Lunch over IP

Swisscom's new logo/brand: bah!

Swisscom, the biggest Swiss telecom operator, will be launching a new brand identity: the new logo, which will be rolled out across fixnet, mobile and Internet services next spring, is the one at right. The choice and detailed crafting of the font is good, but personally I find the graphical element confused, unclean, emotionless and meaningless -- simply unappealing, even in the animated version ("a dynamic logo designed for the screen"). It's one of those logos that you understand only (maybe) after reading the agency's brand manual ("The implied Swiss cross in the logo, the warmth of the red shade and the axis as the central starting point create a sense of closeness, combining and uniting our customers’ different experiences. The dynamism of the logo shows that life is a moving force and full of surprises. Swisscom gets things moving, has its fingers on the pulse and is part of everyday life." - quote via Alceste ). Bah! Your opinion?

ComDays07 / Martin Cave: The big changes to come

(Running notes from the 6th Communication Days conference in Bienne, Switzerland)

The afternoon sessions start with David Pogue, NY Times' tech columnist and "tech comedian", singing several funny songs on tech topics -- watch some in this TED video (not sure that all of his jokes are understood by this mostly German and French-speaking audience, but he is funny).

Martin Cave, professor at the Warwick Business School in the UK, gives a speech about the changing value chain of telecommunication, about market competition, about net neutrality ("a bit is a bit is a bit", "we should avoid the risk of vertical translation of market power, from the transmission of content to other activities"), and next generation networks. Here is one of his slides (notice the sentence at the bottom, from a Cisco report):

Here the big changes to come according to Cave (what he calls "the rise of consumer2.0"):

• No interest in linear content
• Focus on self-made content, transmitted peer-to-peer, and social networks
• Mash-ups, widgets galore
• Huge challenge to digital rights management
• The end of asymmetry
• Bigger pipes for high-definition and gaming
• Achieving mobility with high bandwidth

The money collection points ("bottlenecks") are changing. He sees good prospects for: Internet advertising; indispensable content; and technical bottlenecks.

(Others blogging from the conference: the ComDays blog in German, Mathieu Janin and Xavier Studer in French).

ComDays07 / Stefana Broadbent: The 20 people we communicate with

(Running notes from the 6th Communication Days conference in Bienne, Switzerland)

Swisscom anthropologist Stefana Broadbent talks about how people really use technology (I've already blogged about her research here and here and here and wrote an Economist story about her).
In traditional marketing research, she says, if you ask what the main constraints on usage of communication services are, the obvious answer would probably be price and some personal attitudes towards tech. But what we find in our research, observing people closely, is that actually the real discriminants are time and social networks.

Time: we collect hundreds of timelines and logs, we ask people to reconstruct with us their previous day of communication: who they communicated with, how, etc. We ask them to describe their social environment. Let's consider teenagers. The image adults have about teenagers online is lots of friends, connected all the time, etc. Swiss teenagers: all use instant messaging; e-mail is used only for communicating with adults and institutions; all of them have a mobile phone and send SMS daily; more than 50% have a profile page on social networking sites; they read blogs and use Youtube etc. BUT there is something very specific to the Swiss educational system. In Switzerland, there is a high proportion -- 75% -- of professional/vocational training ("apprentices"). Teenagers are in a professional setting; receive a salary; they are in constant contact with adults during the day; etc. If we compare the structure of the day of the teen apprentices and that of their parents, it's often not that dissimilar, except for the evening hours. And their patterns of communication are also very similar: balancing between work and private life; have a rather limited set of contacts. Apart from instant messaging, in Switzerland from 13 to 50 year old the patterns of usage of communication channels are very similar.

The other factor that has an impact on communication behavior is social networks. The close circle of contacts is composed of about 20 people: 7 in the "intimate circle", 13 in the "close circle". A further 37 are "weaker ties". This core of 20 is a number that's consistent across countries in Europe and the US. Who's in this core? About 60% are "given" contacts (family, schoolmates, work colleagues, neighbours), only 40% are "chosen". If you look with whom people communicate, 3/4 of the contacts happen with the people within those 20 "core" contacts. What does this mean? It may look obvious, you only communicate with the people you know. But to me it means: those 20 people are our (telecom operator's) playing field. When we think of services for our customers, we have to keep in mind that their space is 20 people wide.

