When was the last time you dialled a telephone number?

Image by IronRodArt - Royce Bair via FlickrTelcos are facing something of a challenge moving forward. They are staring looming disintermediation in the face and many don’t have the faintest clue what the hell to do about it.

It's an interesting idea, but there's every chance that social media will end up transforming them beyond recognition and even killing a number of them off. 

I got to thinking about this speaking at a telecom event recently. I came across more than one Great Question in the process. For instance, when was the last time you actually dialled a telephone number? We’ll be unlikely to ever dial numbers again. With today’s IP enabled networks, telephone numbers are actually something of a virtualisation – we don’t need numbers, because we don’t have to use circuit switches any more. We don’t even need URLs to communicate with each other, we’ve finally arrived at the point where we can all mimic the prisoner – we’re people, not numbers.

In this virtual world of Facebook phones and IP to IP connections (whether that's between handsets or PCs), the good old fashioned telco is reduced to being the provider of ‘the pipe’. It’s sort of analogous to a road network – the company that used to provide us with our car (finance and all), maintenance, petrol and car washing services – as well as the road network we used, together with service stations and hotels, is now just providing the blacktop. From the huge logistical enterprise that gave us everything we needed for road travel (and that also ran the big lorry networks for commercial customers) – except choice, they face being reduced to toll road operators. All they’ll be is the occasional toll booth with a sleepy chap taking our payment and a crew to fill in the occasional hole. There are other companies now providing the cars, the maps, the petrol and the logistics.

Even more scary for the telcos is their coming irrelevance.

The reason that Microsoft went for Netscape is that Netscape’s gameplan was to expose APIs to applications – this meant that Windows would become irrelevant to users and be replaceable by any old operating system, because applications only care about the next set of APIs down the pancake stack that sits between you and the hardware. Telecommunications has its own pancake stack, known as the OSI model - and telcos are facing being shoved down to the transport layer. Or perhaps even lower.

Today’s social media platforms are scaring the bejabers out of operators. If I spend all my time on Google, Facebook et al – and if these platforms are providing me with my telephony connections, I don’t actually care very much about my telco – I don’t actually see the transport layer, just the applications I use. And so the telco becomes irrelevant, whether you’re Etisalat, Du, Zain, BT or Vodaphone doesn’t matter to me. I’m just buying bandwidth and I don’t really care who I buy it from apart from price and stability – and they would all be pretty much comparable in a perfectly competitive market (which regulators are there to give us).

This means operators today have a very stark choice – transform or die. I’ve been saying this at conferences and stuff for a while now. Operators need to define new business models based around selling content and services that consumers want. They need to compete in the social space, they need to build complex revenue models that use the thinking that drives services like Google, YouSendIt and AVG. They need to look at those ‘Freemium’ models, indirect revenue streams and new competencies. They need to sell the stuff that smart IP networks enable - including content. Anyone planning to continue depending on the ongoing flow of easy money across the counter, cash for credits and money for minutes, is on a one-way ticket to oblivion, baby.
 
If they don’t change, and I'd suggest pretty quickly at that, they’re just going to be joining the queue behind the newspapers. Like newspapers, they’re not going to die overnight – just slowly and awfully collapse in on themselves, threshing around and squawking painfully on the way down. There'll be something left at the end, but it won't be the telcos as we know them.  More like a number of bandwidth wholesalers. Pipe pushers...

How did you get here?

Image by tricky ™ via Flickr
I'm not asking any deep philosophical question or setting out to give you a Paulo Coelho answer to the riddles and mysteries of life. I was just wondering how you actually, you know, got here.

SiteMeter, which is a handy little doodad that does all sorts of analysis on visitors to one's blog, shows a remarkable diversity of paths that lead to this silly little blog. Quite a few people come via the UAE Community Blog, appearing to use that Venerable UberBlog as a 'jumpsite'. Another good dash of visitors wander in from Twitter for one reason or another - some impelled, no doubt, by the odd pimping tweet broadcast by yours truly.

