It’s the Sunday night before Mobile World Congress… which means I got to head to Showstoppers and meet some cool people. Showstoppers is a pre-MWC event where bloggers and journalists get to meet with some of the companies who will be exhibiting over the week to come.
The ever informative and delightful Dr. Arun, Chief Marketing Officer from Newbay, demonstrated their Life Cache Social Networking Gateway (SNG) and their Life Cache Media Upload Client for me. Newbay is now working with Deutsche Telekom and is the reason Deutsche Telekom subscribers can, with one click, upload pictures of friends and family to a Media Center. From there, they can be instantly shared anytime via PC, mobile or even TV! GoMo News spoke to Dr. Arun at CTIA last year, where we duly impressed.
After Newbays demo, we had a chat about whether or not operators had been quick enough to react to Google’s advances into all sorts of new areas for them, and whether or not the operators are still playing catch up. They are, we concluded; and some are playing it really slowly. To help the operators, Newbay intend to help them get content into the cloud. But that’s not enough, and Newbay are smart enough to help operators to, as Arun put it, “get context for that content” – using meta data to help content make sense and become useful.
Next I had a chat with Ivan McDonald, CEO of Dial2Do, a technology company that enables voice-activated hands-free communications – send a text using dictation. Ivan was a finalist at last year’s MoMo awards and to be honest, while the presentation was interesting, I didn’t really see the need for the product. Thankfully, I was wrong and Ivan told me they are now “gaining traction” and partnering with device manufacturers. This week they are announcing a partnership with Jabra, a headset manufacturer, which Dial2Do will now be embedded on. I still don’t need the service though to be honest, but then I also don’t see the day when I’ll have a bluetooth headset! I suppose I’m not busy enough…
Most impressive was David Sharpe from Arantech. He spoke to me about Touchpoint – a service that gives operators a really clear picture of their customer’s experience of the network. Picture this: an operator’s network management room. Engineers watching all the pretty green lights that indicate all is well with their network. Two floors down, the customer care team can’t take toilet breaks as the phones are hopping with customers that can’t use the service. Where’s the problem? No one knows! Which is where Arantech will come in. I asked David if some of the problem was user error, he agreed it was and that up to 50% of problems are people trying to access services from their device that they have not subscribed to. This alone provides a powerful business reason for an operator to use Touchpoint – apart from creating harmony between engineers and customer care, the user has expressed an interest in a service; the operator can now identify that device, see the problem and fix it over the air for the customer. As David put it “user shows an interest in a service; operator grants them the ability to access the service; creates revenue. Within seconds.”.
Arantech was acquired by Tektronix last year and are now looking at expanding their product to cover fixed line, VOIP, LTE and 4G. As David put it, “All customers, all the time, in realtime”.
I was really impressed by this as I worked in customer care for an operator in my distant past and engineers were often reluctant to accept that the customers knew there was a problem on the network or with the service before they did! I can see much more harmonious operator Christmas parties in the future.
