 | Issue: | Asia-Pacific II 2006 |
| Article no.: | 16 | |
| Topic: | Personalisation ‘magic’ – a personal edge | |
| Author: | John Tull | |
| Title: | Chief Marketing Officer | |
| Organisation: | Lucent Technologies Asia Pacific | |
| PDF size: | 52KB |
About author
John Tull is the Chief Marketing Officer for Lucent Technologies Asia Pacific. Mr Tull has ten years’ experience starting-up technology-based product and services companies in both the telecom and IT sectors, principally in Asia. These include roles as Regional President of 360networks Asia; Senior VP of Level 3 Communications Asia; Director of Business Development, MCI-Worldcom Asia; and Business Development Project Director of BT Asia Pacific. Prior to this, Mr Tull spent ten years in Sales and Marketing roles with IBM and BT in Hong Kong and Australia. John Tull has a Master of Applied Finance (MAppFin) degree from Macquarie University in Australia, where he is currently a doctoral candidate, and has MBA and BA (Hons) degrees from the University of Otago, New Zealand.
Article abstract
The magic of technology is seen in today’s advanced telecommunications systems. Communications magic can locate, and instantly bring together for an online conference, a good number of widely separated people. They can share photos, text and information of all sorts, on their mobile devices, naturally, as though they were indeed together, without interrupting their conference call. Service providers seeking new revenue generating services see, in these highly interactive personalised services, ways to create real market advantage and then preserve it.
Full Article
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – Arthur C. Clarke, ‘Profiles of the Future’ 1961 If the response from audiences across Asia to the Harry Potter phenomenon is any indication, we all seem hungry for a little magic to be injected back into our lives. Although quidditch broomsticks are still beyond current capabilities, more imminent forms of ‘magic’ are promising great new ways for people to experience daily events. Good tales of magic always begin with the possible, the world of the believable, and then surprise us with imaginative extensions into the realms of mystery. This is not confined just to children’s books and fantasy novels. The telecommunications industry itself was founded on the ‘magic’ of Mr Bell’s first utterances, and the familiar extensions from there often appeared nothing short of wizardry in their own right, cross-country and then cross-ocean conversations, the uncoupling of voice from the wired world, and various attempts at allowing pictures and video clips to materialize on small screens anywhere that a signal can reach. Having now accepted all this as the stuff of normal daily life, what new magic can we conjure up, then, as an industry? Picture this everyday scene, which we’ll label ‘Friend’s Night Out -Take 1’. Sitting under a shady tree in the college quadrangle, Alice, the star of our vignette, spots a couple of pairs of friends wandering about and waves them over to have a chat. Alice picks her moment and gets their attention: “So, what’re we doing this weekend, guys?” Franco chimes in with the suggestion of dinner followed by a movie. While speaking, he waves to another friend who just turned the corner, summoning her to join in. The first question tackled is which movie to see. Several of the group had just picked up movie flyers at the café – they all start exchanging them, checking out the details and the star photos. Alice then pulls out her new mobile phone and downloads the movie trailer for their preferred movie and hands it around. Looks good, now, where to eat? There’s a new Cuban place near college, says Abhay, showing a leaflet; but where exactly? Luckily there is a local map on a nearby billboard. They identify the restaurant location and scribble down directions on notepaper for getting there from their respective apartments. Friday night is sorted out – what could be easier! This is a naturalistic, everyday experience that we typically find effortless, satisfying to engage in, and very productive. Now for the magic. What if all of this could occur despite all of the friends being in various parts of town, or even out of town – and, effectively, no-one even notices the difference? “One man’s magic is another man’s engineering” – Robert A. Heinlein ‘Time Enough For Love’ 1973 ‘Friend’s Night Out – Take 2’: Alice has decided she’d like to get a group of friends together for a night out, but currently she’s across town from the campus and not even sure who is in town. In this alternate picture, Alice consults an active phonebook service on her mobile handset to determine quickly which of her friends are available to be contacted. Getting the attention of everyone appearing ‘in town’ is easy – rather than making a round of phone-calls, she sends an instant message to all available parties, and then sets up a VoIP conference call instantly with everyone who replies. They quickly decide on dinner and a movie. Alice has a great new film in mind, so she adds a shared web browsing session while they chat and they concurrently visit the official film site to view the trailer via streaming video. After agreeing on the film, can they get a table at that Cuban restaurant; and how do they get there? That’s easy. Adding a shared web browsing session, they quickly visit the