TeleMedia Strategy
The Bleeding Edge of Disruption

Sat, Nov 01, 2008

Welcome to the inaugural issue of TeleMedia Strategy—and the first installment of “The Bleeding Edge.”  I hope you enjoy what you find here, but be warned: the edge is pretty far out there… 

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, I had the opportunity to work with some communications service providers, developing different transformation strategies for parts of their businesses.  As is typical in the telecom space, most of these initiatives were too tactical to be called truly transformational, disconnected as they were from the rest of the business.  And, more than likely, they were doomed to failure anyway, thanks to the standard, incessant infighting.   

You know, it’s really a shame that so many companies still allow various cliques and fiefdoms to pursue competing agendas, needlessly diluting available budgets.  Ultimately, this competition prevents anyone from making any real transformational impact.  It’s unfortunate most of the time, but it's especially disatrous in this time of retrenchment, reorganization, and what is approaching general panic in the industry. 

Everyone knows it’s a problem, but it seems that the largest companies—the ones who need it the most—simply lack the executive will to tackle the wholesale organizational restructuring that needs to occur.  But hey, if you can’t do it in the middle of the worst economy we’ve seen since the Great Depression, and use that as a convenient excuse, when can you?  But then again, those silos hold a lot of power and really don’t like to share.  So, with their businesses being threatened on every front, why would anyone in the executive ranks want to take on the real internal issues that prevent them from creating agility in the business?  Let's just build things bigger, faster, and with zero down!  Hello...?  Detroit calling…  

Anyway, back to those transformation initiatives…  The one thing that stood out for me was the lack of agreement within the middle-management set with regard to whether they even needed some kind of transformational change.  Huh?!

Now, I’d been hearing for some time (via the media) that the vision was Telco 2.0 (meaning content would save us all).  Executive management's rationale was that, left unchecked, Web 2.0 would quickly start commoditizing broadband.  Hence, the telecoms needed to get into content transactions streams.  Made sense to me…  

I don’t think everybody got the memo, though.  Lots of people seemed to be waiting around for instructions.  It was almost as if someone higher up walked in and said, “Hey, we need to change,” but then walked out with no further vision, guidance, or rationale.  Maybe everyone did get it, but decided it wasn’t their job.  Maybe they figured that sooner or later Moses would show up and lead them to the Promised Land.  Who knows?  

I’ve been with both AT&T and Verizon (back when it was still called GTE), so I wasn’t totally shocked at the whole thing.  But I was definitely disappointed.  All I know is that everyone seems to roll their eyes, as if to say, “Here we go again...”  The more things change the more they stay the same.  The whole thing reminded me of a discussion I had some years ago.  About trains…

About seven or eight years ago I found myself in the Main Operations Center for Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) railroad.  I’d been in a lot of MOCs over the years, and none of them can touch BNSF.  I was told that, from the BNSF center, you could find out the color of every railroad crossing light in the western United States at any given moment – all arranged from east to west on three walls of a gigantic hangar.  I didn’t believe it until they walked me over to the crossing nearest my house and I watched the traffic stop as a train went by.  Total Mission Control.  After that I just shut up and admired all the cool lights.

But I digress… So, shortly after the tour I sat down with Fred, the guy who invited me over.  We talked about the huge telecom network that BNSF owned, the cost drivers of that end of the business, and eventually the competition.  I assumed that the competition was the five or six other railroad companies scattered across the northwestern hemisphere.  Imagine my surprise when I was politely but firmly corrected.  It turns out that Fred and the other railroad execs were not at all worried about their competing rail-lines.  In fact, they engaged in a running dialogue.  They held regular industry meetings together.  They shared track, operating crews, management tips, and many other things.  If someone got in a jam, one of the others might send an engine and crew to help out.  Needless to say, I found all of this quite amazing.

What did keep Fred and the other guys up at night was what the trucking industry was doing.  It was Mayflower, Yellow Freight, and all the other 18-wheeled brethren that posed the real threat to the railroads.   To the railroads, the trucking companies represented an entirely different distribution system, and at a very different price point.  And what's more, the trucking companies also controlled the last few miles to the point of consumption.  Ever seen a freight train behind a supermarket?  

What's more, trucking companies frequently use trains to move their trailers over long distances—because it's cheaper than driving.  So, not only were the trucking companies taking their business, but they were also using the railroads' own infrastructure and pricing models against them.

I will say one thing for those railroad execs – they figured out who the real competition was.  It wasn’t the most obvious conclusion to be reached, but once it was explained to me, I understood where the long-term threat was.  While they may have had their disagreements, the rail-lines all understood that there was a bigger competitor out there, threatening them all.  I must admit—I was thoroughly impressed.

If you examine technology from about a century or so ago, you’ll find another industry that has been around for a long time and is now trying to deal with a newer, faster, and much more agile distribution system.  Instead of vegetables, hard goods and coal (all of which actually have SLAs in the railroad world), the commodities being moved today include songs, movies, games, blogs, advertising, and other forms of digital content; not to mention millions and millions of financial transactions.  Here, too, the interloper stacks its loads on the incumbent’s infrastructure, and then uses their own infrastructure against them.

So what’s a communications service provider to do?  Well, it depends.  If the service provider wants to be the best railroad in the business, then it should strike an exclusive deal with the coolest and most dominant content distribution company.  It should make sure that the content company can fully load the warehouses on one side, and that they, in turn, can sell directly to the consumer on the other.  Perhaps through a multi-colored supermarket the size of a credit card.  Or, better yet, let them embed the credit card into the supermarket.  That way they wouldn’t have to deal with anything other than transportation.  Then help them sell millions of ’em.   

Of course, the competition would be forced to cut similar deals, and they, too, would help their content distributors by trying to help them sell more supermarkets.  That way you could all try to capture a few (or maybe many) more points of subscriber market share in what is otherwise pretty close to a zero-sum game.  If nothing else, it would clarify your role and that of the rest of the industry – you are today’s version of railroads, a.k.a., “dumb pipes.”

But what if you didn’t really want to be relegated to being a “dumb pipe” because the pipe margins were thinning and you were worried about getting pushed further and further away from (what everyone believes will be) the next great source of potential revenues – a.k.a., digital content.  What would you do?  Exactly how would you make yourself relevant in a transaction stream that started and ended with some kid pushing a button on a device you don’t control that billed a credit card that wasn’t in your database in the first place? 

Could be worse:  Imagine that, along the way, the transaction didn’t work, and even though nobody knew why, you were the one who had to pay a refund - even though you didn’t actually get a piece of the transaction?  Now that would be a nightmare scenario.  But look on the bright side: you are now somehow relevant.  Kind of like how Adam became relevant when Eve got him ejected from Paradise for taking that first little bite.   

Sorry, I got lost again…  So just who is the real competition for service providers in the here and now - other railroads or the trucking companies (Web 2.0)?  I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t be both.  If the answer is the other railroads, well, that leads to one version of the future.  If it’s the trucking companies, then that’s a different rabbit hole altogether.  Maybe it’s neither one.  Maybe it’s some combination of both.  Maybe it’s something else entirely. 

I do know one thing with 100% certainty – I know that I do not know the answers.  I also know that we are going to spend a lot of time and energy exploring the questions.  Maybe this month’s article on the Digital Supply Chain – Part 1 is someplace to start.  I’m pretty sure that before this whole TeleMedia convergence thing is over I’ll have a huge headache.  Actually, I have one already.

Makes me wish I took the blue pill instead.  Or was it the red pill?   The heck with it—give me one of each.  Who says you can’t have it both ways?  Gotta run.  My iPhone’s ringing...  

By Earl "Woody"   Wed, Jan 14, 2009

As TeleMedia Strategy magazine’s Entertainment Editor J-Michael Cabosky describes in his article “The Digital De-Evolution” industry observers have witnessed the demise of the traditional major label-based music industry over the last several years.     

Former industry giants such as PolyGram, Arista, Motown, and all the others struggle to remain relevant in the newly interactive and Internet-based music business.   Quite simply, the “new economy” has changed the business model to such an extent that the traditional major record label’s main advantages – financial support and industry connections – aren’t all that necessary anymore.  In fact, one can argue whether or not a “music industry” even exists anymore - or has it been swallowed whole and now part of a larger “new media” or “digital content” world.  

