Are you talking to me? Social Media at Amdocs – a B2B social media blog

There will be a strong social media presence this year at both InTouch and Management World Dublin. If you’re at either of the conferences, you’ll be able to interact with other people also attending via our social media channels. If you’re not there, you’ll be able to keep up with everything that’s happening in Miami and Dublin. Either way, social media offers great ways to stay up to date with what’s going on, and to connect with people at the shows.

We’ll be live blogging both events on Amdocs Voices, where you’ll see quick summaries and opinions on the different sessions by Jeff Barak. We’re also running a special InTouch blog, especially for live news and views from InTouch.

InTouch

If you’ll be at InTouch, join the attendees-only LinkedIn group to virtually meet other people who are going and connect with them, and to talk about the conference and topics raised there. You can also sign up on the LinkedIn event, which includes details about the conference and is open to everyone who wants to attend.

Once you get to InTouch, check in on foursquare to see who else is there when you are – it’s a great way to make sure that you connect with everyone you want to while at the conference.

If you’re a Twitter user, use and follow the #intouch12 hashtag – we’ll be live tweeting the conference and so will other attendees. This will be a great way to follow along – whether you’re there or not. In fact, if you’re not there, this will be one of the easiest and quickest ways to get a feel for what’s happening at InTouch, and read what people are saying in real time.

Management World Dublin

Twitter users can follow the hashtag #MWD12 to catch our live tweets from the show, and follow along with what others have to say while they’re there. We’ll also be posting links to blog posts about the conference from both our blogs and from Billing World, where we will also be blogging live.

In addition, don’t forget to follow all the Amdocs social media channels – we’ll be bringing you updates in the weeks leading up to InTouch, as well as from the event itself! You can follow Amdocs social channels on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+.

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I’m the mayor of Amdocs. No, really. Ok… I’ll admit, not in real life, and Eli – you probably don’t have to worry about me leading an uprising. But on foursquare, the location-based social network, I am the mayor of the Amdocs building where I work.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, foursquare is a pretty addictive check-in application. Arrive at a restaurant, bar, hotel or even beach, and you can check in to that location using the foursquare application available on all the major mobile platforms. When you check in you get points to help you climb a leaderboard made up of your Facebook and Twitter friends, and if you’re the person who has checked in the most at any one venue then you’ll become the “mayor”. In real life it may mean nothing, but on foursquare it’s a badge of honor. And speaking of badges, you can earn those too – for random things such as checking into five different bakeries, checking in after 12 on a “school night”, and checking in while out at sea.

Since 2009, when foursquare launched at SXSW and became the darling of social media, the platform has grown. As of today, which coincidentally has been named “foursquare day” (April 16th = (4/4^2) – but don’t ask me to explain the math), foursquare has 20 million users accounting for 2 billion check-ins around the world. People also share their check-ins to Twitter and Facebook. So why is it so popular?

One of the reasons that I enjoy using it, aside from getting points, badges and mayorships of course, is for the information that I can find on the network. Other users leave tips at restaurants recommending certain dishes or warning other diners of bad service. When I don’t know where the nearest coffee shop is, I can find it on foursquare. And if one of my friends checks in nearby, I can give them a call and tell them I’m in the area.

Foursquare has also tapped into the commercial market. Businesses can set up venues and reward people who check in with special deals. This makes them stand out on the list of local restaurants or bars, and (theoretically) gets the 750,000 merchants who are signed up to the foursquare business platform more customers. It’s also possible to set up foursquare venues for events like InTouch 2012, so people can check in to the event itself – which lets other conference or concert attendees know who is in the crowd with them.

Although Facebook also introduced the ability to check in, foursquare is still going strong. The ability to post to different social networks, and the gaming elements that foursquare brings, seem to have swayed the checking in public – for now at least. Do you check in? Do you think it’s a good way to see where your friends are – or are you concerned about privacy? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

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Ever since Red Herring pulled their telepathic email product launch gag in ‘99, I’ve looked forward to seeing the April Fools pranks coming out of tech each year. Some of them, while impractical, are actually pretty cool ideas. Some, of course, are just downright ridiculous. But all of them are fun.

