Vodafone will partner MySpace to launch Vodafone Music Reporter, a platform that will share footage from Vodafone-sponsored music events with MySpace users across the UK, Spain, Italy and Germany markets.
The Vodafone Music Reporter interactive profile, hosted on MySpace, will offer clips from summer festivals including the upcoming Vodafone Music Unlimited event in Cologne.
It will also host user-generated content so that subscribers can share their own music footage, upload and download photos, videos and additional content related to Vodafone-sponsored events.
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Broadband provider Wind Telecomunicazioni has launched a redesigned Libero Webmail service powered by Critical Path’s Memova Messaging solution.
Libero is Italy’s biggest email service provider and hosts the country’s largest Internet community with about 11 million active members.
The company claims is also the first fully integrated portal for fixed, mobile and Internet services for Italian consumers and offers a range of content and services, such as search, news, sports, finance, business, entertainment, blogging, dating, shopping and specialty channels.
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Amobee Media Systems announced it will be providing ad server capabilities and dynamic ad selection for Vodafone Italia’s live! portal.
Amobee, a world leader in advertising solutions for mobile, focuses on ad-enabling the first and the most frequently viewed screens on the mobile handset, like those used for messaging and on the carrier portal.
As Vodafone Italia’s partner for mobile advertising solutions, Amobee’s telco-grade ad server has been integrated with the operator’s network enabling its customers to watch and interact with relevant and contextual advertising while browsing Vodafone live!.
Several major brands are already using the service including Mercedes, BMW, Nokia, Heineken, Lavazza, Nike, Agos, Axe, Agip, Eni, and RCS.
The partnership follows a successful collaboration to deliver Freevideo, a recent ad-funded mobile video service with Vodafone Italia.
Amobee also works with Vodafone in Spain, Greece and the Czech Republic, delivering advertising on Vodafone live! as well as services such as ad-funded peer-to-peer SMS and games.
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Telecom Italia on Wednesday said it will cut 5,000 jobs through 2010, a move that will increase costs this year to yield savings of €300 million a year once the job reduction is complete.
The Reuters report said the operator plans to spend €350 million this year, €250 million more than forecast in March, to cut staff.
“They will mainly impact 2008 results and the relative targets announced in March and will be more than offset by savings expected in the next two years,” Telecom Italia said in a statement.
On March 7 Telecom Italia said it was targeting 1-2% a year revenue growth between 2008-2010 and earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of 39% of revenues.
Telecom Italia has about 83,400 employees.
The former monopoly also said it created a Domestic Market Operations Division integrating its fixed, mobile and top clients structures.
The new unit, to be headed by Oscar Cicchetti, will focus on customer segments rather than on mobile or fixed-lined clients. Integrating marketing, sales and field service operations will allow Telecom Italia to save money and be more competitive, it said.
Chief executive Franco Bernabe, named in December, has promised more efficiency and better customer care to stem a decline in profits.
He is struggling with a mountain of debt. The result of three leveraged buyouts in 10 years, the debt pile of more than €35 billion towers over Telecom Italia’s market capitalization of €25 billion.
Bernabe has put the French broadband unit, Alice, on sale but he has little else to cede.
Previous management already sold businesses across Europe and Latin America to finance the debt and pay dividends, reducing a global company to an Italian company with large mobile phone operations in Brazil and a broadband unit in Germany.
The job cuts show he needs to change Telecom Italia to face stiffening competition in Italy as broadband companies such as Fastweb, taken over by Swisscom last year, win a greater share of business.
While Telecom Italia failed to stem its decline, other large European former monopolies such as France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom have been able to hold the line or increase sales even in mature markets in western Europe.
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Reports from the Italian press suggest that the UK’s Vodafone Group is ready to make an offer for all of the assets of Sardinia-based internet service provider Tiscali. The Italian daily MF says the British firm will submit its bid within the next 24 hours and intends to make an offer for the entire Tiscali group, including its main operations in Italy and the UK. It had been thought that Tiscali would have to split its UK and Italy businesses in order to attract suitable offers. Tiscali is valued at around EUR1.6 billion (USD2.5 billion).
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Italian holding company Weather Investments does not intend to sell any of its shares in Orascom Telecom.
The report said Orascom is seeking to buy back 12 million of its own shares for about €119 million (US$186 million).
Weather, which is owned by Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris and has a controlling stake in Orascom Telecom, said in April it would sell some of its OT shares to OT under a previous buy-back offer which ended on May 14.
The earlier buyback offer, for 106 million shares, was more than three times subscribed, but neither company announced how many shares, if any, Weather had sold, the Reuters.
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Vodafone and Telecom Italia will both sell Apple’s iPhone in Italy, in an apparent break from previous exclusive carrier deals, a Reuters report said.
So far, Apple has struck exclusive deals with carriers to sell the phone, such as with AT&T in the US, Telefonica’s O2 in Britain and Deutsche Telekom in Germany, the report said.
Neither Vodafone nor Telecom Italia provided much detail.
As reported yesterday, Vodafone said it would sell the iPhone in ten countries.
Rival O2 has described the device as a star performer which draws increased numbers of customers into its stores.
Customers using the phone have also driven up data revenues by surfing the internet and sending emails, a key attraction to operators as the cost of making calls decreases.
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- April 15th, 2008
- 12:55 pm
Mobile advertising is widely regarded to be inevitable given the ubiquity of the device and its ability to deliver on all of the four ‘Ps’ of traditional marketing parameters. BI-ME reports from the Mobile TV World Summit.
According to panelists at the Mobile TV World Summit in London last month, mobile advertising is about to go prime time. Three reasons were given for this prognosis.
