Orient Expression

TiVo has been the leader in the digiital video recorder space long before Sky gave you Sky+ It's of varying success in the UK but in an effort to keep current in the times of SlingBox and Orb and place shifting partnerships with 3 UK they have announced the ability to share and invite users to shared content from your TiVo. For those of you that use Flikr or Picasa Web you will be used to sending invitations to your photo archive. TiVo what this to be true of TV content, one of their ideas is a YouTube type video share with the Grandparents. This form of Family Private Network may be successful in some of the transitory nations (Sweden and Finland spring to mind) and given the slow uptake of DVD cam corders and the increasing difficulties to source VHS media for the family video this might be a good use. The sharing is performed by uploading your video to One True Media in a classic publishe/subscriber model. At least one side needs to be a TiVo series 2 or series 3 owner, th

The recent announcement from 3 UK to partner with Google, MSN and Skype caused some noise. Many pundits are musing over the partnership with Skype and it's disruptive "the whole world can talkk for free" which is targetted directly at 3 and it's usual suspect of associates. You've got to figure that the expansion of municpal networks (Norwich and Milton Keynes stlye) combined with more dual mode handsets appearing on the market that Skype is going to make some real in-roads into the mobile space. 3 are probably thinking that the timing is right to be a partner and not a target if the domain is going to change anyway. What was of lesser visibility was the time and place shifting that is also planned to be part of the X-series phone kit. The platform also includes Orb and Sling for viewing your TV choices over the 3G wireless network. Given the Skypers next disruptive project is the Venice project and their idea for TV 2.0 I'm not sure how the TV part of t

After a recent article about Virgin deploying WiFi on their trains in the UK I was very surprised to find that ye olde GNER network already had it installed. Blogging from Coach B of the Edinburgh to Peterbrough service. All in all not too bad, apart from the price of GBP 2.95 for 30 minutes (plus 5 minutes free). They add the free minutes to allow for the predicted degradation of speed. Having flown Easy Jet from Luton to Edinburgh I thought I would take the train back. For close travel dates the train was actually have price, plus I can take liquid on board and as my luggage as I want (Easy Jet let you have one piece and then every bag after that is GBP 10). Total travel time, if you include the drive to the airport and the mandatory wait at the terminal, means the journey is about the same. Anyway don't want to sound like a "spotter" so on to the point. At my seat I have power to compensate the poor battery on my company laptop :( and the ability to walk around

Just got my invite to Yahoo! Mail Beta. It's got some nice new usability features that I welcome in my email client. Preview Pane for advance reading Drag and Drop support for organizing your mail into your folders (a big thumbs up for someone like me that likes to compartmentalize my mail) Multi non-contiguous select using CTRL+Click Multi coniguous select using SHIFT+Click 3 and 4 are what we are used to in spreadsheet tools so no steep learning curve there. I like to general feel of the new interface, it's more akin to a traditional email client on your PC (Outlook Express et al) than the online mail readers. I am a very big user of Gmail, I would welcome some development in this direction from the Google Dome.

Last night as events unfolded here in Bangkok the military coup targeted mobile phone, international gateway and TV operations in effort to keep some control. I was talking to a friend in the UK when the phone went dead. I thought nothing of it then around one hour later I got the sniff of tanks rolling down the streets of the city. Thai TV was on a loop of pictures of HM the King and the occasional message from the coup leaders. The military took control of at least one TV station that was repeatedly playing a message from the fallen leader and the telecoms gazilliionare's building (HQ of his mobile phone giant and TV station) were put under guard. I thought that the mobile networks had been locked down but then realised it was just another repeat performance of the years of under-investment in interconnection routes between the now overly busy operators. Next to go was the satellite feed, also owned by the now ex-Prime Minister. This lost me access to CNN and BBC World, howeve

I was just catching up on some news and I came across this from the BBC. In summary the Royal Mail allow you to print a barcode that represents the stamp value and pay for it online. Think of it as prepaid franking.... They are targeting the work from home and eBayers to try and assist them and to try and reduce queues in the post office. Given that the letter business has been unraveled and that the distribution side of the Royal Mail, according to the BBC, made an annual profit of ~350M with the post office counters business losing 2M per week I would like to see more granularity behind the costs. The actual distribution costs don't change because of this model but the cost of sale for consumable does. I don't know how much they pay for paper, glue, ink etc. for the stamps but based on some analysis I have done here the printing and postage costs of today's large operations, say a telco, make up the bulk of the cost and it is fairly fixed. There's not a lot of

