Downtown....
Instead of the usual stories about making money and corporate machinations, today I thought I would point to to the personal story of an ordinary revenue assurance Joe Shmoe.
When Fraud Belongs With Revenue Assurance
There is a debate about whether telecoms fraud falls within the remit of revenue assurance, or has anything to do with revenue assurance, or is something that needs to be managed differently. I never could understand those arguments. Businesses should organize themselves in the way most efficient for their circumstances. Sometimes that will mean linking the management of fraud with revenue assurance, sometimes keeping them separate. It all rather depends on what frauds and revenue losses the business is likely to suffer from and how it deals with them. Here is a very good synopsis of the various kinds of fraud from Geoff Ibbett of SubexAzure. Stephen Tebbett of Ernst & Young has an awesome list of all the kinds of revenue loss that I would give you the link to, except it is not on the web yet, so come back soon as we will be hosting it here in the near future. Though the causes of the losses on Geoff's and Stephen's lists are quite different, many of them revolve around similar weaknesses or gaps in monitoring, and there is a lot of overlap in the indicators of fraud and revenue loss. Of course, in the real world lots of questions about who does what job are decided by internal politics and power struggles. But if you want to think about the question solely on the basis of efficiency and effectiveness, here are the three factors to consider when deciding whether to link the management of fraud and revenue assurance.
1) Human Resources, Staff Time and Communications
Will there be pre-launch analysis of risks for both fraud and revenue assurance? If so, could this be performed by the same individuals? Can the training of fraud and revenue assurance analysts be combined to improve effectiveness and reduce overheads? If fraud and revenue assurance staff were in the same function, would they have improved promotion prospects making it easier to retain good people? Are losses due to fraud and revenue leaks reported using a consistent format? Are they both presented to the same executives? Could they be collated and reported by the same person? Are they calculated in a consistent way?
If the answers to the questions are "yes", linking fraud and revenue assurance will provide efficiencies in terms of human resources, communications and the time of senior staff. If the answers are "no", it is still worth asking why. Why not have the same person trained to identify fraud and revenue assurance risks? Why not calculate losses in a consistent manner and present them to the same execs?
2) Incident Management and Process Improvement
Are there overlaps in the way fraud and revenue assurance weaknesses are addressed? Is there a similar scope for the systems and processes reviewed and monitored for both fraud and revenue assurance purposes? Is same the documentation used to understand internal processes and system performance and hence to identify weaknesses? Are there topics like information security or business continuity where both fraud and revenue assurance considerations are often addressed in the same way? Do improvements related to reducing fraud often have benefits for reducing revenue loss and vice versa?
If the answers are "yes", there is a good case for trying to resolve issues and fix bad processes using a common approach with common prioritisation. Where the understanding of technology and product is much the same for preventing or identifying weaknesses for both fraud and revenue assurance, duplication of effort can be reduced by linking the goals.
3) Monitoring Systems and Processes
Is the same source data used for both fraud and revenue assurance monitoring? Are alarms that indicate possible fraud sometimes set off by accidential revenue leakage? Are checks for accidental revenue leakage sometimes evidence of deliberate fraud?
If the answers are "yes", there should be cost efficiencies in implementing systems and processes able to identify and react to both deliberate frauds and accidental revenue losses. Exploitative customer actions like use of SIM boxes, or internal frauds where some customer bills are suppressed, may not be picked up by classic monitoring focused on looking for certain pre-defined types of customer fraud, but may get identified through generalised RA checks. Likewise, monitoring for unusual customer activity or for internal frauds may highlight an accidental error by the business or one of its partners as well as identifying genuine frauds. If there is a high degree of overlap in the recurring checks that would counter both fraud and revenue loss, then it is more efficient to combine the monitoring strategies and to reuse data where possible.
Democratic Revenue Assurance
I like the idea of democracy. I think there is something to be said for sharing authority between a large group of people rather than giving it to an elite. That is why I like blogs. Why listen to one person's view when you can listen to many? Check out this blog about user-centric revenue assurance, which started me thinking about revenue assurance and democracy. I always enjoy listening to points of view which are more sophisticated than the usual "buy this stuff and it will fix all your problems" marketing blurb.
