Presence of Mined

A good friend of mine has been talking about presence for some time and the blurring of the lines between telecoms and communities.

We all use a location aware device, your mobile phone, but these are pretty dumb. They know you're there but they don't really know who you are.

As the pressure on voice carriers increases from the VoIP providers of the world how can they make their money? what can they offer that Skype can't. In order to survive they will have to become a lot better at providing content and other value added services. One thing that they do offer is an ingrained history of their customer base. This is their strength and they could use it with communities to "own" the subscriber and help control what is delivered to them, through their network.

The ultimate direction should combine the dumb location awareness of mobiles with communities and be able to target upsell opportunities to select groups based on that community's preferences.

This takes our digital ID and presence to a new level, the success [or not] of the traditional operators will be based on their ability to effectively mine the presence within their networks and provide tailored and appealing content to the community members.

Who will be the early adapters? Google today are best positioned. A parallel use of Google Talk and Google Groups broadens the collaboration options for these users. If only we could get away from fixed networks and make use of Internet technologies from a familiar interface! maybe Nokia have the answer with their N91