Product Ideas Gone Wrong

If you had some really terrible ideas come out of your no-holds-barred brainstorming sessions this year, just pick the worst ones, and use them as April Fools announcements like these guys did:

- The Sony VAIO Q, world’s smallest ultrabook, is the size of a quarter
- Apple’s 42-inch iPad
- Toshiba’s 3D monocle
- Hungry Hippos for iPad
- All of YouTube on DVD, delivered to your door
- Virgin Volcanic lets you (or at least Richard Branson) travel to the core of a live volcano

Google, the King of April Fools

The creative minds at Google love to unleash the gates each April. Here’s some of what they did this year:

- Use more than one mouse at once with Chrome Multitask.
- Easily translate messages from your boss with Jargon Bot
- Optimize websites for rotary phones with Google GoRo.
- Google Maps in 8-bit (think Nintendo) – check out “Quest” mode in Google Maps
- Really Advanced Search includes rhyming slang, innuendo, and search by odor.
- Google Racing cars (in partnership with Nascar) drive themselves.
- Gmail Tap simplifies typing with just two buttons… for Morse code.
- Google Fiber revealed (it’s a health bar)
- Interplanetary reporting for Google Analytics
- Mapping the Outback with kangaroo cams: Google Street Roo

And some of sites in our industry hosted faux-nnouncements as well, in the spirit of the holiday:

- Crank Call Centers, 6G, Fog Computing (even more confusing than Cloud), and more (TMCnet)
- Google sells Android to Microsoft (Mobile Industry Review)
- Apple puts a patent claim on rectangles (The Register)

Thanks to all the sites that did roundups, making the pranks easier than ever to find, including The Next Web, Daily Mail, and PC World.

What were your favorites this year?

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By definition, “convergence” means coming together or intersecting at a common point.

Our industry has been talking about convergence for a long time: prepaid-postpaid convergence, wireline-wireless convergence, voice-data convergence, and more. But convergence in our industry is bigger than that.  We support the convergence of people and technologies. We support the convergence of systems and devices.

Convergence is even reflected in the language we use – communications, connections, networks. Basically, everything we do in communications is about bringing things together, be it people, systems, or technologies.

Jacob Smith's winning design

So, we decided to take a fresh new look at convergence, sponsoring the Art of Convergence contest for young designers interpret the concept in a work of art. They came up with some amazing pieces, representing how communications has brought people around the world together, and changed our lives forever with new technologies. The winning design even used the concept of convergence in the creation of the piece itself, converging multiple images in a map to represent our digital communication trails, and sending the piece as a file on that journey via friends in locations around the world.  (Find out more about the winners  on Dana Porter’s blog.)

We think these designs are a great source for inspiration, an opportunity think about your perspective on convergence in a new light. To hear what more people had to say, we ran a tweetchat on topic of convergence of communications. Here are some of their thoughts:

What are your thoughts about convergence in communications, how it’s helped shaped the world we live in, and how it will impact what the future looks like?

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What does convergence in communications mean? What does it include? How has it changed they way we live, and what will the future look like? You’re invited to come discuss on Wednesday, March 28 at 2pm GMT, 10am Eastern (find your timezone). Everyone is welcome to join!

Sounds great, how do I sign up?

No need to sign up! Just join in the conversation on Twitter at the appointed time on March 28 by using the #artofconvergence hashtag so that others on the chat can see your tweets. We recommend using tweetchat.com, it makes chatting much easier, and will add in the hashtag for you. Feel free to let us know your thoughts here in the comments section, or by writing to us at @Amdocs or @ArtConvergence. And if you know someone else who might be interested, let them know!

Convergence by Julie Hurst

What is “The Art of Convergence”?

In the real world and online, convergence is all around us. We converge in conferences, tweetups, Google Circles and flash mobs. We converge in protests, music concerts and Facebook groups. In part, this convergence is made possible by networks and communication systems which provide us with consistent connectivity.

In the world of communications, convergence is a business and technology principle that brings together multiple systems, networks, processes and organizations in order to enable, ultimately, a better customer experience.

We recently sponsored the Art of Convergence contest for young designers around the world to interpret “convergence” in a work of art – their artwork received over 7,000 votes from viewers around the world, and at the close of the chat, we’ll announce who the 3 winners will be…

See you on Wednesday!

Don’t forget to set a reminder in your calendar, and if you want, you can add yourself to the Facebook event page. Talk to you soon!

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BLOGGER: Raz Froilich

Editor’s Note: As part of our new brand promise – “Embrace Challenge, Experience Success” – we’re introducing a series of inspirational stories. Raz Froilich, Amdocs head of operations - Europe, embraced the challenge of climbing Mount Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Americas. After a grueling three-week effort, he succeeded in reaching the summit. This is his story.

It all started a couple of years ago, after finishing a course of high mountain climbing and reaching a couple of summits in South America and Europe. A group of us decided to raise the bar and go for the Seven Summits Series challenge, in which climbers aim to conquer the highest mountain in each of the seven continents. After climbing Kilimanjaro in Africa and Elbrus in Russia, we decided a year ago that the next mountain would be Aconcagua in Argentina. In order to meet this target, we started an intensive training program lasting almost a year, which included running, walking with weights, cycling and even the Amsterdam Marathon.

All of that preparation felt like a joke when we arrived at the “Canaletto,” the most dangerous part of the ascent, which is located eight hours from the third and final camp on the mountain.