Mobile phones now have the processing power to handle the types of rich media content and displays required for quality advertising. Consequently, this ‘third screen’ is now a viable choice for advertisers wanting to create advertisements of the quality that are available on other digital media.
With minute bundles and calling plans becoming old news, mobile advertising is top-of-mind with operators as a means of providing a new message to consumers, as well as a much needed additional revenue stream.
Users have responded positively to operator mobile marketing campaigns by exhibiting a quantifiable appetite to consume more, whether the content is on-deck such as ringtones and mobile music, or off-deck such as consumer durables. Clearly, mobile advertising works even though it is held back by regulatory issues and issues of the viewing experience (lengthy navigation or download times) and the cost of the necessary bandwidth.
In Italy 3 Italia claims that its DVB-H (digital video broadcast-handheld) mobile TV service boosts its ARPU (average revenue per user) by 60%. One third of the extra revenue comes from the DVB-H service and two thirds of the extra revenue comes from additional voice and data services, according to Marco Maestri, TV solutions Director at 3 Italia, speaking at the Mobile TV World Summit, organised by Informa.
The operator, which had 8 million 3G customers in Italy at the end of 2007, had 800,000 mobile TV customers at the end of last year.
Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) and Vodafone Italy also offer DVB-H services in the country. According to Gian Paolo Balboni, head of innovation trends at Telecom Italia, there are about 1 million DVB-H devices in Italy, “but that does not mean there are 1 million subscriptions.”
“Most of the devices are sold without a related subscription contract but with the capability to have pay-per-view….They are used, but occasionally,” said Balboni.
He said that although the free-to-air TV culture still dominates, in the future services will be more interactive with many facilities for voting during TV shows, for indexing channels or even programming the home DVD recorder direct from the handset.
Mobile advertising, he said can come in two different flavours, instream advertising as in traditional broadcast TV, but it will increasingly come in the form of more profiled advertising, and sponsorship around the browser tool, with sophisticated activities like voting built into the content.
Microsoft TV’s Gavin McLauchlin, Customer Marketing Manager, outlined plans for consumers to have access to on-demand and interactive services through the IP-enabled television or mobile, services consumers are used to experiencing on their computers.
Jakub Brzeczkowski, Content Division, TV/VOD Director in the EEMEA region for Orange said that operators are regionally tailoring mobile content for maximum effect. “Mobile TV is in a similar position as SMS in the beginning where everyone was unsure whether SMS was going to fly,” he said. “Handset devices also need to be ones that people will actually use. We need most of the industry on board to stimulate manufacturers to develop good handsets.” Orange also announced that it is currently looking into a plug-in module for mobile TV that consumers can use with their existing handsets.
Orange agrees with the concept of mobile operators becoming content distributors, and Brzeczkowski said the Orange strategy is for “content everywhere” on multiple devices.
Etisalat of the UAE recently announced an expanded partnership with Orange Business Services, the business services arm of France Telecom. Under the terms of the new agreement, the companies, which have worked together for the past six years, will combine forces to further develop secure and scaleable internet protocol (IP) virtual private network (VPN) solutions thus enabling Etisalat to deliver a multimedia network to its customers over the Orange Business Services network.
The surge of Internet TV entrepreneurs promises movies and TV programmes on any screen, anywhere, anytime, yet relatively little attention is being focused on the monumental challenge and new technologies needed to make video ubiquitous.
Brzeczkowski of Orange said the market and the technology are together opening up possibilities, and coverage and accessibility of content is expanding globally. He said the feedback shows that mobile TV can become a major factor in increasing ARPU and customer retention. But the discussion about what is unicast (video on demand) and what is broadcast is not straightforward, he said.
“The consumer will not necessarily understand what is TV, or what is not, and what is VOD,” he said. “There is a history of hype in the industry, but in fact we are barely getting there with the capability of the networks, and the applications are starting to come.”
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Telecom Italia’s new CEO outlined a three-year business plan that calls for investing €15 billion/US$22.98 billion to help the company exploit the industry’s trend toward mobile and fixed line convergence, while reducing debts and compensating shareholders, an Associated Press report said.
The business plan is the first by the new management, which was put in place last November, a month after Spain’s Telefónica and a group of Italian banks took over Italy’s largest telecoms company.
It calls for revenue growth of 1% to 2% a year to 2010.
The Associated Press report also quoted CEO Franco Bernabe as saying that he was constrained by the company’s debt of €35.7 billion/US$55 billion, from making exciting announcements such as expansion and sees little room for selling other assets.
“Don’t expect from us fireworks, don’t expect from us bizarre strategies,” Bernabe said. “I think we are very realistic, we know what needs to be done and we need some time to do it, because the company is big and the problems are many.”
The core of the plan, debt reduction, will be through financial discipline, Bernabe added.
Telecom Italia also has cut its dividend by nearly a half to €0.08/US$0.12, which Bernabe said was more in line with industry standards.
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- February 18th, 2008
- 2:33 pm
Telecom Italia has inked a pact with Acotel Group subsidiary Noverca to enable the latter to launch as a MVNO over Telecom Italia’s mobile network. Noverca will acquire SIM cards, dedicated blocks of numbers, telecommunications services and data access on its GSM/GPRS and UMTS/HSDPA networks. The Alcotel subsidiary will offer services combining telecommunications, internet access and value-added services, such as the distribution of multimedia content, VoIP services, social networking tools and video surveillance. Electronic money and mobile banking services will be developed together with Intesa Sanpaolo, as part of the joint venture agreement signed by the bank and Acotel Group in December 2007. Noverca will function under its own brand and will establish its own marketing and pricing strategies. It will directly deal with contractual relations with consumers and businesses, whether prepaid or contract customers.
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Vodafone teams up with MySpace on music (UK)
