Italian Telecom's plan to embrace the disruptive truth of mobile convergence.

Last week we covered Canada's faltering mobile industry as it continues to use protectionist policies to exclude competitors and ensure Canadians fall further behind in their adoption of mobile innovations. Many of our readers probably don't worry too much about the trend. After all, does it really matter if cell phone use costs a few dollars more in Canada? Damn right it does.

As any marketing geek will be happy to explain to you, markets don't develop overnight. No, they are assembled piece-by-piece through a complex evolution of innovative products, consumer demand, and time. If this market ecosystem does not evolve the result is that in the Darwinian world of modern market share those who don't have the infrastructure will die off.

This is what Ajik Jaokar has to say about how the mobile market is about to change the world of advertising:

Currently, an Operator's core asset is voice. I believe that VOIP and other technologies will cannibalise the Voice revenue. This is already happening. Hence, the core assets of a Telco will shift from Voice(current) to others like Identity, Location(which will power location based advertising), customer history(datamining complex customer segmentation) , billing etc. All of these new assets will be 'sold' to third parties i.e. independent applications developers through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). Services themselves will be 'Plug and Play' and the Operator will be the orchestrator of services (and not a pipe).

If Canada chooses not to abide by the rules of an open marketplace then we will continue to fall behind our global competitors and our telco's "Income Trust" mentality will mean we will be overwhelmed by foreign competition. We have to develop a local ecosystem that will take advantage of the atomization of the mobile (...read more...)