Why is Google supporting RCS? What progress has it made so far? And how is it working with aggregators to power RCS business messaging? Last week, the company outlined its mission to MEF members. Here are the highlights…

“RCS is real. It’s happening.”

That was how Todd Parker, head of business development for carrier messaging at Google, opened up his review of the messaging format at the MEF Connects Digital webinar last week.

During the mid-nineties, consumers and investors discovered the idea of ‘interactivity’. Before long, companies started to add the word ‘interactive’ to their names. It was good for business. Soon after, they did it again with ‘dotcom’. Is there a equivalent magic word for the 2010s? How about blockchain?

Don’t scoff. It’s already happening. In December 2017, the Long Island Iced Tea Corp changed its name to Long Blockchain Corp. It said the re-brand reflected its desire to partner with companies working on the decentralising tech.

RCS. GDPR. OTT. CPaaS. So many acronyms! So much to discuss! At MWC last month, four of enterprise messaging’s deepest thinkers came together to debate the market’s biggest challenges. Here’s what they said.

The audience arrived at MEF’s Future of Messaging panel session at MWC with the latest RCS update freshly arrived in their inboxes.

GDPR is just weeks away. It will affect every enterprise with customers in Europe. And it will ask specific questions of the enterprise messaging community. In a CLX Communications & MEF Connects Digital, three experts wrestled those questions…

Is GDPR the best thing ever to happen to enterprise messaging?

The companies knee deep in compliance workshops, internal training schemes, cyber security consultations and contract reviews may not think so.

Rafael Pellon, MEF LatAm advisor and partner at Focaccia, Amaral, Salvia, Pellon & Lamonica Advogados discusses the ongoing debate in the Brazilian legislature surrounding the adoption of GDPR-like rules governing data privacy for the country.

At the end of May the House of Representatives in Brazil approved the Bill of Law 4060/2012 that would establish a General Data Privacy Law in the country. On this week, given the strong engagement of internet rights NGOs, trade associations, government authorities and luminaries of the academia and legal sectors, Senator Renato Ferraço…

The GDPR special edition of MEF’s eBulletin series, supported by CLX Communications, highlights the perspectives of the diverse MEF membership and experts on their path to preparing for GDPR compliance.

Personal profiling has long-since been the bedrock of how data is used in the digital economy. It can, divulge a users location, help track usage patterns across devices or set up recommendations for online shopping. GDPR in many ways is rock, paper and scissors to the business of profiling. Here GDPR analyst and author of “Applying the GDPR. Privacy Rules for the Data Economy” Chiara Rustici, discusses profiling and the importance of compliance.

MEF Member CLX Communications and Juniper Research, have released a new white paper that explores the rise of Communications as a Platform (CPaaS), and how enterprises can harness the tech to enhance their customer offering.

The last decade has seen a rapid change in how enterprises buy software and hardware, primarily driven by the boom in Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Nick Millward, VP of Commercial & Product explores the use cases of Rich Communications Services (RCS) and how they will provide advanced messaging for consumers across a variety of types of service.

At the recent Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2018, one of the hottest trends was RCS (Rich Communication Services) business messaging. Google announced at the show that more than 50 global carriers in 40 countries now support RCS – a significant step forward in terms of industry acceptance, with another 50 carriers expected to launch RCS before the end of the year.

MEF’s fight against messaging fraud has been welcomed by the management organisation for the ITW Global Leaders’ Forum. Why? Because it’s waging a similar war on voice scams. Here, Jussi Makela, Director of the GLF, talks about the two programmes, and how GLF and MEF are working together.

People hate premium voice line fraud.

For obvious reasons. Carriers hate voice fraud too. It causes horrible PR damage. Oh, and it costs around $17bn a year. That’s why, in March 2018, the international wholesale voice community decided to do something about it.

Everyone likes the idea of conversational commerce. But it only truly works when a customer can talk to a brand across any channel – voice, text, OTT, push. So says James Lasbrey, director of carrier relations at Nexmo. He conversed with MEF in an exclusive video interview…

In 2015, a photo went viral and started to appear in powerpoint presentations all over the world.

