Unlimited Mobile Data means unlimited Mobile VoIP

It’s a truism of Telecoms that Asia leads the way in innovation. Japanese Mobile Network Operators are offering services that are years ahead of the West and creating massive revenues from virtual goods sold from the mobile.  They were first to market with video calling, Multimedia Messaging, mobile micro-blogging and the full experience Mobile Internet.

South Korea enjoys an enviable reputation for high-speed broadband connections per capita and an enlightened attitude to new network services. This week SK Telecom, South Korea’s largest mobile operator, announced new unlimited data plans for mobile, flying in the face of the latest received wisdom form the USA where AT&T recently switched from unlimited data plans to metered data use.

SK Telecom’s new offer is the inclusion of Mobile VoIP use with the data package (capped to 1,000 minutes per month). This makes SK Telecom the first operator in the world to offer a true Mobile VoIP service to its customer base.  One thousand minutes is more than 95% of consumers would use in any given month.  We’ve been banging on about this for years so it’s good to see our convictions realized.

There is absolutely no doubt in the Morodo mind that Mobile VoIP is the way of the future – with or without the co-operation of the network operators. Whether the customer uses 2.5G, 3G, 4G, WLAN or WiFi they can use Morodo’s MO-Call app directly from a mobile and save a fortune on voice calls and SMS.

Image: Bloomberg Business Week

Android Fragmentation a Challenge? Bring It On

We all know that Google owns the desktop, or should we say about 85% of all advertising revenue originating from it.  Over the last 18 months Google has promoted the open source Android Operating System in an effort to compete for a slice of the lucrative mobile advertising market.  Droids, as they a colloquially known, offer an enhanced web browsing experience.  They also are proving a popular vehicle for third party software developers.  These third party downloadable applications are extending the handsets functionality.  Traditional  utilities are being replaced by services, the classic  example of this happening in an app being MO-Call .

Recently there has been some criticism levelled at Google concerning platform fragmentation. No less than four different versions of this platform have been distributed during its very short lifetime. We’re often asked: is this a barrier to entry for developers?

The fragmentation debate is not new to Android.  Fragmentation has been a landmark of the industry ever since there was a mobile  industry.  The Morodo Team saw the individual characteristics of mobile devices as a huge opportunity, not a barrier. If we could cover all devices, what lead would that give us? What a challenge.

Morodo, as a software development house, supports all the popular Mobile Operating Systems.  We cover 95% of the developed World’s most popular handsets (including Android).  Downloadable software as a service is recognisable for what it can do, good Mobile VoIP embraces barriers and fragmentation and makes things simpler for the customer. And as far as we are concerned: what the customer wants – they get.

Footprint and Unified Services Key to Mobile Operator Success

A new report from Strategy Analytics details the changing dynamics of Mobile Network Operators, especially those that think and act globally.

The report fixes on four themes: Network Evolution; Traffic Evolution; Value Creation and Customer Loyalty. As the authors point out, much that is covered here follows on from Orange’s strategy announcement last week. In her speech launching the new direction, Orange CEO Stephane Richard made much of the need to deal with “the new incursion of new actors from the Internet world” and “the conquest of customers…and international development.”

As we have said many times before, for most Mobile Network Operators, growing a footprint and capturing new customers with Unified offerings means embracing the new Operators, like Morodo. Orange’s stated strategy is “growth through innovation.” What better way to expand than through the MO-Call Mobile VoIP model.

Image: NASA

Mobiles and WiFi: Everywhere

As reported in the Symbian Blog, the WiFi Alliance are close to announcing a new standard, WiFi Direct. What does that mean? Basically, any device with a WiFi chip will become a hotspot. Your mobile phone, your computer printer, your camera, your laptop, your PC, even your fridge, can all connect to each other wirelessly and share an Internet connection. This functionality won’t just be limited to your own devices, you’ll be able to wirelessly connect to the Internet via any WiFi enabled device.

The implications of this are significant. The local WiFi network and its connection to fixed broadband may yet usurp the Mobile Networks in metropolitan areas. The implications for Morodo and MO-Call type services are also significant as it means the availability of connections points could increase tremendously making free WiFi a real alternative network.

How many connected mobile phones in the World? This week, global mobile subscriptions passed the 5 billion mark. There are now more than 5 billion mobile connections working in the world today. The 6th billionth connection is forecasted for 2012.

Mobile is the largest single market in the history of humankind.