None of this means that the remaining major labels intend to go quietly.  DirecTV’s licensing of the current Beyonce single ‘Upgrade U’ is part of a growing trend to use new songs in commercial advertisements helps the labels promote new releases.   Using very contemporary music in commercials is a significant reversal of the prior tradition, which relied on use of remakes of older music for advertisements.  When a song breaks through the noise to become a modern-day hit, the combination of traditional CD sales, downloads, Internet radio royalties, and commercial ad licensing can drive more per-song revenue than ever before.  The jury is out on whether this “less is more” approach by the major labels will allow them to stay in business. 

The Internet’s unbelievable impact on major record labels began with the rise (and subsequent fall) of Napster and other file-sharing sites like Kazaa.  In just two years – from 1999 to 2001 - Napster was able to create the notion in most consumers’ minds that music over the web could be free.  While the RIAA and other interest groups were later able to gain legal protection for the unauthorized sharing of music, the stage was set for iTunes to introduce 99 cent downloads.  

At 99 cents a song or $9.99 for an album, the iTunes model has eviscerated the margins on full length records.  This contraction to major record label profitability is causing the traditional industry to put a larger focus and investment on a smaller number of artists and pursuing only the “can’t miss” recordings.  Yet, more music is being recorded and sold now than ever before – just not in the traditional model of major labels selling albums.   

Some background… In the 80’s and 90’s, only artists like Peter Gabriel could self-produce or co-produce albums.  They did so with significant major label support and scads of expensive equipment in their own full production studios.  Major artists could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on studio time alone; just to end up with a dozen songs on an album.  Then there was potentially millions of dollars needed for advertising, marketing, and promotion.   

Smaller artists and local bands were often limited by production budgets.  That led to very judicious use of overdubs, re-takes, and so forth.  Many artists employed top-notch studio musicians to get a great (or good enough) take in the shortest time possible.  It was worth going to famous studios in Nashville, LA, New York, London, etc, to get the best engineers and best musicians together, so that post-production expenses could be minimized.  Still, all that cost money.  Lots of it. 

Let’s fast forward to the late 1990’s and use a personal example. In 1999, I played drums on a local jazz album that was recorded straight to hard drive, then edited and mixed on a Mac.  This was my first experience not recording to big reels of expensive audio tape.  Even that album cost about $10,000 to make, including recording time, musician wages, mixing, mastering, licensing for one re-arrangement, and production of about 1,000 CDs. 

At that time, the complex software and post-processing tools still carried a hefty price tag well into the six figures and beyond range.  Engineers to operate it all added to the costs.   All but the most well-funded musicians had to settle for less than perfection somewhere in the process.     

In iPod and Internet radio parlance, let’s skip forward to today.  In 2008, aspiring artists can walk into any neighborhood Best Buy and acquire all of the same stuff needed to make a high quality recording for well under $5,000.  All it takes then is a little bit of computer expertise, a few tutorials, and you have your own professional quality recording studio.  Believe me, it’s true.

Most bands can either rehearse enough or try enough takes to get what they believe is a good-enough version of their songs recorded, given enough time in the studio.  With the removal of studio per-hour fees, the artist can spend as much time as they desire making takes, overdubs, mixing, and so forth.   With the decreasing costs of post-production tools and the availability of these tools on PCs or Macs, post-production effects, fixes, and “ear candy” can be added at the artist’s discretion, not limited by the budget.  No per-hour engineers are necessary. 

So, garage bands can now capture and mix their best effort in their own studios for a small fraction of the 1990 local music recording costs.  What should they do with it?   

A crawl-walk-run approach is one idea.  Let’s say that a band can access or build their own studio and use as much time as they need to capture a song.  They don’t need more than a few songs to be recorded; after all, the album is dead.  A good draft recording with a rough mix is enough to open doors at the local live music venues to build a local following.   

As a musician, I think this step is still needed, so that the band can get comfortable working with a crowd. Since consumers are not willing to pay more than about 99 cents for songs that they know that they like; live performances have become the primary income source for the majority of recording artists, major label or not.   

Said hypothetical band can post a video of their studio or live performance and then use MySpace and FaceBook to point all of their friends to their art.  These social networking tools are also being used to communicate performances by many small artists to great effect.  While the artist can record onto CD-R or DVD-R discs, some bands have used USB drives to sell or give away recordings of their songs.   

Note to any garage bands out there: Royalty protection via ASCAP, BMI, and the like is probably a good idea by this time. 

Assuming that there is enough money and/or interest to take the next step, let’s explore some ideas for pursuing a larger audience. 

Sites like CDBaby and TuneCore allow indie labels and artists to get distribution in the physical and virtual world (including iTunes) for a series of fees that are generally percentages per download or flat fees for getting works onto iTunes on a per song or per album basis.  Some of these aggregators offer duplication services for CDs, so that online ordering can use just-in-time inventory for the performer (and avoid pressing 5,000 CDs that will sit in the garage until the end of time or the end of the band).  This change to the business model removes up front batch pressing of CDs, which was a significant portion of the traditional recording cost.  In an iTunes world, why bother?  

Internet radio and podcasts have potential to grow the fan base as well, especially as the mobile web becomes, well… more like a mobile web (versus the proprietary nature of early web-enabled phones).  The Apple and Google phones, with full browser capability, allow sites like live365.com, Pandora.com, and of course, iTunes, to stream internet radio to the user anywhere.  

An indie label or artist can easily set up an internet radio station for about $200 to $350 a month on live365.com.  These prices go up as “listening hours” or “simultaneous sessions” grows past certain thresholds.  There are two complementary radio station formats that can be used.  For a label or group of bands that fully own their content, they could have an Indie Radio channel that is exclusive to the music within the group.  The operator would likely have to use outside means, like live performances, YouTube, social networking, and so on to drive listeners to the station. 

A slightly different approach would be to build a station with music that is like the new artist.  A mix of known songs with some unknown band tracks sprinkled in might have a better chance at gaining listeners than a station that is exclusive to one independent artist or label.   On live365.com’s “pro” packages, the station operator has complete control of any banner advertising or in-program ads.  If the radio station operator can drive enough advertising revenue, the station may be able to be profitable in its own right, while promoting the artist’s music. 

So let’s do the math for all the up and coming garage bands reading this article:

·         Home studio and HD video camera  = $5000

·         Studio time = free

·         YouTube posting = free

·         MySpace and FaceBook postings = free

·         USB drive for copies = $10 and up

·         CD-R discs for copies = 50 blank discs for under $20

·         Paper and labels = $14.99/pack

·         Cover art = free (digital band pic with photo editing)

·         TuneCore = $19.98 per album or 9.99 per song for a year (including iTunes)

·         Live365 radio station = $250 to $350/month for a station that plays indie music alongside established artists

In short, musicians can spend much less to make better recordings and get them to the masses.  Good thing, too, because at 99 cents a download, it will take about 5,000 downloads to pay for the shiny new studio equipment that now takes up the living room.  Still, this volume is far smaller than the hundreds of thousands that were traditionally needed to break even in the past.  No wonder the major record labels are going, going, gone.  

By J-Michael Cabosky,   Thu, Jan 01, 2009

The casual film follower has always measured a film's success by its box office grosses.  While this may have been an accurate method in 1949, or even 1999, it isn't anymore.  Back in the day, 100% of a film's gross was collected in movie theaters.  Then came television, and the film was sold to the networks.  Later, it was packaged and sold to the consumer on VHS tape, then DVD, and now on Blu-ray, the internet, and iPods.  With each progressive technology, the possibility for sales and revenue exploded.  This is where the film and television markets find themselves today. 

The music industry came crashing down years ago thanks to internet downloading and file copying.  Then came legitimate online sellers such as iTunes, which reduced album sales but allowed single title sales to soar.  The result was an industry that made more money than ever from live performances, and less money than ever through album sales.  Go figure. 

It wasn't that the music industry was dead; it was simply that a new, digitally-minded music economy was needed.  Those who adapted, succeeded.  Those who didn't, hit the unemployment lines.  Due to the complexity of film and video files, it took a few more years to affect the visual medium.  Thanks to advanced technology, however, that tricky time is now upon the film and television industries. 

The formula of making high budget films, releasing them in theaters, and counting one's money is now merely old hat.  Films and TV shows can now be made anywhere in the world, by anyone.  With HD 24p cameras accessible to any middle-class individual, filmmakers now have all they need to make a project.  So, instead of making a $5 million indie film, for the same price, small production companies can make ten films.  Sure, the film may never go to theaters, but, with budgets that small, why do they need to?  