restaurant’s website, see that there’s an available table and make a reservation. Alice grabs the address and forwards it to the group via IM, instant messaging, and then using their location service, each friend gets a unique, customized set of directions delivered to their mobile phone. The real magic is that all of these various actions are done in a single communications session, from a single sign-on, without interrupting the flow of the excited conversation. “Essence of Strategy: choosing to perform activities differently than rivals do.” – Michael E. Porter ‘What is Strategy’ HBR 1996 Service providers are constantly seeking new services that can enable them to generate additional revenue, stand out from their competitors and increase subscriber loyalty. Seizing the opportunity to provide the ‘magic’ of highly interactive, personalised services like the scene played out above, is a strong strategic play that can both create real market advantage and then preserve it. One key enabler is the fast-maturing IP Multimedia Subsystem, IMS architecture. Because it is based on IP ,Internet protocol, IMS-based systems enable network operators to deliver services to any kind of device, on any kind of access network, wireless or wired, enabling anytime, anywhere communications. Since IMS supports a wide variety of multimedia applications – and ensures that they can interoperate smoothly – service providers can create, integrate and launch new, innovative services quickly and cost-effectively. For these reasons, IMS represents an attractive proposition for service providers of all kinds. Perhaps the more important question, however, is: what benefit does IMS offer end users that earlier service delivery platforms do not? IMS enables the delivery of the highly personalised, blended lifestyle services that emulate the natural world of communication. More specifically, IMS makes it possible to create services that blend voice, data, video and other multimedia content –delivered to subscribers anytime, anywhere – in ways that enhance their lifestyles. Recent primary market research indicates that there is significant demand for these kinds of services. You may ask, don’t we have these services already, in the services-rich sophisticated markets of Asia. After all, in Japan or Korea, consumers have a choice of many hundreds of services, with ring-tones, music downloads and gaming predominating, bundled together as affordable service packages. Blending is different than bundling. Bundling is mostly about providing economical access to a wide menu of separate services. By contrast, blending is all about enabling traditionally independent services to interact with one another, typically by sharing information such as buddy lists, location data, presence information and subscriber preferences and profiles. Because they are based on a single delivery platform, services such as instant messaging can be combined with IP voice and video capabilities to create such new offerings as multiparty video conferencing, that can be switched into and out of, without stopping and starting new sessions. The minimum requirements for delivering truly personalised, blended services would include making it possible for end-users to maintain a single, integrated ‘phonebook’,or contact list, that includes: email, instant messaging (such as MSN, Yahoo, etc.), fixed and mobile telephone numbers, VoIP addresses, mobile video gaming buddy lists and more. Managed through a client that can be deployed on a variety of devices (3G phones, PC’s, wireless-enabled devices such as PDAs or game consoles, TVs, IP phones and other multimedia devices), it would incorporate location and presence information in addition to more typical IP address and phone numbers, and captures that information in a simple, easy-to-use graphical format. If Alice, star of our vignette, had instead been ‘Alice Inc’, IMS would have additional things to offer as well. For instance, imagine extending the features of an IP PBX solution over mobile networks, enabling business users to access all of the capabilities of their office PBX system on their mobile phones, including shared phone number for desk and mobile phone, four-digit extension dialing, and a single voice mailbox. IMS is attracting a lot of attention from Asia’s leading service providers, several of whom have announced strategic initiatives in IMS. The driver is to find ways to ‘monetize’ the capabilities of the next generation networks being planned. Naturally there are challenges to making IMS services a reality. The technical challenge involved in the above scene is considerable, as it involves the transparent convergence of multiple sessions, services and systems, across multiple operators’ networks. Fortunately IMS is strongly backed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, 3GPP and 3GPP2, which has had a great deal of experience with managing the development of complex technology standards that require the integration of a variety of diverse elements. Progress on the IMS standard is benefiting from that experience and moving forward at a rapid pace. As a result, the sort of exciting IMS-based personalised services I’ve described here, and many, many more, will be coming to your mobile phone, PC, PDA or gaming terminal (any to any, transparently, just like in real life) sometime soon and putting the magic back into telecoms.
