One thing that will not be integrated into a unified messaging box is the snailmail. As much as I would like my post to appear in my inbox, this is not going to happen ........... unless you read iLocus blogs!!!! If there are secretarial services available whereby I could outsource my postal mail handling, I could achieve many things: I could filter out the junk post; I could get my mail delivered to my email account; I could send out autoresponder to those marketers where I want to be taken off the list; I could send autoresponders in case I move address. I could save some money on repeatedly having to pay for the re-directs if I move more often.

Just like you instruct the postal service to divert your post to a new address when you move, you could instruct the postal service to divert your post to this snailmail outsourcing (SMO) service provider.

I am at the Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) analyst event in Amsterdam. The company, an 8 month old entity, was set up mainly to achieve synergies on the services side of the business. And that is what the presentations seem to focus on: the services aspect. There was some sneak preview provided by parent company Nokia regarding its Internet services model going forward. NSN also revealed some useful data. Serving over 1.2 billion lines now, NSN ranks among top 2 telecom vendors in most geographical regions except North America where it is a distant 6th.

We are told that the combined entity, coming in parts from Siemens and Nokia, are left with over 2 billion Euros worth synergetic revenues which NSN expects to cash in by end 2008. Thirty new cross selling deals have so far been closed since the merged entity started operations in April this year. While much of 2Q07 was spent in the merger process, Q3 saw revenues touching 3.7 billion Euros which represents Q3/Q2 sequential growth of 7%. That puts NSN at number two in carrier revneues - behind Ericsson. Incidentally, the large BSNL tender that made news recently (because NSN refused to accept the contract at the set prices) was awarded to Ericsson today. NSN walked away from the deal “because it did not make long term business sense.”

Nokia is in the process of publishing its Smartphone 360 Panel survey results. The company gave a sneak preview today. As they hurried through the slides I could note down only a few pointers. There is going to be an analyst webcast (probably on 18th of this month) which discusses the results. So I will update you when these results become available. Basically Nokia has embarked on a permission based user behaviour study which seeks to establish smartphone usage patterns. The company does publish some results from the survey from time to time. I could find one old link here. Anyway, following are the survey pointers the company revealed today:

Users spend an average of 48 minutes per day on their mobile phones (smartphone). 12% of the time is spent on making voice calls. Messaging consumes 37% of the time; multimedia 16%; PIM 14%; Games 4%; Browsing 8%.

What are the synergies of NexTone-Reefpoint merger? Are we confining the synergies to FMC or are we looking at Fixed AND Mobile AND the FMC opportunities?

That is the first time anyone has asked the question that way. And that is very insightful. One of the component parts in this merger comes from the mobile world and the other from the fixed world. And we will let the products from the component parts serve their respective markets. Bringing these two entities together is also complementary. One such complementary product is the IBG which we have already announced.

Is the thrust area for the combined company going to be mobile operators?

The thrust area will be operators that are looking at blending the two networks. For example we are talking to cable MSOs who are exploring the femtocell option. As the world moves towards SIP mobile devices, our offering will be very compelling to the operators.

What will the combined company have in terms of capabilities that competitors like Acme Packet on one hand and Azaire/Stoke on the other hand will not have?

We don’t see companies like Acme Packet having mobility capability like we have. Nor do we see startups like Azaire and Stoke having the signalling sessions management capabilities that we inherit from NexTone platform integrated into one IBG.

NexTone on its own has been playing in the tier 2 market. Reefpoint on the other hand has a couple of tier 1 customers. What are the prospects of the combined entity getting tier 1 business?

NexTone has started to gain traction in the tier 1 space. As a new merged company we will be pursuing the partnership approach versus direct sales approach in order to get inside the tier 1s. Partners like ZTE – we made the partnership announcement today – are significant players in their respective geographies.

There are quite a few companies providing mirror numbers now. Where are we headed with this interesting new business model?

Rebtel was actually one of the first ones that created a local phone number for (both) the party to be called and yourself, and then to either connect the two local calls or enable direct calling. That concept of telephony has now been applied in various different contexts. The nice thing about this service is that it is viral. You invite a friend into the service and they can invite you and that way it spreads, so the market for this service is quite big.

But with SIP, these mirror numbers were possible several years ago. Right?

It is not about getting the local numbers and using the latest voice technology. It is about leveraging the internet for an ordinary mobile phone.

Is this model going to scale? If this trend catches on, we might probably need a trillion phone numbers worldwide?

