An Economist conference about telecoms
Posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 2:03pm. #
To a conference run by The Economist, focusing on the telecoms industry. (And for telecoms, incidentally, think ‘mobile’: fixed-line is so passé these days, and not one person really mentioned it).
The conference was ‘Chatham House rules’, i.e. anything specific said would remain within the room and wouldn’t be reported on. Which makes for a quite difficult blog posting.
A few things, though, that I can probably mention (given lack of specifics and/or checking it’s already publicly known): Denis McCauley from the Economist Intelligence Unit used a nice phrase to describe those that are self-publishers on the web, or those that are really heavy users of email, IM, etc, as “compulsive communicators”. I like that phrase, and will nick it shamelessly.
Jon Fredrik Baksaas from Telenor gave us the rather amazing statistic that more tracks are downloaded in Norway from Telenor (over mobile) than from iTunes. That’s quite a story, even if it dates from July of last year.
We learnt that the penetration of 3G-enabled handsets is around 30% in the UK (which took me rather by surprise).
Ben Verwaayen from BT Group said a few good things about products needing to “fit into your lifestyle”, and expand on their boundaries. TV for example is currently a standalone technology, but TV broadcasters are now having to expand and open up their content to be available in other places (like iPlayer). For radio, of course, this has never been more relevant.
Finally, Ian Pearson, formerly a BT futurologist, was excellent. His twenty-minute speech was captivating and incredibly exciting. One of his gems: “Throw your five year plans in the bin. They’re not relevant any more. Look at an eighteen month plan instead.” I’m not sure I agree to always look solely at the short term, but his point - that of rapidly-changing technology - was a good one and well made.
A good morning, and one well out of my specialist area.
Photo: John Levett. It’s the Economist’s building (which I wasn’t in). Used under licence.