The problem with democracy is that if you give responsibility to many, you may find nobody takes responsibility. Revenue assurance is like a public good. For a start, revenue assurance is something that benefits everybody (unless you actually want to work for an unprofitable and wasteful business that makes lots of mistakes). However, measuring and allocating responsibility is virtually impossible to do. Many revenue assurance big-shots would no doubt choke, or laugh, after reading that last sentence. But that is because they like to take all the credit for any successes, and take no responsibility for any failures. Holding an RA department responsible for revenue assurance is like holding environmental activists responsible for global warming, making the Police responsible for crime, or holding a doctor responsible for the health of the community. Sure, they have some role to play, but they do not cause the problems they deal with, and many of the solutions are outside of their control. So if things get better, they may deserve some credit, but much of the credit must go to other activities too (think about the impact when people recycle, or take better precautions to prevent crime, or exercise regularly). The same is true of revenue assurance. Spending money on a revenue assurance department so it can employ people or implement tools is like putting your faith in centralised solution to the problem that people make mistakes. I say people, because systems do not make mistakes - only the people who choose them, design them, implement them, and use them make mistakes. There are lots of ways to avoid mistakes, live emphasising simplicity in design, taking a modular approach, or being thorough with testing. Encouraging people to avoid mistakes, or to identify and correct mistakes, is like encouraging people to recycle or to exercise. It would be a bad doctor who wants his patients to be unhealthy just so he can then give them expensive treatments. But it is very hard to measure the benefits of preventative medicine, and hence to reward it, either in terms of the doctor's efforts, or of the community as a whole. Hard though it is, a service provider must remember the importance of collective action, or else he will end up with very expensive doctors trying to cure a sickly business that never gets well. So revenue assurance is not the problem of the RA department, it is everyone's problem. That means the first step is the same as with any public good: educate the public. If people do not know what the problem is, they will never start to work on the solution.
Letting The People Decide
I will get back to blogging about revenue assurance and other things at some point. But having blogged about the Celebrity Big Brother racist bullying scandal a couple of days ago, guessing that it might turn into something with enormous consequences for how we debate public standards of behaviour, I cannot stop now. Last night saw the worst episode yet. And today, the chickens are coming home to roost. Here is a quick update on where we are now:
- Complaints to Ofcom now total 30,000, by far the most ever about a UK TV show;
- Carphone Warehouse has now pulled their sponsorship of Celebrity Big Brother;
- Ofcom is writing a letter to Channel 4 about the show.
Two separate debates are getting muddled during all this. The first one, which gets a lot of coverage, is about whether the obnoxious behaviour of some of the contestants is racist. The implication seems to be that people being nasty in a non-racist way is a perfectly acceptable thing to show on television, but if it is racist than it must be stopped. The second one, which is not getting much coverage, is what exactly people are complaining about. Are they complaining that Channel 4 should not show this programme, or are they complaining that people are behaving obnoxiously (whether racist or not) on the programme?
Let us focus on the second question. Perhaps some people on the show are racist. But it seems most people agree that even if they are racist, these people are making complete fools of themselves. Channel 4's editing clearly highlights their ignorance and stupidity over and over again. All the indications are that the bullies will be left with no choice but to apologise, desperately try to justify their actions, will spend lots of time being seen out with coloured friends and denouncing racism in order to hold on to what will be left of their careers and businesses. If you oppose racism, then presumably the best outcome is to keep these imbeciles on television for as long as possible to guarantee they ultimately suffer the maximum in humiliation. People do not tend to complain about television channels presenting racists as stupid, ignorant bigots, so I assume the complaints are caused by the dislike of these particular bigots, and not because Channel 4 is so expertly highlighting it. Given that this is television that anyone can watch unedited if they wanted, Channel 4 and the producers, Endemol, have only sinned by pointing the camera at some fools, by allowing them to act like the fools they really are, and by broadcasting edited highlights of the most foolish things they do. In which case, the makers and network should be applauded for performing a public service, not castigated for failing to protect a supposedly feeble-minded public from the truth of what these people are. The gut reaction is to be angry at the behaviour of these silly bullies, but a calmer head says that the bullies are doing the most harm to themselves and anyone else who thinks like them.