Think A2P is big business now? Wait until consumers start having free-flowing chat sessions with intelligent robot agents. The numbers will be eye-watering. So says, CLX’s Rob Malcolm. But it won’t happen overnight…

It’s possible to break down the history of mobile messaging into four eras. In the first one, when SMS was launched, telecoms engineers used the channel to speak to fellow engineers. Later, users started to message each other. Then came A2P messaging, with businesses sending texts to customers.

Enterprise messaging is on the verge of embracing the next generation of SMS, rich communication services (RCS).

Ian Germer, director of communication services at Orange Group, discusses the RCS opportunity.
To get an insight into the potential of next-generation RCS, it’s good to think about parking. More specifically, the nightmare of paying for parking.

In our 5 minutes with profiles, MEF members talk about their business, their aspirations for the future and the wider mobile industry. This week, Dr. Piet Streicher, MD of BulkSMS.com.

BulkSMS is a global A2P SMS messaging service provider offering innovative solutions, enabling our customers to communicate their short and relevant messages using self-service or API products. We offer large, medium and small organisations in the commercial, public, government and non-profit sectors, the ability to send person–to-person, application-to-person and application-to-application SMS messages. Our SMS gateway connects to over 900 mobile networks.

In our ‘5 minutes with’ profiles, MEF members talk about their business, their aspirations for the future and the wider mobile industry. This week, Florian Lichtwald, SVP of Global Telecom and Data Partnerships introduces zeotap.

We unite the world’s most valuable data especially from telecom operators to enable the world’s largest brands to achieve better results in their advertising campaigns through precise targeting and intelligent technology. Mobile users have shown that they often prefer advertising as a currency when consuming digital content.

In our 5 minutes with profiles, MEF members talk about their business, their aspirations for the future and the wider mobile industry. This week, Marketing Director Simon Gannon introduces mobile app distribution specialist, appScatter.

appScatter distributes, manages and monitors mobile apps across multiple app stores worldwide. The platform offers unrivalled audience reach, efficient app management and centralised reporting. By distributing apps across the best app stores globally, brands, agencies and developers use appScatter to more effectively manage app portfolios and dramatically increase revenue.

In our 5 minutes with profiles, MEF members talk about their business, their aspirations for the future and the wider mobile industry. This week David Poole introduces mobile authentication solution specialist MYPINPAD.

MYPINPAD is a technology company with a goal of delivering economic, scalable solutions to meet our clients’ diverse requirements for authentication and identity management.

The Company is managed by an alliance of leaders from the payments industry with a collective 100+ years’ experience spanning a wide spectrum of banking, security and payment technology.

Daniel Nunez Rodriguez, Product Lead for Instant Ads, an intraprenurial initiative at Telefónica Innovation shares ten key facts about digital marketing campaigns, digging into the intricacies of how success is measured, where mobile fits in to the picture of how consumers are exposed to campaigns and some of the technical barriers and opportunities for creating a successful digital campaign.

In 2017 Digital Advertising investment surpassed TV as the preferred media channel for marketers to pour their marketing dollars, accounting for $200B in total. Digital Advertising is also a healthy industry growing at a steady 20% YoY and projected to be a +$400B industry by 202

Clear informed consent is the key to ensuring consumers trust every digital transaction. It’s a critical issue – which is why MEF’s Global Consumer Trust Working Group has examined the issues in order to develop a free whitepaper on the subject. Here, we present some of the highlights.

In 2010, 7,500 people sold their souls to the UK retailer, GameStation. These unwitting customers had bought from the store and missed the “immortal soul clause” buried in the site’s terms and conditions. Thankfully, this was an April Fool’s joke and GameStation returned its harvested souls back to their rightful owners.

In May 2018 the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will be implemented. Consumers will be compelled to give permission before any of their data is collected by a company, and that data must be transferrable and deleted, or returned on request.

