A good friend in the telecom world, Kerry Ritz, who is the ex head of Vonage UK and before that was with 3 in London tipped me off to a move at Microsoft-Skype that is sure to cause raise some eyebrows over at WhatsApp in Mountain View and with their VCs I bet. If I was WhatsApp I would become even more agressive and start to look for more carrier and operator deals before Skyprosoft gets serious with their operator partners whom they are already deeply courting on all levels to sell services and solution. (By the way, if you're not using WhatsApp and you text across borders or send photos your missing out. I couldn't travel and stay in touch without it and iMessage as easily as I do.I just wish Whatsapp worked on tablets and had multi-device sync like iMessage.)
Ritz tipped me of about Ran Mokady, a veteran mobile exec who is credited by many as being the father of the mobile browser. Think of Mokady as the Marc Andressen of mobile. In March Mokady was made Senior Director of Program Management, Messaging and Async at Skype. Now at first blush the title has to be considered a mouthful, but given Ran's background, time served inside and around Microsoft, his work with Apple and vision, plus the ownership by Skype of GroupMe (a company that took part in one of Larry Lisser's Startup Camps at ITExpo a few years back) WhatsApp has to be looking over their shoulders.
Let's think about market rationale and opportunity. Skype is globally used and has massive penetration and market share with app usage on mobile devices climbing. Currently Skype's SMS is one way and basically useless compared to WhatsApp. On the otherhand iMessage and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) have enourmous user bases which like Skype are OTT (over the top) service. In a note to me Kerry pointed out the Lync installed user base, which I feel becomes Skype accessible very soon. Add in the demise of Microsoft Messenger and one has to know that like everything Microsoft does, they tossed a pebble in one direction while preparing to roll a big boulder down the hill.
Take all the pieces-Skype, Lync and GroupMe, put together a service focused approach, store it in the cloud, and you have one more take money away from the carrier service. Also, with Microsoft adding federation to Lync and Skype (think what Xconnect has done with cable operators voice and video traffic) with messaging it totally goes after the markets held by not only the mobile operators, but also brings in an alternative to things like Twitter and email itself. Gone are the 160/140 character limits because the messaging is inside Skype. Want to go from chat to call to video to screen share...those are why the ASYNC in the title is the key....
Growing up, there was a television program called Land of the Giants. The premise was the human race was battling against a much larger species of creature and had to survive. And survive they did. While the program didn't have the run length of StarTrek, Bonanza or All in the Family, it could be a blueprint for how today's rising stars in WebRTC have to work and are. Out thinking the giants, being nimble, and resourceful to be victorious.
When I look at this week's Enterprise Connect line up of companies I see parallels to Land of the Giants with companies like Vidtel, AddLive, Twelephone, Zoom, Firespotter Labs (Craig Walker's company) for UberConference and client Magor, who are the kinds of companies who have the nimble and resourceful approach. Some of these are at the new VoiceCon conference, which was renamed Enterprise Connect to be more encompassing in brand name. I also see further "rise of the dump pipe" where carriers like AT&T and Verizon claim to support WebRTC by attending shows like EC, but really only end up enabling, much the way Skype was supported by Verizon Wireless and 3HK, but not really embraced, all the time having their lunch eaten by Skype and soon Microsoft.
Already today we see UberConference using and deploying their service to include WebRTC within GoogleChrome, eliminating the need for a phone or softphone app. That's change for the better and I predict those in the softphone biz will be migrating in that direction, not to replace what they have, but to support what they offer to enable those who can use WebRTC to be able to do more, with less. As a global nomad road warrior who has been using my iPads and Android Nexus 7 so intensively the last month, I can't wait until WebRTC and support for it comes to those and my iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices.
Each of these small and nimble companies are embracing WebRTC, not fighting it. And more importantly, each is looking at how to really reshape the way people communicate, and engage more in conversations.
As the world migrates from Instant Messaging to Instant Conversations, we will leave behind SMS 1.0. The executioner of SMS, WhatsApp is proving that every day, and if they ever added WebRTC would redefine the idea of how to keep in touch instantly. We would leave behind the need for emoticons, as we'll be able to see, talk, share and refer to what we're thinking in real-time, one one one or in groups, all within the browser on our computers today, and soon on our smartphones and tablets. Make no mistake, WebRTC will first be an OTT (over the top) or UTF (Under the Floor) type experience long before it's mainstream, but as we're seeing with Skype and Google Hangouts, people in the workplace want to engage in the concept of visual conversations, not simply talk, text and share a screen. They want to work collaboratively together, regardless of distance, time zone or geography.
Oh, and at Enterprise Connect there's even a conference within a conference about WebRTC, as well as the Byte Innovation Showcase, two events that show off what's coming or what you need to know about. To me, the company that can blend all this together is the winner, not the compay that simply adds a tube inside the pipe.