I last wrote about the developing business cases for WiMax , on of the favourites in TV over WiMax. The bandwidth and transmission distances make this technology, in many peoples eyes, a good platform for IPTV. The UK is in the stages of going digital anyway so most people will have to get used to the idea of some form of set top box, might as well be some form of WLAN modem. The pressure that Cinema is facing, see the plea from Mark Cuban , to try and get some form of ROI in the film business is in large part down to the challenge that home entertainment lays down. The convenience factor of being in your home with your widescreen TV, DVD player and Home Theatre with full Dolby support means that the effort required to pull people out of their LazyBoys and head in to the cinema is large. As Mark mentions during a first weekend a typical distributor can end up paying $12 per head in advertising to get them to come and buy a $5 cinema ticket. One of the leaders in the home entertai

The most hyped, most promising technology to really be tested gets another push from the Rupe. Rupert Murdoch is looking for life after (or during) satellite and he seems to think that TV over WiMax is it. It leads to an interesting discussion that is still ongoing, what is the business case for 802.16? Not surprisingly many people are still convinced that VoIP or VoWLAN will be the real use for the technology. This is because of the super-sized cell that potentially can be created, the super-hotspot could be a real challenger for GSM and CDMA due to the typical usage habits of the average subscriber. So with that said do we already have the killer application for WiMax. Skype was an early disruptor to voice reveune and it's portability across many platforms does it make the ideal choice for the VoIP application. Gizmo is also a strong candidate for me, it has already been trialled on GoogleNet in Mountain View by Team OM , and I like the fact that it does run on the Nokia 7

It's been one year since I tried this blogging thing. I've had to learn a lot along the way and it's quite difficult to maintain the motivation to go out and find the supporting articles and links that I like to try and use. In the short time that I've been doing this I have noticed a shift in the way that the blogosphere pulses with stories and where the scoops come from. I know that not a lot of people read this but it's best not to know, there is a blogger who was getting a LOT of traffic but when she realised the volume of readers out there she stopped writing. The pressure of getting it right got to her. To get her going again she was given a very simple piece of advice "imagine you are writing for just one person" and this got her back in on track. So to the one person out there that reads this blog, I thank you.

In previous postings I have rambled about disruption in two popular media. Television - the concept of broadcasting will change to accommodate IPTV, VDO on demand and subscriber specific content Books - book readers will continue to grow in usage Well there is a long overdue overhaul for the newspaper. Forget the movies like Minority Report and their vision of a dynamically updating newspaper headline, news is already disrupted. Look over a colleagues shoulder and check out what they have on their RSS feeds. My habits have changed since being in Thailand where there is a limited supply of English language newspapers. The Nation and The Bangkok Post both do a good job but I need more. TV based news is Thai, unless you want to pay large amounts of money to the UBC monopoly, in which case you can get BBC World. So with these restrictions I went out and found a decent RSS reader and subscribe to varying forms of news inputs. For UK and International news I get a feed from t

Almost 1 year ago Paul in his usual tongue-in-cheek approach blogged about the foresight of Uma Thurman's parents Well in a shock exposure she has decided to become a Danish National !! The Baltic trader that is TeliaSonera, with presence in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, is the first mobile operator to release [publicly] UMA into it's network. Unlicensed Mobile Access or UMA is the technology that allows more traditional mobile operators to create a pire into their GSM network to allow people to start make use of some of the IP and dual mode feature on their phones. It, in theory, allows mobile subscribers to use VoWiFi features but this then gets routed through onto the GSM network. It is one of the real enablers for one form of fixed mobile convergence (FMC) that opens up the mobile handset to be used for home based telephony, using SIP phone. The key benefits for the subscriber are that they have the convenience of their contacts at their fingertips when using their phon

I thought I'd have a go at using the Windows Live Writer to add blog entries. The configuration to be able to blog to blogger from here is pretty easy, we'll see if it works as well as it would imply. I have tried this with Writely, now Goolgelized, and it work from time to time but was not consistent. I have the same (if not more) options for editing in Live Writer. I want to see if I can unlink myself from having to log in to Blogger all the time, of course as you can expect the toolbar that includes folio and the blog tools is only visible in IE as far as I can tell.