A good number come via search and all sorts of strange searches lead people, presumably often bitterly disappointed to find that what you see is most certainly not what you get, here. I am particularly proud that all sorts of permutations of Subway, Aquafina, Pringles and Kelloggs are leading people to the posts on this blog that explore the egregious side of all four. That people searching Google for "subway fake wheat bread" get this post on their first page of search results is a delight to me. I see quite a few people, one way and another, who are looking for various sorts of fakery. A rod for my own back, that one!

Some appear to repeat searches they've made before - at least I can only hope this is the case with the recurring incidence of 'Russian Girl Face Slash' I get landing here. I'm also very glad I regularly disappoint the people searching for various permutations centred around Russian girls and nocturnal activities. I occasionally post some of the stranger searches I get, such as this here post.

Some people seem to stumble by. Some use their RSS readers, although by no means as many as I'd have thought. A few people wander in from other blogs who have either linked to one of my intemperate rants or kindly put me on a blogroll.  Quite a lot come up as 'unknown', so I don't know where they came from.

So here's my question today. Where did you come from? Drop a quickie comment if you wouldn't mind.

Oh - and thanks. It's nice to see you!

Rotten Bankers

Image via Wikipedia
I'm being predictable, I know, but there's no way on earth I'd let the news that customers are unhappy with their banks pass me by without comment.

A poll by YouGov, full details on Zawya here, has found that 20% of people are highly upset with their bank, while fully 50% of consumers would not recommend their bank to a friend. 42% cite the main reason for their dissatisfaction is the lack of priority banks give to customer service. Some 40% of people have cancelled a credit card.

I am shocked, people, deeply shocked.

Why aren't the figures higher? Nobody I know who lives in the UAE is happy with their bank. Nobody has ever been able to recommend their bank to me. The one time I bit the bullet and tried to flee ever having to deal with the hapless goons at my bank, Lloyds Jumeirah failed to open our account without a litany of stupid mistakes that finally had us giving up and sticking with the devil we, sadly, know all too well.

Actually, one reason why the figures may not be as high as I thought is that between them, the 'most used banks' are Dubai Islamic Bank and HSBC - and between them, they account for only 21% of respondents to the survey.

I'm saying nothing about DIB, you understand...

Watching A New Life Unfold

Image via WikipediaI have known Sara for years. A former colleague and current friend, she is far too talented for her own good and manages to combine a keen intellect with an absolute lack of ambition for herself. She believes in people and in the good to be found in people; something I admire particularly as I do not at all share her capacity in this regard.

She left Dubai for London some years back with a vague idea of using the communications skills she had honed in a sort of NGO sort of way. That never really happened as I fancy she thought it would until a few weeks ago all sorts of things came together and she decided to throw in London life and travel to Nablus to become a teacher.

I would contend this is not normal behaviour, but then chacun à son goût...

One of Sara's many talents is language. She's always had better than native English language skills (although this is not, generally, setting the bar very high. Few foreigners manage to mangle English like the English manage mangling English); I recall her once stopping a client dead in his tracks by pointing out that their encounter had been more than usually serendipitous. After all, it's not a word you expect from an Arab girl, is it? Her encounters with ignorant English colleagues in London were relayed back to me with delighted indignation ("Dahling, I just can't belhieve an Arab is editing my copy!"), but the fact remains that Sara has a way with words that is unusual, a keen eye for humanity and a strong sense of fairness and compassion.

When you combine these things with the whole 'Year in Provence' adventure of starting a new life as a volunteer in the West Bank, you could be forgiven for thinking the mixture would provide a powerful, evocative and compellingly detailed account of the experience.

And it does. Her blog is linked here and I commend it to you with all my heart. Go there now while it is still new and she is at the very opening of her adventure. Because I bet you a pound to a penny that this unfolding story will delight you as the days fly by.