Today marks the end of a two week respite of sorts. By working from Cascais, Portugal and now Paris, France I was able to spend time with friends and still work remotely using a combination of blazing fast 60 meg symetircal broadband in Cascais, and mobile technology when I was out and about.
But, starting Monday, with Pepcom Digital Experience as a prelude to CES in Las Vegas, the January Juggernaut begins, with plenty of hardware and apps finding their way to us all. Right on the heels of CES in New York is the annual National Retail Federation conference and trade show begins on January 13. There, whats new for retail and e-tail makes their marks. Then over in Hawaii, the annual Pacific Telecommunications Council conference takes hold on January 20th before we end the month with IT Expo East starting on January 30th in Miami Beach, FL.
So what does this all mean? Well for starters it means a lot of NEW and a great deal of hype being played out. What's old doesn't make the news as much, and speculation on what will be the next big things starts to mount. In reality a lot of that work began months before and really goes live during the events, and surrounding activity points, taking what was once an ideal or concept, all the way through to the finished goods.
For the media it will mean long hours, races to beat their competitors to the news that will break down into there categories:
New and Shiny-this is where press releases rule, where notes about something new comes out, where testing and validation are not part of the news. Largely, the informaton comes from the companies, and sometimes a third party speculates.
Release and Review-here, what's new actually gets tested or reviewed by the reporter, with some degree of experience ranging from holding it in their hands, having someone show them the features to having actually used the product or app for enough time to share their views on how good (or bad) it is, or if it's worth buying, trying or should be passed up.
Insight, Perspective and Opinion-This is perhaps the most valuable but least found writing or coverage weeks of shows. It means someone takes the time to look at what's "new" and evaluate it's impact on society, business or the market at large. It's less about the wow factors that seem to envelope the news during show weeks, and more about the what it means and how things will change, could be different or be the means to make things different.
For those on the other side of the screen, it means information overload, too much delivered that looks to be the same, and the need for greater curation, aggregation and what none of us have. Time. Starting Monday, January 7, we become time famished, time challenged and time contrained. Hopefully some of the new products and services find a way to eliminate those...but I doubt it....
Have you noticed at which the number of apps being updated in the Apple App Store has increased lately? Between new apps being launched along with updates and bug fixes for iOS 6 as well as to work more and better with the iPad Mini, the volume of updates since Thanksgiving has accelerated.
This is because of one reason. It's called the holiday break before CES. Taken seperately, there's no issue with Apple's super staff who manage app submissions and approvals from taking a well deserved holiday break, espeically for new apps going into the store. But with CES starting on January 5 (well AT&T's Developer Summit is then at the Palms) and as apps are the new products for many, getting into the App Store is equivilant to landing a slot in every Wal*Mart or being found on the shelves at Costco to a brand.
That's why you are seeing so many apps being pushed out now.
Miss the window that reportedly closes the week of December 17 and it likely will be when CES starts before new apps appear.
For many years Mary Meeker has been considered the doyan of the invesment community from her days on Wall Street to today with Kliner Perkins, the most venerable of VC's nestled in Silicon Valley. Mary's annual "Internet Trends" report is a must read as it shapes the opinions of where money goes and people follow, based on facts and insight that she draws upon to form her opinions.
I quickly zipped through the report this morning when it came accross Business Insider and was pleased wih some of her observations as those tied into either clients or companies which I have an interest in so in many ways her report is validation of some gut level calls we've made on who we work with and why.
Slide 23 - Natural Language Understanding-this ties directly to OneTok, serial startup and exit guru Ben Lilienthal (HiDef Conferencing) launched earlier this year, including an appearance at GigaOm's Mobilize Launchpad. (watch the video)
Slide 9, 13 and a few others about iPad and tablets. As a member of CounterPath's advisory board, their Todd Carothers and I have been bullish on the iPad as a communications device since it started. The same with HookFlash which works with LinkedIn to enable their members to be more switched on and connected. I can add to this and also point to 8x8 and their Mobile Virtual Office effort recently announced for iPad as well. Clearly those telecom sector companies that already realize that the iPad and Android tablets are replacing the previously purchased hardware from the likes of Polycom and Cisco.
Slide ten talks about Android, a market that KeyPoint Technologies with their Adpatxt soft keyboards that use focused dictionary based on audiences, languages and industries.
Slide 47 talks about the changing picture of health awareness. We're working with Endomondo, the leading social fitness app that is hooked up with Facebook, Coke, Microsoft and of course found on iPhones and Androids. Their growth has been steady over the past year and as mobile, LBS and fitness all meld into mHealth darlings, they're well positioned.