Of course, there will be some politicians jumping on the bandwagon. A lot of MPs have tried to grab some attention by signing up to a motion on the topic. London Mayor Ken Livingstone, a man who thinks it inoffensive to compare a Jewish journalist asking a question to a Nazi solider following orders, has also spoken out. Livingstone has suggested that Channel 4 should lose their licence to broadcast as a result. But then Livingstone also praises China for being an open and tolerant society so we should not be too surprised at his attitude to free speech.
But I am grateful that Channel 4 are not backing down to pressure and intend to continue the show. The moral of the story here is not to be impressed by people who take any opportunity to promote themselves, whether they are a footballer's girfriend or Ken Livingstone. The victim of the bullying, Shilpa Shetty, is a successful person who is showing the bravery to stand up for herself. She is not running away from the show or her treatment. Three other contestants have previously walked out on the spur of the moment, one claiming it was because he had no clean underpants. Nobody would think less of Shilpa Shetty if she left because she thought herself victim to racist intimidation. But instead, she battles on. As a result, she will be giving the public an ultimate opportunity to send a message about racism, as she contests with the loudest bully, Jade Goody, which one of them will be evicted from the show in the public vote this Friday. All the predictions are that Goody will kicked out by the viewing audience without needing the involvement of politicians. Many predict that Shetty, largely unknown in the UK beforehand, will go on to victory in this most straightforward of popularity contests. If she has the courage to continue, and to take on the self-publicising fools inside the Big Brother house, I see no reason why self-publicising fools outside should interfere.
Standing Up For Standards
Ofcom, the UK's communications and content regulator, must be working at full speed today. Yesterday I blogged about the complaints Ofcom had received about racist bullying on UK's Celebrity Big Brother. The number of complaints went from 2,000 when I started blogging to 3,500 by the time I finished. Less than 24 hours later the reported total of complaints now stands at 16,400. Carphone Warehouse boss Charles Dunstone is considering pulling his firm's sponsorship of the show. Tony Blair was asked about it at Primeminister's question time. Chancellor Gordon Brown has spoken out against it whilst touring India. Elsewhere in India, there are protests on the streets. Back in the UK, the police are investigating death threats. I am half tempted to get in my car and drive the half hour to where the show is filmed to see if an angry mob is rioting outside.
So, what is the good news, you ask? Well, at least people are finding it easy to complain these days, and part of the credit must go to modern communications. The foolish and insensitive behaviour of a few self-absorbed minor celebrities is hardly the worst thing happening in the world today (is it even a surprise?), but it certainly is provoking many to speak out to condemn it. In condemning their behaviour, they are also establishing a standard they expect all to conform to, not just the fools promoting (or destroying) themselves by living in a box for a silly TV show. And thanks to the speed of electronic communications, the numbers of complaints can be counted and reported with only a short delay. The public relations people are unable to argue for a spurious balance in the media presentation of this news story, because we can all see the numbers of people that have been upset. Well done to Ofcom for getting its numbers straight for once (we hope) and for reporting them so quickly. Sadly, they have not yet decided to put up a real-time complaints counter on their home page (perhaps they would if Carphone Warehouse offered to sponsor it?)
