LATAM Telecom

From one of my favorite techie blogs at Salon.com , Farhad Manjoo today posted about Google working together with the city of San Francisco to provide free voice mail to to the city's homeless: "Bless Google for doing something amazing: The company is handing out phone numbers and voice-mail boxes to every homeless person in San Francisco. Folks can sign up for the numbers at shelters across the city. The numbers will be local and personal -- i.e., each person will get a unique 415-area code number that will never expire. The number will ring a voice-mail box that will play a personalized greeting; homeless people can check their messages by dialing in from any phone." Great initiative by Google and SF mayor Gavin Newsom, that others can and should emulate! This idea should be adopted by other cities, surely Verizon and others will be happy to participate in similar initiatives. In Latin America, this reminds me of an initiative by Carlos Slim's TELMEX, the fixed line...

Yesterday we posted about Ovum's particpation at Barcelona GSMA and Forrester's Tecnographics Webinar , both focusing on new revenue opportunities for mobile operators: Mobile Advertising (Ovum) and Gen Y's use of interactive media (Forrester Technographics). Pyramid today published a new report titled "Social Networking Goes Mobile", (from the report excerpt) ; this report "assesses the current and future state of mobile social networking, whereby members access their favorite sites using their mobile devices." Both mobile advertising and mobile social networking represent opportunities for operators to introduce new exciting services and increase revenues. A key factor, however, is whether the on line world will enter the mobile arena or whether mobile operators will enter the on line arena, in other words, who will control introduction of new services? Past experience with similar services such Mobile Instant Messaging have shown that operators stand...

As a follow up to our previous post addressing Ovum's participation in Barcelona highlighting the rise of mobile on line advertising , I'd like to share with you my thoughts on the Webinar run today by Forrester Resarch. I joined today a Webinar run by Ted Schadler and Jackie Rousseau of Forrester Research. The Webinar, titled A Marketer’s Dream? Connecting with U.S. Gen Y through Interactive Media, provided an interesting view on the way "U.S. adults and Gen Yers (18 – 27 year olds) use and feel about media and advertising in games, mobile devices, Internet video, and rich media." Schadler and Rousseau addressed not only the behavior patterns of Gen Yers as compared to the adult population in general, but also paid special attention to the habits of these segments for the mobile world. An interesting webinar with many takeaways, for now I'd like to emphasize some of Ted Schadler's observations on the challenges facing mobile advertising: Gen Y is the first In...

John Delaney and Vincent Poulbere from Ovum bring to our attention how mobile advertising can help operators face their two biggest challenges: declining ARPUs and expanding their reach into media. An interesting initiative by GSMA announced at Barcelona was the creation of a Working Group to define common metrics and measurement processes for mobile advertising. Vodafone, Telefonica, T-Mobile, Orange and 3 are the five members of this group. Ovum mentions other activities at Barcelona that clearly show enthusiasm for bringing advertising into the mobile world such as round table discussions and initiatives by different vendors including Comverse Mobile Advertising Solution, Nokia's Media Network, Openwave's Contextual Advertising and Amdocs' mobile advertising solution. While we applaud their efforts, we should note that operators have still a lot of work ahead to catch up and bring the web to the mobile world. Internet advertising has come a long way but it remains unchar...

We are back after a couple of weeks with a lot of news and information, including latest happenings and info from Barcelona .... many new posts coming soon! We have info from the latest trends in the industry and the impact we expect for Latin America.

From UNSTRUNG NEWS ANALYSIS, René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom AG is quoted stating that even though Europe is not selling as many iPhones as AT&T, the iPhone is helping to drive up mobile data use ( iPhone Data Booms at T-Mobile ). This is interesting news for operators in Latin America interested in launching the iPhone. The unique situation of the US market sometimes makes it difficult to undertand how a certain product, service or strategy might work if launched in Latin America, so looking at European markets, who have alos high prepaid subscribers and similar pricing plans, helps a lot. In Latin America, mobile demand continues to grow (it is expected to surpass 500M subscribers by 2010, according to Pyramid Research) but voice ARPU has been falling for the last five years. Operators are looking at data to offset this fall and the iPhone hype seems to fit in nicely with this strategy. Interestingly, this was also named as a challenge to European operators by the UNSTRUNG...

This is a follow up to my previous posts (see here and here ) on the announcements -or lack of- by Apple during Macworld. No 3g iPhone, no new operators, no Latin America, no nothing .... very disappointing! I am still hoping for announcements in the coming weeks, that both Claro Brazil and Telcel Mexico will be the two operators launching the iPhone in Latin America. After all, Apple kept at least one important announcement from Macworld: the launch of the new 16Gb iPhone. As reported by Cellular News : "Apple has launched a new version of the iPhone - with double the internal storage memory. The iPhone now comes in a new 16GB model for US$499 ... Still no sign of the elusive 3G iPhone though." Just last week, the hype was that Apple was losing millions from phones that were unlocked to be used in other networks. From Cellular News: Apple Lost Up to $400 Million in Revenues from Unlocked iPhones : "Analysts believe more than 1 million devices may have been sold and unl...

Not sure what to think of the headline in the Newspaper CLARIN highlighting the success of Instant Messaging in Argentina: "One hundred thousand already chatting in their mobile phone: IM has been in service for more than a year" (loosely translated for my readers that do not read Spanish, link here for those that do). I understand the point they are trying to make but somehow, if the news is that the service has been there for ONE YEAR .... so do people in Argentina actually know about the service ... after one year? Anyway, other than the weird headline (blame the editors!), the article is well written and informative, and covers the efforts by both Movistar Argentina and Telecom Personal. However .... we will discuss their statistics later, it is an interesting topic. As we mentioned here before, Movistar Chile and Argentina were the first to sign an agreement with MSN, leading the region with these services. Movistar, however, launched a WAP version of the service using M...

The initiative by Brazilian Operators together with GSMA is groundbreaking in Latin America, not only because of the imminent launch of Personal Instant Messaging in the region with all six operators offering interconnection but also for the fact that these operators are sitting together in a work group to define a product, evaluate vendors and complete a through study before launch. We expect that this will delay even more the launch of the service, which has been evaluated by operators like TIM, VIVO and Claro for at least two years now. However, the approach of this work group, led by Ms Paloma Vivanco of GSMA, will increase the likelihood of a succesful launch and service penetration. The work group met recently in Rio to discuss with different vendors their solutions. Among the vendors presenting were market leaders Acision, Colibira and Comverse, as well as an up and coming Uruguayan company, INI. The only other big IM vendor that always seems to be absent from Latin America init...