Frontier says that the 30K people affected by the transition (and who still have issues) will get credits and should get over it as 30K represents less than 1% of their customers. The Florida Attorney General jumped on the PR bandwagon to wag her finger at Frontier. When you deregulate phones and then give a pass on an acquisition like this, you can't do more than wag a finger.
Sprint just remembered that they have a fiber network. It only generates about $600M in revenue for them currently - about the same as the revenue VZW makes on IOT.
This is offbeat: The FCC issued an Order ($100K fine) resolving a call completion investigation involving inContact.
Evolve IP took a majority investment from a private equity firm, Great Hill Partners. It is a cash infusion for growth and ramping up. " The Company's services are currently deployed in four continents and 15 countries, to more than 1,300 commercial business accounts with more than 100,000 users, licensed seats and managed end points." This investment makes it a little harder for someone like Vonage to scoop up Evolve IP.
Vonage spent most of its acquisition fund buying twilio's biggest competitor, Nexmo for $230 Million. This is CPaaS, communications platform as a service space that Twilio has owned. This is the elastic VoIP space. It will be the fourth platform that VB will be running, which is an expensive proposition. It is a business more like wholesale VoIP Orig/Term than it is about retail VoIP, which is Vonage's bread and butter. This begs the question how do their salespeople sell this versus UCaaS? Two entirely different businesses.
Diane Meyers at IHS released their Top 10 UCaaS players scorecard: 8x8, Vonage, West, RingCentral, Mitel, Verizon, Star2Star, Broadview Networks, Fuze and Nextiva. 600K seats puts you at the top of the heap. "Landing just outside the top 10 were Comcast, ShoreTel, Cox, CoreDial and Windstream."
Lenovo gets into the UCaaS space with the launch of its "Smart Meeting Room Solution, essentially a unified communications offering which allows various devices and screens to be able to collaborate in a workplace... The solution combines Lenovo's ThinkCentre Tiny desktop with Intel's Unite software."
Streaming video is a big thing for Live events like Blab, FB Live, Periscope and others Rich Tehrani takes a look at it here. Note: no telecom companies are in this space.
Telcos in the US and UK are not making enough SaaS sales. A majority of the SMB cloud revenue is going to the SaaS providers themselves, according to a report.
The Digital Divide is real: Broadband service tends to stop at the poverty line in the US.
The FCC approved Globalstar's spectrum for wi-fi. They want to create a nationwide wi-fi service and charge for it. No idea if the radios in devices can utilize it. Google of course despises this plan.]]>
Did you see that Apple had a revenue problem? Not as many iPhones are selling. "Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) says the mobile wave, which is split between mobile phones (voice/SMS) and smartphones, is coming to an end, and the next obvious market for growth is cars." Ben's blog is here and the slide deck is here.
The Autonomous car has big investment from everyone from GM to Apple to Google to Tesla to hundreds of other companies. It is where we are heading. (It is just another robot!)
Robotics. Global investment in robotics doubled from 2014 to 2015 to almost $600M, according to Financial Times. Robotics is going to replace a ton of workers.
Life Science (or biotech) is still healthy. From cancer treatments to testing, investment in this sector is still good, largely because R&D spending at Big Pharma has shrunk in total dollars due to consolidation. Also, Big Pharma drug pipelines are lean; they tend to buy new drugs, treatments and tests these days.
The ancillary to this is the IoT Healthcare sector which saw a rise of 20% in 2015 investment, according to CB Insights. One problem being faced is clinical efficiency, which is tracking treatments to boost the effectiveness of healthcare providers as well as to improve the delivery of healthcare in hospitals and clinics via connected devices/objects. That takes us into wearables, ingestables, brain sensors, home monitoring and more. A lot of cool stuff in this space, especially happening here in Tampa Bay.
In Colorado and California, cannabis startups are the rage. Legal marijuana sales are tracking at 3x Coke's bottle water sales.
Education technology is also seeing investment, but our education system sucks, so I am ignoring it for now.
CHATBOTS, PERSONAL ASSISTANT and Other forms of AI
Matt Swanson, Paula Bernier and others think that "chatbots will cause a near-term disruption in how businesses interact with consumers, and a long-term paradigm shift in how people interact with machines." See Matt's article on VB.
Paula writes about Facebook, chatbots and customer service here. Thomas Howe wrote, "As alternatives to websites and to mobile apps, Chat bots, digital assistants and intelligent agents are the quick and efficient way to connect your employees and customers to your business." Companies like BizTexter and KISST are already shipping services (and they did it before Facebook!)
Financial Technology is looking good. When there is a best of list of conferences for a sector, you know there is money there. The Fintech startup scene, according to CB Insights, has been healthy for a while. Pretty much the way Craigslist sucked a lot of revenue out of newspapers, banking startups will suck some profitable lines of business from Wells Fargo and other large banks. Hopefully.