Milton Keynes is famous for two, maybe three things: Lots and lots and lots of roundabouts Concrete Cows XScape -indoor snow zone amongst other things Now it is set to become the site of the first commercial use of WiMax in the UK (as far as I can see). There's been a lot of buzz about this so here are a few of the blog ping echoes: Andy Aramson VoIP Watch iTWire The Register Gizmodo (Warning! includes Concrete Cows) James Enck EuroTelcoblog ;) Pretty upbeat news off the back of the Sprint announcements that it's 4G network will be mobile WiMax based. A recent article in Telecom Asia here lays out the developing business case for WiMax depsite the pessimism from the old school (but no surprises there).

At the weekend I sat down and took some time to go through Seth Godin's Web 2.0 list to see what was out there. The usual suspects are at the top but I wasn't looking for the volume but the movement that shows increasing; albeit brief maybe, popularity. After a long trawl a couple caught my eye for further research and some I went as far as registering. More than a cursory glance: ChainReading ZoHo SlideStory In the might go back later category: RedToucan - more social networking. Today I use LinkedIn and openBC Mozy EchoSign ThinkFree There was the usual mixture of URL not found errors that come with this hit and miss approach :( What comes out of my walk about is the niche of it all. Some of the sites look good but are obviously meant for a very small number of people. Still it's good to see that in many cases the internet is becoming easy to use that some of these groups and sites exist at all.

Paul Jardine once coined the phrase "the other network" when talking about the mobile operators in the UK spending vast amounts of money to build out their networks when there was already a network that could (with some thought) have been used. By this he meant the slowly decaying Public Phone network. Now I am working with a fixed line operator here in Thailand that still maintain a pay phone infrastructure, this is barely used due to the proliferation of mobile phones; a trend that is bound to be repeated in countries all over the world. So what can the Telco's do about it? In my converging ideas posting I highlighted the innovation that I had long been thinking of that New Zealand Telecom are driving forward with. This was the natural expansion of two previous ideas that I had expanded on and is a WiFi twist on the other network idea of Paul. The basic concept is that the pay phone becomes a node in the MuniNet (Municipal Network). This could equally be using

I've been looking into getting a Fax setup at home, I know what you're thinking why? The truth of it is here in Thailand faxing is still very popular. You cannot assume that any of your business partners have an internet connection (other than dialup) due to the low penetration of broadband outside of Bangkok, so....? Normally you would say get a Fax modem and use some sort of fax software. Problem: It took almost 1 year to get one telephone line put into the house, I can't afford to wait that long for a second analog line. Other options include the online services such as MBox , which looks good but I would still like to find a solution. Well I think I have two options: A pure old school hardware solution: Andy Abramson over at VoIP Watch put me onto this with his posting which led me to the Engadget page for the Sharp Broadband fax machine. The UX-B800SE provides the usual fax machine features that you would expect from an analog machine, it also has an Ethernet co

In the second part of my three things series I would like to focus on three things that I would like to own to add to my current toolkit . Nokia 770 Nokia E60 Jabra SP500 Bluetooth speaker phone. Why? Nokia 770: apart from the fact that it looks cool :) there is a real use for this sort of device. Now that it has significantly improved and new applications are creeping into the domain I can see me using it in one of two modes; and not necessarily exclusively Communication: Gizmo phone and the ability to use Gmail and GoogleTalk mean that I have a means of communicating in my palm. This becomes useful when I am on a client site; like today where I need to be on their network to get to their servers but I need to use an external wireless network because their firewall and proxy doesn't allow me to use some sites. In this mode I can leave the 770 connected to the external network and still have my laptop connected to their LAN. The size lends itself to being used on the hoof a