People today are not calling phone numbers they are calling the name associated with number, which is a major behavioral change. We are using numbers in a smart way. The usage pattern of our subscribers shows that those who call international numbers, they only tend to call their top five contacts frequently. And for business callers they spent 90% of their calling time with top five contacts too. It is easy to type these five favorite numbers in the address book.

You must be paying to procure the numbers. How do you make money? Is it mainly through the phone charges you put on calls or is there any ad insertion as well?

There are phone charges. But we also get a small share in the interconnect revenue which offsets the cost used in connecting the numbers and in converting TDM to IP.

Floppies have almost vanished now and flash drives have become bread and butter. However CDs and DVDs are ubiquitous and cheaper than flash drives. Most of our back up data or music or games and software is on CDs. The ones you burn yourself, you hardly ever bother to label them properly. The best you do is put a black marker over it. And even that is not descriptive enough.

If we could somehow have our mobile phones display title and file names of files saved on CDs that would save people like me from going through the cruel ritual or changing two dozen CDs each time we want to search for some file. I suppose you could use some technology similar to laser pointer inside a mobile phone whereby the laser is shone onto to a CD surface and an application on the mobile screen displays the title and names of files contained on the CD. That is one application of laser pointer technology within mobiles. You could also then use your mobile as a laser pointer in your presentations. I will leave it to you to decide which one is more important.

Interaction is important to any content site. Although comments system is an old Internet application, it is still the main way to interact. I however fail to motivate myself to leave a comment on a blog entry as much as I may be inclined to do so. I also think that written comments can be less articulate and unable to convey the intended opinion. Not all are able to write with ease. Speech is far more powerful and articulate.

So let us have some application like Snapvine integrated with Wordpress and Movable Type. All voice comments will of course need moderating but that should not be a problem (if it is part of your work!!!!). Leaving voice comments would be convenient especially for mobile Internet users. It is very difficult to type on mobiles and other handhelds, especially if your fingers cut a bunch-of-bananas figure.

So we got the video bug too! We had originally planned to make short documentaries on various topics relevant to us. But I don’t think we have the resources just yet to embark on such ambitious projects. So we will instead be posting these near-uncut video interviews. The Q&A video interview series kicks off with discussion on carrier choices with regard to EPON and GPON. I am interviewing Yukihiro Fujimoto, Head Supervisor, Optical Access Systems Project, NTT. There is some background noise and the volume might not be adequate. I am afraid that is the sort of presentation you will have to put up with for some time till we get our technical person to acquire some video editing skills. And depending upon how you like the content, we are willing to improve presentation for sure. One thing I would request however: It is not feasible to travel all the time for these interviews. If some of you would be willing to do these things off the webcam that would keep the video content going. Thanks. JR

According to our estimates, in Q3, there was an aggregated total shipment of 259 thousand IP media server ports shipped by independent media server makers. North America accounted for majority of the deployments in 3Q07. CALA saw some ramp up during the quarter. An estimated $14.9 million was generated by the IP based media servers in the carrier segment in Q3, which is down by about $2.5 million or about 14% decrease compared to 2Q07.

Cantata merger with Dialogic could be one of the reasons for this one-off decline. Although IP Unity media server shipments grew substantially, Radisys, the leader in this segment did not show much increase its shipments as compared to previous quarters.

Here are some of findings from 3Q07 minutes data survey:

• Service providers worldwide recorded an estimated traffic volume of 328.7 billion VoIP minutes during 3Q07

• Split: 72.3 billion local, 232 billion national long distance (nld), 24.4 billion international long distance (ild)

• Local split: 69.1 bn is retail VoIP, 3.2 is wholesale local VoIP i.e white labelling

We have published an interview with Ivar in the past as well. However this time you get to actually see him talk about things. He talks to me about mobile PBX. Ivar discusses the evolution of the PBX product, how companies including Microsoft and Asterisk could define the value chain in mobile PBX space, and the impact his company - OnRelay - could have on the business of PBX/handset vendors.

OnRelay is actually one of the very few companies that have commercial mobile PBX deployments. Ivar talks about the number of licenses they have sold so far. We also talked about the types of mobile PBX service models that OnRelay enables: models including enterprise hosted, carrier hosted, or hybrid mobile PBX set up. I had a somewhat similar discussion with Alastair Westgarth, CEO, Tango Networks a few days back. I will be posting that video interview next week. Alastair was not allowed any make up either.