But so far, there is no sign that the BB show will be cut short or that the offending people will be kicked off the screen. The increased attention has only helped ratings which must encourage Channel 4 to leave things unchanged. Until the victim complains personally, or somebody obviously oversteps the line, they can probably get away with leaving things as is. And I hope they do leave it on for as long as possible. However unseemly the behaviour of the contestants, it is glorious to find so many ordinary people empowered and willing to register their unhappiness about it. Although I feel sorry for the victim, Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty, I hope she will be able to look back and feel some greater good came from it. The response generated is helping to define expectations about acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, both on and off television. Society's standards may seem too often to stem from an elite that is forgiving of the rich and famous (Lord Archer? Prince Philip?) and intolerant of the weaknesses of the rest of us. If this fracas defines better standards for everyone in society, and those high standards come from common ordinary people appalled by the actions of the representatives of wealth and celebrity, that can only be a good thing for us all.
Orwell That Ends Well?
My good friend Marais did something remarkable the other day. He sent me a thank you letter. It was written by hand, and was on nice paper in a matching envelope. It was brief, but the epitome of good manners. Truly astounding. And it was not as if I was very deserving of thanks either.
The reason why I comment on the sending of a letter is that there must be a limit on how much people need to communicate. So as we develop more and more ways of communicating at distance, the need for older forms of communication must decrease. There may come a time when writing by hand is seen as quaint. A letter has a proper format, a series of conventions about how it should be spaced and structured that needs to be learned. The conventions about what can be said and how to express yourself in a letter are also learned. There are many differences between the letters sent in the novels of Jane Austen and a modern business letter, but each must conform to a certain kind of standard. Otherwise, the author is at risk of not being taken seriously or of somehow being excluded from society. Other forms of communication need to establish their conventions too. For example, I am not someone who has felt a desperate need for the acronym "lol" so prevalent in chat and email these days, but people seem to use it fairly often so it obviously has a place. Stubborn though I am, I used it myself shortly before writing this blog. I never used to like smileys and now I use them all the time :) Perhaps I am conservative when it comes to how we change language and our polite standards, although I accept not all change is bad. Someone deserves a pat on the back for drawing on Monty Python when christening the modern plague that is "spam".
When conventions in society change quickly, this often causes unrest and quite a bit of unhappiness. Inventing and delivering new modes of electronic communication is not as dramatic as the kind of changes that followed the French or Bolshevik revolutions, but the principle is the same. Revolutions include their fair share of idealists, humanists, and anarchists dreaming of a better world, but whilst some good things may happen as a result of rapid change, plenty of bad things may result as well. The same is true of the revolution in communications we now find ourselves in. On the one side, we have the familiar group of well-intentioned dreamers who hope to make the world a better place, and on the other we have the people looking to exploit change for more mercenary reasons. At the least, we can suppose a change in communications paradigms is unlikely to result in bloodshed. And an easy argument is that it makes communication, and hence the functioning of society as a whole, far more democratic, because it greatly increases access to information. It also gives people a voice (so long as you are probably a rich spolit white young American with a PC and an IP address, that is). But then, being on the side of the "people" does not automatically make the world a better place. The counter-argument to unfettered democracy is that you need some kind of elite to keep up standards. In the communications sphere, the elite is effectively the same as those who control content and decide what gets broadcast or published. If we scroll past the long list of countries (China, Saudi Arabia, Russia) where the (usually unelected) government has a stranglehold on what information the people can obtain, the best example of a broadcast elite in a free country is the UK's favourite anachronism, the BBC.
I love the way that in the UK people need a licence to watch television. The implication is that a television is like a dog or a gun or a car or something else the government needs to keep a careful track of because of the potential for misuse. In a country full of sceptical tax-payers, why there are so few complaints about this obvious abuse of the language - and rights - can only be explained by the enduring popularity of the BBC. Which means that, in the right circumstances, some people will prefer that an elite makes decisions for them, and decides what everyone should be able to watch and how much they should pay for it.