Companies like Magnolia Pictures seem to have mastered this technique.  Combining DVD sales, an HD television network, limited theatrical releases, and other distribution techniques, the company has seen amazing under-the-radar grosses while keeping costs obscenely low.  Take the company's film "Bubble," for example.  The HD Steven Soderbergh flick reportedly grossed only $70,000 or so in theaters during its opening week.  A miss, right?  Think again.  Combining the film's other, digital, sources of revenue, it had a stunning $5 million first week!  Not bad for a film produced for only 20% of that.  Lionsgate made little more than that with their much more expensive bomb, "Punisher: War Zone." 

Even studios can't rely on theater-only releases anymore.  If a film costs $100 million to make, it needs to gross almost twice that in theaters to actually see a profit, thanks to the hefty chunk that exhibitors take out.  Even in this day, there aren't too many $200 million grossers going around.  Add in another $30-50 million in prints and advertising costs and that $100 million film actually has a cost of $150 million, meaning it needs to make $300 million to list a profit at all.  Only three films made $300 million in U.S theaters in 2008, but far more than that cost $100 million or more to make.  So, how in the world do the studios make any money anymore?  While international sales account for a large part of it, more of their revenue comes from digital sales on television, DVD, the internet, etc...  According to some sources, an average of only 10-15% of a film's revenue comes from theaters, meaning $100 million in theaters can turn into $750 million more in digital revenue.  That's hardly chump change.   

Television currently faces its own crisis.  While ABC's "Lost" seems to have hemorrhaged millions of viewers over the last few seasons, several million more have started watching the show at ABC.com.  With recording devices, online episodes, and stellar DVD sales, shows no longer need massive upfront ad buys to make a profit, even if low TV ratings remain the cause for many network execs to get the axe.  It's no coincidence the WGA (and now potentially SAG) hit strike territory over digital residuals, the new bread winner of media revenue.   

With the ability to market projects online in low-cost (and sometimes free) ways, all a company needs is digital and telecommunication knowledge to succeed.  When a film costs $5 million to make, but only brings in $1.5 mil, it's considered a big miss.  But, if that same film can be made for $500,000, it's suddenly considered a huge success.  There is something to be said for a 'quantity' model.  While quality certainly matters, so does quantity.  With digital processes combined with digital distribution, why make one large film when you can make ten small ones for the same price?  Why limit yourself to only one revenue source when you can have several?  Under this low-cost digital model, if seven out of ten of your films are flops, but the other three are hits, you're still looking at major returns. Why force yourself to bat 1.000 when .300 is all you need?   

Get ready for the drudge of mediocre and unprofessional product.  It doesn't take millions of dollars, connections, or years to make films or shows anymore.  From this standpoint, it's a film and video 'de-evolution,' since the common man is now allowed to play the game.  Golf used to be a game of the rich and elite.  Thanks to mid-level and public courses, that's no longer the case.  So, while there are more mediocre golf courses and more hackers on the links than ever, there are also more profits for golf retailers and course owners.  At the end of the day, from a business perspective, that may be all that matters.   

So, plug in your internet, download a few flicks, watch some TV episodes online, and enjoy the dawn of the digital entertainment age.

By Pushban Rajaiyan,   Tue, Jan 13, 2009

Computer gaming – as an industry - has come a long way. The question we all ask is how and when computer gaming became such an integral piece of the entertainment landscape.  When I look back just a couple of decades, computer games were not at all popular. Most of the people had never heard or played computer games outside of the occasional arcade, but today computer gaming is gaining popularity among all ages of people.  It's really amazing (and somewhat concerning) for me to know that the computer games he likes can keep my 5-year-old son occupied for hours.  Nothing else seems to be able to do that. 

In early stages computer games were very basic from an animation standpoint and not all that interactive.  Nowadays the computer games are very complex, with life-like animation extremely interactive – even immersive – and growing exponentially across a broad landscape of form factors, including stand-alone (arcade-based) computer games, home-based gaming consoles (such as X-Box and Wii), Internet-based online games (think World of Warcraft), hand-held electronic games (PSP), and gaming applications running on multipurpose devices such as the iPhone and Blackberry . 

Today computer games are one of the most popular and fastest growing forms of leisure entertainments for people of all ages.  How popular and how fast growing?  Here are some of the facts:

• Research has shown that 33% of the US population used a computer game console at least once. 
• An estimated 80% of the students between the ages of 12 and 17 are play and own computer games and consoles.
• Two third of all men from the age group 18 to 34 owns computer gaming consoles.
• Researchers estimate that people in the age group 18 and 24 buy an average of 4.5 computer games per year, and in the age group 25 and 34 buy average of 4.2 per year.
• Another study from 2007 estimated that 24% of Americans over the age of 50 played computer games, a 9% increase since 1999.
• In the US, at any given moment a minimum of 1.6 million people are using a computer game console.

All that playing generates a LOT of money.  In 2007, the global computer games industry was worth about $40 billion. Of the total, the US computer game industry represented about $16 billion - almost 34 percent of the industry total.  Even more unbelievably, the industry is growing almost 18.5 percent a year – just in the US.  With new games, opportunities, innovations, and big corporate players coming into the business, I am confident that the industry will continue to see skyrocketing growth for the foreseeable future.  

Just how did we get here?  The history of computer gaming, how it was born, and how the industry managed to capture the hearts and wallets of the world may surprise you.  Unlike many of the other aspects of modern technology, computer games were not created or originated by a single person. They were cultivated by a lot of engineers and scientists working independently and by today’s standards quite slowly.  

In 1947-48 working with devices called Cathode-Ray Tubes (CRTs, or what we know as TVs) Thomas T. Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann jointly patented a CRT-based amusement device in the USA.  The patent described using eight vacuum tubes to simulate a missile firing at target and contains knobs to adjust the curve speed of the missile.  In early 1951, Christopher Strachey tried to run a draughts program for the NPL Pilot ACE.   

One of the earliest tic-tac-toe computer games was made for the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) computer during 1952.  Alexander S Douglas as an illustration wrote this for his Ph. D. Thesis on human-computer interaction for the University of Cambridge.    

In 1958 William Higginbotham an American physicist created one of the first computer games, Tennis for Two.  This game is like a ping-pong or Tennis, which enabled two players to play at the same time.  Later, the commercial version of this application, Pong, was one of the first games to reach a large consumer-based audience. 

In the 1960s, computer games (it was not yet an industry) started seeing a number of rapid innovations. Initially, the computer games ran on university mainframe computers in the United States. In 1961, a group of students at MIT, including Steve Russell, programmed a game named “Spacewar!”  on the DEC PDP-1.  In 1966 Ralph Baer created a simple computer game named “Chase” that displayed on a standard television set.  Ralph Baer and Bill Harrison then created a light gun and several other games during 1967 and 1968.  In 1969 AT&T computer programmer Ken Thompson wrote a game named “Space Travel” for the MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service a time sharing OS) operating system.

In the early 1970s, computer gaming actually started making money.  The student union at Stanford University created the first coin operated computer game based on the “Spacewar!” called “Galaxy Game”.  In addition, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney created a coin-operated arcade version of “SpaceWar!”  Three decades later a number of these concepts (including simulated missile firings and tic-tac-toe would be packaged for the Hollywood thriller “War Games” starring Matthew Broderick.

As an aside, computer gaming has for some years been expanding in its usefulness.  Countries like US and Singapore used very advanced computer games for training their militaries.  The use of advanced computer simulation has then tricked down to many civilian applications such as police and airline training.  The US Army even creates computer games to help develop the strategic and decision making skills of its officers.   We will also discuss the growing industry of commercial and military simulation in a future installment.

The year 1972 saw another milestone with the launch of console-based computer games starting with the Magnavox Odyssey system in the USA. Philips bought Magnavox and released a different game in Europe in using the Odyssey brand in 1974 and an evolved game that Magnavox had been developing for the US market. In total, the Odyssey system achieved sales of 2 million units.

In 1980s, computer gaming saw a high growth rate. Piggybacking on the success of the early personal computers, IBM PC and Apple Macintosh-compatible games became very popular during that decade.   On-line gaming also got started during this period as Nintendo's Game & Watch line began in 1980.

Needless to say, the birth of an industry is never totally painless.  There was a significant crash in the computer game industry in 1983 due to the bankruptcy of several North American companies producing home computers and computer game consoles.  Among the reasons for the crash was development and production of a number of poorly conceived games such as E.T the Extra-Terrestrial and Pac-Man for the Atari 2600. However the industry soon learned its lessons and came back full speed in late 1984 and 1985.