My father has self-scribbled at least a dozen telephone diaries over the last few years, entering and updating numbers. When he travels he carries with him the necessary diaries. I have not been successful in persuading him to use electronic directories or the available directory application on mobile handsets. He is naturally good at remembering phone numbers. I am on the other hand quite the opposite. I only remember the phone numbers of my office and home. For me, and for several people around the world, an irreversible change has taken place. We click a name. We don’t punch in the numbers.

This is one of the reasons why minutes are increasingly migrating away from landlines to mobiles. This is also one of the reasons why providers of mirror numbers are gaining some traction. Jaxtr just announced that it signed up 5 million subscribers. The fact that people click names rather than remembering numbers means that your contacts could have any phone number. You do not care what phone number sits behind a contact name.

Just like you do not need to know the IP address of iLocus website, you can also make the phone numbers irrelevant by promoting the use of usernames perhaps. The difference however between a domain name and a username is that a domain name can be unique. Usernames are not unique. You could have the same usernames across Google mail and Hotmail for instance. Making phone-mapped (and later just SIP-address-mapped) unique usernames could create lots of new dynamics. Imagine if you could dial from Skype (or from Gizmo or from an IVR assisted VoBB /PSTN phone) the name of a business like iLocus and you get connected to our office phone number (or a number we designate against the username iLocus). Such a set up could be beneficial for businesses. That is just one area of impact.

Geography might be history, thanks to the Internet. But I am still interested in the local content and news. By local I mean just the 1km radius area. I had a look at this application called Your Neighbours on Facebook. It is being used by some 800 active users. That is all. There is no concerted effort to engage and network local communities online. The challenge in engaging the local community online stems from our lifestyle. Unlike friends and colleagues you do not know the email address of your neighbour to invite him over to your Facebook network, but you still have some appetite for the local community news.

I think local community networks can be as popular as your existing social networking sites. I once asked a local shopkeeper in my locality to start a weekly newsletter writing about the community issues and news updates. I thought at the time that this would be one of the best ways to get the local content. I still think this is the way you do it. I am thinking local citizen journalism. So if I live in Soura in Srinagar, the writeups or videos I upload on the site should be categorized under Soura category.

I wrote last time about how various service providers are waiting for Sprint’s launch of mobile WiMAX. This launch is affecting decision timeframe of many other providers exploring WiMAX. There is no doubt about that. Even some of the fixed WiMAX projects seem to be on hold, playing the wait and watch game. But they are surely not watching Sprint only.

In fact if we look at the WiMAX services today, the landscape is dominated by emerging markets. There are around 100 countries among the emerging markets where broadband penetration rate is under 5%. These countries are seriously looking at WiMAX as the alternative. They include Saudi Arabia, Paraguay, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Pakistan, Indonesia etc. Looking at the market requirements of these countries, WIMAX is going to be a multi billion dollar game. BSNL in India has announced that it will spend around $1 billion on WIMAX in coming years.

Sprint is not the only provider that has budgeted over a billion for WIMAX. VSNL (India), Optus (Australia), NTT DoCoMo (Japan) and Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan) have all set aside a billion or over for WIMAX. These projects amount to expected investments of nearly $10-$15 billion till 2012 in these countries.

Vonage bashing continues. Nortel is the latest one to join the bashing bandwagon. The vendor has filed a lawsuit against Vonage for patent infringement. This is a great case study for the future aspiring service providers looking to do serious business in telecommunications. The moral is simple: if you develop your own solutions, you can only last as long as you are small. Extension of the moral: once you get big (and you are still using in-house solutions), get ready for the IPR headaches.

Over 1.83 million IP-only PBX lines were sold in 3Q07 generating revenues of over $182 million during the quarter. Cisco was the overall market leader.

Among the non-Cisco shipments in the category, Mitel emerged leader with 36% market share, followed by ShoreTel.

North America accounted for nearly 71% of the pure IP PBX license shipments during 3Q07, followed by EMEA. Shipments to CALA and Asia-Pacific were not substantial during the period.

Please note that effective 1Q07, iLocus has discontinued coverage of shipments related to legacy PBX upgrades or the hybrid systems. We focus on only the pure IP PBX shipments in the enterprise VoIP equipment quarterly tracking service.

At the end of 3Q07 there were estimated 9.4 million IP TV subscribers worldwide. An estimated 23% of live IP TV subscribers are being served by proprietary IP TV middleware. Those who have been successful selling the middleware solution off-the-shelf are still typically confined to one or two large accounts. Thomson leads the pack because France Telecom is the leader among the service providers. France Telecom still accounts for a big majority of Thomson middleware deployment.

