I had planned to bring you a celebratory Position Update this month, filled with positive news about Locatrix Communications, and looking towards the year ahead. However, following the flooding that occurred in South-East Queensland last week, damaging thousands of properties and changing tens of thousands of lives, it just didn’t feel appropriate. Instead, we’ve decided to publish a brief perspective of the disaster and also to provide suggestions for how our friends both in Australia and overseas can contribute to Queensland’s rebuilding effort.

I received dozens of e-mails and text messages asking how we fared in the floods. In summary, we’re fine – though we did have to close our Brisbane office for much of last week, with power outages and road closures impacting the CBD. And while the extended Locatrix family experienced some property damage and extended power outages, I’m relieved to report that everyone is safe and well. I’m also pleased that our primary hosted services facility wasn’t impacted, maintaining 100% uptime for our customers during the flood period. Our office regained power on Sunday afternoon, and we were able to resume normal operations on Monday morning.

There’s many news sites and archives containing photographs and video imagery of the flood and its aftermath, some examples are here and here. But we each saw first-hand evidence of mother nature’s ferocity that will remain with us for the rest of our lives.

How You Can Help

Thousands of Queenslanders were and continue to be severely impacted by the floods. The Australian Red Cross is on the ground in 25 locations across the state managing and assisting with evacuation centres. It is also assisting to manage the Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal, which as of Sunday has raised more than A$85 million to help those most in need. Please consider contributing to these efforts by donating if you can, as every amount will help restore a sense of normalcy to people’s lives.

Back to Normal

Next month, we promise to be back with a much more positive Position Update, including new customer and product announcements, and details of where we will be exhibiting at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Until then, I wish you a happy and safe January.

At first glance, this initiative had a tremendously successful outcome for the MNO. Their mobile Internet usage saw double-digit percentage growth overnight. And kept growing.

A week later, the operator announced increased usage caps for all of its data plans. No great problem here, as subscribers rapidly became new mobile social networking enthusiasts, often in their thousands each day. But certainly less revenue per MB.

In fact everyone was terribly pleased until later in the month they discovered that while overall mobile data was substantially up, their on-portal traffic had actually decreased, by more than 30 percent. And adding to that dilemma, ARPU decreased for nearly every VAS product they offered to their subscribers.

So while the social networking traffic was increasing, the mobile operator had become a dumb pipe – and found themselves dramatically exposed to churn in a competitive market. Because “m-site” social networking on network A is an identical experience on network B. And C. Or even D. Popular social networking sites are attracting millions of unique visitors to their mobile portals every month, and while mobile data usage rises, the ARPU curve – from data usage alone – is trending ever downwards. What should be an opportunity for mobile operators can very quickly become a massive problem.

To help mobile product and VAS managers meet this challenge, we devised the Locatrix (Re)Engage Workshops. Our thesis is this: mobile operators don’t need to “introduce” social networking services – their subscribers are already there. Instead, they need to formulate and execute strategies which provide a re-engagement path, via and through existing social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter and Friendster.

Delivered in either half-day and full-day seminar formats, our (Re)Engage Workshops help mobile product managers and network executives better understand the demographic mix of social networking users, and teaches them how to create a subscriber engagement strategy by working within the social networking paradigm. Creating, for example, a framework for injecting your mobile brand and VAS solutions into social networking portals, and helping your customers promote their favorite services to their friends. And while we of course present engagement examples based on Locatrix solutions and services, there is no ongoing commercial obligation from the (Re)Engage workshop – just an opportunity to learn and refresh your strategies for leveraging mobile social networking within your subscriber base. And (Re)Engaging with your customers!

There’s more information about the Locatrix (Re)Engage Workshops on our website, but for a limited time we are offering a free half-day (Re)Engage Workshop to qualifying operators who are readers of this newsletter: simply mention “Position Update” when you contact us, or use this special e-mail link.