In the late1990s, what we now know as the computer gaming industry really came into its own.  Most of Today’s top selling home-based gaming consoles were initially launched during the late 1990s and early 2000s starting with the Nintendo.  Sony’s PlayStation was launched Japan in Dec 1994 and in USA in Sep 1995. Microsoft’s XBOX was released in early 2000.  It was initially launched in USA and launched later in other regions such as Europe and Asia in 2002.  The replacement for the original Nintendo console, GameCube, was released by Nintendo on September 14, 2001 in Japan, November 18, 2001 in North America, May 3, 2002 in Europe and May 17, 2002 in Australia. The GameCube sold 21.74 million units worldwide at that time however GameCube failed to reclaim the market share lost by its predecessor.   

Currently, the latest product from Nintendo (Wii) is competing with Microsoft’s XBOX 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 with total market share of 34.5 million.  I, for one, can’t wait to see what comes next from the Big 3 home console manufacturers.  When we have such tough market competition and the potential revenues continuing to grow I can’t help but wonder what the best strategy to capture market share may be? 

Now that telecom providers like AT&T and Verizon are starting to provide full packages of multimedia services in addition to traditional services such as land line, wireless, and internet through multiple bundled options, it is not a far stretch to assume that they will soon be adding computer games to their list.  

A lot of people think that Apple somewhat covertly entered the handheld computer gaming market with the introduction of the iPhone and iPod Touch – especially since gaming applications are one of the biggest sellers on the iTunes App store.  Is there a conflict with AT&T’s strategy since the iPhone is only available on the AT&T network in the US?  What are Google and Yahoo going to do?    

There are thousands of questions that are soon to be answered.  Not by me, but by you – the consumer.  We’ll try and keep track of some of the goings-on in this department.  In future installments, I am going to write more about the computer gaming industry, the industry leaders, and the best (and most well known) gamers and so on. Up next: Social Implications and the Effects of Computer Gaming on today’s young people.  

Well folks, thanks for reading this first article. I hope you enjoyed my writing and learned something along the way.  Please send me your questions and valuable comments.

By John Lee,   Mon, Nov 03, 2008

By Greg Lisovoy,   Wed, Jan 14, 2009

Welcome to our first edition of Content is Everything at TeleMedia Strategy! While the subject of Digital Content is not new, it is quickly evolving and we promise to bring you the most comprehensive analysis, thoughts and ideas from the industry’s subject experts and thought leaders.  

So, what first comes to mind when you hear the words “Digital Content”?  Is it a video you get to watch on YouTube, songs you purchase on iTunes and download to your iPhone, a Texas Hold’em game you subscribe to and play on your Blackberry? Is it an article you receive because you subscribe to an online magazine, an alert you get from a news network or maybe a ring tone with your favorite tune?  Well, it is all of that and much, much more.  

Consider this day in the life of a friend of mine or maybe a friend of yours...  

Dick gets up and checks his Blackberry Bold for the Manchester United vs. Chelsea game score, a football game that took place while he was sleeping (real football-not the American version).  Dick gets the score for every game his favorite football team, Manchester United, plays. Finding a score he doesn’t like, he streams several minutes of the second half on ESPN to watch the last goal - again on his Blackberry Bold.

Meanwhile his daughter, Jane, spends 5 minutes checking her Facebook profile and uploading her picture over breakfast while listening to the newly downloaded album of Beyonce on her new 3G iPhone.  She had asked Dick for the new phone since the 2G version was too slow to stream the last season of American Idol reruns real-time.  As Jane gets out the door, she receives a text message from Fox.  The message advises her that the new season of American Idol is about to start.  It also recommends that she go to www.att.com/idol for the latest info on their sweepstakes and to download some American Idol trivia stuff.                                                       

Dick gets to his office and is immediately overwhelmed with all his meetings and anxiously awaits his client’s call; scheduled for later that morning.  He worries that he will be expected to talk about ways he can help his client in 2009.  Just minutes before his call, Dick gets an alert on his Blackberry from FierceTelecom, a leading daily news source for  telecom industry insiders.  The alert informs him that 10 minutes ago his client just announced a new acquisition.

He is elated.  This new acquisition creates great opportunities for Dick and his company to help the client consolidate their operations and save money for 2009.  He quickly capitalizes on this real-time bit of information.  He makes a great impression on his client by being proactive and up-to-speed on the client’s latest state of affairs.  The client is suitably impressed.

All of this before his first cup of coffee.

Does this sound like a normal day for you?  Indeed.  Let’s be honest, whether it is always deliberate or not, we rely on digital content more than we have ever relied on anything else in our lives. Empowered by the vast and fast internet, mere availability and ease of accessibility of digital content is changing the way we receive news, consume products and services, interact with other humans and, ultimately, do business.

Is digital content becoming a part of our lives or is it fundamentally changing the way we live our lives?   Is content becoming everything to us to the extent that we can no longer imagine our lives without it?  Ok. I may have gotten a little overzealous, but have I really? Could we do our jobs, be productive, get ahead, if we did not have the right content at our fingertips when we needed it, when we wanted it, or better yet…before we even realized we have to have it?

Back to Dick and Jane. What exactly happened?  Let’s take a look behind the scenes… 

1.   Dick's ESPN alerts come to him as part of his free ESPN Alerts service and subscription.

2.   Dick's ability to watch ESPN Mobile TV is a result of his monthly subscription with his service provider for Live TV (eg. Sprint TV or AT&T Mobile TV).  

3.   Jane’s interaction on Facebook is one of the most recent examples of social networking where content is published on a daily basis (eg. photos, profiles, events, stories, and live feeds) 

4.   Jane, of course, is able to listen to Beyonce’s latest album by subscribing to iTunes, the world’s largest online catalog of music and video. 

5.   Jane is receiving a message from American Idol because she has in the past voted for her favorite singer on this show (by sending an SMS to a short code). This approach effectively serves as a mechanism for delivering content. This channel is what we often call an off-deck channel where content is sent directly to a subscriber.

6.   Finally, Dick gets his updates from an online news source (FierceTelecom), as a result of his free monthly subscription.

These are just a few of the many ways Dick and Jane consume digital content.  There are many more every single day.  Many more channels, many more types of content, available from many more content providers than anyone ever imagined.    

So we have established that content is a big part of our lives. But what is it exactly?  Is content a product, a service, a combination, or something else entirely?  Who really owns content?  Who distributes it? What makes it all work?  Should it be regulated or should it just be allowed to evolve in one big free-for-all? Who is the winner and who is trying to stay above water?   

This department, our articles, and our writers are going to take you through the entire digital content value chain and all its players. Content is Everything hopes to bring you a unique 360-degree point of view of the issues surrounding Digital Content and explore them from literally every angle: content creators, aggregators, distributors, service providers, and consumers alike. Every month, we will examine the latest trends, issues, and innovations then begin by asking ourselves what makes it unique and necessary.  

If there is a certain topic or a particular  issue that you would like to read about, please let us know and we will gladly accommodate it here in this place.  Stay connected. 

By Domenic Centofanti,   Wed, Dec 10, 2008

It wasn’t that long ago when executives were asked to spend millions of dollars to “Solve the year 2000 (Y2K) problem”. The Y2K problem was the bug in software, built before the 2nd millennium, that was expected to explode precisely at 12:01 am, 2000. While there has been a great deal of debate, with regard to the reason the problem never materialized as expected, the fact is, 100s of millions of dollars were requested to solve the problem and 100’s of millions were spent with a bunch of quizzical executives looking on. 

Now executives are being asked to spend millions on Master Data Management (MDM) or Customer Data Integration (CDI) software. Ironically, executives are being told that all the new software, implemented to solve Y2K, had the unintended consequence of decentralizing the maintenance of “Master Terms” (a.k.a. Master data) used to tag and find business events in databases. Consequently, it is not unusual for the same master term (e.g. Customer, Supplier, Product name, etc.) to be recorded differently in different databases and to create conflicts when a centralized understanding of the term, and the events it tags, is required.  

To be fair the introduction of new Internet systems that coexist with predecessor systems and new systems introduced as a result mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have had a similar effect on the decentralization of master terms. Regardless of the cause the operational impact of decentralizing maintenance of master terms has not been lost on executives. Every Account Executive (AE) for a National or Global Customer of any size understands the often Herculean effort required to reconcile all the different terms used to record transactions for their customer. As the AE and her team prepare for an upcoming meeting with their customer’s CFO they are often embarrassed when the CFO has a better understanding of events than the account team.

Very similar situations occur when Global Supply Chain executives try to consolidate purchases for the same supplier at a national or global level.  Engineering executives have similar frustrations when they try to reuse parts in Bills of Material for products sold by different business units. The root cause is the same. Databases, used to record the names of real world things, are decentralized and consequently terms that describe the same thing are often stored differently. In many cases the need to record the terms differently, for legitimate business reasons, cannot be dismissed either.