Wedding Night

Sabina England, or Deaf Brown Trash Punk as some will know her, is a colourful character at the best of times. I first met her on authonomy where her entrance, characteristically led by a greeting laced with the 'C' word, caused outrage amongst the serried ranks of tank-top wearing literary aspirants. Her book, 'Brown Trash' was a stunning read - fresh, challenging and with so much voice you'd want to cover your ears to block out its strident call. If you did, you'd get a taste of Sabina World, because she is (as you may have worked out from the above sobriquet) profoundly deaf.

Sabina's silent movies have been popping up on YouTube for a while now and have earned her a growing following. Her stageplays, never less than provocative, have been produced both in the US and UK and now she's gone and written, direct and produced a bigger budget film, 'The Wedding Night' - a much slicker piece that has so far been funded by donations raised by supporters. She's not quite there yet, the film's in the can (well, on the hard disk) but she needs more money to pay for the final edit. Take a look at the trailer:

 

I wanted to bring Sabina onto the radio show I co-host with Jessica Swann every Tuesday on Dubai Eye Radio, Dubai Today, but there's a slight glitch - being deaf is a slight impediment to doing phone interviews on the radio. So we did it by text instead:

What inspired the idea of ‘The Wedding Night’?
I was inspired to write "Wedding Night," which was originally a stage play. It is a very minimalist piece with just 2 actors in a hotel room. And I thought to myself, I can turn this into a film with a very low budget. It is heavy on drama, but very light on the budget. I wrote "Wedding Night" because it is a feminist response to the hypocrisy of sex and women's bodies in Indian-Pakistani culture and amongst Muslims. It is widely accepted for males to have had sexual experience and to have many female partners, yet if a woman dares to explore her sexuality and have sex with just 1 man, she is shunned and shamed by society. Also, I was inspired and disgusted by countless real-life stories I have heard about forced arranged marriages and the tragic consequences that come out of it.

Who are the actors? Are they trained?
The actors are Alpa Banker (actress) and Sanjiv Bajaj (actor). Alpa is a professional actress who lives in Los Angeles. She does theatre, commercials, modeling, and film. Sanjiv Bajaj is a doctor who graduated from Princeton University and founded an independent South Asian theatre company. They were both amazing in their roles.

What was the greatest challenge in conceiving, filming and directing this?
The greatest challenge to make the film happen was getting started in the first place. I didn't know who I was going to hire to shoot the film. I didn't have any money. I didn't have a goddamned clue how to go make this happen. But after consulting many Facebook friends who have worked in the film industry, I got some very good ideas and began raising funds through IndieGoGo. I also posted ads online seeking crew and actors. And soon, all these people were coming up to me and they wanted to work with me.

What’s your hope for it?
I don't have any hope for "Wedding Night." I just made the film because I've always wanted to be a filmmaker, it was always a dream of mine to write, direct and produce my own film and call my own shots. Well, I did it, and I'm glad.

Conflict runs through your work; you hit issues head on all the time and relish holding their little corpses up to show us. What was your one BIG target here, among all the little targets you’re hitting?
My big target in Wedding Night? It's just a big fuck you message to all these narrow-minded male chauvinists in our society. Misogynists, chauvinists, old-fashioned, sexist males and even sexist females, who believe that sex is a bad thing, these people who look down at women for even daring to speak out about sex and for having the courage to explore their sexualities. Sexual liberty is one of the most important rights for human beings, yet most people won't acknowledge that. "Wedding Night" is also a film that proudly shoves female aggression in your face. It's a film that says "hey, women have rights, too and we're not going to let you push us down."

It’s very slick, the trailer. How much did it cost and how did you raise it/convince people to take part in it?
The trailer didn't cost me any money. I just salvaged the film footage from the storage drive and then I created it on my laptop. But the real money will be pouring into post-production. It will cost me $4,000. Post Production includes: editing, colorization, sound synching, music, credits, and so on. When I first began to raise money for the film shoot, I used IndieGoGo and convinced a lot of people to donate to my film project. I raised over $1,000. I said that if you wanted to support a Deaf South Asian Muslim female filmmaker, this is your chance to help me. Hollywood is notoriously racist, sexist, and misogynistic. There are plenty of successful female filmmakers, yet they are ignored and shunned by the Hollywood studio system. Men are always favored over women. And then white men are always favored over non-white men and people of color. And then of course, most people cannot name a successful Deaf person working in Hollywood. So I said, if you're tired of the Hollywood studio system and you want to help someone make a film on her own, this is it. And that's how I got a lot of donations from the public.

