Indonesia economy’s strong growth has propelled a growing middle class eager to spend in more sophisticated telecommunication services. At least this is the conclusion from several research companies that have deeply studied this market. The establishment of a growing and sophisticated young professional segment, highly-educated and well employed will represent the next growing consumption-engine, but will also set the stage for other segments to follow.
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The 50,000 million USD in which the social networking site, Facebook has been valuated after the entry of an investment vehicle from Goldman Sachs financial have returned some “internet bubble” déjà vu feelings to the market: Companies only measured on their number of users, their growth or their ability to serve as a gateway to the Internet and the irrational interest from investors to participate in their capital structure.
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Telefonica has been trying different strategies to tap into the exponential growth of social media phenomenon. And tt seems like this time they are making their biggest bet in this area by acquiring 90% of Tuenti, the second largest social networking site in Spain for 75 Million Euros.
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Analysts and telecom executives haven’t been highlighting extensively product and service commoditization as the main risk operators will face in the coming years driven by their marginalization into the value chain as a mere “bit pipe” provider. Meanwhile new media players are expanding their reach in the mobile space with strong and global brands threatening current operator’s revenues.
Faced with a bleak prospect, many have considered that Telco’s future is to become just a dump pipe similar to what utility companies are today. But, how true is this hypothetical and “devastating” outlook?
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One of the biggest challenges technology companies face these days is to maintain a fast pace of innovation and try to foster an entrepreneurial culture where employees can bring lead and drive the development of new ideas.
Google is a great example of innovative culture and one of the programs that I really like is their Innovation 80/20 model, so called “innovation time off”, where employees are encourages spending up to 20% of their time working in their own innovation projects or ideas.
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Last week Vision Mobile consulting released a new study regarding application stores. The report is extremely interesting since the main sponsor is Telefonica developer community and some of the findings are quite disruptive showing how mobile operators losing the battle for application developer’s heart. continue reading »
Some weeks back, the United States Federal Communications Commission released a survey on consumer mobile experience. The survey indicated that 30 million Americans or one in six mobile users have experienced “bill shock,” a sudden increase in their monthly bill that is not caused by a change in service plan.
It also discovered that almost 50% of mobile users who have plans with early termination fees and 66% of home broadband users with early termination plans don’t know the amount of the fees they’re accountable for.
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During a Barclay’s conference last week, Verizon Wireless CEO, Lowell McAdam stated that for the commericial launch of its LTE network some time this year, the company will be introducing a tiered or metered pricing data plans.
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GlaxoSmithKline, The pharmaceutical giant, has decided to open to public the design of 13,500 chemical compounds that could inhibit malaria, In order to foster collaboration among scientists and researchers interested on developing a drug that can control this disease. The malaria is a condition caused by parasites which are transmitted to the human blood through a mosquito bite. It is one of the world’s biggest health problems with more than 210 million cases annually. Most of these cases affect poor countries where people live with less than 1USD per day.
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New research into online behavior suggests that up to 44% of users using illegal download sites could be converted into paying music subscribers if services were priced correctly. Most of 44% P2P users would be willing to pay a small fee every month to continue downloading from their favorite sites on a legal basis.
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