PARIS |
PARIS (Reuters) - France Telecom (FTE.PA) would consider floating a stake in its market-leading British mobile joint venture Everything Everywhere as the tie-up finally starts to realize its potential, Finance Officer Gervais Pellissier said on Wednesday.
France Telecom's (FTE.PA) Orange joined forces with Deutsche Telekom's (DTEGn.DE) T-Mobile in 2010 to become the biggest operator in the highly competitive market with more than 27 million customers. The group pledged 3.5 billion pounds ($5.4 billion) in cost savings largely by creating one network and taking down excess mobile towers to go from 28,000 to 18,000 sites.
But the joint venture has taken longer than expected to generate synergies and the group is still yet to decide how many brands to maintain and how to resolve other operational issues.
"It could be an opportunity," he told the Reuters Global Technology and Media summit when asked about the possibility of a float, adding that he expected both sides to want to remain in control of the business.
"If EE is really on the right track in terms of synergies and if we can make a good case to investors, we might look at a listing. But my feeling is we would keep control, both of us."
"In the UK, we have created the number one operator in the market and if we succeed it will have value," he continued.
"But the partners need to distinguish between the short-term value we could get from an IPO or a sale, and the long-term value of being number one in the UK for the two companies."
Analysts have suggested that Deutsche Telekom may have to exit the lucrative joint venture one day to protect its dividend and strengthen its fixed and mobile business in Germany.
Deutsche Telekom failed in a bid to sell its U.S. business to AT&T (T.N) for $39 billion last year due to regulatory opposition, leaving the group with a $6 billion breakup package but also with a need to invest in its U.S. unit.
In response to the speculation, Deutsche Telekom's Financial Chief Tim Hoettges said last month he had no intention of leaving the British market. Fourth generation wireless technology will be rolled out there soon, offering faster speeds to mobile-data hungry tablet and smartphone users and a new business opportunity for operators.
"We want to be there when demand for mobile data increases. We want to participate in upgrading the network," he said.
Deutsche Telekom has always been seen as the most likely partner to exit the joint venture after the French firm took over the main management roles in a reshuffle last year, and as it struggled in other markets such as the United States.
An analyst said earlier this year that Deutsche had at that time considered an IPO for either part or all of its stake in the joint venture but had pulled the move due to market conditions and other factors. The analyst said the business was still expected to come back to market sometime this year however.
Pellissier said France Telecom was happy with the joint venture but that it had taken longer than expected to grind out synergies.
"In the first two years we didn't dismantle any antennas; now we are taking down 2,000-3,000 a year and in about two years we will be at our target."
But he acknowledged that the more thorny cost cuts on stores and brands still remained to be tackled.
"There will be a new brand probably, whether the two other brands survive or not that is a big question," Pellissier said.
Despite initial hope in 2010 that Everything Everywhere could scrap one of the brands, the two names of Orange and T-Mobile still exist in Britain.
Pellissier said that keeping multiple brands to target various segments of the market was a good idea.
"You cannot cover 40 percent market share with one brand today," he said. "The question is how do you organize the brands between themselves."
Follow Reuters Summits on Twitter @Reuters_Summits ($1 = 0.6432 British pounds)
(Reporting by Paul Sandle, Kate Holton, Leila Abboud and Gwenaelle Barzic; Editing by Hans-Juergen Peters)
A Samsung Intern May Have Cracked One Of The Mobile Industry's Biggest Problems - Forbes
Samsung wants consumers to help it build a ubiquitous near-field communications infrastructure, one tiny sticker at a time.
Want to spend a summer making photocopies? Don’t work as an intern for Samsung’s Nick DeCarlo.
Forget making coffee. The vice president of portfolio marketing for the South Korean tech conglomerate’s US arm had a far more challenging assignment for Eric Medin last summer: figure out a way to make use of a technology known as near field communications (NFC) that doesn’t involve payments.
Not an easy task. NFC has long been regarded by cynics as the Brazil of mobile technologies: it’s the future… and always will be. The technology lets smartphones and other devices communicate with each other by holding them near each other. To put it crudely, think of it a smart, two-way version of the radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags widely used today.
That could unlock a dizzying array of new applications involving payments, user authentication, and communication. The problem: while Samsung is pushing NFC in its phones, including its new flagship, the Samsung Galaxy S III, no one has bothered building an infrastucture to support NFC because, well, no one uses it yet.
Medin’s proposal, put into action by Samsung Senior Product Manager Fred Zimbric, may have cracked that chicken-and-egg problem. TecTiles, launched Wednesday, are smart stickers that customers can program with their Samsung smartphones and use to automate a broad range of tasks. The phone’s alarm can be set by tapping it to the nightstand, for example. A text message to a spouse can be sent reading ‘I’m headed home now’ on the way out the office door by tapping a sticker on their desk.
Samsung is basically letting consumers build their own personalized NFC infrastructure. The price is right: the TecTiles will sell for $14.99 for a pack of five from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. DeCarlo is hoping that Samsung’s bottom up approach will encourage small businesses to help build out an infrastructure fo the technology, too.
