LATAM Telecom

A recent article published by the New York Times (Jill Colvin, "You’ve Got Voice Mail, but Do You Care?" , April 1st, 2009) announced the demise of Voice Mail and the rise of new technology and services such as Google Voice's Voice to Text and the iPhone's Visual Voice Mail. According to the article, most people don't bother to listen to their voice mail messages and that the technology is obsolete. Interesting article but Colvin's article misses the point: most of the new services she presents as examples of technology that is replacing voice mail are actually an evolution of voice mail technology. Voice to Text, for example, which is included in Google Voice, is a voice mail message delivery mechanism that allows text transcription of voice mail messages. This means that you have to have a voice mail message to begin with. It is new technology that provides a better user interface to recover voice mail messages, precisely what Colvin points out is missing fr...

"Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some." - Robert Fulghum The market for mobile applications has changed significantly in the last four years, when I first started working with these applications. Four years does not sound like a long time but in this industry it means I have lived through several generations of devices and have seen some applications take off and many others fail. This year, analysts expect mobile applications to really take off; it is very exciting to see the industry reach this point, so I thought I'd share my experience and what I've learned in the process. Back then, Comverse was working on developing client applications that used new device capabilities to enhance network based services. These services included Call Completion, Mobile Instant Messaging, Address Book Backup, Mobile Email and Visual Voice Mail; each of them had different technical and commercial issu...

"Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity." -H. Jackson Brown Jr. This is a follow up to my two previous posts where I discussed opportunities and my top five predictions for the Latin America mobile market in 2009. The global economic downturn has forced operators to take a second look at new investments for 2009; however, this can be a good opportunity to look at things differently. Operators can rethink their VAS strategy and Repackage, Reposition, and Reinvent services and adapt to succed in the new economic environment. What follows is a list of services that, based on my experience, have a higher probability for success in 2009-2010: Reinvent voice .... Operators will be watching CAPEX spending closely and looking for ways to reduce OPEX. In addition, voice will continue to be the greatest cash generator in the region through 2013; it therefore makes sense to think about services that will help them offer voice services as cost-effectively as possible. ... ...

With mobile penetration around the world reaching saturation, and the growth rate for traditional services flattening, operators are looking for new options to increase revenue. However, traditional services (voice, SMS) continue to be the main revenue generators for operators and there are still many interesting options to continue milking the cash cow. Services such as Ring Back Tones, MMS and Push e mail, when they were first introduced, created huge expectations that have not been delivered. In addition, operators get distracted by these new services and tend to overlook the basics. Voice mail, for example, is still the main call completion service and SMS continues to be the main messaging service worldwide; it is expected this trend will continue for the next few years. Operators can benefit from looking at options that sit on top of both services, to revitalize them and target missed opportunities. One of the key advantages to leveraging voice and SMS is that they can be used to...

Voice Mail and SMS have been in a mature stage for several years now; growth in most markets has slowed down and until recently, they kept the same form and functionality they had since they were first introduced years ago. Both services, however, remain the bread and butter of VAS services. In most markets (the USA being a notable exception) Voice Mail is the largest VAS contributor to revenue for mobile operators; SMS in some cases accounts for up to 90% of data revenue. This alone justifies paying attention to recent developments that are breathing new life into these two services by dramatically improving the user experience with visual interfaces. The best example of this is the iPhone, which introduced to the market visual applications for both services. Visual Voice Mail had been around for several years, but it was not until the iPhone was introduced that it got the attention of mobile operators. While it can be argued that the iPhone reflects a shift in users’ expectations as ...

Following an earlier post (see here ) about the potential VISUAL VOICE MAIL for iPhone has to impact subscriber data usage, I will be posting excerpts of an article I wrote for Convergencia Latina to expand on this topic. After more than one year of its launch, the iPhone has shown that traditional services such as voicemail and text messaging can greatly benefit from the use of visual interfaces that improve the user experience [1] . Acording to M:Metrics, the iPhone is already the most popular device for accessing news and information on the mobile Web [2] : 85 percent of iPhone users browse the mobile Web 30.9 percent of iPhone owners watched mobile TV or video, versus a 4.6 market average, and more than double the rate for all smartphone users. Usage of social networking is also popular among iPhone users: 49.7 percent accessed a social networking site in January, nearly twelve times the market average. Improving the user experience can increase voicemail usage, which should reflec...

While everyone else impatiently waits for Apple to make up their mind about the iPhone, as reported here before (see here and here ), CTI quietly launched their CORREO MULTIMEDIA CTI (CTI Multimedia Mail), which is a great option for deploying Visual Voice Mail to mass market. Even though the service currently is only available to the postpaid segment, this service is part of the Visual Voice Mail offering that seems to be the buzzword not only in Latin America but worldwide thanks to Apple's iPhone. We expect to hear more from operators regarding this service, as we have mentioned here before , the time for an upgraded version of VOICEMAIL is long due and it took an outsider to reinvent the service.

Voicemail has been a common service for both wireless and fixed network operators in Latin America for more than 10 years but it has remained essentially unchanged since its introduction. Calls on busy/unavailable/unreachable are transferred to Voicemail , where callers can leave a message. The called party receives a notification, usually by SMS and then dials in, enters a password and listens to recorded messages. Even though vendors like Comverse and Glenayre have had multimedia voicemail solutions for a while now, it was not until AT&T launched the iPhone that services like Visual Voicemail started gaining traction in the end user's perception. This is prompting operators to look into bringing their Voicemail into the 21st century. Even though it is a service that in many countries in Latin America has almost 100% penetration, operators have been slow in updating their Voicemail application. The iPhone's Visual Voicemail interface, however, is changing subscribers...