Charlie discusses managed services model for IPTV advertising, the trials PacketVision has so far been involved in, and how the company's solution matches buyers and sellers of advertising time thus effectively operating a clearinghouse. Charlie also talks about the IPTV advertising benefits for the emerging new channels.

Alastair discusses factors determining FMC growth and reasons for slow FMC uptake so far. Tango Networks claims that its hybrid FMC architecture is a win-win solution for both the PBX vendors and carriers thus avoiding possible cannibalization of revenues of these two important players in the FMC game. You can hear more from Tango Networks during our upcoming webinar on FMC security.

Gareth talks about SIP trunking integrated with Microsoft OCS, possible hosted model for OCS, and Arena. Arena is a service offered by Interoute that includes things like switch partitioning and VoIP peering. This is a much shorter version of the video conversation. A full transcript of the interview will follow later this month.

You had a quiet launch. Is the obvious name of the company - phone.com - compensating for the quiet launch?

Obviously when you hear the company name it stands out. That is what attracted me as well. If you have a quality product with such a name it lends added credibility and perception of a bigger company. All of that leads to a lower marketing cost direct and indirect. We are three months into our launch. We see steady growth in traffic and customer acquisition. There is direct typing traffic and search results traffic via Google where the word phone is one of the most searched word. People find us very little advertising.

Do you think some of these visitors could be people who want to purchase phone.com domain and their search leads them to your page?

I don’t think so. The history of this domain name is interesting. It used to belong to a company that was acquired a long time ago and it sat idle for few years. After it was re-purchased and I came in, we kept a sign-up page where we did a survey of visitors asking them why they came to the site and what kind of phone related services they are interested in. We got statistics. Among those answers, there were a few questions about purchasing the domain. But whoever is serious about purchasing a domain knows how to find the owner. A vast majority of the traffic we had pre launch was people looking for phone services.

If you are getting good amount of traffic you could monetize that by offering advertising space. Is that a possibility in the future?

When you hear the name phone.com everybody has suggestions what to do with it. We took a decision to offer services ourselves rather than being a referral site for telecom services of other companies. Looking at advertising models, the answer is yes this is definitely something we will be exploring.

Continue reading "Interview with Ari Rabban, CEO, Phone.com" »

Ubiquisys, the Femtocell maker, is involved in 8 operator trials within Europe. The vendor also runs a few of its own trials in order to study how consumers react to the technology. Trial data collected so far suggests that 'coverage' ranks very high among the users. The second highest ranking feature is the 'simultaneous calls' (you can make 4 simultaneous calls through the Femtocell). Most of all, it is the mobile data in form of Internet browsing that has turned out to be a big hit in the trials. And since the trial participants have become used to fast Internet browsing on their cellphones inside their homes, they have shown preference to extend the usage (Internet browsing) on macro networks as well.

That could bring about a behavioural change among Femtocell users. Also read this on the subject.

In the video below, I am speaking to Keith Day, VP Marketing, Ubiquisys. I shot this around evening time out in the open. You will notice the video getting progressively darker as you play it. Enjoy the fountain in the background. One day – hopefully some time soon – you will start seeing HD quality videos from iLocus. But we would rather you looked at the content than the jazz we add around it. For now, I have an excuse for the noisy video.

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.

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.

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