Telecom Companies are looking for Innovations

Everyone is talking about the growth of the Mobile telecom industry, half of today's population already use the services offered by this ever increasing industry. Future trends predict that it is only a matter of a decade and some years to capture the other half of the population. There is one industry that is suffering the most due the success of the Mobile telecom business, the traditional Fixed-Line Telecom industry.

In an interview with the New York Times, chief executive of the British Telecom, Ben Verwaayen, is betting that services like customized applications for corporate clients and advising companies on their networks can generate profit growth in an industry where they are loosing out to the subscription base of end users pretty fast. He stresses on how there is a need to move away from selling the telephone calls and sending faxes to more services which are backed up by social networking capabilities.

He points out that the way to innovate is not by investing in a large Research and Development team but to form small innovation teams across the layers of the industry which are closely in touch with the customers. He points out that British Telecom has a huge team of 26,000 people working for them in India, not because the labor is cheap but the fact that they see more entrepreneurial people in the Indian markets.

Read the interview here.

An international cellphone service provider

This is a classic example of disruptive service innovation to cut down International calling by placing the calls through IP. The system right now has a lot of glitches but with the doors open now, i am sure there would be more such services which cut down on the costs of talking across the globe.

An extract of the original article from NYT:

"On this phone, rates can fluctuate. But at its launch a 20-minute call from the Bahamas costs costs $7.40 (that’s 87 percent off T-Mobile’s rate). The Cubic price from Russia is $1.24 a minute (75 percent lower than AT&T).

Calls from the U.S. to Greece cost $1.77 a minute (37 percent off), to Iraq, $2.02 (28 percent off) and to Australia, $1.77 cents (51 percent off).

It works like a prepaid phone, where you put some money in your account and use it up as you talk. There’s no traditional monthly fee, although you’ll be charged 1 Euro a month (about $1.42) if you don’t use it. "

you can read the full NYT article here