ComDays07 / Moritz Leuenberger: Minister-blogger

(Running notes from the 6th Communication Days conference in Bienne, Switzerland)

After a short intro by the conference's host (and head of the Swiss Federal Communication Commission) Marc Furrer, the Swiss Telecommunication minister Moritz Leuenberger (he's also an active blogger) gives the opening keynote (after shuffling around with his microphone).
New forms of communication are changing the established media landscape but they don't replace them. He refers to his blogging experience as a tool for cross-fertilization: "I've just written a book using the blog as a tool to push my thinking further" (the book is in German, he says that it's been "provoked by bloggers and professors"). New forms of communication have a significant impact in that they speed up time. Leuenberger, who's a politician-philosopher, quotes Franz Kafka's "thirsty ghosts" and Heinrich Heine's "electrical beam enchanting people across continents" (Heine was talking about love, but it sounds like a description of SMS texting).
Two weeks ago I was at the UN general assembly in NY, says Leuenberger, speaking late morning. Considering the time difference between NY and Switzerland, it was too late for the Swiss TV newscasts, so they broadcast a summary of what I haven't yet said, commenting the reactions of people to a speech I had not yet given. Not long ago the Swiss evening news were a monopoly media and my contribution at the UN would have been aired the next day, with more research and better comments I assume. Now there is a race against time. We're going from scarcity to overabundant of channels and information. But consumer can only absorb so much information. As  writer Robert Walser said, "There is no freedom that doesn't create new limits": the new limits are about how to figure out what's important and what's not, what's authoritative and what's not, what's signal and what's noise.

Asked by moderator Christine Maier about his blog, Leuenberger says that he is finding the experience inspiring an the reactions from readers often surprising. Here is how my friend cartoonist Chappatte looked at Leuenberger's blogging a few months ago:

European Commissioner Viviane Reding (she's in charge of informations society and media) is then on video from Brussels. A few points from her speech:

• The average European watches TV for 222 minutes a day; the average Swiss for 148 minutes.
• There is an increasing disregard of the rights of online consumers across many European countries.
• Online content is playing a key role in increasing EU competitiveness.
• 2008 is gonna be a decisive year for the introduction of mobile television in Europe.

(Others blogging from the conference: the ComDays blog in German, Mathieu Janin in French).

EuroScan: Videobreakfast with grandma and more unconventional skyping

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, has just been published. It deals with the unconventional ways in which people use Skype and similar free Internet-based voice and video communication services. Here the full column:

Give people unlimited cheap or free phone or voice-over-Internet service and what happens? Not much, according to research by sociologists and anthropologists. People don't tend to increase the number or length of their calls significantly. There is only so much time you can spend talking, after all, and a phone call requires more commitment in terms of attention than, say, an instant messaging session—just try handling multiple phone conversations in parallel.

Yet there are exceptions. The rise of Skype, MSN, GoogleTalk, iChat and the other free Internet telephony and videotelephony services out there has led people to use voice and video communication in surprising, unconventional, and creative ways.

Here, for instance, are two anecdotes culled from the Skype Web site:

• An American band that had split up after college wanted to reunite for their 10-year reunion, but three of the musicians resided in California, others in Colorado and Massachusetts. With a few amplifiers and some microphone adaptors they practiced in real-time via Skype, and did the reunion gig.
• A piano teacher in Illinois gives private lessons to students across the U.S., and as far away as Europe and Australia. He mails them the assigned arrangements and then listens to them through his Skype headset.