Slide 67 puts upcoming UK based MPme squarely in the sweetspot of asset light music delivery. With MPme users search for music they want to hear and find professionally curated music that's being picked and played by real DJs on real radio stations, not simply music from friends that may or may not change over time (like my Spotify lists that rarely change ever.)
Slide 78 talks about Healthcare. That's a market we're deep in with Independa (I'm a shareholder), Diversinet which provides mobile health security as well as with the San Diego based Wireless Life Sciences Alliance.
I was really impressed with what one of my agency's client's did when it came to communicating with their customer base surround Hurricane Sandy. Cloud communications leader, 8x8 sent out an email pointing to a web page that had a Disaster Planning document, all geared around the concept of maintaining communications using their platform.
Good disaster planning starts before the situation arises, so with a service like 8x8's Virtual Office Online, the ability to work around Hurricane Sandy can occur, with some advance work or the next time someone can log on.
This type of functionality is not unique to 8x8 as others like Phone.com, OnSip and RingCentral, to name a few, have the web based portal management to enable customer adminsitration so should disaster strike, business and communications can continue.
In addition to the web page, 8x8 smartly posted tips for staying connected on Facebook and Twitter before the storm hit. Equally smart thinking was sending out a special email ONLY to all of their east coast customers with the same information. This elevliated telling unaffected customers what was needed to be done with the primary information being the tips on how to easily route business calls to other locations or cell phones.
This happens because cloud communications companies can more easily be redundant and shift their network services from one place to another when disaster strikes. That's called being PREPARED.
The architecture of the iTunes app store was created for tracks of music, and was based on rights management issues tied to licensing of the mechanicals, the words and the recorded works, which is why the iTunes store and App Store architecture is country specific. To gain access to a specific country's app store or iTunes store, you need a credit card in that country or you need to load the account with Apple credit That means creating yet one more account with Apple..Not something I want to do and between business and personal, I'm already getting confused.
But apps are different. Rarely is their licensing tied to countries, so unless an app developer only chooses to list an app in specific countries, it would show up in all. The rub though is with the telecom/mobile operators who forget the pre-paid market of visitors who come to a country with an unlocked iPhone, pick up a local SIM and then want to manage it from their iPhone or iPad, like I do.
In France the SFR app would very helpful to me, even with my limited ability to speak and read French. I can follow instructions. Same in the UK for T-Mobile or Three. The list likely goes on. All of this is rather niche I know, but for those of us who do know, and do use the iPhone and iPad when we travel, and go through the effort to become a customer, even for a week, it would be nice.
I'm not giving up on Apple. No way. But what I do like about Android is the true multi-tasking that it offers. Lately, I've been using my Androids and iPads more for multimedia and less for work. Being home helps, of course vs. the 32 days of business travel I did between mid-October through mid-November, but being home has given me the opportunity to test out connectivity between my various BlueTooth and Bonjour enabled devices.
One of the devices is the not yet available in the USA HuaweiMedia Pad which runs Android Honeycomb (3.2). It's a major upgrade from my Huawei IDEOS 7, but lacks the GSM phone capabilities that the IDEOS 7 has as the Media Pad is a data centric device much like the iPad. What I like about it most is the form factor. It's 1/3 smaller than the iPad and light. Given I plan to have some tailored suits and sport coats made in the new year, I'll have the tailor shape the inside pocket for it and use it as a modern day FiloFax or DayRunner with it's easy integration with Exchange via Touchdown for Tablets (beta) from NitroDesk.
Skype and Counterpath's Bria for SIP and GrooveIP for GoogleVoice makes it an ideal communications device, and apps like Spotify, Pandora (despite the bugs), XiiaLive and Radio Tunes Pro I can get all the music and radio I need, and just like my iPad which I use to stream to my Apple TV and connected speakers, the MediaPad and the Jawbone Jambox is a killer combination of music portablility on the go via BlueTooth (though 128K audio does have a buffer issue but that's BlueTooth not the MediaPad's limitation)
With it's HDMI output port and a cable this can connect to my monitors and widescreens as another playback or steaming video device. Since it's 1080p natively you get really true HD playback so again, it's a great media device, so I can put up with the lack of the real phone capabilites that I have in my Samsung Galaxy Tab P-1000 (and soon a Tab Plus.)
The size makes it a nice toss in the travel bag form factor, and with a good headset, a solid VoIP provider or Skype, I can still be in touch with all whom I need to be.
Net net--options beyond iPad abound, and while the iPad apps and capabilities still win out for me, the Media Pad is an ideal device for the entertainment junkie, and like the Kindle Fire is a very good lean back device when I want to be AFK (away from the Keyboard) and in front of the TV and still be staying connected.
