Orient Expression

I have been using LinkedIn for a long time but it has taken a new focus recently as I actively use it to build out my potential business contacts. It has many good features that allow you to define your online profile and easily share this with would be partners, colleagues, customers. There are many of these Social Networking tools available today and it allows a good depiction of the kind of people you know, who they know and out. LinkedIn also gives you a break down of what your network looks like as you build contacts and connect and you get to see the kind of people they are connected to. This is a very powerful tool and it could be used in a very useful way if you were (or wanted to become a Telco 2.0). Your average Telco 1.0 that serves Joe Public knows; and possibly cares, very little about you as a person. See Paul's posting on "you the ARPU" and see how different the Social Network view of your customer is from Name: Number: ARPU: We are so much more than...

Three of my favourite bloggers have posted statements about quality , pricing and what the telco's need to do about it. I particularly like Martin's phrase of Telco 2.0 and what this means for the current cash-cow approach that the average Telco 1.0 operator sees as their subscriber base. Look back at Singlepoint (a Caudwell company). They set themselves up as an MVNO with a main differentiator being cost. Buy the MOU's from T-Mobile at a discount and sell cheaper than the original MNO. They then sold the shop to Vodafone for a huge profit. The main revenue stream for them wasn't voice or line rental but handset insurance. Now look at the present situation here in Thailand. With increasingly poor first time connection success and diminishing completed call success across networks (interconnwhat?) and a similar story within the Number 1 mobile operator, AIS, when subscribers on the same network can't connect. The frustration is starting to build within the us...

Flown Singapore Airlines recently? they were one of the first carriers that I knew of that had in-flight internet access; using the Boeing Connexion service. OK so it's not cheap, I did hope that you would be allowed to use those accumulated airmiles as a payment method but it hasn't happened yet, but it could be a premium service people might want to use. Heard of a SlingBox yet? got one? want one? So you're on your flight from Singapore to London and you'd like to catch up with some TV programmes that you missed. Browse from your laptop via the Picocell connection (Connexion) and hook into your SlingBox feed. Now slide over to Yahoo and re-programme your TiVo to get your favourite programs ready for the return flight.

Do you ever watch Click Online on BBC World? if you lived in the UK do you remember Tomorrow's World . Both programmes that walk the average Joe through new and emerging technologies and they were scheduled and run by other people. Today think about how I could sit in front of my PC and do something similar that is relevant to me and my community of like minded people. PodCast SkypeCast Video Logging (Vlogging) Blogging All powerful idea centric tools available to you that enable you to share (ramble) your suggestions and opinions. A weekly show to demonstrate a gadget? A weekend broadcast...? Daily Blog? Online conference? All of the above or any combination that works for you and your audience. We have more and more tools at our disposal to reach outside of physical location and have mass contact with others all over the world. A marketing man's dream.....! It's a desktop publishing revolution and will start soon. But..... there's always a but right. Reporters sans...

I am a frequent user of Skype. Living and working in Thailand I find it a very good and CHEAP service to call back to the UK for family and business contacts. I'll correct that I found it good. The last couple of weeks I have been suffering with extremely poor service quality, so bad that I have to revert to traditional PSTN technology. In of itself not bad but way too much money for the 3 hours I would spend on the phone talking to different parts of my UK family. This isn't Skype itself. I am in and out of Taiwan and I never have the same problems there. I also have free in room broadband and WiFi. The Hotel allows me to make VoIP calls from their own infrastructure and I can us Skype for clear and cheaper yet calls from the room. The problem I suspect lies in the incumbent duopoly of CAT (Communications Authority of Thailand) and TOT (Telecommunications Organization of Thailand). Both are starting to feel the pressure from trying to run profitable business in a [slowly...

Discussion around IP is already steady and high, VoIP is popular and IPTV is a recent and so far has low volumes but still a reasonably consistently ranking in the blogosphere . There are all the same a method of access that is finding new uses all the time. Living in a country of limited choice for television I welcome the dawn of IPTV as the low infrastructure cost (the customer buys most of it themselves) means that there should be more programming choice as the provider (publisher) can invest more in buying the programmes (content) and delivering to me (the subscriber) I use the terms publisher content subscriber for the generic tone that it requires. We could equally be refering to games for your phone or ring tone, TV programmes, Pay Per View films the applications are fairly limitless the delivery framework is the same. The uses are personal and/or commercial and are centred around IP Access. Having already mentioned the impact on non-traditional media channels with respect ...