Why would anyone in their right minds fund a revolutionary film-maker who’s made a habit of confronting taboos and prejudice so violently and graphically?
I have a little bit over $1,500 in donations for my Film Finishing Fund now, but I need more. If you can donate as little as $10 or $100, that would be great. If you're wondering why you should help me out, all I can say is this: if you go to the cinema and you complain about how mediocre, stupid and pathetic the female lead is, or if you read an article about Hollywood or Bollywood and you complain about the lack of successful female filmmakers being ignored, or if you complain about how film awards are always being handed out to men instead of women, then do something about it. Take out your wallet and give money to an aspiring female filmmaker. Encourage a Deaf person to become a filmmaker, artist, or writer and make their voices be heard. Encourage more filmmakers to make strong, interesting films about strong female leads instead of always creating bimbo, weak, pathetic female characters. Encourage young Muslims and South Asians to go out there and create a film, novel, play, or music that's not typical or cliched. Give me your money and I'll make more films with even better storylines that'll smash the mirror and shove it in people's faces.

The Internet has given you a voice and audience you otherwise wouldn't have, hasn't it?
I think in the Digital Age, in the age of youtube and Vimeo, in the age when crowd-sourced funding is becoming so common, we will face an even bigger change coming onto the filmmaking field. Today, you can create a webseries and put all the episodes online and people will watch. You can put your film online and people will watch. You can even get press attention from it, too. It's nice. More people are discovering that they don't need to get an agent or approach a film producer to get their scripts produced. You don't need to move to Los Angeles to be a filmmaker!! Who cares about Hollywood or Bollywood? Who cares about these irrelevant, pointless networking parties? You don't need an agent. You don't need famous friends. Write a script, set up an online fundraiser, ask people to donate money. I made a film on my own, and so can you. Hollywood is a place that needs to be destroyed. Hollywood keeps churning out pointless remakes and sequels. Hollywood keeps churning out the same, tired, sexist, racist, homophobic stereotypes. Hollywood is a white boys club where women and people of color are struggling to get into. Well, guess what? The studio system is rigid and it's time for Hollywood to collapse and crumble down.

Sabina's website is linked here or you can find her on Twitter: @jihadpunk77.

Talker

Image by notacrime via FlickrI'm doing quite a lot of conference speaking thingies this Autumn, so apologies in advance to anyone who suffers in one of those audiences. I'm particularly looking forward to the MediaME Conference in Amman on the 8th and 9th November, I'm genuinely pumped (but retained as a consultant by, so please take a pinch of salt) about the MENA ICT Forum taking place in Amman on the 10th and 11th October and I'm speaking on a panel thingy tomorrow at the Global Arab Business Meeting in Ras Al Khaimah.

There's more, but I've forgotten them. It's not arrogance, I've just got a brain the side of a dried pea.

I think tomorrow might be interesting. I'm a panellist on the topic of The Sustainable Corporation - "How the corporate sector may embrace socially responsible strategies" and I'm planning to set a cat or two among the pigeons. You see, I think the Middle East's corporate sector must embrace socially responsible strategies or die - but I'm not talking about giving a few thousand Dinars to some centre that's backed by an influential figure. Believe me, I have seen enough of 'ana mudhir' companies doling out cash to well supported causes (which they laughingly call 'CSR') to last me a lifetime, and railed against it every time I've encountered it (often to little effect). I'm not talking about that tomorrow. I'm talking about true social responsibility.

Try this on for size:

Be transparent.
Your ability to obfuscate and dissemble is being limited day by day because of the sharing and access that the Internet is driving. We know much more about you than you think - and we share a lot more opinion about you than you'd like. That movement of opinion, that tide of consumer-driven feedback is actually becoming increasingly important.