The regulation is a significant step in placing the consumer in control of who uses their data and how it is used. At the same time the business models of apps and services often rely on personal data to help monetise their offerings.

As a mobile first region, the growth in Africa is relentless.

Landmarks like registering its billionth mobile subscriber have already been passed and the systematic upgrading of mobile networks to 3G and 4G LTE is enabling a flourishing mobile ecosystem that, coupled with the declining cost of smartphones is helping to galvanise the African mobile economy.

Here we take a look at the recent market trends, analysis and forecasts that show how growth in the region is taking shape.

MEF has announced the results of its Global, EMEA and LatAm board elections for the 2017/2019 term following its AGM in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress last week.

19 executives representing the diversity of the global mobile ecosystem from mobile operators to companies at the forefront of mobile payments, messaging, personal data and content were elected to take forward MEF’s mandate.

MEF has announced the results of its Global Board elections for the 2015/2016 term following its AGM in London last week.

Candidates representing a variety of markets and sectors contested four seats on MEF’s Global Board, reflecting the organisation’s diverse membership as mobile becomes the primary technology for engaging consumers in growth and established markets

The newly elected and re-elected board directors are:

It’s one of the great truisms of the mobile industry: smartphone ownership is rocketing in developing markets. But is it true? Well, kind of but not really. At least according…

All over the world, ride-sharing apps are taking on powerful local taxi businesses. But in India, the situation is a little different: there are hardly any local firms to take…

Rafael Pellon, MEF LatAm advisor and partner at Focaccia, Amaral, Salvia, Pellon & Lamonica Advogados discusses the ongoing debate in the Brazilian legislature surrounding the adoption of GDPR-like rules governing data privacy for the country.

At the end of May the House of Representatives in Brazil approved the Bill of Law 4060/2012 that would establish a General Data Privacy Law in the country. On this week, given the strong engagement of internet rights NGOs, trade associations, government authorities and luminaries of the academia and legal sectors, Senator Renato Ferraço…

Rafael Pellon, MEF LatAm Board Member and partner at Focaccia, Amaral, Salvia, Pellon & Lamonica, here explores the ongoing issues surrounding the repeated blocking of hugely popular Whatsapp across Brazil, and the knock on effects this has had across the region and the mobile app ecosystem.

Almost a month since the 2nd wholesale blockage of WhatsApp in Brazil, Brazilians are starting to appreciate that WhatsApp has become nothing but essential.

MEF recently hosted its largest LatAm event to date: MEF Connects Brazil, held during Tela Viva Móvel, supported by Movile and Digital Virgo.

Over 130 senior executives from 60 companies representing the mobile ecosystem in Latin America got together for the business networking event.

We partnered with Tela Viva Móvel, the most relevant conference in Brazil for the mobile sector.

Brazil’s economic growth is well documented. It is a mobile first country with 50 per cent of all households using mobile as their primary means for communicating and getting online.

Today that’s a mix of feature phones and smartphones but by 2018, one third of the country is predicted to own a smartphone.

Fred Martinent, Product Marketing Director at Gemalto envisions how mobile operator marketeers can take advantage of impending regulatory changes and the opportunities they will present to boost revenues from digital advertising – and how to convince management of your winning strategy.

Buzz…buzz…buzz…the shrill noise of your alarm clock wakes you with a jolt. You haphazardly reach over to press the snooze button but then you remember that today is D-Day.

Senior Customer Success Manager Linden Dawson shares her takeaways from the International Association of Privacy Professionals ANZ Summit in Sydney, and how marketers can stay on the right side of the “creepy line” when personalising advertising.

Privacy and the “creepy line” were hot topics of discussion last week at the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) ANZ Summit held in Sydney. We’re all familiar with the creepy factor online at this point; we’ve all searched for a pair of shoes or a piece of furniture only to be stalked around the Internet for the next few days with banners for those items showing up on website after website.

Just as smartphones have upped the ante on what can be achieved in terms of content, services and customer interactivity, the accessibility, importance and value of mobile user data has snowballed. Businesses now build commercial strategies based on hundreds of points of measurement or data-capture – the personal data economy.