So what are executives to do? Just grin and bear it? Well kind of. Unlike the Y2K problem though, no one is suggesting the sky is falling and a business will come to a dead stop if Master Data is not reconciled. MDM is the cause of increasing inefficiency. Some studies suggest business people spend 15 - 20% of their time resolving differences in terms found in company reports that should have a common meaning.

Because the issue is so pervasive, companies that do solve it could realize a competitive advantage over those who don’t especially when it results in better purchasing and retention of customers who expect to be known, regardless of the company representative or system with which they are speaking. There are 3 things executives can do without turning MDM into Y2K: 

1. Put business people in charge of the vocabulary – Make sure business people, who understand the meaning of business terms, are in charge of any MDM service. There are two major ways a MDM service can be organized:

a. System of Reference – The MDM service collects all of the different terms and standardizes them.

b. System of Record – Standard terms originate in the MDM service and are distributed to operational services

Regardless of the way the service is organized, effective operation requires sign- off on the use of the standard terms that are the end product of the MDM service. That sign‐off is not the job of technologists. It is the job of a person who understands how business people need to communicate and the vocabulary of business terms needed to enable communications.

2. Don’t buy a “pig in the poke” – Might sound a little anachronistic to use this old-fashioned term for advice related to something so modern but the advice is sound none-the-less. It simply means don’t buy something until you have seen it. The colloquial phrase is enshrined in common law as “Caveat Emptor”; let the buyer beware. 

The market for commercially available MDM systems is immature. Products are advancing through a classical technology maturity life cycle. Some are still the tools of technologists. Some are applications and some have matured to platforms, from which various solutions to manage master terms, can be deployed and economies of scale realized. So make sure you know the state in the maturity cycle in which the products under consideration are or as the old English would say, “When ye proffer the piggy, open the poke”. 

3. Focus all efforts on the “R” in ROI – It is not unrealistic to think that development and maintenance of a business vocabulary will require the expenditure of millions of dollars. That is not to say, however, that millions need to be expended immediately or that an entire vocabulary needs to be available to all immediately.

There is a time value to money and it will take time to get a vocabulary of master terms developed and widely adopted so that a workflow improves. Consequently, like all investments it is essential to understand how the adoption of some portion of the vocabulary will improve communication and the workflow for a group of people. The “R” in the ROI of MDM needs to articulate improvements in communications and work before funds are authorized. 

The job of executives is to simplify, not to complicate. The “MDM thing” is really simple. To simple we often want to make it complicated to justify spending the time it requires but just to say it is simple is not to say it is not important or fundamental to the efficient operations of a business. After all if people don’t have a vocabulary they don’t have a language; and if the don’t have a language they can’t communicate and if they can’t communicate…Well, you get the point. 

Linguists tell us that communication requires a “Chain of Transmission”. All that means is their needs to be an unbroken chain in the meaning a person assigns to a “thing” and the words used to communicate something about that “thing” to other persons. If there is a break in the chain of transmission ambiguity results and people receiving the message will likely spend time resolving the ambiguity that results from the break in the chain.

For all of their wonders, modern computerized systems create a real risk that a break in the chain of transmission will occur because they are the principle tools of 21st century organizations to automate communications. Computerized systems risk breaking the chain of transmission & need MDM to mitigate risk for 3 reasons:

1. They are asynchronous – They put data in a place at a point in time and expect people to get that data at another point in time. This means the people who put the data in the place will likely not be available to explain what they meant by the data when people come to get it. 

2. They are decentralized – Lacking a coordination mechanism, different people operating in different times and places will in all likelihood use different terms to mean the same thing. Those different words or terms will be recorded differently in the decentralized systems. 

3. Human beings operate them – This is probably the most compelling reason to invest in MDM. Unless a business intends to go completely “lights-out” people will always be involved in one side or the other of a communication and ultimately it is people who assign meaning to things; not computers.  

Fundamentally MDM systems mitigate the risk of a break in the chain of transmission and all of the inefficiency that creates. Should executives invest in them? With the proper controls, yes they definitely should. It’s not another Y2K.

By Uday Bhaskar   Mon, Dec 15, 2008

Contrary to popular opinion, technology does not always follow a purposeful path of evolution.  Spectacularly successful inventions have often been solutions in search of a problem.  Alexander Graham Bell had the modest goal of designing a hearing device to help his mother, and he ended up inventing the telephone.  Unsuccessful research into tracking and intercepting Soviet bomber aircraft called Semi- Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) led to the invention of modems to connect remote computers.

Of all the industry's technological innovation stories, I am most fascinated by the origins of the UNIX Operating System.  Much of the modern day connected world would not have been possible without fundamental concepts that were first introduced by the perverse, innovative genius of Ken Thompson.  Mr. Thompson wanted to develop a video game on an abandoned PDP 7, and ended up inventing the UNIX Operating System.

Today's communications industry owes much of its technology to a series of fortuitous accidents. As in all fields of human endeavor, chance had a lot to do with its evolution.  One can only speculate how the world would have evolved had Bell not had a deaf mother, or had the Department of Defence not canceled the MULTICS project.

When the DOD shelved the MULTICS project in the late sixties, several engineers from Bell Labs who were working on it found themselves with a lot of time on their hands.  As Ken Thompson "hit the bench," to use the consulting parlance, he seized the opportunity to tinker around with one of the PDP 7s that Bell Labs had allocated to the project.

Like a true geek, Ken was fascinated by the latest toy in the Labs, the vt100 visual display units.   Contrary to the bulky teletypes that were being used at the time, the vt100s allowed him to type his commands and see the responses on a screen.  Ken was an expert assembly programmer, and he knew he could manipulate the image on the vt100 screen.  He was also an avid science fiction buff.  Thus was born what was arguably the world’s first video game.

Ken called his game “Space Travel,” and it involved simulated travel across the solar system.  By today’s standards this would probably be little better than a high school project, but in 1969 it was a technological watershed.  To be able to see spaceships traveling through a scale model of the planets and their moons, factoring in gravitational effects to give a realistic feel, with the user constrained to give inputs through nothing more exotic than a qwerty keyboard on a rudimentary terminal on a PDP 7, was no small achievement.

To manipulate all those celestial bodies with their varying masses and orbit sizes, and to dynamically compute the impact of user’s actions on the spaceship, required the ability to process large chunks of data in real-time.  As a corollary, it required very efficient use of the computer's scarce resources, including memory, disk space, input/output and, above all, keeping track of all the programs executing in the memory.  Being an assembly programmer, Ken developed routines for each of these tasks and pretty soon established a neat collection of tricks to impress his Bell Labs colleagues. These routines became popular, and others started using them for their own purposes.  Dennis Ritchie later helped him rewrite most of them in C, making them portable across computers, and Brian Kernighan half jokingly called these routines UNICS (as opposed to MULTICS).

These routines were written solely for the purpose of making Ken’s job of developing the Space Travel game easier.  But the concepts used were from the project that he was working on earlier – that is to say, the development of a multi-user interactive operating system, a.k.a. MULTICS.  So it was natural that eventually these routines took the form of an operating system, and thus the UNIX operating system was born.

Unlike the operating systems that preceded it, however, UNIX was not a monolithic piece of system software that stood between the computer and the application programs.  It was rather a collection of programs that each performed a limited function very efficiently, but designed to work together like building blocks in a Lego set - A kernel to manage processes, files, devices and memory allocation, a shell to interpret user commands and execute them, and a library of commands to perform a wide range of useful tasks, ranging from copying files to sending messages to other users.  Further, the shell came built-in with a scripting language that allowed easy creation of automated system admin tasks, which would then in turn become commands that can be executed by the shell.

Eventually, the "powers that be" in the Labs decided that Ken was having too much fun, and assigned him to a “productive” project.  Ken found a way to continue working on the development of UNIX.  He offered to develop software for the Bell Labs Patenting Department to support complex text processing.  If you have ever wondered why Unix has complicated text formatting utilities like nroff, troff, tbl, eqn, etc., well, now you know.

UNIX became ready for prime-time when the Labs decided to freely distribute licenses along with source code to universities around the world.  Soon, many universities began contributing enhancements of their own to UNIX.  The releases from The University of California at Berkeley in particular were very popular.  Known as Berkeley Software Dispatch (BSD) versions, they were quickly adopted by many commercial vendors, and before long UNIX became the de facto standard for the fast evolving workstation market.  Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, DEC, and IBM each came out with their own versions, as did some independent vendors like Santa Cruz Operations (SCO) who provided versions that could be ported to any hardware.  Microsoft, with their XENIX, was a late adopter.

