Great Couples (part IV)

Todays is Vonage IPO & 'Put' options ,

Any price around the offer price is likely to make money over a couple of months!

With no USP, there has to be a consensus opinion that it just won't make the expected growth. When that realisation is widespread, the stock price will not be sustainable.

On Telco valuations, Vonage should be worth at least $500 million, but I would not expect even that price to be sustainable.

To the Max!

Next Generation Wireless here we come.

Apparently, xG Technologies has passed FCC certification in tests carried out in an independent lab, the story is on their site and many other places. It also sounds like they are on the market, for the right price!

There's also a rumour that BT is poised to bid for Pipex, for 350 million?!
Pipex have spectrum and have recently been conducting WiMax trials.

Great Couples (part III)

Google  & Fon   (the Google link is intentional)

This was/is a little surprising, but I suppose when you are the size of Google, fingers and pies are not limited to the usual number of digits.
It makes a huge amount of sense, and gives Fon credibility to bring the ISPs on board.

I'm looking for another Great Couple over the next few months, which will be Fon & Netgear, or Fon & Linksys. Once you buy a router with Fon already built in, then the spread of the Fon movement will rapidly gather momentum.

As I have said in several previous posts , this is about local access in the places you go on a regular basis, not so much about going to another town or country. The ability to get access in your local supermarket, or school, or bar, takes presence to another level and one which is worth a lot of money to advertisers.

Great couples...part II

My earlier potential match that probably won't happen if James Enck's bones are telling him the true story, started me thinking that a 'Coupling' website something along the lines of 43 things would be a great thing. Maybe someone will start one after reading this!

In the meantime I thought I might start a small series of different 'Great Couples' just to get the ball rolling...

This couple is great for stress relief: Lagavulin & Capercaillie (Tradewinds)

(P.S. I have no connection to the Islay Whisky Society - or iTunes!)

Mobily Challenged?!

Dean Bubley reports from the FMC congress in London on a Swisscom presentation which says that statistically, around 70% of their subscriber base only uses 3 cells to make all their calls.
This is something I have known for a while, but it has always been studiously ignored by the mobile operators I have worked with. When running large billing systems, one of the major causes of performance problems is contention for accounts or services. Operators will often dump an entire MSC-day-load of data into their parallel rating engines and then throw up their hands in horror when the performance tanks. "That's because you're only accessing a small proportion of your customer database, mix up the files from all the MSCs and your performance will get better."
It's amazing how many of them didn't believe me. (incidentally, sorting also helps! ;)

We are just not that mobile! Martin Varsavsky has also made this argument in the past, i.e. that we tend not to make our communications while travelling but when we are stationary, somewhere where we can focus on the task in hand.
This is more true of Data communications than it is of voice. As an example, how many people have used a data service while driving?? Typing an SMS while negotiating the M25 is probably not the most sensible (or legal) thing to do (although I seem to remember trying!)

I think it's time we had separate, widely understood, terms for the (at least) two types of mobile access.
The first is what I would call nomadic, i.e. it involves a translocation from point A to point B followed by similar levels of network access requirement - bag up your teepee and cross over the mountain, then reconstruct your village.
The second is mobile, i.e. it involves network access while actually moving, potentially at speeds in excess of 160kmph.

Once these modes of access are separated there can be more creative focus on the kind of services that would be useful in each market. Currently the focus from a technical perspective is towards creating networks and standards for mobile acess, yet the services and general marketing efforts are primarily directed at nomadic access. There is a huge imbalance between the marketing and technical effort.

WiMax is the prime example; we have nomadic WiMax already, yet the huge technical effort to get mobile WiMax working seems to be viewed by marketers as essential before they can start proposing the 'standard' services associated with WiFi and Mobile(e.g. GSM) networks.

Nomadic services are: ability to use messaging, voice, presence, applications, file-sharing, IPTV, etc from ANY location.
Mobile services are: The ability to use the above services while travelling at speed, between any locations.

How much of our access is mobile, as opposed to nomadic? Probably substantially less than 10%.

So here's the challenge to marketers; what are the services that will require mobile access? (do any exist today?)

The one market that really does need mobile access is telematics, and yet this is something for which most mobile operators have no product offerings. There were 133 million registered cars (excluding trucks/SUVs) in the UK in 2000. I wrote a piece in an AMS technical bulletin I started in 1999 (pre-blog blog?) which was titled '200% mobile penetration and climbing'. I haven't changed my view, athough the technology and players in the market will probably be different.