I am finding myself increasingly dependent on a couple of things that I now leave in my toolkit. My USB adapter for SD cards My external USB hard drive My Bluetooth headset SD cards: when was the last time you saw a laptop with a 1.44" drive; quite a long time I wager. However as I drop in and out of client sites I am faced with a series of connectivity problems which sometimes aren't worth solving given the duration of stay. More often than not this is around printing of documents. I started out using the normal USB or thumb drive but as I changed cameras I found that the SD card I had was no longer usable with my new camera. Also given that SD card storage size it increasing I looked for an alternative that gave me the flexibility of floppy disks without the expense. I adopted this guy , or at least something similar. I find it incredibly useful and I can carry more, smaller, SD cards around to give me extra capacity and flexibility without having to have lots of USB d

I have just had an absoulte shock :O Living in Thailand (particularly Bangkok) you get used to the fact that Copyright really means the right to copy stuff and that IP is more likely to mean Internet Protocol (although even that's a leap) rather than Intellectual Property. I have just paid full price for three CD's of Thai artists distributed in Thailand. The distributors are GMM Grammy and More Music . Like a lot of people today I listen to music at work, this generally means MP3. Unlike most people I don't like to be bound to Windows Media Player (the evil empire) and often spend a lot of time on Linux (be it Ubuntu or SuSe ) which don't have Windows Media Player [obviously!]. So imagine my surprise to go through my usual routine of using AudioGrabber to convert my purchases to MP3 so that I can listen at work from my hard drive or play on my MP3 player during the many hours I spend on planes and the less hours that I spend in the gym (more's the pity me) to

I am a firm believer in Linux, or at least the idea of Linux. I have used Red Hat at work; I then favoured Ubuntu as an all in desktop with good server support as well. I have now installed SuSe 10.1 on my server at home. All of these platforms have a common flaw, the lack of or at least the general lack of WiFi support. Part of the problem is the slow adoption of WPA-PSK on Linux. Until very recently WEP was the only security (other than MAC address filtering) but this is old and so the move to WPA is essential if Linux is to move up to XP again. Ubuntu Dapper and SuSe 10.1 are very good replacement desktops and I would easily jump across permanently if only we could solve the WiFi issue. With SuSe the D-Link card I have is potentially supportable with Madwifi or Ndiswrapper. I couldn't get either to work at all. Then some more googling later I [finally] discovered that version C of the PCI card was not Atheros but Ralink. A quick trip to the site (via my laptop and trusty U

or should that be using Web 2.0 to get some action. Damien Mulley has laid it all out in his 11 step guide to "using google to find girls and get laid", you can find it here . Typically the early adopters of new technology has been the porn industry, I have had to mask by country location in Skype as I was getting random connect requests from less than desirables. Damien has a very scary insight on how you can use the array of free tools and move from networking to neckworking the Google way.

Flash memory has been dominated by two things of recent times: Capacity goes up Price goes down We now have a 4Gb SD card, that's the same size as a DVD and how well were they lauded when they arrived? There are prototypes that use magnetic charge (like a traditional hard drive) opposed to the [volatile] electric charge. But what does this really mean? It means that we are very close to having a non moving part PC. The average size of a hard drive in a laptop today is somewhere between 20 and 40 Gb (although this is trending up) so imagine being able to have 10 such SD cards creating a logical drive. This would take up much less space than a normal hard drive and would give the ability to swap out parts of the storage. Think of it as SD raid.

Not long after Nokia announced it's plans to release a non-phone I was keeping my eye on the project. Living in neither the UK or US I haven't been able to buy one yet but a good friend did buy one whilst on a trip in November. I played with it for a bit as was mostly disappointed. The screen is amazingly clear but there was limited functionality and the WiFi connection was clunky and unreliable. Now with the release and installation of Maemo 2.0 the tablet has really come into it's own. The connection is far more reliable and the new range of applications makes it a truly useful piece of hardware rather than just a play thing. The inclusion of Gizmo for 770 is a nice addition and the ability to use GoogleTalk would now give me a full range of communication options. Even when outside the range of a WiFi hot-spot with a suitable phone (something like the E60, which I am still waiting to buy) I can pair it up and use the GPRS connection over a bluetooth bridge to stay conne

