1. Knowing the story is not enough.
2. Telling the story is only the beginning.
3. The conversation about the story is as important as the story itself.
4. The more you try to be paternalistic and authoritative, the less people will believe you.
5. The more you cede control to your audience, the more people will respect you
6. The more you embrace new technology as a platform, the more your ideas will compete.
7. The more you abandon the faceless and characterless, the more you can set the agenda
8. The more you look beyond the story for connections, the more value you will have.
9. And if you have value and no one else does, you will get paid.

It’s worth reading.

Indonesia limits foreign ownership in the telecommunication sector to a maximum of 65 percent for mobile phone operators and 49 percent for fixed-line operators.

Two tender offers would begin concurrently in Indonesia and the United States at 7,388 rupiahs ($0.661) per share and would expire on Feb. 18, Qtel said.

“The Indonesian government has determined that Qtel’s total ownership will be limited to 65 percent of Indosat,” Qtel said in a statement.

“Guided by this ruling, Qtel is thus offering to acquire an additional stake of up to approximately 24.19 percent of Indosat, after taking into account its existing 40.81 percent indirect stake in Indosat,” Qtel said.

Qtel bought a stake in Indosat, the country’s second largest mobile phone operator, from Singapore Technology Telemedia for $1.35 billion in June, increasing its ownership of the company to 40.81 percent from around 10 percent.

Indonesia’s communications minister specified last year Qtel should not control more than 65 percent of Indosat and that it had to separate its mobile and fixed-line business in two years.

Read the full story in Reuters here.

Licensing the 2100 MHz spectrum band for 3G services would enable Bangladeshi operators to launch mobile broadband services, which their customers can use to gain fast and easy access to the Internet and online services, it said on Wednesday.

Bangladesh’s mobile sector has grown rapidly, with user numbers reaching more than 45 million at end-September from 200,000 in 2001, while the country has only 1.32 million fixed-line phones.

“Laying new fixed-line connections is expensive and inefficient, so high-speed mobile networks are Bangladesh’s best bet to realise the many social and economic benefits that arise from widespread access to broadband services,” said Ricardo Tavares, senior vice president for public policy at the GSMA.

Analysts predict the number of subscribers could top 70 million by 2011, nearly half the country’s population of more than 140 million people.

Many developing countries, including Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Kenya and South Africa, have already deployed mobile broadband services enabling their people to get easy access to information on health, education, job opportunities and agriculture.

There are six cellphone carriers in Bangladesh, including five foreign operators.

Read the full story in Reuters here.

On average, analysts expect global growth to be 3 percent in both the fourth quarter and in 2009, compared with well above 10 percent in recent years. Eight out of 22 analysts said they expected the market to contract next year.

In a similar poll just a month ago, only one analyst out of 23 expected 2009 market sales volumes to fall, and then only slightly.

For the fourth quarter, analysts expect the market to grow 11.6 percent from the third quarter, less than the 13.5 percent estimated by Nokia, the world’s largest cellphone maker. The fourth quarter has traditionally been a bonanza for cellphone makers as consumers snap up phones for holiday gifts.

Read the full story in International Herald Tribune here.

Leading mobile firm Bharti Airtel signed up 2.7 million customers, enough for it to overtake state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd as India’s largest telecom firm by total subscribers, including fixed-line subscribers.

Second-ranked mobile firm Reliance Communications added 1.75 million customers, and No. 3 Vodafone Essar, controlled by Britain’s Vodafone Plc, added 1.76 million.

India is the world’s fastest-growing market for wireless services and the second-largest market for such services after China, with growth fuelled by cheap handsets and call rates as low as 1 U.S. cent a minute.

See the full story in Reuters here.

Telecoms operators in India were earlier permitted to share only passive infrastructure such as mobile towers, buildings and power backup facilities.

Sharing infrastructure reduces the operating costs and capital expenditure of wireless telecoms operators, allowing them to maintain margins in a competitive market that has call rates as low as 1 U.S. cent a minute.

“The guidelines are aimed to reducing the input costs on telecom access providers… (and to aid) reduced tariff and increased tele-density in rural areas,” the telecoms ministry said in a statement.

Read the full stroy in Reuters here.

Hosted by the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planner, the hearing discussed two proposed plans for roaming charges, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Both proposals involve cancelling the existing roaming service fee of 0.2 yuan per minute, which users have criticized as being too high, according to local media reports.

