Is it worth the hassle to work with telcos?

With the TC3 Summit, the annual meeting of global carriers and startups and vendors, just weeks away - Derek Kerton, Chairman of the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley examines the historically rocky relationship between startups and telcos, and asks the question, is forming a partnership worth the hassle? Since the late 90s, the pendulum has swung back and forth for startups considering partnering with phone companies. Early this century, many VCs, dot com, and Internet companies were drawn to the allure of the mobile Internet. But the network operators were so clumsy at partnering with …

Global Mobile News Round-up – Week 25th May

Android Pay unveiled plus all the news from Google I/O, Swatch to Launch Smartwatch with payments, 5 things we got totally wrong about FinTech, OTT threat to India voice revenues and more... Each week the MEF team curates mobile stories from around the world. Essential news you may have missed, the latest market insight & data nuggets, the Global Mobile News Round-up offers an instant international mobile content and commerce snapshot.  Global News Stories Android Pay is all about tokenisation, (mostly) replaces Google Wallet arstechnica On Thursday, Google officially …

The Future of MNOs – Utility Cash Cows or Mobile Service Stars?

In the age of app stores and OTT services, mobile network operators have struggled to develop new revenue streams in the provision of content and services. Here, Mike Bradbury, CEO of billing and payments consultancy, T-Exec argues that MNOs need a cultural over-haul to compete in the mobile services economy. It is accepted fact that mobile is the dominant technological force in 2014. Latest statistics show that smartphone penetration sits at 71%, 53% of internet access is from a mobile, m-commerce accounts for 27% of all online shopping, 71% of all social media access is via a mobile handset …

Location based services – why operators hold all the cards

The area of Location based services (LBS) has been getting a lot of attention of late, and it’s no wonder, Juniper Research has highlighted that the Mobile Context and Location Services market is expected to generate revenue of $43.4 billion by 2019, up from $12.2bn in 2014.  With this in mind it is clear why businesses within the OTT, telecoms and media space are vying to get their piece of this promising revenue stream. Donald Stuart, CEO of mobile engagement firm, Brainstorm, explains why mobile operators are well placed to take advantage of the revenue streams opened up by location …

Creating Conversations in the Smartphone Era

Stacy Adams, Vice President of Marketing at mBlox shares what you need to know about Application-to-Person SMS versus Over-the-Top messaging, and the battle for consumer mobile engagement. Today’s messaging landscape is rapidly diverging. Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Alibaba’s investment in Tango emphasizes today’s shift by consumers to over-the-top (OTT) messaging applications to communicate peer-to-peer. In contrast, the use of application-to-person (A2P) SMS messaging, the channel businesses use to engage with customers, is on the rise. The increased activity in OTT messaging …

10 reasons why companies will keep on texting: Cassio Bobsin Machado, CEO Zenvia

Every week, we ask  our members to sum up everything we need to know about a given topic in 10 easy-to-digest bites.  This week  Cassio Bobsin Machado, CEO at Brazilian SMS company, Zenvia, gives us ten reasons why SMS still endures.   Texting fever hit the world throughout the last decade, driving a new behaviour on almost every mobile user from 8 to 80.  In 2002 some 250 billion SMS were sent, meanwhile 2012 saw 6.7 trillion text messages beeping worldwide. As mobile operators figured out how to charge some bits of information for a few cents, this massive adoption created a tremendous …

Sign up for our next webinar – Monday 16th July

Hot on the heels of the recent webinar from MEF LatAm on the Code of Conduct for VAS in Brazil, MEF Middle East is set to host another on line thought leadership session on the charged topic of the challenges facing network carriers in the face of OTT content and services.We have some fantastic guest speakers from both camps, listed below, including representatives from the Qtel Group and Telefonica discussing the advances by network operators to roll out Rich Communication Services (RCS) strategies, and from OTT service providers Nimbuzz and Vopium who will be sharing their market …