I've been having frequent problems with my ADSL connections recently. I have the same provider both at home and at work. On both connections I get intermittent; seemingly random, outages on the pipe. The service provider has a "help desk" that are typical in Telco environments and IT Companies you know the routine: restart your computer check the cables restart your modem "are you sure you've got the password right? is caps lock on?" Anyway the problem at home was initially a broken modem after 4 months of use and the problem at work was initially a broken splitter after about 2 weeks of use :( Anyway getting to the point (finally), how did I know there was a problem with the network in the first place? not just the usual random web page not available (aka someone's turned the server off) I knew because my trusty network sniffer couldn't find a way out; what is the sniffer I hear you ask? The answer is Skype! Wherever I am, inside or outside of a

Or should that be I am mobile, I never was very good at grammar. I have been made aware of Mxit recently. I downloaded it onto my phone to have a play. Mxit is an Instant Messaging platform for small clients, handsets, that connects you to your list of online contacts in your messenger of choice through GPRS or CDMA (3G) networks. The interface is good considering the size of the phone screen and pretty intuitive to use. It could certainly become popular here with some minor tweaking. Localization would be a plus for the app to make it easy for non-English speakers to use the service. One of the things I like about it is the ability it gives me to see across many IM's who is available. I use YIM and MSN and more and more I am using GoogleTalk as me network starts to move into the Googlesphere. In windows world this generally means many IM clients, Mxit acts as a mobile IM aggregator. Agile is also out there but not an option for me as it doesn't support GoogleTalk. The

The mighty Om thinks that WiFi location based services will be the next kickstart in the industry. I agree that this could be the killer app, the SMS of WiFi/Max, that could really be a key integration point for Muni nets, FON networks and the newest WiFi enabled handsets. He mentions Loki so I went off to have a quick look. It seems pretty interesting and it made me revisit a previous idea for book readers . Combining LBS with a brand like The Lonely Planet would be a pretty powerful partnership; apply the whole thing in a PDA or some other WiFi enabled device that makes book reading easy (something like Nokia's 770 ) and you have your own tour guide in your pocket that is as close to being smart as you can get. It will be able to know which country you're in and allow you to subscribe to the guide for that country, or mini-guide for that city. Once walking around the LBS granularity would enable a smart book mark to move you to the section of the guide for where you

The last week has presented a raft of operators in Thailand jumping on the IPTV bandwagon. Recent announcements by True TT&T And discoveries of a Shingapore Telecom service shows that there is a Thai foray into the delivery of TV over broadband. The numbers of subscribers are limited by the lack of infrastructure in the Kingdom but True seem to understand what is required and TT&T have a license (under TTT Broadband) that allows them to roll out services in Bangkok as well as their traditional stomping ground of upcountry (rural) areas. I wonder if the intention had been to try and open up the service in readiness for the world cup, I hope they succeed in getting at least some subscribers to the final as it will be a good test of the service and scalability. I wish them every success in their endeavours, I already use many services from True; and would be willing to look at some of the TT&T offerings as both of these companies are really trying to make an effort to shift f

Like many people out there I started my blog by commenting on things that I had found on the News feeds, I try not to recycle other peoples blog entries but this is a common practice as well. For me the blogosphere was an echo of the traditional press, akin to the thunder clap after the lightning bolt. Over the past few months I have noticed that the storm is getting nearer; I now hear the thunder very quickly after seeing the lightning. In some sectors the blogosphere is now very much the lightning generator and there is often a delay before the old guard (BBC et al) feel the pulse. More interestingly there seems to be a higher form of intelligence in the bloggers. On many occasions people are authoring in isolation on the same (at least very similar) ideas and concepts. The pace of idea forming is increasing exponentially as the seed of the idea is shared across the blogosphere and extrapolated in follow up postings. To quote the BBC yesterday If you believe the hype, blogs are as

Once more I find convergence, and I don't mean FMC or any of those other Telco terms, I have found Idea Convergence. Some time ago Paul Jardine talked about "the Other network" an idea he had many years ago, now we have NZ Telecom doing just that. On this blog I have extended the ideas of the Wifi Lightpost and fixed wireless access and Paul raised the idea of TescoMax . Right now WiFi access in Bangkok is far from prolific but with the license given to TTT Broadband they could use some of these ideas to broaden the access to their network. Throughout this sprawling city you can rely on finding one of two things: A petrol station - PTT, Caltex, Shell, Green Leaf etc 7-Eleven - the ubiquitous convenience store And in many locations you can find both i.e. a 7-Eleven at a petrol station. Tie in to these two infrastructure nodes and you have a pretty good grid for your network nodes. Both places by default are in built up urban areas with homes greedy for internet acces