A few years ago the BBC tried desperately to reposition itself by spending a fortune on providing alternative portals for content, whether through the interactive elements of its broadcast TV service, or through its website. The website in particular tried to break a lot of new ground in terms of offering a quality service with a large variety of streamed content ranging from radio shows to news clips. And a lot of it was very good quality, reflecting the scale of the investment made. But ultimately it was a push of content, not an attempt to be any more democratic. Former BBC One Controller Alan Yentob devoted a recent BBC programme in his "Imagine" series to giving a sweeping review of everything new in communications since the invention of the computer and the arrival of the web. Though it covered blogging, Wikipedia, MySpace, Second Life and much more along the way, the show was dull, joyless, stale and awful, in jarring contrast with the dynamic world it was presumably seeking to present. In one particularly painful sequence we saw Yentob, aided by an internet-savvy assistant, writing his first blog entry, a dreary unimaginative musing about why people would want to blog in the first place. "Imagine" is a good title for the show, because I found it very hard to imagine the impact it had on the cattle herds who still faithfully watch the BBC and presumably only find out about the internet when the BBC tells them about it. Despite the Yentob's pretence at interest, he was yesterday's man uncomfortable with the idea that people can be clever and creative, can entertain and inform others, without there being a pre-determined hierarchy, without huge teams of employees and without enormous budgets. The show was so awful I was going to post links so people who missed it could see it again, assuming this programme would be a prime candidate for the BBC to show off its interactive credentials and for redistribution over the internet. But the BBC did not push it on the internet, Yentob's blog disappeared off the net, the YouTube video he created for the show was quickly deleted and the gimmicky URL-style name of the show "www.herecomeseverybody.co.uk" is a dud when typed into your browser. All of which made it hard for me to feel sorry for the BBC when the British government announced late last year that the tax that directly funds them will fall in real terms over the coming years. My licence fee probably paid for less than one second of Yentob's desultory insights into a world beyond his understanding. Furthermore, I have no interest in giving the BBC money so they can spend it on things like pushing up the price for the rights to rebroadcast football games, thus making footballers and their Wives-And-Girlfriends even more obscenely rich.
George Orwell was no fan of elites telling people how to live their lives. If he was alive today, presumably he would have mixed feelings about being constantly watched on CCTV. Though useful for prosecuting attempted bombers of London Underground that would be scant consolation if the bomb had gone off and is no deterrent to somebody who plans to die in the blast. But if Orwell was alive I suspect he would also have some strong reservations about how the dystopian vision of 1984 has mutated into entertainment in the form of Celebrity Big Brother and its ilk. I normally loathe the television show Big Brother. I do not watch television to see people being bored inside a house. If I wanted to see people bored in a house I would switch the television off and watch myself in the mirror instead. But sadly, you can hardly escape it, with the constant references to BB in radio and print and other television shows. On top of that, even intelligent friends of mine sometimes insist on watching it in my presence. My heart sank after seeing an episode of the current series. In it, the most interesting event of the contestant's day was when a former TV star from the 70's and 80's (Dirk Benedict) got a bit moody with a person whose original claim to fame is that she made a laughing stock of herself on the non-Celebrity version of the show (Jade Goody). Arguably, the rise of this kind of entertainment is a direct consequence of the handing over of control from an old-style elite like the BBC. In the new era of entertainment, businesses like Endemol, the producers of Big Brother, must treat viewing figures and hence advertising revenues as all-important. In the show I saw, Benedict's moodiness (no doubt the result of a mixture of boredom and lack of sleep) seemed to provoke Goody and two other z-list celebs (one a footballer's girlfriend, another, a has-been teenybop singer) to climb into bed together and enjoy an extended and tedious session of bitching about him. That the three were white, female, and between the ages of 20 and 30 was depressing. Doubtless they were included in the show to reflect a key audience demographic for the advertisers: young female viewers. Needless to say, their exaggerated prattling and the excessive offence that they took at a trivial disagreement made them into very poor role models. Of course, what makes it much worse is that this show is at the very forefront of the new communication paradigm. As well as the very concept of 24-hour surveillance, and its delivery and promotion through traditional channels, BB's ability to inspire interest and interaction, through phone voting, web forums and the like, make it a cheerleader for new communications. And it is seemingly universal in appeal, having been adapted with minor rule