Image: Associated Press

Mobile VoIP Growing – Sharpen Up Your App Skills

Juniper Research published its latest Mobile VoIP report forecasting 470 billion minutes of call traffic originating from Mobile apps, like MO-Call, by 2015. As senior Juniper analyst Anthony Cox put it. “We forecast that mobile VoIP over Wi-Fi will cost operators $5 billion globally by 2015.” That’s revenue that disruptive companies, like Morodo, will be taking away from the Traditional Operators.

Perhaps we should leave the final word on this subject to Om Malik who wrote of Morodo’s like-minded companies: “..well, maybe the carriers who hate them so much will end up buying them.”

Elsewhere in the online press, further interesting statistics reported by AppstoreHQ. According to their latest metrics, 43,185 developers are working on the iPhone platform (iOS) and 10,199 developers are working on Google’s Android smartphone platform. Only 1,412 developers work on both platforms.

As we have stated before, Morodo developers work on both of these platforms and many more. When we looked at the Venn Diagram that AppstoreHQ published, we thought: I wonder how few developers can truly compete with Morodo for cross-platform coverage? In our opinion, not many.

Yet more good reasons why Morodo is leading the way in Mobile VoIP and Mobile Development.

Image: AppStoreHQ

Bit Torrent and Open Government

Generally speaking, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that the UK Government has got a few things wrong in its short history of using and legislating the Internet.

Let me nail my colours to the mast and say that I am a huge fan of Cory Doctorow’s philosophy:

“As a practical matter, we live in the 21st century and anything anybody wants to copy they will be able to copy. If you are building a business model that says that people can only copy things with your permission, your business is going to fail because whether or not you like it, people will be able to copy your product without your permission. The question is: what are you going to do about that? Are you going call them thieves or are you going to find a way to make money from them?”

I truly believe that there are new business models waiting to be discovered, tried, tested and executed. I’m not just talking about Kevin Kelly’s Truefans or Rupert Murdoch’s Paywall, P2P is perhaps one of the best marketing tools that has ever existed (next to the immortal words Free Beer). The best way to monetise P2P file-sharing is not through litigation.

Today, whilst reading Nextweb’s piece on the UK Government releasing 10GB of public-spending information via Bit Torrent, I actually felt a little proud of the Men-from-the-Ministry for embracing the 21^st Century.

Dare I say it, I even felt hopeful. This is what Open Government should be. Fingers-crossed eh?

Image: P2P Foundation

The Mobile VoIP Model is Changing and it’s “Good For Business”

This week, not one, but two, heavyweight analysts have published reports that indicate the growing strength of Mobile VoIP. The first is from Juniper, and the second from Ovum. For the uninitiated, here are several of the salient points as we see them.

Mobile VoIP customers make more calls. It seems so obvious one wonders why the Mobile Network Operators took so long to do the math. Interrogating our database of heavy-use MO-Callers, we know that people who want to save money on calls do so because they make a lot of calls.

Mobile VoIP customers are “sticky” and less likely to churn away to alternative services. Again, seemingly obvious but give the people what they want and they’re happy, try and ban or block the services they want to use and hey presto, they move away.

Mobile VoIP and VoIP will not be free forever – this is not a race to zero. Frankly, we were unsuprised that Skype announced that they would begin charging for 3G Mobile VoIP calls in the New Year. The Telecoms Industry is struggling to find new data tariffing models to support the build and maintenance of high speed networks, everyone is making every attempt to sweat monetization at every point of the value chain.

So what does all this mean for Morodo? Well, we’re pleased to tell you that it’s all good news for us. Why?

Mobile VoIP is an offer that has yet to reach mass-adoption in any market. The more people putting Mobile VoIP in the press, on blogs, on TV, radio etc the better for Morodo.

Mobile Network Operators get Mobile VoIP and their interested. Regular readers of the Morodo blog will know that we presented MO-Call at the Beijing Global Mobile Internet Conference. We were very pleased at the number of approaches from Operators, most of whom just ‘got’ the business model right away.

Morodo’s network and apps sweat every network technology. Honestly, we read a lot about 3G, 4G, LTE, WiMax, EVDO, HSDPA etc. etc. ad infinitum. These are meaningless terms and acronyms to the consumer,  they don’t care about the technology that provides the service, they just care that it works. Well, Morodo works on just about any network bearer you care to mention.

