09 December 2011

In this guest post, Charles Damen, Vice President of Mobile Billing and Payments at MACH, says that direct operator billing solutions offer opportunities to capitalise on revenue opportunities in the apps market.

The explosive growth in the uptake of smartphones and tablets has defined the mobile industry in the recent past. Largely, it is this growth that has driven the rise of the applications market; mobile apps now offer one of the most promising revenue streams for the mobile industry. Gartner estimates that global mobile app store revenues will triple from $5.2 billion in 2010 to $15 billion this year and reach $58 billion by 2014. With such vast potential, it is easy to assume that all content providers and apps developers need to do is to develop a great app and then sit back and reap the revenue rewards.

In reality, it is far from that simple.

05 December 2011

Infonetics has produced another of its regular troikas of information, producing forecasts for the the Convergent Charging and Subscriber Data Management (SDM) markets, and releasing a few results of an operator survey looking at Policy Management.

The busy Shira Levine,  directing analyst for next gen OSS and policy at Infonetics Research, is forecasting that the SDM market is on track to "blast past" the half-billion-dollar mark in 2011, hitting $563 million, a 55% increase over 2010. By 2015, the market could be worth $1.5 billion, Infonetics said. the market will be pushed along by carrier spending in subscriber analytics to support advances in mobile advertising, network modernisation initiatives, and machine-to-machine (M2M) applications.

Key players include vendors such as HP, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks looking to expand their traditional HLR/HSS offerings; players in the adjacent charging, policy management, and deep packet inspection markets (e.g. Openet and Sandvine); and large database and IT suppliers like Oracle, IBM, and Amdocs looking to leverage their longstanding enterprise data management capabilities.

01 December 2011

The clue to what Carrier IQ does is in its name. Carrier IQ markets itself as a company whose technology can help carriers understand and monitor the performance of devices, apps and services.

To do this, it installs its technology on a device. Carrier IQ has not been shy about this, although some of its customers may have been. If you look at its press announcements page, you will see that where it has customer approval it will release who it is working with. Over the past couple of years, the company has mentioned NEC, Huawei and Vodafone Portugal as customers. It has said publicly it is working in the mobile broadband space, in other words in dongles (Keystroke logging your laptop? Head for the hills...) as well as smartphones. And also that it is developing for Android.

If you look at the Android release, it talks of “on-device measurement of the user experience”, and says that Carrier IQ can “provide direct insight to end customers’ experience to facilitate some of these focus areas.”