I shared with you some of the results on December 4th. In addition to the results mentioned in that post, here are some interesting findings revealed by Nokia:

Where are outbound calls being made: On the move 47%; At home 29%; From office 24%.

Where is packet data being consumed: On the move 35%; At home 44%; From office 21%.

Data traffic use by survey panellists: Increased from 6mb/month in 2006 to 14 mb/month in 2007. If we look at the distribution of data traffic by bearer, WiFi/WLAN accounted for 31%, WCDMA 54%, EDGE 7%, GPRS 7%. Not all panellists had WiFi. WiFi sessions were longer with an average session duration of 4.5 minutes.

Market: Redline Communications serves fixed / mobile wireless broadband access and backhaul solutions.

Deployments: The company presently has around 50,000 installations in 80 countries across 6 continents. It works with a network of more than 100 partner distributors that support voice, data and video services.

Scale of Deployments: A typical deal for Fixed WiMAX ranges between $250 - $500k in the beginning and can go upto $2 - $20 Million for a commercial deployment over a period of several years. For Mobile WiMAX the company expects larger trials with multi-city rollouts similar in investments to current 2G/3G mobile coverage at 50% of the CAPEX involved in a 3G network It has currently 130 networks globally testing and trailing its solution. 33% of these networks are commercial deployments. Some of the commercial WiMAX networks running on Redline solution include Personal in Paraguay, Saudi Telecom and MTN. Personal has around 4000 subscribers presently and expects to reach 10,000 by the year end. Similarly Saudi Telecom has installed around 500 base stations and MTN is targeting around 10,000 subscribers with the launch of services by the year end in two cities.

Expanding services revenue is one of the main reasons why Nokia and Siemens merged their telecom infrastructure units. In the video we discussed how far the services side would develop at NSN going forward. We also talked about Voice 2.0 and the impact of Nokia’s OVI Internet services model on NSN. Other bits included areas of improvement such as NSN’s market position in North America. I am speaking to Jyrki Holmala, Head of Sales, and Martin Blades, Head of Marketing, Service Core and Applications division within NSN.

The background 'noise' is Pekka Ala-Pietilä, CEO, Blyk speaking next door. Pekka was the former Nokia chief. I am also trying to get some input from Blyk. Perhaps a post after the holiday period.

IPTV advertising focuses on and highlights one important aspect: more targeted advertising … to the extent that you for the first time enable local business advertising on an organized scale. I briefly spoke to UK based PacketVision on the subject. PacketVision works with operators and channels enabling them to beam different advertisements to different IPTV viewers determined by various factors which could be demographic, geographic or other factors like interests and preferences of these viewers.

Obviously this sort of advertising works if you have an updated and reliable database of demographic profiles. How is an operator or a channel going to have data on things like income, profession, interests, hobbies, gender etc about its customers so that it targets the right ad to the right person? According to PacketVision, initially the segmentation of the operator's TV subscribers will be based on what they (the telco) know about them e.g. location and perhaps the financial band. As they hold only a very limited amount of info on each subscriber the main targeting will be geographic to start with.

Just projecting forward the discussion in Faisal’s post yesterday ….

“ …. Targeted advertising will do wonders if you have local businesses and corner shops being able to advertise on local household TVs. However the telcos and channels do not have the capability to sell ad slots to local small businesses though some have their own Yellow Pages salespeople. Generally speaking the ad agencies only work with major brand advertisers. What is needed for this market to scale and take off is a web-based ad /media-buying agency able to provide self-help ad creation, campaign management and ad slot purchase. There are a number of companies starting to offer these services e.g. Spot Runner in the US and Spotzer from the Netherlands.….”

The problem with Spot Runner type web based business in TV adverting is the lead time. In this particular case the lead time for an advertiser to see his ad run on the TV is 14 days. A clearinghouse that consists of Spot Runner type web interface and an advertising server (or a server that works through APIs with an existing IPTV advertising server) could in theory cut down the lead time to zero. That is if there is demand for such instant gratification from the advertisers’ side. The fact that IPTV uses open source TCP/IP, such a clearinghouse would be easier to set up in an IPTV environment rather than in a legacy cable/satellite headend environment.

And if we are to believe that IMS will soon control IPTV elements as well, then the peering providers could be ideal for starting such IPTV advertising clearinghouse business. Another possible candidate could be sites promoting local communities.