I've reached that point in my life/career where I feel the need to attend the occasional conference. There are a couple that interested me here in Bangkok, Thailand Telco Forum , and the other is the Revenue Assurance Summit 2006 . However the costs of both are too high for me to justify at this point. Although I have to say that I did receive a phone call from IQPC to see if there was anything that could be done to help with the price which as nice follow up on the CS front. Still what are the benefits of conferences: Networking - shaking hands and exchanging details Workshops - facilitated discussion with presentations Coffee or Watercooler chats - sidebar discussion with peers Presentations and case studies - slideware and demos Now given the advances in technology and delivery options do we need to spend many thousands of US$ to get these today? Paul and myself conceptualized the idea of a meeting room in a box when we worked in the same company. In essence it was all of th

In an interesting twist I thought I would do some background reading on Wireless Facilities Inc, commonly (you could say Jargon) known as WIFI after yet another shameless act to grab a phrase in common practice, stick a trademark on it and see the $$'s roll in. I wonder if they've ever thought of their abbreviated name, and how similar it seems to WiFi which is trademarked by the WiFi Alliance back in 2003...... This shameless practice should be stopped or before long every word in the Oxford English Dictionary will carry the ™ sign. I wonder who holds the trademark on ™ sign???

There's been a lot of talk on Net Neutrality and it's all gone quiet. I don't see why everyone is so surprised Net Neutrality is the Techno equivalent of "selective listening" something that we all learn from a very early age and continue to practice through life. Working in a tricky project right now where I am employed to advise the client on how they should be implementing their chosen product to give them the best of functional match and easy maintenance and upgrade paths. However the client employs a lot of selective listening and it got me thinking of "Advice Neutrality" ©™® and why baby Bell react the way they do. Many decision have already been made before I joined the project and no amount of discussion and persuasion is going to change their minds as it might be more work upfront (short term pain, long term gain) or it might mean that they lose their position of power (they are the SI) as the real client won't have to go for them for chan

Earlier I wrote about integrating the Gizmo VoIP client with Asterisk (open source PBX) . Well I mostly use Skype and not Gizmo, for not other reason than familiarity and first come first serve adoption patterns on my part. Skype is not a SIP based client. They wrote a proprietary protocol as they felt that SIP did not allow the navigation through the firewall that Skype clearly has. Warning: an aside.... This is one of the advantages for Skype for me. I am frequently on site and very rarely can I get to any other of the Intranet or Extranet parts of the corporate network. Yahoo messenger sometimes works but mostly MSN is blocked. However with Skypes snakelike ability to transit the firewall I always have the options of Skype chat and encrypted file transfer. People have been trying to get a SIP connection to Skype.... and succeeded for more information go and check TMC and the vendor RSDevs So good news all round and it runs in Asterisk. So could this be the first interconnect

When I first starting reading up on the E series I thought I saw some mention of the ability to use the E60 within the company PBX with support for 4 digit (extension) dialling. It seemed to disappear from the blurb on the Nokia site but as Mobile Burn have confirmed it is there. This is good news as now it opens up a realm of possibilities. If you are using a PBX with wireless support; something like Asterisk , then you can configure the SIP settings so that when you are within range of the WAP your shiny new E60 can be used as your normal deskphone. Impressive but so what? Asterisk 2.0 also supports Gizmo a SIP Softphone VoIP client similar to Vonage and Skype. This now allows me to route calls from Gizmo to me mobile handset. That's pretty useful if you're on Gizmo which is very US centric but does support Call In in the UK and Spain. It comes with the usual Call Out and Gizmo->Gizmo free calls. All very nice and relatively easy to do. Asterisk runs on Linux and so

Bluetooth was once a bit of a gimmick and was hard to come by. It was toyed with by some of the gadget freaks but never really found a proper niche as they were very few devices that you could connect with. The last couple of generations of handsets has seen Bluetooth have a pretty healthy comeback and now you can find the technology embedded into phones, thru headsets, stereo headphones and on to cameras. However until very recently you were still limited to one channel, this gave you very little flxibility and the profiles are a bit clunky. Again this is in a state of evolution and my future phone; the Nokia E60, comes with six bluetooth channels. There is the usual banter about how WiFi enabled handsets will start to undo the handcuffs that the Mobile Operator has put on your wrists, although in reality the MNO will still own the pipe, but many people forget about Bluetooth. It is a complementary connectivity option as it to can be a route into the UMA and out on to the mobile net

