Lessons learned from ITS Rome conference

Sometimes I found some of the chats to be too theoretical, after 10+ years working on Telcos. "This ecuation fits the SMS growth in such and such (very unpredictable) circumstances". "This is the development of broadband in this exotic country". Oh Lord, let´s talk about more general things.

On the contrary, two thirds of presentations were great. To my surprise, there was high concern in 2.0 approaches (my paper was not alone on that field), user-generated content copyright and the creation of wealth in the Telco industry. Two friends of mine, Peter and Jason, surprised the audience with a paper about acquisition of former soviet countries Telcos, titled more or less "the danger of buying used cars". Russian cash goes afterwords to football players, so you can expect everything...

Italian TV market is awesome, with great competition of old analog TV (watch the antennae in top of buildings!), digital TV, satellite TV, mobile TV, etc.We discussed here the old song: "is content the king or not?". Well, I´m quite sure it is. No need to say that it is the end of walled gardens. Still, you find from time to time a Facebook app for certain device from certain telco. Shit happens, from time to time.

Everyone is so concerned about the US financial crisis. What I grasp here is another victory to Finance guys, controlling cash and delaying investments. Marketing guys while have to wait a little to launch new products. I`ve been there...

To my surprise, I expected more buzz about Google -today in his 10th anniversary-. For me Google is the next big Telco; for ITS guys information is just a secondary asset.
As for handsets providers, everyone keeps on talking about Nokia and Symbian. 20% of the assistants were scandinavian, but Ericsson wasn`t there in the same proportion.
Not so many papers about the consequences on individuals. I think I was the only one in this field. Anyway they agreed when I displayed the Twitter Curve.

If you want details, here´s the abstract booklet of the conference. Next ITS conference will be in Bahrain, so the European conference will open frontiers to EMEA countries. Hope to be there, somehow (two stops, 50 hs travel, mmm).

And of course, Rome was great. But that belongs to Otredades.