Wishes for 2007

I wish you and your loved ones a happy, creative, funny, exciting, beautiful 2007 full of joy, laughter, warm moments with friends, great business, love, passion, commitment, co-creation and basically everything you wish for yourself that is also in harmony with the universe.

New Fonero on the block

I just configured my FONERA and will be trying out FON in the coming couple of months. Configuration was super smooth and their marketing is really cool. Hope the service turns out to be as valuable as the whole concept is sexy.

Season's greetings

Selfish business?

Not too productive these days because of an annoying flu, I've been using some of my time to look for interesting sources of inspiration and I think someone like Richard Dawkins is such a source. A long time ago he took part to a TV program aimed at correcting the misinterpretation of the thesis behind his book Selfish Gene. In that TV broadcast Dr Dawkins discusses evolution theory, game theory and the value of cooperative strategies, showing how fundamentally flawed "survival of the fittest" is and how incorrect a statement "nice guys finish last" can be. It seems like an interesting follow-up to yesterday's quote of the day and good food for thought at a time of the year when many of us are thinking about their strategy for the coming year.

Quote of the day

"It is our earth, not yours or mine or his. 
We are meant to live on it, helping each other,
not destroying each other.     " - J. Krishnamurti

Today's quote is by one of my favorite authors and I think it is relevant to superb business quests. From those I had the opportunity to watch closely, I conclude that the forces of creation and meaningful cooperation are far more intense than those of destruction and useless competition.

Telcos: is being an incumbent the shortest path to trouble?

The launch of Jajah in 2006 is probably one of those extremely interesting events in an industry. These days, they seem to be pursuing an objective of acquiring more share of market and consumer attention with their offer for free calls for Christmas. Since I now have some data to crunch on how Jajah's changed my pattern of consumption, I thought it interesting to do the analysis. My conclusions may not be statistically significant, but I guess they will give you more reasons to consider Jajah very seriously.

I downloaded data from Jajah (they have this neat service of delivering your traffic in Excel sheets) and also accessed my purchases of Skype Out credits.

Let's start with my Jajah consumption data for February through November 2006:

• my monthly budget is in the region of 8 €



• I am placing about 14 calls a month using Jajah



• the average cost per call was in the region of 0.6 €

During the same period, I continued using Skype a lot for computer to computer calls or for conferences with several people all on Skype and I still bought some credit on Skype although (much )less than before: until now my purchases of Skype Out credits for 2006 are 55 € and I still have about 7 € on my account valid till June 2007, while in 2005 I purchased Skype Out credits worth 85 € and in 2004 credits worth 75 €. So I guess there's been a transfer of part of  my Skype VoIP budget to Jajah, while my overall VoIP budget went up 62% in 2006, with the share of VoIP in my consumption of telco services being over 250% bigger in 2006 than in 2005.

Now making a rough analysis of my yearly budget in connectivity services (telco + ISP, not GSM because I don't have access to my consumption data right now, but I know I dramatically reduced my roaming traffic thanks to Jajah and Skype), I notice the following interesting points:

• while my consumption of connectivity services and the time I spend online has increased, my yearly budget is now half what it was in 2004



• the share of my budget that goes to my ISP increased because my ISP is now also offering VoIP telephony and a fixed budget for domestic calls after 18:00



• the share of my budget that goes to Skype grew much less in 2006 (+12%) than it did in 2005 (+60%)



• I spent 50% more on Jajah than I did on Skype, which is not that bad for a service that got notice of and tried only in February

So I guess that this confirms many of the trends professionals of the telco business are seeing on the market andit should be good news for Jajah and Skype. It does confirm Jajah's claim of being a killer of roaming and I think this space is interesting to watch because the nature of impacts that the telco industry is going through with the wave of adoption of disruptive web tools is likely to be valid in other industries as well. By nature of impacts I mean that the sources of value are changing from "the privilege of access" to "the imperative of customer experience". Access is no longer the issue; customer experience is more than ever, which makes product and service design all the more essential.
That makes people even more important because they represent competencies that ultimately define the performance of a business. And I think that's quite a quest in business.

Are you person of the year?

Now, that's quite an acknowledgment, coming from traditional media: the web  has shifted the balance of influence it seems, with people taking more power in  their own hands. Mass media is being transformed,   perhaps becoming the media of the masses as claimed over a year ago by Joel de Rosnay. It's quite clear that things are changing and no longer will consumption of information be as it used to be in the early days of mass media. In the recent conference Le Web 3, I was impressed when a top French journalist (Jean-Pierre Elkabach) failed to take control of the interview of one of the French presidential candidate as the organizers gave the floor for questions to the bloggers first. That would have been impossible only a few years back.
This space is getting extremely interesting and as a blogger and tech enthusiast I can only rejoice at the fact that the web is finally recognized as a power to be reckoned with. Also particularly pleased that the reality of the Information Age is made so clear.