In tandem, the forthcoming (May 2018) EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) expands the personal data rights of EU citizens.

At the end of last month the 2nd MyData event took place. It was an ambitious 2-city location (Tallinn and Helsinki) complete with a boat trip and even a track choosing game to help delegates navigate the complexities (in case it wasn’t complicated enough!).

Here’s some of the highlights by COO Joanne Lacey, MEF’s speaker at the event which brings together a passionate community of developers, researchers, Government agencies and businesses looking to build a more human-centric approach to personal data.

MEF recently launched it’s new Trust in Enterprise Messaging (TEM) service backed by an industry Code of Conduct for A2P (Applications to Person) SMS in collaboration with 30+ participants of MEF’s Future of Messaging Programme, that includes MNOs, messaging companies and signalling providers.

The new service is self-regulatory – its goal, to accelerate market clean-up and educate enterprise messaging solution buyers about the threats of fraudulent practices and poor procurement processes.

A new breed of fintech startups with an innovative business model are attempting to take advantage of customer’s unused, ‘limitless’ text message contracts, leveraging them as an integral part of blockchain ventures, allowing users to essentially resell messages that would be wasted.

From one perspective, such services make use of messages that would go otherwise unused to make some money for users, while providing useful services for other businesses and consumers.

Recent hardware releases from some of the most influential players in the mobile ecosystem have introduced the latest wave of mobile and IoT technology with some eye catching features focusing on privacy, security and new ways for consumer’s to use their phones.

Google unveiled their 2nd generation of Pixel phones as well as a host of smart home hardware and peripherals just weeks after Apple’s annual event where they showed off the iPhone 8 and iPhone X and a new sim-ready watch. There was also a major hardware push from Amazon with a newly updated range of connected smart-home accessories.

We asked MEF Members for their thoughts on the new hardware and strategies – here’s what they said.

Last week’s ransomware attacks were aimed at vulnerabilities typical of big enterprises and government bodies, but the true impact was felt by consumers – cancelled trains in Germany, people forced to pay cash for petrol in China, missed hospital appointments in the UK, the list goes on, with poor user experience and damaging trust the result.

While the WannaCry attack was upon a very specific desktop vulnerability, the possibility of similar attacks on other operating systems, the media coverage and the effect on consumer’s perception of digital safety are lessons to be learnt. We asked what can mobile tech industries can do to better prepare for similar attacks and protect consumers…

MEFTV speaks to Flavio Pallotti, EVP Digital Entertainment at Neomobile during MWC 2018, where he explains the company’s move to an all encompassing digital group, Digital GO.

“Neomobile in the last couple of years has been moving its core business from a pure mobile content and monetisation player to a full digital group. This is something we have seen here at MWC: there has been lots of focus on artificial intelligence, providing chat bots for customer support …

MEFTV speaks to Mathias Schroder, COO & Co founder of Calldorado during MWC 2018, where he explains how their business has grown and how they are helping their clients do the same.

“We recently announced the Calldorado App Growth Fund – worth 12 million dollars, which on selected apps or publishers – we help them grow, get more downloads, get more users if they utilise our monetisation model.”

Alex Klose, VP of Marketing at IMImobile, looks at the opportunity for enterprises to differentiate customer experience by combining new rich-media messaging channels such as RCS (Rich Communication Services) with customer journey automation platforms.

There is no doubt that consumers have a huge desire for messaging-based experiences. In fact, 66% of consumers prefer to reach brands, or be reached by brands through messaging apps, and two-thirds expect to increase their engagement with businesses via messaging channels over the next two years.

India’s Hungama Mobile dominates digital entertainment for the world’s south Asia population. It reaches 40 million people in 50 countries. In an exclusive video, Hungama’s CEO Neeraj Roy describes the journey and the future…

In the early years of the 21st century, there was a mobile entertainment revolution. A group of pioneering companies realised phones could do far more than deliver talk and text. The market for ringtones, wallpapers, alerts and screensavers was born.