A few weeks ago I started collecting my own stories and anecdotes through my blog and at conferences I was attending, specifying that I was not interested in traveling businessmen keeping in touch with the office, which I considered a "normal" use of Skype. I was looking for more unpredictable uses, and I found plenty:

• An immigrant family from the Balkans living in Switzerland has a big computer screen in their living/dining room, with a Web cam focused on the dining table. The MSN messenger window is open all day, for incoming messages or calls from family back home or friends who migrated to other countries. And almost every morning they have breakfast "with" grandma (the husband's mother) who lives in Kosovo with a similar Webcam set-up.
• A girl in Switzerland, the daughter of immigrants from Spain, gets regular video-over-Internet tutoring from her aunt, a teacher who lives in Spain.
• Several evenings a week, a retired grandfather in New York reads bedtime stories to his young grandson in California over Skype.
• After hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, a group of activists from around the world used SkypeIn and SkypeOut (the features that allow Skype users to communicate with normal phone users and vice-versa) to set up a virtual phone bank and messaging center. Collaborating also with ham radio operators, they relayed emergency messages in and out of the devastated region, let people ask for information, or just let them reach a friendly voice. The phone bank was staffed by volunteers from India, Europe, the Middle East and the U.S.
• Kid Lucky, an MC in New York, uses Skype to jam with beatboxer Zede in Switzerland.
• VeeSee TV is a British Web-based TV service airing news and other programs tailored to deaf viewers, using British Sign Language (BSL). Via Web cams, viewers chat freely on the channel's Web site in their native sign languages.
• Parents use Skype as a baby-monitoring application by keeping the Skype channel open on a laptop placed in the baby's room while they are working on their computer in another room.
• Customers are starting to use Skype to call help desks and customer service departments so that, if they receive poor service, they can record the calls using plug-in software that stores Skype conversations as audio files.
• Language schools are offering lessons with native teachers or tutors. A U.S. or European student learning Chinese, for example, can work directly with a teacher in Shanghai. The lessons come as a downloadable podcast, while conversations with the teacher happen over Skype.

Needless to say, these are all uses of Skype, MSN, and similar services that the engineers who developed them never intended, and the marketers never foresaw.

There is a whole history of this type of adaptation, stretching back to Edison and Antonio Meucci and probably beyond. More recently, the inventors of the Internet and the developers of the Web didn't set off to create a network that would one day be used to connect avatars, stream videos, and book flights. It's a testament to the openness and flexibility of their inventions that these uses are possible.

This leads to a speculation: Successful communication technologies are those that are designed with this openness at their core, so that their real applications can be figured out not by the developers or the sellers, but by the actual users.

Home truths about telecoms

I have written a story for this week's Economist on how anthropologists investigate the use of communication technology, discussing some of the findings of two of them, Jan Chipchase of Nokia and Stefana Broadbent of Swisscom. The article is on the Economist website.

DLD07: Young entrepreneurs, good ideas

Running notes from the Digital Life Design DLD07 conference in Munich (Germany) (Live video)

I've been moderating a session this morning with four young entrepreneurs, which included Rob Kalin, one of the founders of Etsy; Stefanie Peters, who's heading European activities for Jajah; Tamer Kulmac of Vaybee; and Nikolaj Nyholm of PolarRose. The latter has not launched yet: they are developing a picture search system, which will include sophisticated facial recognition technology and combining it with tagging (I will review it when it goes live).

Vaybee is an "ethnic" online social network for Turkish immigrants in Germany and in other European countries (but it is used also in Turkey), with about one million users, a set of services including news, online dating and a Turkey-focused travel agency, and an interesting anecdote: "some people have the impression that we aren't a business, but rather a non-profit institution of some sort working on social and cultural integration", says Tamer.