Coffee shop owners, for example, can boost their shop’s profile by encouraging user’s to ‘check in’ on Foursquare — or automatically ‘like’ the shop on Facebook — by tapping the phone to a TecTile. From there, DeCarlo is hoping NFC will trickle up to larger businesses.
As for DeCarlo’s intern? Samsung brought the graduate of the Georgia Institute of Techology’s MBA program on full-time last month.
Samsung TecTiles: NFC-Enabled Stickers Allow For Smartphone Automation With The Tap Of Your Device - Huffington Post
The highly-anticipated Samsung Galaxy S III will arrive in America in just about a week; but first, Samsung has another product offering for U.S. consumers: Stickers.
Stickers? Yes, stickers.
Say hello to Samsung TecTiles, which are NFC-enabled, postage stamp-sized stickers that can be programmed to trigger a single function on a smartphone when the phone is held in proximity of the sticker's surface. The actions that the stickers can be programmed to trigger include:
- Launching an application
- Joining a Wi-Fi network
- Making a phone call
- Sending a text message
- Sharing a contact or business card
- Showing an address on a map
- Opening a web page
- Posting a pre-written status to one's Facebook
- Posting a tweet, or following a contact on Twitter
- Adding a contact on LinkedIn
...and others, which you can see here.
I tried out TecTiles at a meeting with Samsung earlier this month, and the little NFC stamps are easy to use and to program. From the user's end, you simply hold your NFC-capable smartphone (like, say, the Galaxy S III) over the TecTile for a second or so, and a dialog box pops up on your display asking if you'd like for your phone to complete the requested action. I checked in on FourSquare, added a phone number to my address book, and silenced my phone simply by holding the GS3 close to a TecTile.
(Samsung reps, by the way, were pitching that final function -- silencing one's phone -- for movie theaters and libraries: Imagine a line of folks queueing into a film screening, holding their smartphones up against the door to silence their phones as they streamed into the theater).
The TecTile was similarly easy to program: Just hold your smartphone over the sticker until a box with all of your programming options pops up; you then choose from a list which function you want it to perform. After you've chosen, you can "lock" the TecTile so no one else can program over it. It's all very intuitive.
Though TecTiles work well, two pesky questions linger: Who will purchase these things, and how will people learn how to use them? In response to the first question, a Samsung representative told me that retail store owners -- especially small business owners -- could benefit by pasting the stickers around their store, to help shoppers get more information on products, retrieve coupons or discounts, check in on Facebook or follow the store on Twitter to build customer relations.
Though primarily targeted at businesses, these TecTiles apparently have their domestic uses, too: Another Samsung rep said that he had placed a TecTile on the nightstand next to his bed, so that he could easily turn his phone on silent in the moment before he fell asleep.
As for how customers will learn to use TecTiles -- Well, the biggest thing that TecTiles have going for them is probably that they are not QR codes, the universally-reviled robot-vomit scannable squares that have polluted our cities and magazines for months and have yet to catch on. (It is also much easier to hold your device over a sticker than it is to scan a barcode).
Past that, Samsung will have to educate consumers to look for its stickers, which are so small that they can be easy to miss. An advertising campaign will certainly be necessary for TecTiles to gain any traction.
Samsung TecTiles are available for purchase right now in store or online from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint (all of which, by the way, will soon carry the Galaxy S III). Five stickers cost $14.99.
Also on HuffPost:
Samsung TecTiles Let Users Automate their Lives with NFC - PC Advisor
Forget about mobile payments, Samsung wants you to use your smartphone's Near Field Communication (NFC) chip to complete tasks at home, the office and in your car. Samsung announced that it will sell programmable stickers, called TecTiles, that you can use to automate daily or repetitive smartphone operations with just one tap.
You can stick Samsung's TecTiles in your car to toggle your Bluetooth radio on or off, or place a TecTile at home to automatically set your phone to silent. Samsung also envisions restaurants placing TecTiles on their menus to enable one-tap Foursquare check-ins or to connect to a public Wi-Fi network.
Each TecTile sticker is about the size of a postage stamp and comes with an embedded NFC chip. You can buy a pack of five TecTiles for $15 through AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon stores, or online directly from Samsung. Samsung says TecTiles will work with almost any NFC-enabled phone, but users will need Samsung's TecTile application from Google Play to program the stickers.
You will also need the app to perform certain functions such as changing your phone's settings or launching a specific app. The TecTile app requires an NFC-enabled phone and Android 2.3.3 or higher. NFC is a technology that allows you to share small bits of data between devices using special chips that can connect to each other when in close proximity.
NFC has yet to take off in any significant way in the United States. Early uses of the technology have centered around mobile payment services such as Google Wallet, which launched in September. There are other applications as well such as Research in Motion's recently launched BlackBerry Music Gateway. This small $50 gadget lets you stream music wirelessly from you phone to a home or car stereo using NFC and Bluetooth. Some PCs such as the Envy 14 Spectre Ultrabook have NFC reading capabilities to share data such as Web addresses between NFC-enabled devices.