Ever wondered why similar startups surface roughly at the same time? There is a generally-held view that since these startups talk to similar VCs and since VC community is a tightly knit community, the idea spreads around. Since I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, I have to look for a plausible explanation. After all …… assuming for a second that VCs spill beans, why do similar ideas reach VCs at the same time in the first place?

Different forms of an innovative idea evolve or surface at roughly the same time because sustainable innovation stems from necessity. The problems and issues you are facing and thinking about are also faced by and pondered upon by several, among whom some like yourself could be thinking of possible solutions to the issue. This is no multilateral telepathy. It is a simple case of people around the world being limited by common technological contours looking to stretch those contours further out. Among the possible solutions that people think of, there just happen to be a subset of those solutions that have similar specs. And so you have similar startups mushrooming at roughly the same time.

Your incoming call solution is essentially click-to-call where you forward the incoming call to either a VoIP client or an IM client or a designated cell phone or land line. Now, we have had the first generation of web telephony vendors like Net2phone and eFusion (which is now eStara) enable similar features. What is different now in terms of capabilities?

Our basic intention has been to enable VoIP without the need to download anything. The click-to-call capability fits within our overall solution accordingly. Suppose you don’t have access to your laptop and you need to call from some place where you have just plain old Internet connection. With our solution you can make the calls without downloading anything. The VoIP capability is enabled by a web integrated dialer.

But we have had companies like Dialpad and couple others who offered web integrated VoIP dialers.

I don’t know much about those companies. But there have been a previous generation of companies that offered Java based clients. We do Flash based embedded clients. Flash is now ubiquitous. Our web based Flash VoIP client is merely 3k in size. It shows up instantly upon clicking.

Do you think the differentiating factor in your click-to-call approach might be the fact that you had previous click to call application targeted mostly at the businesses, and now you people have extended that offering to consumers?

That is right. There are numerous personal sites and so many profile pages on social networking sites now. That drives the demand and makes the timing right for extending click-to-call to consumers.

Here are my top 10 predictions for 2008 ....

1. Web mashup will stay hot. Old wine in new bottles mostly. I expect to see old VoIP applications being revived just because of the timing factor. Social networking will drive a lot of this.

2. Will see some of the legacy service providers also trying the ad supported telephony. Perhaps a two tier service: one with ads and one without.

3. Wireless VoIP: Mobile operators and MVNOs will launch private labelled Voice-over-Wireless-Broadband (VoWB), with the solutions coming from the existing VoWB providers. A few operators will start their own VoWB services letting consumers leverage the integrated SIP client capability in smartphones, or by trying to occupy the mobile screen with their own softclients. Within the mobile telephony arbitrage play, mobile callback will start to lose appeal. VoWB will strengthen in comparison. Packetized Wireless Trunking will take a back seat because consumer VoWB does not need a managed packet core. VoIP over WiMAX will gain traction during 2008 as service providers in emerging markets add VoIP to their already deployed WiMAX network.

How big a proportion of your business comes from VoIP providers as opposed to call centers and radio stations etc?

It has so far been mainly the radio stations and call centers. We serve over 450 radio and TV stations: businesses with high call volumes. VoIP is a new sector for us.

Can non-telco businesses really generate high call volumes?

It is interesting how people treat only Internet as the interactive media whereas radio has been interactive since the day when the DJ sat behind the turn table and took calls on listener lines. One of our radio station customers generates about a quarter million calls a day. Another customer, Radio Disney, does about 5 million calls a month across their network.

How did you stumble upon this idea of ad insertion into telephony call streams?

We were originally in the business of collecting data on inbound radio station calls, data related to what people wanted to hear. Along the way we realized that we could turn this into a targeted marketing opportunity where we could promote complementary products and services: Movie releases, CD releases, Concert tours, etc. And it was very successful ... to the extent that we had no more traffic left to monetize and so we had to explore other high call volume segments.

Which segments did you probe after the radio stations?

After radio stations and call centers, we explored the calling cards segment. We work with a lot of calling card companies including the largest calling card company in the country, IDT. We are picking hundreds of millions of calls from calling card companies on a monthly basis. We have now focussed our attention towards VoIP providers. We are about to sign two large deals.

I haven’t seen eFax type services on social networking sites. It would be nice to receive faxes on your personal pages. It sounds like a genuine necessity. Although that pushes social networking towards communications more, but that is going to happen eventually. You are likely to have your mails being ported on these sites through simple popmail readers. In fact I would be surprised if there is no popmail reader available as an application on Facebook etc. And that pops up another idea. Let me post that after this one.