BTW, Payments startups saw a shift in the last two quarters. Digital wallets like Apple Pay are here. Investments will slow as winners start to emerge (like in the ride sharing space).
SIDE NOTE:
Latency Arbitrage is why latency matters to anyone in financial. Listen to why. ]]>The TCA added 17 more members at the CPExpo in Orlando as the TCA closes in on 550 members - about 200 of whom have signed up to get certified as a CTP.
The US Secretary of Defense announced that Cyber-attacks could threaten US infrastructure. The DoD is working on a response. It is a constant game of cat and mouse - and the mouse is a fixed target.
SaaS company, Workday, IPO'ed today with a 70% bump to rake in $637M. "The company has not turned a profit." And revenue last year was $134M. That cloud buzz is a hit with investors.
"Integra Telecom today announced that investment funds affiliated with Searchlight Capital Partners, L.P. have acquired a significant equity stake in the company."
Virtual Communications Express is VZ's Broadsoft based SMB Hosted PBX offering that has some integration with Google Apps and a dashboard. I know someone who is exhausted and glad it launched!
An inside look at the Sprint-Softbank negotiations. Customers? No a worry in those rooms.
Master Agency, Intelsys, blogs about the huge opportunity in sales that agents have. "Conservatively we believe the US addressable market share for the telecom services channel of which we are all part is $100 billion annually, or $8.3 billion in monthly spend. This excludes most of the Fortune 1000 on the high end, and the SOHO/consumer segment on the low end.... , Intelisys Sales Partners will own about 0.2% of the addressable net billed market share." The numbers say we need more volume to move the needle.
]]>Other ITSP's are actively seeking an acquisition or hoping one will come along.
It hasn't been all peaches and cream for Hosted PBX providers. There have been a number of stumbling blocks like QOS, call quality, E-911, fees and taxes, uptime, inter-operability, reliability, growth and scale. Coming on the heels of the Vonage lawsuit mania; the SunRocket implosion; VoIP Inc. bankruptcy; and other bad news in the sector that led some prospects to shy away from VoIP.
Compact that with free VoIP calling, iPhone apps, and the market got crowded real fast. Meanwhile, a real marketing campaign and clear messaging were lacking from many companies. The sales process for this service is different from other telecom services (TDM), which created a hurdle to sales growth (and scale).
Now we come to a time when VC money to Hosted VoIP (or Hosted UC or Cloud Comm) is slowing down, while the MSO Hosted PBX sales effort is launching.
Fair warning to ITSP's: Get your sheep together! Now!
By 2Q2011, Comcast and Cox will be rolling out Hosted PBX (99 seats and under) to top markets. This will put intense pressure on ILEC's, CLEC's and VoIP companies. Why?
For the following reasons: Both Comcast and Cox have
As a client mentioned, "This isn't a message you want to hear (as a VOIP Provider), but it's one to take seriously." So get your ducks in a row, fast.
]]>Meanwhile, GENBAND bought Cedar Point, a provider of integrated packet-based voice and multimedia switching technologies to the cable industry, which is the industry that GENBAND wants to dominate. GENBAND is banking that cable voice will grow along with cable broadband sales (at the expense of ILEC DSL).
In non-acquisition news, LightEdge was named to Gartner's Visionaries list for UC as a Service. "The LightEdge Connected Office suite includes: hosted PBX voice services, hosted e-mail (Microsoft Exchange), hosted instant messaging and presence (Microsoft Office Communicator), hosted desktop faxing, and voice/web conferencing." The fact that Iowa-based LightEdge melds email and OCS with the other voice stuff makes it different. Only a few providers do that - Alteva in Phillie.
Please note my one point is that these Hosted PBX companies are getting crazy with the marketing terms: Converged Comm in Cloud, Converged Comm AAS, UCaaS, blah, blah. Do you think any of your prospects is shopping for that? I'm in this Industry and can barely keep up with the term of the week that your PR firm made up. How about developing a real USP / Value statement / elevator pitch / brand statement?
]]>Ask.com gives up on search [RRW] they will just do Q&A (for now).
Twilio raises $12 million to let you call from web apps to phones. [venturebeat] Twilio is a 2x sponosr of StartupCamp Communications.
23% of all US households report that no one in the home uses the Internet anywhere. [Ars]
Phone.com Offers 100% Automated Voicemail Transcription
What does an entrepreneur do for fun? Think, talk, and dream about business.
Mobile payments: Square is processing millions of dollars in transactions each week [TC]
Cisco - 42% of employees restricted from using social media at work.
@HeinzMarketing: "my product is better" triggers a price war. "my product is different" drives discovery and value. #sm20
Do you really think blogging is being replaced by FB, twitter? Thought leadership doesn't happen in 140-420 characters.
Cisco led the Series C funding round which closed last week for RingCentral. RingCentral launched an agent program a couple months ago and already have 150+ sales agent partners. (It's not quantity; it's quality/relationship).
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