September 06, 2006
No news is good news
Having a total time management meltdown this week: Edinburgh, Newcastle, Berlin, London, New York, Cape Cod, and Boston. So here’s a tiny thought or two.
Airline magazine.
Advert, Advert, Advertorial.
At the conference in Berlin, the telco execs still just dismiss Skype and its ilk as inferior products. Clearly, they personally don’t use the competition. Voice quality is generally superior to the PSTN, particularly as these days much discount PSTN service involves convoluted routings and transformations. They don’t understand the value of integrated presence, sharing and conferencing. The only telecom ads in the airline magazine were for Skype products. They should be more worried. I’m increasingly bearish on Skype’s long-term prospects, but they’re teaching new and dangerous competitors what works and what doesn’t.
You can download my presentation from the conference in Berlin I spoke at here.
This payphone in Berlin Tegel airport was busy trying to sell me stuff on its big screen:
Can you think of any other screens for telephony that don’t do a good job of cross and up selling you services? An exercise for the reader…
By the way, the Ottawa Voice 2.0 event also now has a blog that you ought to be subscribed to.
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Hello Martin,
I saw your presentation in Berlin. One question is coming up to me. You talked about the idea of PSTN 2.0, but not in deep. How do you mean this slide? Was this only a hint or is there a concrete concept for a telco in your mind? I think the best opportunities to realize a PSTN 2.0 principle is to use the big customer base of the telco as a given dataset. E.g. to find another person with specific attributes like call volumes. What do you think about this?
Best regards
Peter
You can read my thoughts on the matter at http://www.telco2.net/blog/2006/07/should_we_build_pstn_20.html.
The call detail records are an unexploited pot of gold -- a huge amount of latent social network information that, with the user's permission, can be turned to good use.
Posted by: at September 13, 2006 02:24 PM