Meanwhile, the birthplace of UNIX was going through significant change of its own. As part of the Modified Final Judgment in 1984, AT&T split itself into the RBOCs and the long distance company that retained the original name. The Bell Labs became a part of a new subsidiary called AT&T Computer Systems (ACS), which later became Lucent Technologies. ACS sold UNIX to Novell in 1991, who in turn sold it to Santa Cruz Operations (SCO) in 1995.

Around the same time, prof. Andrew Tannenbaum developed the MINIX operating system, which was modeled on open source UNIX.  He distributed the source code freely to the readers of his book “Operating Systems: Design and Implementation.”  One of the readers of this book, a man from Helsinki named Linus Torvalds, adapted MINIX and developed the hugely popular open source LINUX operating system—largely based on UNIX.

UNIX has developed a cult following over the years, and loyal UNIX aficionados continue to thrive in online communities like the UNIX Heritage Society (http://www.tuhs.org/).  UNIX is also well known for the thorough documentation that comes with the software, with the typically cryptic UNIX command man (which of course is short for manual). 

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of UNIX will be the uniquely geeky humor that is an integral part of the core of UNIX. One can find humor almost in any corner of the UNIX world (well, it's humorous if you're a geek like me).  UNIX, to my knowledge, is the only computing environment with a built-in fortune cookie generator (with an adult version in some implementations).  As examples, here are a few interesting UNIX commands, and the expected output from them –

$cat “a can of tuna”
cat: cannot open a can of tuna

$if I had a ( for every $ that the Congess spent on bailouts, what would I have?
Too many (‘s

$make love
Make: don’t know how to make love. Stop.

$man: why did you get a divorce?
man: too many arguments

$nice man woman
no manual entry for woman

So what started as a toolkit for the geeks at Bell Labs has taken on a life of its own, and has evolved into a versatile and powerful operating system.  It pioneered concepts that fundamentally changed the way users interacted with computers and with each other while connected to the computer, ultimately leading to the internet and the World Wide Web.

Today’s teenagers might be shocked to learn that email and instant messaging started out as UNIX commands more than thirty years ago.  Many core constructs of the internet owe their existence to the principles established by the Bell Labs geeks, including the concept of hierarchical namespaces, device-file equivalence, building block approach using pipes, redirection, etc.  UNIX was perhaps the first computing environment in which everything was treated as simple byte streams instead of having complex file formats and “record based” file systems.  As mundane as this detail sounds, this is the principle that makes such critical technologies as Telnet, FTP, SMTP, TCP/IP, HTTP and SIP possible.  Believe it or not.

Until Next Time.  Stop.     

Welcome to the first episode of the Customer's Corner.  Nothing better than to launch commentary from the customers’ corner than to describe a real customer experience, so let's talk about my own recent mini-drama:   

I’m a new girl in a new town. With all the housing choices in the market and "newly converted from British pound" dollars in my pocket, I went with a new designer condo wired head to toe.  So, I thought choosing a telecommunications service provider might be kind of fun in this new bundled landscape with companies selling television, Internet access, phone service, content and more.   I also thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to experience and write about quad-play acquisition from a customer perspective. 

And what an experience. The main thing I learned from was that service providers’ processes are developed based on the limitations of their systems, databases and policies rather than what the buying process would be for a customer.  Am I surprised?  Mapping out the end to end customer process is a concept I’ve been peddling as a consultant for a couple of years now - though I’ve not seen one client or service provider actually do it - so no, I wasn't surprised.    

Here’s the journey:

1.   Customer (yours truly) starts to shop around for bundled services for a new home – listens to the radio, television, talks to new colleagues, reads the paper. There are lots of ads for many different service providers. I’ve been told that Verizon FiOs is in town, so is AT&T UVerse, DirecTV, Time Warner cable and Comcast.  Wow, choices! What a change from living in the UK where the only quad play in town was Virgin Media (who never returned my multiple responses to their direct mail) and the only triple play was British Telecom who only offered a very limited selection of television channels. So, full communications shopping in London was like how your mother used to shop for groceries – she went to the butchers, fishmonger, vegetable stand and so on….mobile separate from fixed, separate from the Internet and television.  

2.   I’m a busy girl too so I decide to do my research at the end of a late night at the office (too new for a social life yet). I start down the list to see which services are offered for my uptown address. That was the first problem – trying to determine if my address qualifies for service is a unique exploration in how not to design web sites. I never could figure out if I was served by Verizon – their website couldn’t recognize a new build address (even though the developer had registered the new address 18 months earlier). Comcast quickly said no.  

AT&T’s site first indicated that yes, UVerse is in my area so I happily went down the path of filling in all the information to order on line thinking, “Ah, this will be so simple”. After filling in all my details and credit card information, pressing enter….the process broke down saying it couldn’t verify that my address was served. Nowhere could I find a number to call. In fact, the error message just looked like a possible computer glitch so I blindly went through the whole process over again to be told on the last step again that it couldn’t verify if service could be delivered for the television portion of my order.  

By now it’s late; I’m tired, frustrated and hungry. I’m now giving up on quad play and settle for triple play Time Warner and again, the same illusion as AT&T. Service is definitely provided in my area but after going through the whole process, the website cannot verify that my address is actually served (even though I do know that two of my four neighbours in the complex have Time Warner). However, at least their website had a simple message and process to have you pick up the phone, call a certain number and the call center picks up the order from there. But there the nice process stopped.  

3.   To get my service installed and activated, I needed to call a separate number and that one isn’t manned at this late hour in the evening. I call the next day to be told that my information hasn’t travelled yet from one system to another and to please call back again at 11:00 the next day. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m busy and calling a certain person at a certain time is fine if you don’t have meetings, conference calls and clients to looks after. After three days, I’m able to catch the person I need to schedule an installation….you know the usual, they can’t narrow the time down less than 4 hours. I also explain to the rep that without fixed line service yet, my front gate call button doesn’t work so I can’t hear the bell and the installer needs to call my cell phone to let me know he’s there. This is getting very complicated.  

4.   The nice installer shows up (without calling my mobile – thank goodness I saw him leaving the gate from the window) wanting me to show and tell him how the complex and the house are wired.  Now, I may work in this industry but when it comes to installation – I’m as clueless as my mother.  The gentleman gave up.  

I call the electrician get some vague instruction on the phone and call Time Warner again and arrange to work another half day at home without a phone, Internet service or a working doorbell.  The same guy shows up, manages to install something – having just come over the pond with no US appliances, the only thing I have to test is my laptop and the front gate.  We get the laptop working after a couple of hours but the gate call button will only ring the phone on the ground floor  – that’s a job for the electrician (even though I know the bell is already wired to the fixed line phone line which should run throughout the home).   At least Internet service is initiated.  

5.   I finally buy some phones and find out that the phone service doesn’t work. Besides not being given a phone number, the line has been patched into the complex’s fire and alarm phone line from AT&T so I can’t dial out. I call Time Warner again and arrange service for my third half day working from home without a phone but at least I have Internet this time. Thankfully for him, a different installer arrives who figures out what is wrong, gets the phones to work but now the front gate call button doesn’t – that’s a job for the electrician.  

Meanwhile, I’ve had to pay an electrician to come out twice to patch up the work that Time Warner did or didn’t do…and guess what? My phantom ground floor phone still rings every Saturday and Sunday morning at 6:12am – when I pick up the phone, it’s a line test. I’m not calling Time Warner back – but I can bet you that somehow it is picking up a channel or is somehow still patched to fire and alarm line.  

6.   I’m not looking forward to getting my first television. I’m sure I’m in for another half day at home and expensive bill from the electrician. Should I re-evaluate? My neighbours insist that UVerse is in the neighbourhood and they tell me that AT&T’s bundled service installation and activation is even worse than Time Warner’s. My electrician swears by Verizon but he doesn’t use them for mobile or television – so back to boutique shopping again.  

Lessons learned here?  Even if a consumer wants to buy bundled quad-play service, he must be very committed, patient and determined.   

I know from working for a service provider that the typical operational process for the above transaction would have been split up between the on-line channel, service delivery, and customer service. The data about my residence, order and service was probably all there somewhere but in three different databases. The business process for quad play qualification, activation and service if even written down is probably broken up by channel, department and only starts when a ticket number is issued and ends when the installer leaves the premise. My customer process still hasn’t ended yet. Not until I test that television service. 