Jajah is one of the most interesting companies I've seen recently. They launched about one year ago, offering cheap phone calls using the Internet. There was yesterday another panel on this topic (see this post on "disruptive connections"), and of course the immediate benchmark in this space is Voice-over-IP service Skype. Jajah's approach however is different: it uses normal phones. "We are for the ordinary people who know the Internet but they don't want to download software, install it, get updates, use a headset", says Stefanie. "The existing phones work very well, both fix and mobile, so why bother with a headset?". The way Jajah works: after registering on their website, you get a page with two fields; put your phone number (the number which you are using/where you are) in the first, and the number you want to call in the second; the Jajah computer calls both numbers and connects them (while telling you how much the call will cost). Technically, it is an automatic call-back system. Quite simple and straightforward: use the Web to initiate the call, but the call happens on normal phones. Calls are significantly cheaper than using normal phone services (2-3 cents per minute for a transatlantic discussion) because the user end up paying the equivalent of a local call. Jajah makes money by taking a cut on the communication charges, and by charging for other services such as SMS and scheduled calls. On average, they make 8 euros per month per customer (for comparison, mobile operators in Europe generate revenues of some 30-40 euros per month per customer). I asked Stefanie about the quality of service, and particularly of the call, and it turns out that Jajah doesn't transport the calls over the public Internet: "we have our own leased lines to connect to the operators, so we can guarantee good voice quality". The Jajah approach also works on cell phones of course, as long as your device has a browser (to initiate the call using the Jajah website) or you can install a small J client software. Yet: imagine that you're on vacation in another country. If you use your cell phone to place a Jajah call, you will still be paying the roaming charges to your operator. So here is a trick to skip the outrageous roaming fees: send an SMS to the friend you want to call, telling him to Jajah you on your hotel room phone number or any other fix phone that you have access to. Cost for a long call: a few cents for him/her, the cost of the SMS for you.

Another very interesting company that was represented in the panel is Etsy, which is an online marketplace (à la eBay) for handmade, non-mass-produced goods (from handbags and shirts to paintings and iPod covers). There are many interesting aspects in what they do, starting with the design of the website, with a large use of images and of interesting navigation approaches, including a feature allowing "shopping by color" (looking for a green t-shirt to match your green bag? - see the screenshot for their unconventional Flash-based interface). Listing an item costs 10 cents, and Etsy takes a 3.5 percent cut on transactions. Rob Kalin, one of the founders, was in the panel; he is a fast-talking carpenter by training, and I asked him about the re-birth of crafting that Etsy seems to be riding on. "I believe it is a generational issue; the generation of my mother doesn't use Etsy, baby-boomers were fascinated with mass produced goods, with their polished look; younger people - and my grandmother alike - are instead very much into Etsy, into non-homogenized products, into connecting with other people who "make" things, into caring where the goods you buy come from and how they were made. That's the same trend that's bringing back farmers markets in big cities". 

DLD07: Disruptive connections

Running notes from the Digital Life Design DLD07 conference in Munich (Germany) (Live video)

A panel about "disruptive connections" features several speakers that are trying to shake up the world of telecommunication. Alex Straub, from Truphone, a service that routes mobile calls via the Internet, preaches about "liberating the users" through Wi-Fi and says that "there will be Wi-Fi in every island in the ocean"; Jeff Pulver explains how Nokia and other handset vendors are putting Wi-Fi on their cell phones and that won't be a gift to telecom operators; Hjalmar Winbladh of Sweden's Rebtel (this is a true disruptor) describes his product allowing users to place international calls at local cost (it works by having both ends of the call use local connections to a Voice-over-IP point of access, bridging them over the Internet).

Former Nokia designer Marko Ahtisaari has recently co-founded Blyk, a mobile operators for 16 to 24 year olds, funded by advertising, that will be launched around mid-2007 in the UK first (technically, it will be a MVNO, using the existing operators' infrastructure). It will be a base service giving calling and texting - the key features of current cell hones - for free. "The ads will not interrupt communications", and it explains that initially at least it will be "not rich in pictures but rich in interaction".

The enthusiasm of Straub and Pulver seems a bit excessive: the backbone of the network is still in the hands of telecom operators, and even Internet applications that run on top of the network need massive investment in infrastructure in order to guarantee reliability, bandwidth, uniformity of coverage and access, etc. Moreover, open Wi-Fi networks are not commonplace - although the emergence of citywide Wi-Fi networks will change that.

