM vision of a smarter planet, then we need to stop thinking of OTT players and payments providers as threats. They will, clearly, erode some
Read More »There appears to be a new favorite metric among corner office CSP execs – Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS aims to measure the willingness among a company’s customers to recommend its products and services to others. Traditionally, Telcos have focused on measures like churn rate and customer satisfaction. NPS is a level up from these metrics; a Telco can figure that if a customer is willing to recommend its services, that customer must be satisfied, unlikely to churn, and a good candidate to spend more. If a Telco can improve NPS, it is doing a
Read More »There was one set of conclusions that came out of last week’s Big Data Summit, such as big data is big (but often thin), that eBay doesn’t need any data from telcos, it has enough to be going on with and that trust and privacy issues are probably the Achilles heel of using big data to everyone’s advantage. There were another set of conclusions around the two things that always ruin the best-laid plans – people and politics. One speaker said that there is no way that you can possibly build a business case for big
Read More »Last week in Amsterdam, the TM Forum’s Big Data summit caused a few old (by which I mean experienced) telecoms professionals to change their minds on the subject. The consensus is that it is at the top of the hype cycle and about to plunge into the ravine of reality. And that – to me anyway – means that it is time to concentrate on the reality of it, as it relates to telcos. Amongst an interesting line up of presentations, (and there are excellent summaries of the event from Tony Poulos here and Light Reading’s Ray
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