How can service providers increase the take up of bundled services?  Not by discounting prices further…I would have paid much more for a seamless, painless on-line order, installation one time and working service.  

The key to success is mapping out the end to end customer process and determining how operational and business processes and policies can bend with minimal system customization. The customer process mapping is easy but never done – primarily because the inertia of working internally to build cross department and channel processes is overwhelming.  

Even the simple act of putting a phone number to call on a web page when an online process fails indicates that it can work.  It may require a third party or cross channel department to do the work – but believe the customer, it makes a difference.   Please somebody... anybody out there?

Wed, Nov 19, 2008

When we innovate we are caught up in the excitement of creation. We are urged by investors, stakeholders and management to bring our innovations to market as soon as possible. Time is of the essence; if we don't bring innovation to the market, someone else will. In the frenzy, we cut corners. We don't cross all the T-s and we don't dot all the I-s. This is natural and, actually, fine. Our “version 1” will not be perfect but it will get the job done and we'll have time to make it better in “version 2”.

The key to making this work is to know which corners can be cut and which cannot. In the past, many have allowed security and privacy to be an area where corners can be cut. Most important was innovation and functionality, and once things work then we'll invest in security. This is no longer possible. Today's cyber risks are too many and telecoms are so tightly regulated that they cannot afford to be perceived as being negligent.

According to a US Treasury advisor, at the end of 2005 global cybercrime turned over more money than drug trafficking. Valerie McNiven, an advisor to the US government on cybercrime, claimed that corporate espionage, child pornography, stock manipulation, phishing fraud and copyright offenses caused more financial harm than the trade in illegal narcotics such as heroin and cocaine.

"Last year was the first year that proceeds from cybercrime were greater than proceeds from the sale of illegal drugs, and that was, I believe, over $105bn," McNiven told Reuters. "Cybercrime is moving at such a high speed that law enforcement cannot catch up with it." In fact, multiple sources confirm that the cyber crime world is thriving and is the largest illegal revenue-earning industry today. And while there are certainly law enforcement agencies devoted to combating cyber-crime (maybe not as developed as the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and its counterpart in other countries), this is a much harder battle to fight because it is everywhere; and nowhere. It is more lucrative to “run data” than it is to “run drugs” - and it is safer.

Furthermore, the global cost of identity theft is putting a huge strain on the economy. According to the Federal Trade Commission, the cost of identity theft in 2004 reached $50 billion annually(http://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/idtheftstudy/identity_theft.pdf). Estimates from the Australian Centre for Policing Research place the cost of identity theft at $3 billion each year during 2001-2002 (http://www.acpr.gov.au/research_idcrime.asp). These numbers are obviously much higher today and this is a global problem that impacts all geographies. 

And so, if we are going to innovate and create new offerings for the new world, let's do it responsibly. Let's make sure we understand the risks and let's build offerings that address security and privacy concerns. Let's make sure we can measure the risk and that we can prove compliance with regulations and requirements – and let's do it before the auditors come – not after they show up and threaten to shut us down. At the end of the day, beyond the need to do the right thing, it will also be far less expensive if we address security and privacy up-front and build it into our offerings.

This is the topic of this column. Each issue I'll look at issues involving security and GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) as they pertain to new telecom, media or computing technologies. I'm not claiming to have all the answers. Some of these new technologies pose a great challenge to security researchers and practitioners alike – but understanding the problem is half the journey toward the solution. So let's innovate – but let's do it safely so that we don't end up regretting our creations.

Sun, Dec 21, 2008

In 1992, a strange, new creature was born.  News of the creature spread across the world as more and more people became familiar with it.  We soon became attached to it, as it helped make our lives easier.  But just a few years later, the unthinkable happened:  This creature evolved into a terrible, unstoppable monster that changed people’s lives irrevocably.  The monster is known the world over as…  The Internet.

The internet is defined as a worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using standard Internet Protocol.  But when most teenagers hear the word “internet,” that’s not the first thing that comes to mind.

What does come to mind are the changes in our lives:

The year is 1990.  A young girl–let's call her Lisa–walks home from school, grabs a snack, and rushes to the mall to hang out with her friends.  She and her friends laugh because someone tripped and spilled soda on his shirt.

Ten years later, Lisa’s younger sister–Megan–walks home from school.  She grabs a snack, and rushes to sign-on to her computer and hang out with friends. She starts to LOL because her friend had to BRB because he just HIJKLMNOP (Yeah, I don’t know that means either, but we’ll probably start seeing it on instant messages soon enough.).

So, due to the existence of the Internet, these two sisters had very different ways of spending time with their friends.  What’s wrong with that?  Of course, they have remarkably different concerns.  Megan’s sheer loss of exercise and Lisa never having to worry about online predators, for example.  (Both of these are very important issues, but we’ll be tackling them in another column.)

Every day, technology progresses.  We are constantly gaining access to these new, almost magical, forms of communication.  Whether it was AOL Instant Messenger in 1997, Friendster in 2002, or Facebook and MySpace in 2004, online chats are clearly the ‘hot spot’ for today’s teens.   Unfortunately, as more and more of us become a part of the online world, we put ourselves in danger—before we even know what’s going on.  

There are many problems with this new Internet stuff that we don’t yet know about, but we do recognize some of the pitfalls this monster can engender:

1) It can be really distracting

2) It changes our personalities

3) It makes us less connected to the rest of the world  

So the first problem with online communication is that it can be really distracting.  Sometimes when I’m talking to my friends on AIM, or going on Facebook, the house could be burning down and I wouldn’t even notice.  I mean, when I’m online, I can barely concentrate on what chores my parents are telling me to do, let alone do the homework that’s been piling up for weeks.  It’s not that I consciously decide to procrastinate on homework and go online.  What’ll happen is, I’ll turn on my computer, planning to research something for my history essay, and end up typing “Facebook.com” in my web browser.  It’s instinctive.  And once I’m at the site, I may as well check my profile.  And since I’m checking my profile, well, why not just have a look at my wall?  Then maybe check out my photo comments…Have a quick look at my messages…  By then, well, the rest is history.  

Don’t look at me like I’m crazy, ’cause I know it’s happening to you, too.  It happens to all of us.  If you can resist the temptation to go online when you have a computer right there, then I have a lot of respect for you; because it’s not easy.  Even adults can’t resist the urge.  Dr. Cullen, of  the internet filtering company, “SurfControl,” says, “Facebook is the new time-waster.”

Apparently, tens of thousands of employees are getting banned from using social networking sites at work because they’re wasting too much time.  Yeah.  Even parents get distracted.  Did you know that there are Facebook groups that are actually dedicated to slacking off?!  What’s even sadder is that I’m pretty sure I’m part of one!

The internet can actually change your personality.  When I say the word “bullying,” what’s the first thing you think of?  Probably something like a little kid being made fun of by some other kids on the bus.  I know you’ve heard the lectures at school since you were in kindergarten.  I know you’ve been told over and over again that you shouldn’t shove some kid into a trash can or, conversely, what to do if you are being shoved into a trash can.  And, chances are, each time you heard it you shrugged it off, because you never shoved anyone into a trash can, and never really wanted to.  You’ve probably never thought of yourself as a bully.  Maybe it’s the fact that when you’re safely behind your computer screen you can’t see or hear other people.  Or maybe it’s that those other people can’t see or hear you.  Whatever the reason, the research suggests that, these days, online harassment is even more common than face-to-face bullying.  Bullying can mean anything from insulting a person on their Facebook wall to posting videos on YouTube about how annoying they are.  It can be an anonymous death threat, or it can be hacking into their MySpace profile. 

It’s called “cyber-bullying,” and it’s becoming worse and worse each day.  The big problem with cyber-bullying is that kids don’t look at it as a big deal, and we don’t consider it actual bullying.  But in a lot of cases, and for a lot of kids, cyber-bullying is even worse than “actual” bullying.

Marilyn Campbell, of the University of Technology in Queensland, Australia, says that kids who
are being bullied online feel like they have no place to run or hide, and that they feel like the whole world can see what’s going on.  Experts say that when kids are online, they’re less apprehensive about being mean as they would be in person.  Think about the last time you had a not-so-nice conversation with another kid on AIM. Would you have said those things in person?  Me neither.  

Have you noticed that some of us are so attached to our computers that we’re becoming disconnected with respect to the rest of the world?  This machine is actually becoming so important that it can seem even more valuable to us than our own families.