EuroScan: Read that voicemail

EuroScan, my monthly column for the Innovation&Design section of BusinessWeek Online, is published today. It discusses a British service that takes voicemails and turns them into text, opening up new communication possibilities. Here it is:

While generally useful, I find voicemail to be inherently inefficient. You dial someone. The phone rings. The call rolls into the machine. You listen to a message that too few keep short. You leave yours, often just asking to be called back. When the other person calls back, you may be in the middle of something and ask to call them back, or you may just be unavailable and so the call rolls into your voicemail, launching a game of phone tag. And even when a caller does leave a to-the-point message, you still have to retrieve it, and that can't be done at any time. It's rude to retrieve messages during a meeting, for example, and if you're driving, you have to stop to write down a phone number. It is not uncommon to have to listen to the message twice to get a detail right. Frustrating is voicemail's middle name.

Someday, so-called "presence information" (a system that tells the caller whether you're available at that moment, as happens on Skype or on instant-messaging platforms) may solve that problem. But for now, wouldn't it be better if your caller's message was delivered to your e-mail in-box or to your cell phone as a text? Christina Domecq believes it would, and that's the whole, simple idea behind her company, SpinVox, a two-year-old startup based in London.

Domecq used to be a consultant, and experienced voicemail frustration firsthand. "I would get to the end of a fast-paced day and check my voicemail and find that I had still 14 messages to go", she said when we spoke recently. She started looking for a solution, and when she found none, she decided to create one, together with co-founder Daniel Doulton. They developed their voice-to-text system on top of existing speech recognition software, adding some patented technology, and launched in Britain in the second half of 2005.

Today, SpinVox has 150 employees and claims 120,000 paying users, mostly in Britain, but the service has recently launched in the U.S., Spain, and France, with Germany following soon. Users pay about five British pounds (just under $10) a month for the transcription, on average, of 30 voicemails a month (you can listen to the original messages anytime). This year, the company plans to announce deals with telecom operators to deploy its technology directly within their networks.

Transcribing a voice message into text may not seem like much, and there are other companies that offer similar services, but SpinVox seems to have made it extremely easy to use. And cell-phone subscribers accustomed to receiving SMS alerts that they have new voicemail will quickly appreciate how much better and faster it is when that notification contains instead the actual text of the message.

"It's all about saving people time," says Domecq, "and giving them more free time." Or the time to do more. "One evening at a party," she says, "someone walked up to me and said, jokingly, 'You should be ashamed; you sped up my life another notch.'"

Of course, a key question when it comes to voice recognition is accuracy, and SpinVox's is surprising. I asked them for a test account and called in leaving myself a message with the text of the first few lines of this column. Here is what came into my e-mail and (by SMS) my cell phone about three minutes later, unedited:

"While generally useful(?) I find voicemail to be inherently inefficient. ___ someone, the phone rings & the call rolls into the machine. You listen to a message that too few keep short, you leave yours often just asking to be called back. When the other person calls back you maybe in the middle of something & have to call them back or you may just be unavailable & so the the call rolls into your voicemail launching a game of phone tag."

And consider that I speak fast and have a thick Italian accent.

The idea, really, goes beyond voicemail-to-text. "It's about voice-to-screen in any application," says Domecq. SpinVox is working on expanding the concept to blogging by voice, for example. What gets me really excited, however, is when voice gets turned into text on a screen, then it becomes searchable, archivable, editable, taggable, bloggable, and forwardable, opening up whole new areas of communication.

Telekommarkt06 - Notes on European telecoms

Running notes from the Telekommarkt Schweiz 2006 conference in Zurich, an annual Swiss telecom industry gathering organized by EuroForum (I will be giving a speech about blogging).