changes to suit the tastes of audiences in nearly 70 countries. It should be no surprise that telcos rank high amongst the businesses keen to sponsor the show or advertise during it. Paradigm of new, liberal, cultural and communication values it may be, but BB is also a debasement of polite standards in society. In the episode I watched, I was reduced to seeing how very ordinary and unaccomplished the aforementioned celebrities were. Without media handlers to guide them, and without the benefit of favourable editing, I was made to see how petty and undeserving these people really are. Seemingly the bitchy young ladies have no appreciation or concern over how their behaviour might be viewed by the world outside, despite having careers that depend on it. There is no such thing as bad publicity, said Brendan Behan, but the ladies seem set to test that proposition to the fullmost. When I started writing this blog the news was that Ofcom, the regulator of standards in broadcast television, had received over 2,000 complaints that the ladies had acted in a racist and bullying way to another participant, a Bollywood star. Now I see the current total is over 3,500 complaints, plus another 1,000 complaints to the broadcasters - see here. Presumably the number of complaints will continue to rocket up, causing an enormous headache for the broadcasters who have unwittingly given the participants an ill-controlled platform for what is perceived by many viewers to be racism. I have no opinion on whether the ladies did act in a racist fashion, and have no intention of watching the show in order to form an opinion, but I can observe that there are standards of behaviour that are expected in society and it seems a large number of people agree that the ladies have failed to meet them.
That the perception of racism should provoke such a strong reaction should not be a surprise to people in the public eye. Only last week saw a protest at the English National Ballet, of all things, aimed at challenging the participation of a ballerina with links to an allegedly racist political party. Late last year, former Seinfeld actor Michael Richards destroyed his own career when an inappropriate (and very unfunny) racial outburst on stage got recorded on the mobiles of audience members and then shown to the world through YouTube. On the basis that I assume everyone - not least Richards given his subsequent apologies - will understand the outburst is despicable, I have the link to it here. Naivety that unkind or impolite comments may be misinterpreted as racist will not serve as much defence for people who aim to prosper through being in the public spotlight.
In Orwell's 1984, Big Brother was watching everyone, not just a few foolish young women in a make-believe house. I do not find it that surprising that you might catch people behaving badly. The format is obviously intended to catch people behaving badly. First, they pick a few contestants at random. In fact, they purposefully pick contestants because they lack any natural merits other than their desire for publicity. Second, they record their actions night and day. It would be more surprising if other Big Brother viewers really expected or tuned in for anything else. Not everyone is going to set a good example for others, though to be fair to Big Brother at least one participant observed the similarities between the childish and bullying antics around him and the story in Lord of the Flies.
There will always be a fair share of hypocrites and fools to balance out the saints and geniuses that walk amongst us. Democratic access and distribution of content and contribution gives all of them (and us) equal opportunities to show off our flaws as well as our merits. What is happening now, for the first time in history, is a convergence where everybody could literally be broadcast on television to the whole world at any time, maybe even all of the time. In a few years there will emerge a critical mass of people that have a device in their home, or on the move, that can serve as both PC and television, able to support two-way video communication, the recording of content and the replay of video on demand. Broadcasting and messaging paradigms may start to merge, because we will all have a ready ability to send or receive video content to others. Orwell's vision of the television that watches you will be realised more completely than he imagined. With no elite to censor or control content, our expectations of what we see on that screen will change. In the transition from the written letter to the email, there was a significant shift in cultural standards, and lessons about how to interact had to be relearned. Emails were less polite, less formal, less grammatical than the written word. With emails came new problems. Insults are not new, but flaming was a new kind of anti-social behaviour. Authors sometimes miscalculated that the storage and ease of resending to large audiences could amplify the impact of the content. New legal questions were raised about the extent of damage caused by libelous emails. So new modes of communication, and with them the erosion (or is it just a change?) of the elite will bring in new standards that we use to measure polite and appropriate behaviour in society. The problem with any revolution, is that change may happen faster than our capacity to establish standards, and the negative implications of change may outweigh the positive. Time will only tell if we behave better, or worse, when we all become the subjects of Big Brother.
