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.

Tim Barber, Vice President of Global Telecoms and Media Industry at MEF Member ForgeRock shares insights into the impact of 5G and identity on “digital native” individuals and companies for whom the online digital world is the only marketplace.

Everyone is by now probably familiar with the concept of ‘Digital Natives’ – a phrase first coined by Mark Prensky in 2001, to describe the generation of people born after the advent of widespread use of digital technology. By contrast, ‘digital immigrants’ – those pre-dating 1985 – are destined to be locked in a struggle to adapt to this new digital world order.

MEF Member mGage‘s Phil Speer, Director of Solutions Engineering, explains six key points relating to Rich Communications services and how they will affect the messaging ecosystem.

If you’re one of mGage’s partners, or even if you’re not, you have perhaps heard about Rich Communication Services (RCS) the next generation of text messaging. (The BBC recently described RCS as an “SMS replacement.”) mGage has created a dedicated RCS team to keep up with the latest and to support our clients in developing RCS pilot programs.

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.

SMS fraud affects MNOs more than most. Consumers generally blame them when things go wrong. This is why Telefónica is working closely with MEF on the fightback. Here, Tim Houlihan, commercial lead for A2P messaging development for Europe at Telefónica, explains more.

Operators occupy an ‘interesting’ place in the market for A2P messaging. In many instances, they act as an indirect channel for traffic, leaving the A2P aggregators to provide the connectivity to brands and enterprises.

Advertisers are very good at understanding people’s online journeys. But offline? Not so much. Cinnara believes MNOs are sitting on location data that can fix the problem – and unlock huge revenues. MEF talked to Cinarra’s CEO Sundi Sundaresh…

If data is the new oil, then mobile network operators are sitting on lakes of the stuff.

Your carrier knows your name, address, gender, age and more. It also – crucially – knows where you are and where you’ve been.

When the UK ‘taxman’ HMRC hugely reduced email-based scams, fraudsters turned to SMS. Here, Mike Fell, head of operational and cyber security at HMRC, speaks to MEF’s Tim Green about how the agency tackled the new threat.

It’s been said many times that the only certainties are death and taxes.

A bit depressing. But not for the committed fraudster. If everyone has to pay taxes, that means everyone has to come into contact with the tax collector. And right there is a fruitful opportunity to rip people off.

Direct carrier billing is a convenient alternative to cards for millions of users. But for those without cards, it’s a route to healthcare, education and vital utilities. In this DCB video supported by Bango, Fernando Luciano, director of digital services and innovation at Telefônica Vivo, explains why.

Most people think of direct carrier billing (DCB) as something that works best with entertainment – paying for virtual goods in a mobile game; buying a music track; subscribing to a TV service.

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.

Digital technologies will transform the health insurance business. Early adopters have started to implement new digital business models with initial success. A new report from market analysts Research2Guidance describes ten digital business models for health insurers that will disrupt the industry, as explained by business analyst Zhang Jie.

Advances in higher-quality digital technology – especially apps, sensors, and artificial intelligence (AI) – along with their proliferation among members have spurred the emergence of new business models.

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.

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.

Michael Becker, an expert advisor on identity & personal information management solutions, outlines the findings of a new paper from MEF and Assurant that takes a closer look at UK smartphone user’s attitudes towards their personal information and privacy in the post GDPR age.

Worldwide and with a mixture of interest and trepidation, people are awakening to the fact that their identity and personal data are being used for a myriad of social and commercial purposes. For instance, on the one hand, people are increasingly recognising that their digital identities and personal data are being leveraged by industry actors to personalise products and services that create convenient experiences and enhance value.

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.

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.