The conference chairman, Fritz Sutter, introduces the first speaker with a small provocation: Switzerland invests in telecommunication infrastructure comparatively twice what the European Union countries invest. Martin Selmayr, the spokesman for information society and media of the EU, replies by giving an overview of the situation of the European telecom market' regulation (or rather, deregulation: "this is a common misunderstanding: the EU's goal is to open markets to competition that used to be monopolies; we are about less but more efficient regulation"). He offers figures showing that Europe invests more than the US and Asia in what he calls "e-communication" (which, I assume, includes wireless and fixed telecom, satellite, Internet, television, and related fields). "We are witnessing the emergence of a pan-European telecommunication industry - with operators active in several countries - in a landscape that used to be characterized by national players", which he sees as a positive outcome of the EU long-term deregulation efforts. So is broadband penetration: according to EU and OECD figures for, respectively, July and June 2006, Denmark (29.5%) and the Netherlands (29%) are the two countries with the highest broadband penetration in the world (South Korea, generally considered a broadband nirvana, ranks fourth - but it's not clear whether Selmayr's figures include wireless broadband, a sector where SKorea is definitely leading). The EU average penetration (including the Eastern countries) is 14% (the graph below, with the EU figures, is from Selmayr's presentation). Switzerland ranks in the top tier (26%), the US are at 19%.

One of the key goals of the EU Commission, Selmayr says, is to encourage a better management of spectrum and radio frequencies for wireless communications. "There is a growing demand for licenses to use the spectrum", he says. He evaluates the current overall value of the services built on spectrum (mobile communications, broadcasting, navigation, weather forecast, etc) at around 200 billion euros, growing. But spectrum management is still poor: it's in the hands of national entities (hence, 25 different legal systems and admin procedures), many frequencies are "reserved" (for military use, by historical license holders, etc) and not used, while others are getting crowded. The EU is seeking to make frequencies uniform across the continent, and wants to introduce so-called "secondary markets" for frequencies - so that license holders can sell underused or unused spectrum (for details, read "Releasing the potential of radio spectrum to enhance innovation", PDF, 2 pages).

Jaan Männik, the CEO of Eesti Telekom in Estonia, also starts with a provocation: "Can Estonia surpass Europe in the telco business?". And then he goes on to paint a portrait of the small (1.35 million people) northern country that pretty much accounts for a "yes" answer. Estonia was part of the Soviet Union until 1991 (at that moment, "there was a waiting list of 200'000 to get a fixed phone line", says Männik" and has been a member of the EU since 2004. In that period, the Estonians reinvented their country, to the point that "now sometimes we are called e-stonia" (as in e-business) and have become one of the most technologically advanced places on Earth. Internet penetration is at 60% (100% in schools, 91% in businesses); wi-fi is everywhere and free; the government works as much as possible paperlessly; there are 1.3 million online banking accounts; 75% of people fill in tax returns online; people vote online for the parliamentary elections; they carry an ID card that serves both as an ID, as a digital signature, and as a virtual ticket for public transportation; over 50% of parking fees are paid via cell phones; traffic monitoring cameras are connected to the wireless network so people can check road status live on their cell phones; competition is fierce; the tax system simple (flat tax); etc.
I have already pointed out in a previous post that Estonia, like other Eastern European countries, had a unique chance 15 years ago to start over, from scratch, and re-imagine itself, and clearly the Estonians have played their cards better than most. Suffice to say that the country's best-known startup is Skype, "which has given us alot of tech credit", says Männik. The Estonians are good at national PR, too: when US president Bush recently visited the country, he was presented by the Estonian president with a Skype phone.

Boguslaw Kulakowski is the VP of research and development at ITI Group, a media and entertainment group in Poland, and he has a past in wireless telecommunication. He gives an overview of the telco business in central and eastern European (CEE) countries:

• stable growth rate of 5%-6% per year
• different countries have followed different paths of development, hence regional disparities
• generally dynamic growth of mobile subscribers
• still low penetration of fixed voice services (a remnant of the Soviet era)
• stable increase of broadband access users
• fast development of WiMAX networks
• slow development of 3G networks (except Poland)
• incoming global operators investments; global operators active in the region: Orange (in 3 countries), T-Mobile (7), Telenor (5) and Vodafone (4)
• Russian expansion plans for global markets
• MVNO (mobile virtual networks) might start soon in the most competitive markets
• operator starting to provide triple-play services
• expansion of seamless mobility services
• major mobile markets: Russia, Ukraine and Poland (combined 210 million subscribers)
• Russia: over 140 million mobile subscribers (penetration 97%), with three major operators controlling 90% of the market (MTS, VimpelCom, Megafon); 85% of operators revenues come from voice services, and average revenue per user (ARPU) is still growing (in other countries, including in Western Europe, it is declining)
• Ukraine: 36 million mobile subs (penetration 76%); over 90% of users use prepaid cards
• Poland: 37 million mobile subs (penetration 95%); fourth operator preparing to launch; ARPU is declining (halved since 1999); 2.5 million broadband users (in a country of 39 million people) "but demand is huge, that's why WiMAX is so important" (WiMAX is a wireless alternative to DSL and cable): Poland was among the first countries to license WiMAX, and two operators (Netia and Clearwire) are investing for nationwide coverage, "opening a perspective for cheap broadband access and voices services".