Voice Is The Killer App
I am not going to blog about Apple's iPhone. That would be pointless. There are a 100 billion squillion people who have already done that. All I am going to say is that the relentless onward march of Apple seems to be based on pretty good business sense: think about what people want, and then make it. The alternative that most retail technology manufacturers prefer seems to be to make something and then try to persuade people that it is something they what. I just love the fact that Steve Jobs said:
“What’s the killer app? The killer app is making calls. It’s amazing how hard it is to make calls on phones. We want you to use contacts like never before.”
Ignore the question about whether Apple really have got a much better way to access contacts. The main point is simple: ergonomics sells well. Ergonomics is about understanding what people do - what they really want to do - and then designing accordingly. Most marketing of technology retail products seems to be about guessing what might be a USP that somebody in the world might want and then making something with that USP. Apple had the savvy to create their own world-beating USP: they make things that do the basic tasks well. Of course, they do other things well, but the USP is that their products are easy to use for the things you want to do with them. So, it takes a Steve Jobs to point out something that so many businesses want to deny or understate. Some people may want wi-fi and web browsing and google searches and email push and synching with Outlook and...and...and... and so on to infinity. Some people want those things. But most people have phones because they want to talk to other people. Boring old voice is the killer app. Make it easier to actually make calls, and people will probably make more. They will want to make calls on Apple's phone if it is easy to use and not somebody else's that is not so easy to use. Perhaps nobody noticed, but phone numbers are just codes. They are codes used to identify one destination as opposed to another. But who, other than James Bond, wants to remember codes or rummage through code books or search lists of codes? If I want to speak to my mate, or my dentist, or my uncle, what do I care which national code, area code and personal code needs to be dialled to connect me? I just want to be connected as quickly and as easily as possible, and let some device do all the hard work of managing the codes for me. The only thing that amazes is that most businesses so far have completely failed to rise to the challenge. The question is whether they will be able to rise to the challenge now. Not just the handset manufacturers, but the service providers too - what are they doing to make it easier to make voice calls?
Of course, I will probably be buying an iPhone as soon as I can, no matter what network it is with. So long as it works well as a phone. Which means I can hear what people are saying, and it does not fall to pieces when I drop it, and the actual battery life is longer than 10s (something that could not be said for every iPod). All basic ergonomics, of course, because being human I hear with my imperfect ears, sometimes drop things and have conversations whilst on the move that last longer than 10s. But then again, I may not buy the iPhone. If AT&T, who have also just announced they are phasing out their Cingular brand, do not provide a service that matches the expectations of Apple loyalists, the outcome may be disappointment. Apple may get reduced sales of the iPhone if AT&T's exclusivity deal backfires. And in the real world small sales often lead to lower quality in the production line, higher unit prices or slower resolution of glitches and the like.
One final thought. Another good idea is that I can just use my finger to point to things for the interface. I certainly have sympathy for Steve Job's argument that I do not want to use a stylus for the interface - especially given the amazing prices you have to pay for replacement styluses if you lose them. But trying to present this as an incredible new idea still falls short of something that I would find amazing. Perhaps even Apple sometimes fails to think long and hard enough about how people behave. People use phones to talk to other people. Ummm.... sounds like maybe talking is a pretty good kind of interface protocol that everybody knows and loves. So the real boon would be a phone that just does what it is told to do (without being trained to respond to its master's voice first).
