By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Duke Ellington’s 1959 album Blues In
Orbit, which isn’t really blues, but isn’t really just another Duke Ellington
exercise in swing, but one of those genre-benders category-obsessed music execs
hate.
Apologies for not leaving a note yesterday, First CoffeeSM was in The World’s
Most Interesting CityTM, Istanbul all day, laying some groundwork
for what could be an interesting 2006.
…
First CoffeeSM notes the release of AltiGen Communications, Inc.’s IP 710, a business
VoIP telephone, which AltiGen CEO Gilbert Hu describes as filling “the gap between advanced business features on
the telephone and IP telephony.”
It does give users single button access to voicemail,
activity/presence selection, voicemail greeting selections, call recording,
call conferencing, call transferring, and even placing calls to employees in
other countries.
And the 4 line, backlit liquid crystal display on the IP 710 is
capable of displaying time, Caller ID name and number, real-time call center
workgroup statistics, do-not-disturb, and call forwarding status. It can be
personalized with 15 backlit user-defined keys for “any combination of
configurable features like, but not limited to, speed-dialing, extension
busy/ringing appearances, call appearances, line appearances, and workgroup
activity status,” company officials say.
…
Iran’s already frigid foreign telecom investment climate is
getting colder, as the recent machinations with Turkcell and South Africa’s MTN’s
bids for a place in the consortium to
develop the fundamentalist Islamic regime’s second GSM system show.
It’s a deal which, in the words of observer Christian
Oliver, “is regarded as a litmus test of whether Iran is ready for foreign
investment.” If that’s true, results so far do not bode well for the foreign
investment the heavily state-controlled, Communist-style Iranian economy,
complete with Soviet-style Five Year plans, desperately needs.
In February 2004 the Iranian government awarded Turkcell Iletisim
Hizmetleri, Turkey’s biggest cellular company, the first Turkish company to
be listed on the New York Stock Exchange and one of Europe’s ten largest GSM
operators, 70 percent of a consortium to develop a second GSM system in Iran,
where the current one serves six million of the country’s 68 million
inhabitants.
Since then, however, a hard-line anti-Western government has
taken power in Tehran. After that the Islamic theocracy’s fundamentalist-dominated
Parliament informed Turkcell they were slashing its stake to 49 percent, citing
security concerns in having “foreigners” running the system and accusing the
Turkish carrier of ties to Israel.
Turkey and Israel have close military and business ties and
numerous cultural exchanges, which were no secret before Iranian officials
approved the deal in 2004. Israeli tourists are a common sight on Turkey’s
Mediterranean coast – although First CoffeeSM remembers in the
1990s, when Turkish hotels had casinos, Israeli tourists were so plentiful shop
signs in cities along the coast were written in Turkish, German and Hebrew. The
casinos closed down due to involvement by organized crime unacceptable even by
Turkish standards, and Israeli tourism leveled off considerably.
Iranians then turned to another bidder. According to South
African business reports, South African cellular operator MTN
has plunked down 290 million euros – some news reports put the figure at 270
million euros – “to pay for a cell phone network operating license in Iran,” citing
Iranian officials. The latest available reports are that the government is
finalizing a deal with MTN.
“MTN has put a frozen sum of 270 million euros in The
Standard Bank of South Africa for Iran’s Bank Melli so the deal can be finalized,”
Irancell board member Ebrahim Mahmoudzadeh is quoted by Reuters as telling
Iranian state television.
Oliver reports that certain Iranian government officials
would like to see a closer tie between the business they dole out and the
political support the government receives for its controversial nuclear
program, which Western intelligence believes is a weapons program. South Africa
is more supportive of Iran’s nuclear ambitions than NATO member and pro-Western
Turkey.
Bloomberg has confirmed that when Turkcell won a tender last
year to set up a cellular network in Iran, they agreed “to pay a license fee of
300 million euros,” and that later “Iran warned Turkcell it had to pare its
ownership in the venture from 70 percent to a minority stake.”
The license is to act as a foreign operator in the Irancell consortium, where
the successful bidder still gets only 49 percent of the $2 billion investment
project to build and operate Iran’s second private GSM standard network. Iranian
officials are blaming a late payment of a license fee for taking the deal away
from Turkcell.
Reuters cites an “international source close to the MTN deal”
who says it’s still not signed, sealed and delivered, as there are other
technical details and issues of responsibility to be ironed out before it’s all
official. Nevertheless, it does appear that Turkcell’s out, yet optimistic
Turkcell insists it’s still part of a deal.
Iran needs foreign investment since by all accounts it is
incapable of building the infrastructure needed for a second GSM system.
“In the eyes of the Telecommunications and the Iranian
partners in the project, Turkcell is no longer involved and negotiations are
under way with MTN,” Vafa Ghafarian was
quoted as saying by the student news agency ISNA. Other Iranian government
officials are saying Turkcell’s history, and they want to see MTN’s money.
Turkcell’s insisting it’s still in the race, using London-based
HSBC bank to guarantee its intentions to pay the fee and claiming Iran’s
decision to start negotiations with MTN breaches the contract under the tender
it won. Turkcell has threatened court action within Iran if the government kills
the deal.
Whatever the final outcome of the deal, it hasn’t done much
for relations between Ankara and Tehran, or for Iran’s attempts to attract
foreign investment. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development puts
Iran as one of the ten least attractive destinations for foreign investment,
and almost all foreign investment is in oil.
…
Web site traffic analysis firm ClickTracks is announcing the
upcoming release of version 6 of their web analytics software.
First CoffeeSM doesn’t care about most of the ten
bazillion meaningless tech product “awards” given out by anybody with access to
a Web site – if your company hasn’t gotten at least some award or “honorable
mention” by someone by now there’s really no excuse – but finds it mildly
interesting that ClickTracs has won the ClickZ Marketing Excellence Award for
Best Web Site Analysis Tool every year it has been awarded.
John Marshall, ClickTracks’ founder and CEO says the product
gives small and medium-sized businesses “the ability to analyze both past and
current use of web sites through an intuitive visual interface.”
Scoffing at what it calls “guessing the effectiveness or
conversion rate of site changes or online campaigns,” ClickTracks officials
claim their web analytics software “helps marketing and design staffers
literally see the way that visitors behave and interact” with a site: “We’re
taking the same data many other web analysis programs collect, but we’re simply
presenting it to the user in a fundamentally different, yet instantly intuitive
way,” Marshall says.
Some new features on the 6 release include something called “Site
Archiver,” which is described as letting you “capture your web site as it
exists at a given point in time, and store it for future analysis.” There’s
also “Time Splits,” which lets you use
ClickTracks’ browser overlay technology to see visitor behavior on two
different versions of your web site -- on one screen. In other words, see your
site as it was during two different time periods, if you think that’ll help in determining
the result of site changes/upgrades, or proving to clients and managers that a
suggested change has had the desired outcome.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