Peter Trinkl is the head of strategy at Swisscom Mobile, Switzerland's biggest wireless operator. He describes a market situation where the pressure on prices is "extreme" for voice calls, and competition in innovative services is high. The traditional business - based on transporting voice calls and data - "can only decline", and operators need to reinvent themselves if they don't want to end up "as administrators of the erosion of their core business". His response to this challenge is to "speedily and creatively take into account the customers' new needs", which he sums up in a word: "independence". Under that label he puts "always-on connectivity; easy access to data and knowledge independently from place and time; tools to modify and share the data; help in efficiently managing and structuring it; all with high security and privacy".

I give a speech on blogging, summing up my remarks in four points:

• Tools are getting cheaper, easier, more powerful, and in the hands of many
• The world is becoming immediate and un-mediated
• A company's brand or person’s reputation is not what they say it is, but what Google and Technorati say it is
• Synthetic worlds are increasingly shadowing and impacting the real world

(Peter Hogenkamp was in the room and blogged my speech - in German.)

Roland Stettler, VP at Orange Communications, Switzerland's third-largest wireless operator (owned by France Telecom), talks about convergence of wireless and wireline - in other countries, and soon in Switzerland, Orange sells a hybrid mobile phone that connects to the mobile network while on the go, and switches to the local base station (turning effectively into a domestic cordless phone) when at home - and the integration of additional services (music, video) and of GPS navigation. Then he talks about businesses, and has a good point: "telecommunication costs nowadays are marginal in a company's budget - so operators offering them a better deal in financial terms won't really have any significant impact on their bottom line" He suggests that telecom operators focus rather on figuring out ways to help businesses, using wireless technology, lower their other costs - logistics, customer relations, etc.

Stefan Holtel (Xing profile) carries the title of "service creation mastermind" at Vodafone, one of the world's biggest wireless operators, and talks about Web2.0 and its impacts on the traditional mobile operators' business. He points to the ongoing shift form "consumers" to "prosumers", from broadcast to social media, from publishing to participating, from readers to co-creators: "consumers will become an integral part of the commercial value chain". He lists and explains eight Web2 principles, based on the "design patterns" described by Tim O'Reilly in his 2004 founding paper:

1. The "Long Tail": small sites make up the bulk of the Internet's content, narrow niches make up the bulk of the Internet's possible applications: "what are the future telecom niche markets?"
2. Data is the next "Intel inside": applications are increasingly data-driven and competing advantage descends from owning a unique, hard-to-replicate source of data: "what are the telecom's "data inside"? Location info, of course, but what else? And how can we use them?"
3. Users add value: a key to competitive advantage online is the extent to which users add their own data to yours: how can telecom customers add value? He shows Qype, a German participative city entertainment guide, as example.
4. Network effects by default: only a small percentage of users will bother adding information; but data can be aggregated as a side-effect of their use of the application: "have operators implemented ways to handle default user data?"
5. Some rights reserved: benefits come from collective adoption: "how many partners create their business from your core business?"
6. Perpetual beta: applications are no longer software artifacts, they are ongoing services, constantly updated, part of the normal user experience: "is your - operators - time to market 30 minutes or 30 months?"
7. Cooperate, don't control: "how does your cooperative ecosystem look like?"
8. Software above the level of a single device: design applications to work across devices: "how many services do you deploy on multiple devices today?"

Needless to say, many of these principles are contrary to traditional telecom business thinking.