Pricing is not a zero sum game. We have always sought to keep our pricing as transparent and simple as possible. It’s what customers want. In the new era of unmetered charging (flat rate per month fees for usage) we know that we’ll have a lot flexibility to offer the market what it wants. And we know the value of giving the customers exactly what they want.

GMIC Beijing – into the Dragon’s Den

Beijing’s annual Global Mobile Internet Conference was better attended than most GSM Mobile World Congress conference halls.

For two days, the great and good of the Chinese Mobile Internet regaled us with valuable advice, canny predictions and wonderful insight. As a cross-cultural affair for networking and business learning I cannot recommend this event highly enough, definitely one for your 2011 diary and beyond.

Morodo was on the shortlist of the Innovation competition for start-ups. I really enjoyed presenting MO-Call to the massed attendees and a stiff panel of experts. Thank you to the Dragons, Joe Jasin, Victor Tong, William Wang and Wang Ye, for the excellent advice and feedback.

Thank you also to Benjamin Joffe and Barrett Parkman, founders of the Great Wall Club, organisers of the event. Now I’m looking forward to catching up with all the new people we met.

Image: Duncan Leung

If Google can’t do it – why can we?

This was the theme for Wednesday’s excellent Global Mobile Internet Conference dinner panel. Moderated by everyone’s favourite local blogger, Jeremy Goldkorn, the panel of speakers was a veritable who’s who of Beijing tech consulting. We were treated to some fantastic advice for those fresh-off-the-boat or yet to embark on their great Sino adventure.

Kaiser Kuo told us to seek local help and guidance and accept that, as a stranger in a strange land, someone might take advantage of you.

Victor Tong recommended establishing a family-like rapport with your core team of engineers/developers.

Richard Robinson and Alvin Wang both added caution to Kaiser’s comments: find a trusted partner with strong local knowledge and accept that you will be ripped-off at least once.

And finally, David Wolf reminded us all of the cha (茶) principal: C for Creativity, H for Humility and A for Adaptability. I like this acronym very much as it compliments my own advice to newcomers: “Don’t obsess about your Face, obsess about your Work.”

Image: James’ trusty Nokia E71

IMS: What Is It Good For?

Frost & Sullivan agree with the Morodo Team: it is only a matter of time until Internet protocol (IP) becomes the principal transport for various access technologies. Most Mobile Network Operators are some way from launching their much-feted all-IP IMS networks., and we say: why bother?

As long ago as 1999, the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), an architectural framework for delivering IP multimedia services, was defined and placed before the 3rd Generation Mobile Group (3GPP), ostensibly as a means of delivering Internet services over General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), the then Next Generation in high speed wireless data.

Gathering momentum through the latter part of the last decade, Mobile Network Operators, the International Telecommunications Union, 3GPP, device manufacturers and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) devised a framework of standards that define access, billing and control methodology for new network services under IMS. This ‘improved’ network architecture relies on the addition of an horizontal control layer isolating the access network from the services layer. In layman’s terms, the addition of a costly means of control managed by the Gatekeeper networks.

Within the mobile world in particular, the vision of IMS as a Rich Communication Suite (RCS) has become quite popular amongst the incumbents. Not only does IMS provide further protectionism and barriers to entry for disruptors, in the customer context, RCS is meant to offer an enhanced device phonebook, enhanced messaging and presence and advanced call functionality. In other words, very cool services that customers want to use.

The peculiar thing about IMS and its subset, RCS, is that there is absolutely no need for it, unless you are an incumbent operator intent on clinging to the remaining limits of control in your grasp. The base protocol for IMS is Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a common Open Protocol defined by well-written community developed Open Standards that relies on base IP protocols (i.e. the ones we use to run the Internet today).

Quite simply, all of the enhanced features evident in IMS and RCS are available to Morodo today and if they are not already implemented in MO-Call for Morodo’s customers to use, they are either in development or in pre-launch alpha test. Morodo’s MO-Call client applications are fairly agnostic of network bearer technology and can originate and terminate calls over GSM, CDMA, 3G, UMTS, WCDMA, PSTN, WiFi, WLAN, WiMax and probably LTE too. More advanced features, such as messaging, rely on common IP protocols where these bearer technologies support them (which is in most cases).

The answer to the question ”What Is MO-Call?” It’s the next generation of Rich Communication Services available from any connected device, today. In MO-Call, Morodo has created all the services, features and functions provided and supported by a Mobile Network and VoIP Operator and presented them to a global market.