A LIST OF THINGS WE THINK WILL BE BIG THIS YEAR
One of the things you get asked all the time, as an editor, apart from, “You seriously think I’m going to sign that off on your expenses?” is, “So, what’s hot at the moment? What are you writing about?” Skirting over the flattering, if not always true, assumption that both questions are a way of asking the same thing here, in no particular order, are Mobile Europe’s hotties for 2004, some of which we have even written about, or at least will be writing about.
First up, machine to machine, or M2M, to employ the obligatory acronym, communications. Why? Well, in a word, Nokia. And in another word, Orange. It’s gone way beyond popular carbonated beverage vending machines texting the supplier to get the delivery boy to heft another crate of liquid tooth rot on to the back of the truck. It’s the world of telemetry, telematics, remote diagnostics and fixes. Nokia, from what we can tell, may well be bending your ear about this very soon, and Orange has been trialling various things with a company called Box Telematics, some of which are to do with beer, which may explain our increased interest.
Another “hot area that we are also writing about” is push-to-talk, or PTT, or P2T, or PoC, if you are talking standards. Except you may not be talking PoC because the first big commercial cellular implementation in Europe has come from Orange using a system from upstart Kodiak Networks. There’s loads more on them on p12 of this issue, but with all the major vendors lined up behind PoC, expect to see an increasing number of handsets including P2T functionality, and a range of premium services coming out of the operators.
Messaging is another. Sounds terribly obvious, but we’re not averse to a few statements of the obvious as you may have noticed by now. There’s a complete overhaul of how messages are managed and delivered going on out there, as the old store/ forward architecture of the SMSC gets increasingly inappropriate. There’s also a big change coming in presence notification and the development and branding of the phone front end for more advanced messaging services.
Mobile entertainment and all it brings with it is another area we have been writing about. This includes digital rights management, billing, content management and delivery, service activation, quality of service, class of service.
Always, and never more so, issues of OSS, billing, managing partner relationships, getting a unified view of a customer across multiple services, pre and post pay convergence, rights management (again).
So that’s quite a few things then, which can either be taken as a sign of a terminal editorial desire not to alienate any of our advertising manager’s favoured clients, or, I would prefer to think, of a general re-awakening in the industry.
And I didn’t even mention 3G. Or indeed a host of other things, from network optimisation to web services. Time for another list? If you want to add your own please mail keith.dyer@nexusmedia.com