This month we are profiling Locatrix/XLF, our hosted enabler-access and application framework solution. Mobile “enablers” – network elements that provide location, subscriber identity and profile, SMS/MMS messaging and charging – are powerful network assets that can create tremendous value for an operator and their subscribers, through facilitating personalized, interactive and monetizable consumer experiences.

While these enablers of course exist in mobile networks, the cost of opening them up for access by mobile application developers, either directly or via middleware or some sort of service delivery platform (SDP) can be an expensive proposition. We’ve seen VAS business cases shot down because of extensive capital expense requirements, or through provisioning and management costs that make consumer services commercially unviable.

That’s why we’re offering Locatrix/XLF to mobile operators as a hosted, capex-free solution; as the foundation for our consumer applications (friend finder, family minder, location-enhanced marketing and social networking) we’ve already proven the value in enabling multiple applications utilising the same enabler access framework. And by encapsulating the business logic – per-event charging, subscriptions, trial periods and usage caps – within the framework, operators can also launch more “revenue-safe” initiatives, targeted at specifically focused subscriber demographics. We’re also participating in the GSMA’s OneAPI initiative to ensure compliance with the relevant industry standards.

The Locatrix/XLF hosted solution reduces both costs and time-to-market, meaning our customer can design and launch VAS solutions faster, and realise ARPU growth sooner. In one case we’re reducing a six-month initiative cycle (from concept to launch) to just six weeks.

In the current mobile market environment, we believe that operators will be under increasing pressure to both launch new services and reduce capital spending.  Locatrix/XLF is our argument that the two objectives need not be mutually exclusive.  Send me a note if you are interested in exploring Locatrix/XLF further.

Rather than re-hash the news items from the conference itself, I thought we’d devote this month’s newsletter to a rundown on what for us were the top four mobile location topics to emerge last month.

In no specific order, we have:

Enabler Access, or more specifically, how mobile operators can become “smarter” data service providers, was a recurring theme throughout the MWC. Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao spoke of a need to “add value to what we do” in his keynote address, citing that opening enablers (messaging, location, charging, and privacy) through cooperation with content providers was key to providing more relevant experiences for more subscribers. And as a technical starting point, the GSMA’s OneAPI initiative has gained momentum in its first phase. Locatrix – joining vendors like Oracle, Aepona, and Ericsson looks forward to contributing to this effort going forward.

Google Latitude was announced the week before the MWC, proving that demand for location extends beyond corporate LBS applications. There are however limitations to Latitude, and some of these are noted in Telstra’s own blog post and podcast. (You can also read my blog posting on Latitude). There is of course a lesson here: if mobile operators don’t allow access to the enablers, their competitors will simply bypass them.

The OSLO Alliance was announced during the MWC, and while at first glance it seems to be a loose collection of social networking application developers, I’m personally quite thrilled by what they’re seeking: Open Social Location Objects (OSLO’s) that can share a subscriber’s and their friend’s locations/proximity seamlessly across mobile networks, as well as certain profile information.

Collectively, the prominence of these three topics provided a watershed of sorts for Locatrix, demonstrating operator need, market potential, and demonstrable value for social location. And we’re ready to respond. I spent a few weeks in Europe successfully showcasing our eXtensible Locatrix Framework (XLF) to mobile operators; XLF provides a single interface to a subscriber’s social network of “approved” (i.e. locatable) friends that can be used by any number of social networking experiences.

XLF will be the highlight topic of next month’s Position Update, but if you want a preview, drop me a line.

Kudos to Mobile Monday-ers in Barcelona

In a multitude of thanks, I need to congratulate Rudy de Waele and Carles Fereiro (and their team) for a third outstanding Mobile Peer Awards and also Mobile Sunday (the latter so well attended that the bar overflowed into other bars!). Thanks also to Helen Keegan of Mobile Monday London fame for the excellent Swedish Beers event at Dostrece, and the excellent UKTI lunch.

And Finally…

To close on a lighter note –and in response to the barrage of e-mails my Blackberry received on February 18th, I need to state once and for all that – despite the brilliance of Whereis® Everyone for this exact purpose – we sadly have no idea where that particular mobile phone is!