Be truthful
If there's a leak, you can not longer go out and say "there is no leak" and depend on a mendacious PR company and a compliant media. We're sharing the video of people sloshing around as you're pretending there is no problem (Sorry, 'issue'). When you need people to believe in your integrity, you'll find that you've already undermined it.

Be honest
Companies make profits. It's what they do. We don't believe for one second that your move to expand your operations is driven by a commitment to the market or a clear response to the needs of the community. It's about profitability and that's okay. But stop trying to dress up clearly commercial decisions as community commitment. And you can stop the greenwashing stuff right there, buddy. Oh, and one more thing. I'll buy a mobile network based on price and quality of service, bess. Your "giving back to the community" lip service is not a factor for me. If you were a true and active member of my community, now that's interesting. But you're not, you're just bankrolling stuff.

Be responsible
We all make mistakes (as the hedgehog said, climbing off the toilet brush). You can actually engage with communities, your customers, and explain why you made a decision (get a spine) or why you made a mistake and how you'll put it right. We expect no less.  When you don't do this, your customers with gather together and talk about what weasels you are.

Be led by your customers
Too many companies in the Middle East splosh 'customer-centric' in their brand values and then go on to treat customers like dirt. Take a close look at the telco sector and you'll see how those organisations have been punished by customers. God knows, I've taken diabolical glee in every piece of work I've done breaking a telco monopoly and you would not believe how low that fruit lay every time. You're a monopoly? Play nicely, because winds of change are abroad and they can change things a damn sight faster than you think.

Last but by no means least - be digital.
What do I get when I Google you? Do you know? TripAdvisor makes hoteliers sweat, but many other Middle East businesses are unaware of the flow of opinion - and are not searchable, responsive or digitally competent. Which is a shame, because an increasingly large number of your customers are. You can assert what you like about your company, it's products and brand. But you are no longer in control of the process of communication - your customers are talking on a wonderful scale. Your assertions are being tested by third parties with more reach than you have.

That's all I'll have time for - and believe me, my list is a sight longer than that. But I'm looking forward  to the reaction...

Sticker Scratcher

Image by touring_fishman via FlickrQuite properly, the UAE insists that products sold to consumers here are labelled in Arabic - the national language. However, once again, there is trouble in paradise. The Arabic labelling requirements are minimal – the product name, brand name, ingredients and product weight are all that appear to be mandated by the announcement made back in 2008 (which I posted about at the time). Although retailers whinged, the regulation is pretty light compared to elsewhere in the world and, I would argue, does little to help raising awareness among Arabic speaking consumers regarding the food they eat and what's in it.

Another requirement of that regulation is that the affixed Arabic label should NOT cover any of the original language text.

This stipulation is patently not being adhered to – retailers and distributors are constantly handling goods where the Arabic language label does indeed cover part of the original language text. Which is why I found myself the highly unwilling purchaser last night of a pot of Hampshire Sour Cream that did not come, as I had stupidly assumed, from the English county of Hampshire but was, in fact, a brand of American food conglomerate Kraft. The country of origin was covered by the Arabic sticker. I was mildly annoyed, as I consciously avoid using foods from US producers.

This got me going. Fossicking through the kitchen cupboard I found product after product where the Arabic sticker covered crucial information on the original product labels. I also found some products with no Arabic sticker at all – and a few, very few, where the sticker did not impact the original product information.

It’s a rich hodge-podge, a basic regulation that I would argue does not properly serve the Arabic speaking population with full food information and that has been implemented at best sloppily (and somewhat grudgingly, apparently, if you read my 2008 post linked above!) by the companies being asked to conform to a food safety and information requirement. It’s odd, when we can see legislation rolled out here that is no less than draconian, when this piece of regulation – affecting us all – remains implemented so very sloppily and to such a basic standard. It's been two years since the regulation came into force. It's not as if retailers need time to comply.