China’s mobile operators, China Mobile and China Unicom collect domestic roaming fees if the subscriber leaves the local service area. Analysts have mixed views on whether a cut in roaming charges would affect earnings growth for the two operators.

Read the full story in Reuters here.

With no word in state media of any license fee increases, the first satellite dish owners knew of the hike was when they went to pay the 6,000 kyat levy, only to be told it was now 1 million kyat ($780), three times the average citizen’s yearly income.

An official at Myanmar Post and Telecom confirmed the increase on Wednesday, but was at a loss to explain it.

“It’s not our decision,” the official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. “We were just ordered by the higher authorities. Even I was shocked when I heard about it.”

The increase is way beyond the meager means of virtually all the former Burma’s 56 million people, for whom international broadcasts such as Al Jazeera or Norway-based dissident network Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) are the main source of news.

Read the full story in Reuters here

“A global satellite system should come on line next decade, potentially saving billions of dollars and thousands of lives by boosting preparedness for natural disasters, a top scientist said on Wednesday.

Monitoring changes in climate, the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) should also help health officials prevent epidemics and guard against man-made environmental damage, said Jose Achache, head of the group behind the project. “I’m an optimistic guy. So, I think in ten years from now we’ll have a fully operational and fairly complete GEOSS,” Achache, director of the Geneva-based intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations, told Reuters.”

Continue reading Reuters Alertnet | Global system could cut disaster toll by 2018

The victims of cyclone in Bangladesh are poorest among the poor. Their views about effective warning system “lacks credibility” to the concerned bodies.But it is a real bad news when the merchant mariners have slammed Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) for suddenly raising the cyclone’s severity within an hour. It clearly demonstrates the BMD’s professional incompetence. Reuters provides the chilling details.

I was in Macau attending Mobile Asia 2007 when cyclone SIDR was brewing in the Bay of Bengal. BBC and CNN were updating its movement since November 12. To put a perspective to it, their weather commentators said SIDR’s intensity was similar to Katrina.

Both the international TV channels consistently mentioned Bangladesh being the very possible victim. Unlike in New Orleans, the international TV news crew did not physically report from the coastal area of Bangladesh. But the SIDR dominated their news and it gained prominence gradually.

An official at Indonesia’s National Coordinating Agency for Disaster Management said there had been progress in educating people since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that followed a huge quake off Aceh province and killed nearly 170,000 Indonesians.

Read more Reuters Alertnet | Indonesia disaster preparedness a work in progress

He said the developed countries’ financial authorities are not keeping up with the new and complex financial market instruments that lay behind recent credit market turmoil. 

“Thanks to the present crisis which originated in the advanced economies … I think developed economies will listen more to the developing economies’ point of view,” Chidambaram remarked. 

“In the name of innovation, regulators or governments in the advanced economies have fallen behind the curve.”

The time has come for the developed world to attend to its own problems, and stop lecturing emerging economies about what is right and what is wrong, he said. 

“For too long the advanced economies have told the developing economies that this is right and this is wrong,” Chidambaram told Reuters on the sidelines of the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank.

As growth looks sure to slow in much of the rich world, partly due to the fallout from reckless lending in the United States, new economic powerhouses like India say they are tired of being told what to do. Read more.

“The Internet connection was restored on Saturday afternoon, but we still haven’t decided whether or not to reopen our internet cafe yet,” a Yangon Internet cafe owner said.

There had been intermittent access to the Internet over the past week, mostly during a curfew first imposed as the junta sent the army in to end protests led by thousands of Buddhist monks.

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Phone credit low? Africans go for “beeping”
By Andrew Heavens | Wed Sep 26, 11:32 AM ET

KHARTOUM (Reuters) – If you are in Sudan it is a ‘missed call’. In Ethiopia it is a ‘miskin’ or a ‘pitiful’ call. In other parts of Africa it is a case of ‘flashing’, ‘beeping’ or in French-speaking areas ‘bipage’.

Wherever you are, it is one of the fastest-growing phenomena in the continent’s booming mobile telephone markets — and it’s a headache for mobile operators who are trying to figure out how to make some money out of it.

You beep someone when you call them up on their mobile phone — setting its display screen briefly flashing — then hang up half a second later, before they have had a chance to answer. Your friend — you hope — sees your name and number on their list of ‘Missed Calls’ and calls you back at his or her expense.