One of the weirdnesses of Thailand mobile patterns is the skewed use of SMS. I don't know for sure but based on the calls I receive and how I watch people using their handset SMS is not as widely used as in the UK or Europe. Why? two basic reasons The language itself; 44 consonants and 32 vowels Hello: สวัสดี SMS on a normal handset: 9 -> 8 (5 times) -> *(select a vowel) -> 9 -> 1(4 times) -> *(select a vowel) this is then 14 key presses to write hello 2. The people; Thais are very person centric and as such they would much rather speak to someone than conduct a conversation through remote control. IVR and CTI is used in Thailand but most people tend to go to "speak to a CSR" option as they want to have that one-to-one with a person and not a machine. So the operators (DTAC, TrueMove fka Orange, AIS) have a lot of spare SMS capactity that they're not gettting revenue for. DTAC have starting using a combination of PushMail a

Geoff Long wrote in the the Bankok Posts, Database (every Wednesday) in the emergence of "the Long Tail" into a wider audience. He is predicting that the term will become more widely used that today. The term was defined last year and the first cited example is that of a surge in the popularity of a book on climbing several years after it was written and referenced in a much more recently published book. The long tail is ideally suited to many forms of content today. Examples are MPS downloads and Books (electronic and some printed) where you can easily develop the concept of a back catalogue that generates interest. I know that I have 'discovered' a new author several books into their series and wanted to purchase and read everything else. This is certainly the case with Lee Child, David Baldacci and Stephen Leather . This behavior leads me to the conclusion that the Long Tail is the ideal viral marketing technique. For me Skype was pretty viral. I have been u

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

There is a lot of talk around MVNO's at present. Plus: with the announcement in the UK of 11 (eleven) new GSM licencees in the low power model Dean Bubley of Disruptive Wireless has good dialogue on what this means for the market space around MVNO's. He follows up yesterday with his take on the right time for SME MVNO's , this has long been the case in the wireline market with companies like Energis but the space has already started to develop with players like Genesis . Minus: Sprint Nextel have been very vocal this week in stating their desire to try and slow down the emergence of MVNO's by minmizing their part in the MVNE space. Sprint are one of the key providers of Minutes of Usage (MOU's) that allow some of the new MVNO's in the US to be able to offer the voice and data services that are bundled into their brand centric offering. They wish to observe how the current ones (ESPN, Disney, Helio etc) perform before adding anymore. This in many ways ma

Throughout our lives we are surrounded by increasingly complex technology. This is true for Mobile Phones, Software and how services are offered. What happen to the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle? Not so long ago technology evolution was driven by need. As an industry the software development sector has created an environment where platforms change faster than the consumer (the coder) can keep up with the changes. This has left companies in a situation whereby they can no longer estimate how long it takes to produce something as the code and technology underneath the demand is constantly changing and the developers always want to be at the bleeding edge. For example there is a company that has created a front end onto it's billing platform such that a CSR can perform their job. The complexity is reasonably low and could be written in Java Script. But this company has been ruled by the developers so we have Struts, Java web tiers, EJB's and all manner of code parts insid

Having experienced two extremes recently it got me thinking about Fixed Wireless Access. Not so many months ago I finally got my PSTN service connected to my house in Bangkok. This was after almost one year of waiting for someone to either cancel their service or for one of the two main providers to install more hardware to expand capacity. As you can imagine both scenarios are extremely unlikely and if a circuit did become available it was not guaranteed to be close enough to have good performance on ADSL service piggy backing on the same line. So that's scenario 1: massive population with little incentive by the operators to expand and invest in copper wire. Scenario 2: just go back from a two week holiday in New Zealand, awesome place, and scattered townships of small populations separated by hundreds of kilometers of scenery. Very nice for the camera, not so good for the telco. Having said that NZ Telecom have made substantial investments in both wired and wireless access.