One day last summer, I was pretty bored.  So, obviously, the first thing I do is go on YouTube and look for funny videos.  I came across one that featured a girl who looked about my age.  She was asked about which she cared more—her family or MySpace.  Her answer was MySpace.  Hysterically, she shouted that MySpace meant everything to her.  Maybe we’re not all that crazy, but you have to admit—there’s a little bit of that girl in all of us. 

First of all, kids today have A LOT of things going on:  We’ve got school all day, then after-school clubs, sports, and then tons of homework waiting for us at night.  We’re constantly complaining about having too much to do, and we stay up all night doing homework.  Yet, somehow, teenagers manage to spend an average of 11 hours per week online.  Is this really how we spend our precious spare time?  

Are MySpace, Facebook, and AIM really more important to us than our families and our friends?
I mean, sometimes, when we’re on the computer, we’re not even talking to anyone because no one else is online.  Yet we’re still able to spend hours doing things like editing MySpace profiles and finding quotes to put in our headlines.  We really shouldn’t be wasting time doing things like that. We would probably have more fun getting out of the house and riding our bikes or hanging out with friends.

So what exactly does all this mean?  That we should all go home and delete our MySpace and Facebook accounts?  Uninstall AIM from our computers?  Ha-ha.  Yeah, right.  Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with having things that allow us to so easily communicate with people and stay in touch with old friends.  The internet isn’t really evil, as long as you don’t get out of control.  You know how our parents are constantly bugging us about how we shouldn’t be wasting our time online?  And how the internet can cause us a lot of problems?  Ugh.  I just hate it when they’re right.

You can check your Facebook every once in a while without checking it every five minutes.  And maybe next time you realize you're up and online the night before a big test on a book you haven’t even started reading, you might want to shut down your computer and start reading it instead of changing your Facebook status to, “OMG I am so stressed.”  It’s okay to use MySpace and Facebook, as long you’re not using them to leave rude comments about someone else’s picture.  Or to start a group on Facebook about how that one girl is so stupid.   And, maybe, every once in a while, you could even set your status on AIM to “away,” and go watch a movie with your family.  If we can learn how to keep the internet from taking over, we can tame the monster.

By John Lee,  

TeleMedia Strategy magazine is now live! As the lines between Telecom, Entertainment, and Media blur then disappear entirely, we all struggle to make sense out of the chaos, identify opportunities, quantify risks, rewards, and investments so that the most important decisions can be made with as much information, experience, and insight available. The Internet has changed everything - how we think, how we communicate, how we work, and how we live our daily lives - due in large measure to a  parade of technological innovations that have taken the human experience to new heights while continuing to make our world a much smaller place then ever before.  

TeleMedia Strategy was conceived as an on-line forum where smart people could share ideas, catch up on the latest goings on, publish some of our latest work, and generally talk to others that are as interested as we are in the incredible changes that are happening all around us.   Behind TeleMedia Strategy magazine is a diverse group of experts with one thing in common – a passionate fascination for the new digital world.  Whether coming from telecom, entertainment, media, consulting, or academic backgrounds, we all agree that this is undoubtedly one of the most dynamic and exciting times ever witnessed in human evolution.

TeleMedia Strategy will continue to bring you the latest information, deepest experience, and most insightful analysis from across the TeleMedia landscape, plus lifestyle trends, emerging stars, technology updates, the coolest gadgets, and more, all so that you can form your own… TeleMedia Strategy.

Please join us in shaping the future at www.telemediastrategy.com.

Fri, Dec 05, 2008

According to a report published by the UK film council last summer entitled, “Low and Micro Film Production in the UK,” the UK produces about 100 micro-budget films per year at a cost of £18.5 Million ($27.75 Million).  That's about $275K each.  Most fail to secure a conventional theatrical release, but the number of films produced has doubled since 2002.  So why do it?

In the words of the great Bob Dylan, “The times, they are a-changin’.”  The advent of digital production techniques and digital distribution technologies are allowing filmmakers to get their content ‘out there’ through non-traditional routes.  Is a theatrical release important if you can sell your film digitally?  Content-makers (Film and TV) have seen what has happened in the music industry, where individuals have used digital development and distribution to challenge the corporate stranglehold on the provisions of content through traditional distribution models, and are succeeding online.  Film and TV pose a more difficult challenge, given the streaming limitations, bandwidth constraints and audience capture, but as the ‘technological gates’ are opened, these industries will come running through.  

In the UK, we are seeing inventive models around the production of such media content.  This is being aided by the introduction of new production technologies such as the RED digital camera (http://forums.creativecow.net/forum/redcamera and  www.youtube.com/watch?v=QciO6QWBbW8 ), tools like Final Cut Pro, online services, and hosted support models like CreativeLicensing Limited (www.creativelicencing.co.uk), which provides specialized film accounting software on a SaaS basis.  The move to digital content provisions in the UK is also being supported by Large Capital projects such as the Media City project in Manchester. These technological advances are being supported by government initiatives to provide tax advantages to UK filmmakers in the  form of tax credits under which filmmakers can get back 20% of their production and distribution costs (though certain guidelines apply).

We are now seeing private individuals participating in collective film production ‘slates,’ such as Cost Inventive Films (www. Costinventivefilms.com), where members invest in a specific vehicle under a UK tax scheme called an “Enterprise Investment Scheme” (EIS).  The slate typically consists of four films, so the risk of a single film failure is spread over multiple investors.  It is easy to see the potentially  tremendous returns this affords, given the EIS tax advantages.

So the old model where the average UK film costs £2M–£3M ($3M–$4.5M) to make, and generates profits averaging £800K ($1.2M), is about to change.  Digital films are being made for £150K ($300K), and are gaining an equal share of the online and DVD distribution rights. This is possibly the biggest change to hit the movie industry since talkies, so hold on for the ride….  That’s entertainment!

This column will be following these innovations and more over the coming issues.  If you enjoy the journey you are welcome to participate.  Subscribe, blog, join the Forum, make a comment, or just sit back and be entertained.  See you in the next issue...

Fri, Dec 05, 2008

Would you try to run a delivery service with a horse and cart? How about a hospital with a tablet of paper? Of course you wouldn’t! The point is that there are a surprising number of companies who are not taking advantage of the opportunities to improve their business through the use of mobile and wireless technology.

Back in the ‘80’s and early ‘90’s,  when companies were looking at how to improve their business processes, some forward-thinking organizations recognized that computers inside of “the 4 walls” of the office were not improving things that were happening outside those walls. At that time, there were no wireless networks other than private, radio networks. Coverage was sparse to non-existent so mobility was, by necessity, limited to data collection in the best-case scenario. Today, of course, coverage is ubiquitous, however, we still see companies primarily focused inside the 4 walls (and tied to a desk), even though the opportunity to both reduce costs and improve performance exists by focusing on wireless and outside.

Take Vail Resorts for example. Here is an example of a really forward-thinking organization who clearly asked the question, “How can technology reduce our costs, while at the same time improve our customer experience?” And, they came up with a creative solution that not only reduces labor costs, but vastly improves their customer experience. 

Vail Resorts, the premier mountain resort company in the world and a leader in luxury-destination-based travel at iconic locations came up with a great idea to effectively answer this question. In its 2008-2009 ski season, they are implementing premier Mobile Computing devices (Intermec's CN3 devices outfitted with their IP30 Handheld RFID readers) for its customer’s season ski passes at Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone and Heavenly Valley Resorts.

This solution provided an “easy scan” process -- which will make getting through lift lines easier and more conveniently.  In addition, through the use of this RFID technology, Vail is able to give its premier customers (those skiers and snowboarders holding 2008-2009 season passes) the option of keeping their passes inside their jacket as they are automatically scanned in the lift line.  Fast, easy, and convenient – truly a win-win scenario for Vail’s high-value clientele.

“With Intermec RFID readers, we will be able to significantly enhance our guest experience by making the lift-line process easier and more convenient for our guests who have purchased any of our four season pass products – The Epic Pass™, The Colorado Pass™, The Summit Pass™ or The Heavenly Pass,” stated Robert Urwiler, Chief Information Officer for Vail Resorts.

WOW! It seems so simple doesn’t it . . . but how many organizations have this out-of-the-box thinking that can produce real results and business improvement? Well, in our experience the answer is certainly not as many as we’d like to see.  The good news is that the opportunity is out there waiting.  And, our mission with this article is to continually bring you examples from both the private and public sector where companies are using this sort of creative thinking to leverage wireless and mobile computing.  

So, stay tuned for more Big Ideas that’ll get you thinking about how you can improve your business through the Mobile Universe!