TV Party
I enjoy a traditional Christmas, where I spend all day eating and drinking and watching television. But whilst firmly stuck in the armchair, flicking between channels on my remote control, I discovered a truly wonderous tv channel amidst all the infomercials and reruns. Information TV is hardly going to get big ratings. A kind of public service channel, its content seems to be anything that a "public" body might have gone to the trouble of videoing and would want the public to see. In other words, it is the kind of outlet that would show the recording of some stuffy "conference" (in other words, a room with about 100 people listening to a few people at the front) on media convergence hosted by Ofcom. So there I was, spending my Christmas watching Arun Sarin and James Murdoch being remarkably rude about the poor old regulator that was their host and was sat right next to them. When they briefly paused to stop bashing the regulator, Sarin and Murdoch actually said relatively interesting things. In a roundabout way, they said that the party was over for their business models, or at least would be very shortly in the developed world. Presumably this is one of the reasons why Vodafone and News Corp are driven to build a presence in India and China. In short, what they talked about was that:
* communications products are all a commodity (Murdoch)
* eat all you want voice was inevitable in the next few years (Sarin)
* video over 3G is a niche product, broadcast tv over mobile is coming soon
e.g. the new DVB-H service Sky and Vodafone are offering in Italy (Sarin)
* user-generated content like News Corp subsidiary's MySpace makes traditional public
service content generation much less important (Murdoch)
* regulators are useless fools and society is better off without them (both)
Looking past the hubris for a moment, though, I found it all very revealing. What they said was that their business models were ultimately stuffed. In other words:
- 3G was a costly mistake: in a commodity market there is no "killer app"
- the only way to make money is through content
- the market is fragmenting because of easier entry for contect creators and distibutors
So their business models, in the longer run, depend on being the preferred (or unavoidable - if the regulator lets them get away with it) middle men in the distribution of content from creator to consumer. But why does the consumer need the middle man? After all, I was watching information tv via Sky's satellite, but I could have been watching it through a live stream over the internet. The content I was watching was, after all, extraordinarily niche. Past the 100 people in the room, who else but me would actually want to watch this kind of content? In short, anybody with a camcorder is now a potential one-man tv studio. Thanks to NYPD Blue it does not even matter if the camera shakes a bit whilst they hold it.
The last big eruption in the Do-It-Yourself art ethic was in music with the arrival of the punks. Suddenly a lot of fairly talentless people took things into their own hands, formed their own labels and started pressing their own records. Some of them were not so talentless. Some of them sold out at the first opportunity. Ultimately, the music scene settled down and the big companies were able to absorb the movement and even make it profitable for them in the long run. Now the same thing is happening with video. It is one big TV party and everybody can crash it. The question is, will it succeed where the punks failed and leave a lasting change on our culture? Or will we wake up afterwards with a mightly hangover to find we are still in bed with the Sarins and Murdochs of the world?
The Roc(k)y Horror Show
SubexAzure may well be one of the most successful revenue assurance software vendors around, but forgive me if I am left bemused by their rebranding exercise. Somebody must have thought their products needed new names. And it is not hard to see why when they were called things like SAFMS, SARMS, SAIBS and SAROS. But check out the new product brands: Moneta, Nikira, Prevea, Concilia, Symphona and Optima. These appellations must be leftovers from panto season, because when they picked names for the wicked sisters in Cinderella these must be the suggestions that did not make the shortlist. The new name for the overall product suite is "Rocware". This an attempt to try take ownership of the concept of the Revenue Operations Centre. Yup, the "Roc" means Revenue Operations Centre, as opposed to Return On Capital, or the giant bird of legend, or even the wrestler turned B-movie actor. But why try to take ownership of such a dry concept? The ROC seeks to equate RA professionals with IT operational support staff, so I would have thought it was a pretty unattractive idea to buy into for anyone wanting to have a long career in the field. Of course, SubexAzure are making their pitch at the exec level so they hardly care if they are trying to present RA professionals as monkeys whilst they grind the organ. But even at the exec level the idea is confused. Half of these products are as much about costs as revenues, so why get hung up on the word "revenue" when explaining the idea? But then, some of the alternatives might not be great either. The Margins Operations Centre would be tempting to MOC(k), the Profitability Operations Centre is easy to POC/poke fun at, and the Costs and Revenue Operations Centre might be considered a CROC(k) of.... ;)
January Sales
The holiday season tends to delay things like approving contracts, so you can come back to find a rush of deals have just been announced. Here is a summary of the recent revenue assurance deals.
Brasil Telecom spends US$4.7m on revenue assurance software from Portugese vendor WeDo.