1. Make you call in to tell them when you are leaving your market area? They already have my spending history. They know where I travel too based on prior usage patterns?
2. Why do they want me to sign my card? Forgery is easier than asking for ID at the time of transaction yet they want you to sign the back of the card the moment it arrives. Funny thing is the cards that I signed in the past were cloned and forged. Cards without signature, they ask for my ID before approving the transaction face to face.
3. Make the type so small you can't read the call in numbers. I'm part of the aging population (over 50) and while I don't need glasses to read, smaller type is hard to decipher especially when the credit cards are on backgrounds of dark colors, the type is small and it's not in a nice contrasting color.
All of the above are usually called "security" proceedures if you ask. But instead of making things more secure, the companies are adding to customer frustration. The only company that is the exception is American Express. They simply think things through from the Cardmember experience first.
Using Twitter to tell the public that they are aware of the LTE outage this past week, is neither media relations nor public relations. It's hiding in plain sight. It's like a public company putting out news on a Friday afternoon, after the market closes. It's really about hoping the world doesn't learn of your problem.
As a Verizon Wireless customer, and as a member of the media and the media, pr and corporate communications world longer than most who 'tweet, 'book and blog, going to their media web site yields nothing about the outage. It's only found on their Twitter page now. The media web site is the first place one goes to see what the company has to say on a subject. Second is a Google search-which usually yields other people's coverage. and next would be the support page of their web site (which yields nothing using the phrase LTE outage.)
Sorry, but as a corporate customer with two LTE accounts, and many others, I would have hoped that for starters I would have been sent an email advising of the outage within hours of it happening. Why? It would have kept me from saying to my team, "your Verizon devices may not work until they fix the outage" when it only affected the 4G devices. A follow up email telling the customers "all is now fixed. We're giving you credit for our problem" would also be nice. But saying simply this on Twitter is not customer service, and it's far from media relations too. It's a complete and utter failure mostly because Verizon Wireless only wants to tell you what they want to tell you, like a retail store changed location in Missouri (wouldn't an email to the customers who are served by that store be more personal and impactful?) vs. posting a press release about the outage and the service restoration, with details.
That's it..no updates of note. No details. And really, no answers.
Even Network World's Brad Reed's story which had to rely on the Twitter updates for facts. Now, even a rookie in the media relations world knows that in the absence of any news from the comapny, the media, especially social media, will jump to their own conclusions. But I won't. It's not fair to speculate on what caused the outage, but it's also unfair of Verizon Wireless to not know how to communicate when they have a team of media relations folks to get the facts out.
As a example of great customer service, our hosted exchange provider, LanLogic.com emails us before they do any type of major upgrades, taking the servers offline in the middle of the night west coast time. When they suffer the rare outage, they immediately email us after the service is restored and explain precisely what occured and what steps were taken to correct things.
Now, let's look at how this outage and the recent Amazon Web Services outage are intertwined. In his Read Write Cloud article, entitled "Are Telcos Muscling In on The Cloud?" writer Klint Finley points out how the telcos are gobbling up cloud providers, and concentrating who ends up providing services to the Fortune 1000. Well just as Epsilon suffered a data breach with many of their client customers' consumer contact data being exposed, we're heading towards the same kind of issues with only the big telcos taking over the cloud companies.
In the USA we have the FCC in the administrative branch of government, the house and senate in legislative and the court system in the legal. My contention is that none of of those bodies are as well prepared for the lobbyists, laywers and technologists from the telcos, and as such as business owners and consumers, we're never going to see the value that would exist in a total free economy, where barriers to entry are legislated, not new ideas allowed to flourish in a truely open competitive model. The oligopoly of telecom, financial, and eventually legal will only weaken our nation.
Verizon Wireless just proved that a "blind" press is an ignorant press and as eWeek's Wayne Rash points out, by Verizon Wireless is taking the ostritch approach of burying their head in the sand, and hoping when the service is restored, so will be their customer's confidence too. But it's not. Rush contends both that the customer's trust is broken, and that Verizon Wireless failed to "serve the public interest." With consolidation so much a part of Verizon's business gameplan, not maintaining media or public trust is a cardinal sin and both media relations and public relations groups inside VZW are to blame.
Given we are no longer living in the world of the Internet being a "nice to have" for the enterprise, small business and consumers, it's time to look at how the information services are provided, regulated and managed. And that means choices. But with the consolidation approach going on by AT&T and Verizon it sure looks like choice and options are not really on the tip of anyone's honest speaking tounge. In the 1800's the American Indians said the "White man. He speak with forked tongue." So companies that claim they are open and doing things for the better, are likely closed and doing things that are for the worse.
Verizon as a company needs to come clean on this one. Too much is riding on 4G/LTE.