NFC may not be a popular feature yet, but that may soon change as the number of devices equipped with NFC chips is expected to rise dramatically in the coming years. The marketing firm ABI Research predicts that the number of NFC-enabled smartphones will grow dramatically from 80 million devices in 2012 to more than 550 million by 2016, according to IDG News.
But even if NFC becomes a popular feature, you have to wonder how long TecTiles will last. Who wants a bunch of stickers hanging off their dashboard, office desk, and night table? A better option than stickers might be to have programmable NFC tags embedded where you can't see them (like inside your car's dashboard).
Connect with Ian Paul (@ianpaul) on Twitter andGoogle+, and with Today@PCWorld on Twitter for the latest tech news and analysis.
Samsung Wants Its TecTiles To Get You Tapping Your Phone - Wired News
Near Field Communications technology hasn’t taken off yet. Google Wallet can only be found on a handful of phones and Isis – the NFC payments platform from the unusual alliance of AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon – won’t launch until later this summer.
But Samsung is hoping some new stickers dubbed TecTiles will get us tapping our phones in anticipation of an expected NFC-everywhere future.
Samsung’s TecTiles stickers will be sold through AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, as well as on Samsung’s website, at a price of $15 for a pack of five. The stickers can be programmed to trigger your phone into a set of actions once you tap an NFC-equipped phone on them.
The stickers have a built-in NFC chip with a small amount of storage that allows the them to be programmed up to 100,000 times using a free Android app that Samsung launched today called, plainly enough, Samsung TecTiles.
Samsung says the TecTiles will work with any NFC-equipped phone, which isn’t but a handful of devices at this point. But, as far as NFC phones go, Samsung offers the most with the Galaxy Nexus, the Samsung Galaxy S II (on T-Mobile), the Nexus S 4G (on Sprint), and the Galaxy S Blaze 4G (on T-Mobile), all containing NFC chips.
And of course, Samsung’s new Galaxy S III will feature an NFC chip inside, as well.
Among the actions you can program a TecTile to do with an NFC phone are changing a phone settings (turning on Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, set a phone to silent or airplane mode, etc.), launch an app, automatically join a specific Wi-Fi network, share contact info or digital business card.
The stickers can also be used to make automatically make a phone call or send a text message to a specific recipient. For example, a parent could program a TecTile stuck to a refrigerator to automatically send them a text message that says “Hey Mom and Dad, I’m home” when their child gets back from school and taps their phone on the fridge.
The TecTiles can also be programmed to shown an address on a map, open up a specific website, check-in on Foursquare, “Like” something on Facebook, send a tweet on Twitter, or automatically request a connection on LinkedIn, or start a Google Talk.
Call drops higher in Gujarat than most states - Times of India
The data created out of customer responses compares voice quality, network availability, call set-up success rate, call drop rate, metering and billing credibility, and help services, among other things of various telecom players in different states of the country.
The TRAI data suggests that most users in Gujarat are facing problems related to service. TRAI has set a benchmark of 2 per cent for call drops. The services of telecom operators in Gujarat have seen calls dropping at 1.96 per cent. This is higher as compared to other states like Tamil Nadu at 1.06 per cent, Andhra Pradesh at 1.67 per cent, Madhya Pradesh at 1.75 per cent, Orissa at 1.84 per cent, Maharashtra at 1.89 per cent and Jammu & Kashmir at 1.88 per cent.
Metros like Chennai recorded the highest call drop at 0.82 per cent, Delhi at 1.59 percent, Mumbai at 1.70 per cent and Kolkata at 1.83 per cent.
States like Bihar and the North East area surveyed by TRAI were those that lagged behind Gujarat at 2.17 per cent and 2.92 per cent. On the other hand, landline services won customer satisfaction with 84 per cent call completion, the report said. TRAI had engaged an independent agency to conduct network audit for the assessment.
TRAI has conducted the audit of services being provided by the service providers and collected customers' views through survey for the assessment of implementation and effectiveness of the Telecom Consumers Protection and Redressal of Grievance Regulation, 2007 and customers' perception of service of basic, cellular mobile and broadband service providers during the period from July to September, 2011. "Gujarat has been a focus for us since many years. Some problems in terms of network issues are usual with subscribers depending on the area they reside in. With mobile number portability, competition has increased and we ensure that the voice quality and call drop issues are addressed at the earliest," an official with a telecom company said.
What is a dropped call? Dropped calls occur when a phone call is terminated unexpectedly as a result of technical reasons, including poor network signal
Why does this happen? "Call drops happen mostly due to high inflow or outflow of calls from a single mobile tower. If a mobile tower is over-utilised, calls tend to drop. Hypothetically, each tower can handle 110 calls at a time. However, in Gujarat the capacity is over-utilised by 110-120 per cent," said an official from a telecom company.
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