It is a tactic born out of ingenuity and necessity, say analysts who have tracked an explosion in miskin calls by cash-strapped cellphone users from Cape Town to Cairo.

“Its roots are as a strategy to save money,” said Jonathan Donner, an India-based researcher for Microsoft who is due to publish a paper on “The Rules of Beeping” in the high-brow online Journal of Computer Mediated Communication in October.

Donner first came across beeping in Rwanda, then tracked it across the continent and beyond, to south and southeast Asia. Studies quoted in his paper estimate between 20 to more than 30 percent of the calls made in Africa are just split-second flashes — empty appeals across the cellular network.

The beeping boom is being driven by a sharp rise in mobile phone use across the continent.

Africa had an estimated 192.5 million mobile phone users in 2006, up from just 25.3 million in 2001, according to figures from the U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union. Customers may have enough money for the one-off purchase of a handset, but very little ready cash to spend on phone cards for the prepaid accounts that dominate the market.

Africa’s mobile phone companies say the practice has become so widespread they have had to step in to prevent their circuits being swamped by second-long calls.

“We have about 355 million calls across the whole network every day,” said Faisal Ijaz Khan, chief marketing officer for the Sudanese arm of Kuwaiti mobile phone operator Zain (formerly MTC). “And then there are another 130 million missed calls every day. There are a lot of missed calls in Africa.”

‘CALL ME BACK’

Zain is responding to the demand by drawing up plans for a “Call-me-back” service in Sudan, letting customers send open requests in the form of a very basic signal to friends for a phone call.

The main advantage for the company is that the requests will be diverted from the main network and pushed through using a much cheaper technology (USSD or Unstructured Supplementary Service Data).

A handful of similar schemes are springing up across Africa, says Informa principal analyst Devine Kofiloto. “It is widespread. It is a concern for operators in African countries, whose networks become congested depending on the time of day with calls they cannot bill for.

“They try to discourage the practice by introducing services where customers can send a limited number of ‘call-back’ request either free of charge or for a minimum fee.”

There are plenty of other reasons why mobile operators are keen to cut down on the practice. One is it annoys customers, pestered by repeated missed calls.

A second is that ‘flashes’ eat into one of mobile phone companies’ favorite performance indicators — ARPU or average revenue per user. Miscalls earn very little in themselves – and don’t always persuade the target to ring back.

Orange Senegal, Kofiloto said, lets customers send a ‘Rappelle moi’ (‘Call me back’) when their phone credit drops below $0.10. With Safaricom Kenya, it is a “Flashback 130″ (limited to five a day — and with the admonishment ‘Stop Flashing! Ask Nicely’). Vodacom DR Congo’s ‘Rappelez moi SVP’ service costs $0.01 a message.

MORE THAN MONEY

But beeping is not only about money. Donner’s ‘Rules of Beeping’ suggests a social protocol for the practice.

“The richer guy pays,” he writes. It is acceptable to beep someone if you are short of cash and they are flush with credit. Never beep someone poorer than you.

Never beep someone you are tapping for a favor. You don’t want to risk annoying the person you are trying to win over. Never flash your girlfriend, unless you want to look cheap.

“Most beeps are requests to the mobile owner to call back immediately, but can also send a pre-negotiated instrumental message such as pick me up now,’ or send a relational sign, such as I’m thinking of you,’” the paper says.

It can go even further than that.

Cameroonian researchers Victor W.A. Mbarika and Irene Mbarika identified a different kind of beeping-powered relational call in a study for the technology association the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

“Lovers often communicate with text messages or beeping’,” said the study. “One party dials another’s number and then hangs up. One ring could mean, I am here,’ two rings, Call me now.’”

And the name they gave this new entry in the beeping lexicon? Borrowing a street slang term for an appeal for sex, they christened it “the booty call.”

:: bdnews24.com ::

The Nigerian telecoms regulator is working on plans to allow mobile phone subscribers to keep the same number when they change networks in a bid to force providers to improve services, its top executive said Monday.

As things stand, Nigerians have to give up their numbers if they want to move to a new network, which discourages many subscribers from trying a different provider even when they face constant problems making or receiving calls.

“We are planning for the future to allow number portability. The aims are to improve quality and competition,” Ernest Ndukwe, executive vice-chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission, told Reuters by telephone.

“It is still some months away. We are going to conduct consultations with the industry and announce a starting date in the near future,” he said.

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