Tag: Bouygues

Conference: Mobile 2.0, Berlin

On 23/11/2009

It is conference season and one of the more exciting ones kicks off in Berlin this week: Mobile 2.0 opens its gates on Tuesday and boasts an exceptional line-up to look at the future of mobile.

The very, very high-profile set-up of speakers includes:

Olivier Laury, Content Director, Bouygues Telecom
Jonathan MacDonald, Managing Director, JMA
Damien Byrne, Head of Entertainment, T-Mobile
Mark Curtis, CEO, Flirtomatic
Amer Hasan, Sr Manager Apps & Developer Programms, Vodafone Group
Alistair Hill, Analyst, Comscore
Antoine Vince Stabyl, CEO, ItsMy.com
Romi Parmar, CEO, The 3G Dating Agency
Olaf Kroll, Director Business Development Europe, MySpace
Chris Wade, CEO, Shozu
Antony Beswick, Global Strategic Product Manager Social Networking, Ericsson
Stefanie Hoffmann, Founder Aka-Aki
Jonathan Medved, CEO, Vringo
Mo Firouzabadian, Global Business Line Director – Carrier Solutions, Buongiorno
Ilja Laurs, CEO GetJar

and many, many more, including, yes, yours truly (I’ll be on two panels, namely on the succinctly titled panel on “redefining the mobile content marketplace: exploring the growth, development and industry implications of mobile app stores” and on “building strategies around the drivers of innovation in mobile web 2.0”).

You can register here, and, believe me, it’ll be worth it. It is an exciting topic with top speakers in an exciting city. Make your way over and join us!

See you all in Berlin! Ping me on Twitter (@vhirsch) if you want to get in touch.

R.I.P. European i-mode: one more down

By Volker

On 26/03/2008

Following last year’s drop of i-mode by O2 UK and Telstra (see here), Germany’s third-largest carrier E-Plus is now dropping the service, too. I saw the cause last year in the ways of the data charges (through which NTT DoCoMo makes most of its money for the service) and noted that this wasn’t too compelling for users and this seems to hold true, in particular in view of the move towards flat-rate data plans introduced in recent months by a lot of carriers, which will continue in the coming months, too.

Outside Bouygues in France and, seemingly, O2 in Ireland, it never took off over here. Rotten subscriber numbers in spite of huge marketing budgets. R.I.P. Nuff’ said.

i-mode dropped by O2 UK & Telstra

By Volker

On 18/07/2007

Today’s a busy day, and here comes the next piece: we read that O2 UK will stop selling i-mode handsets from the end of this month, so that the service it licensed from NTT DoCoMo will probably soon come to an end. Elsewhere was reported that Australia’s Telstra will close the service in December of this year.

O2 UK spent £10m in marketing which yielded a mere 260,000 users over the past 2 years. Telstra is believed to have gathered less than 60,000 followers of the service. Not impressive and only the last examples of i-mode’s failures outside of Japan (and some pockets in Europe, namely with Bouygues in France and O2 in Ireland).

The woes continue as some other markets either pulled the service already or did not even launch it: following the disappointment in the UK and presumably closely monitoring the struggle of E-Plus O2 did not launch it in Germany. MTS Russia generated a mere $150,000 per month from it. In India, the launch on Hutchison Essar was pulled “in part” because Vodafone invested in the company. Exact numbers are hard to come by but as one does not hear booming statements of its overwhelming success, conclusions can probably be drawn…

What is it then that made i-mode such a success in Japan and such a failure nearly elsewhere? Is it the change of the mobile landscape with more and more operators abolishing usage-driven data charges, the general increase in bandwidth on phones which allows users to access more rich content more easily (this used to be an advantage of i-mode), or the lack of support from handset vendors (often cited)? It probably is a bit of everything really but quite possibly the old and overcome model of making money by letting the meter run: users outside of Japan are neither used to this anymore nor do they welcome it. And rightly so: the value is not in the time I spend browsing. The value is in a specific application, service, game, etc. Being charged for this would appear to be eminently sensible: I buy a product and I pay for it. Paying to use the pavement to go to the shop is less convincing as a concept.

Update: The International Tribune has an i-mode article here. It basically confirms the above but offers some additional viewpoints and quotes and such…