The reason, I would remind you, that we have such a thriving IT industry in Dubai is that it was here, uniquely, that IP legislation was not only enforced, but enforced on such a scale, with computers confiscated from offending companies and hauled away in flat back trucks, that companies like Microsoft felt able to come here and open up shop. Remember the ruling that walking on the grassy reservations or roundabouts would result in deportation? When Dubai really wants to enforce legislation, by golly it goes for it. But for some reason this one is being half-heartedly applied. So expats and the bi-lingual lose access to product information that bodies like the EU have decided we should really have a right to view. And Arabic-only speakers don’t get access to anything beyond the most basic information – information that wouldn’t satisfy any well-informed consumer let alone EU or US regulations.

The requirements and enforcement of the UAE food labelling regulation as it stands serves us all badly.

Spamless!

Image via Wikipedia
Anyone with a blog will tell you that the most annoying thing (apart from snarky anonymice) about the whole thing is comment spam. There's a special place in hell for comment spammers that involves extra unpleasantness and daily algebra lessons. They leave inane generic little comments, "I really enjoyed your post, keep up the good work, this is a very good blog I think" and links to their websites.

In one wonderful instance, a comment spammer was actually daft enough to leave his contact details on his WHOIS entry, with the consequences I delightedly reported in this here post. Revenge is indeed sweet.

I've been comment spammed a lot today by an Indian UPVC pipe making company. Grinding my teeth, I arrived at the blog with some scrubbies and a bottle of spam cleaner when I noticed that although I'd been getting the emails (I get a mail every time one of you peeps slips in a sneaky comment), I didn't actually have the spam in the comments. This was wonderful stuff - Google has actually implemented a spam filter and it has snapped up all that spam in a jiffy. It also sucked down Rootless' response to me on the high fructose corn syrup post, which I have now put back in its proper place.

Thank you Google. Now could you please work on finding a way to stop me getting everything (blogs, Google Maps etc) in Arabic by default? Although I respect Arabic, I don't read it - and assuming I do is just a bit dumb for a company as seriously clever as you are.

Information Overload

Image by Getty Images via @daylife
You could perhaps feel sorry for Dubai's RTA (Road and Transport Authority) faced as it is (and doubtless many other such authorities around the world) with having bought huge, wildly expensive traffic information screens that flash up bitty messages using LED technology. Given the relatively low resolution of the screens, they are only able to show a couple of lines of text - although they are bilingual, which is a good thing.


Someone at the RTA has the unenviable task of thinking up messages to post on the things and there have been signs recently of a certain tendency to surreal, Situationist-like sloganeering. The most recent, giving way yesterday and today to an Arabic only greeting for Sheikh Khalifa (who has just returned to the UAE following medical treatment), was 'SCHOOLS WITHOUT ACCIDENTS'.


That one's stayed with me. What could it mean?

Die Telco! Die!

Image via Wikipedia
Facebook has tossed its hat into the mobile handset ring according to TechCrunch today. The move is fascinating and adds a dimension to the whole new world emerging from the competition between companies who, five years ago, you would have never have thought of associating with the phone business - principally Apple and Google.

The idea of a phone that cuts out the old number dialling thing entirely and creates connections across a social media platform is a short leap ahead from the Google Voice stuff I was waffling about a few days ago, but it's a logical one. With the ability to make 'analogue' calls as well as Facebook to Facebook calls, the phone would logically use the same VoIP based technologies as MSN and Google are using to connect people directly today. The mobile Internet is about to get very hot indeed as 'telephones' transform into IP based devices that will support, potentially, voice and a huge range of other functionalities.

In that instance, you don't actually need a telco or its tottering infrastructure of switching exchanges - and you won't be paying circuit switched pricings anymore, just your flat rate monthly Internet access fee to your ISP.  Today's traditional telco is not a sustainable business model: telcos will have to downscale and slim up to a tremendous degree or will have to find a massive new, services based, business model to add to the diminishing revenues that their decreasing importance in an Internet-driven communications model will yield.

Or they could just keep blocking everything. That's another option, I guess...

But block or not, it is inevitable that telcos that don't transform fast will die.