By this point, only five of us remained from the original group. We were facing a -40 degree Celsius temperature with 60 kilometer per hour winds. The wind chill factor further decreased the temperature by between -30 to -50 degrees. The Canaletto is a steep combination of ice and rock, 400 meters high, that separates climbers from the Aconcagua summit.

Scaling the highest peaks

One wrong step on this narrow path can send climbers into a free fall. Clouds were closing on us and a snow storm had just started. Navigating the Canaletto in a regular weather is difficult, but we knew those conditions would be extremely hard. We had to decide quickly.

We were exhausted, frozen and tired, but our minds stayed strong and we decided to continue in order to reach the peak. The visibility went down to just one meter, so focus was the name of the game. With all the equipment, crampons, ice axes and helmets, we started to climb step-by-step. Each step required tremendous effort (as the oxygen level at 6,500 meters is only around 40 percent) and my whole body seemed to be “screaming” at me to stop and rest. However, we knew that a stop of five minutes in the tough weather was a recipe for hypothermia and possibly even worse …

I started to sing the song “No Air” by Jordin Sparks (which contains the fitting chorus, “How can I breathe with no air?”) to myself, but after couple of minutes the melody faded and the song transformed itself into a prayer. It brought to mind the phrase, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” I think everyone starts to believe when they approach a magnificent summit.

As we got closer to the top, we started to see some smiles on people’s faces and after 11 hours, we finally stood on the highest point, with nothing left to climb. For a few minutes we were the highest people on earth, outside Asia. We made it! Or as it is written on the Che Guevara monument in Cuba – “Hasta la victoria siempre.”

On the way back, we stumbled into a huge snowstorm and only after five hours with zero visibility did we manage to find our way back (after wallowing in deep snow). We didn’t even recognize our own tent due to the heavy snow, but we weren’t picky after 16 hours of physical effort and entered the first one we saw – luckily, it was ours.  We decided to enter the first tent, because being picky after 16 hours of physical effort and -40c degree temperatures is not a good idea. Luckily, it was our tent and we could FINALLY rest, satisfied with a feeling of success after our tremendous challenge.

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If there’s one lesson ComHem, a Swedish triple-play cable company has learnt from the Vasa, the Swedish warship that foundered and sank after sailing less than a nautical mile into its maiden voyage in the summer of 1628, it’s that big projects are best implemented in small steps. The Vasa sank because it was top-heavy and had insufficient ballast. Even though it was clear to the shipbuilders that there was a problem with its stability, the Vasa was still launched because of Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus’ impatience to see it join the Baltic fleet in the Thirty Years’ War and because his advisors lacked the courage to alert him to the ship’s structural problems.

Back to the present day and ComHem. With an old legacy system serving its 1.8 million connected houselholds (40% of Swedish households), the cable company knew the system’s inflexibility was posing a risk. The question, as Stefan Berg, the company’s CIO, told the cable summit at TM Forum’s Management World Americas, was how were they going to transform.

“There’s no silver bullet,” Berg said, and rather than try and transform in one big bang, ComHem decided to adopt an agile and LEAN software development approach, taking many small steps on the road to transformation, rather than attempting to do it all in one go, missing the target and, as in the Vasa’s case, going down.

There are seven key principles to LEAN (which first originated in the Toyota automobile Production System) : eliminate waste; amplify learning; decide as late as possible; deliver as fast as possible; empower the team; build integrity in, and see the whole.

And just as the Vasa sank because of a disconnect between the king and the shipbuilders, executive management trust is a vital component of any successful transformation project said Berg. ”The team can’t be agile without the support of executive management. You need trust and transparency: we’ve proven to stakeholders that it works.”

According to Berg, adopting a LEAN and agile IT appraoch has led to a number of important success factions at ComHem: business is in command of the transformation, not IT; the company enjoys faster time to market, a can-do mentality, higher quality, 400% efficiency improvement, and a measured improvement in customer satisfaction over just six months.

In transformation, “less is more,” said Berg. “When you do smaller chunks of everything, it’s much easier to do things.”

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It’s not often you can find AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile co-operating, but the mobile payment space is one area where they do, under the ISIS joint venture. The reason for this unusual cooperation, according to ISIS executive Douglas Kilgour, is scale. “If you’re going into the mobile commerce market, scale is vital,” Kilgour told a TM Forum Management World Americas keynote forum. 

“Consumers need the confidence that this is a big deal,” he said, but noted that scale was also vitally important in bringing merchants around to accepting the idea. Explaining why mobile payments is taking so long to take off, Kilgour pointed out that the last mile in mobile commerce is the retailer. “Merchants don’t like messing with the point of sale,” he explained.

When Verizon or AT&T approached retailers individually about mobile payments, retailers were not enthusiastic about going with only a single service provider, Kilgour said. If they were going to make the investment in the equipment to handle mobile payments, retailers wanted a system that would work for the majority of consumers, no matter which service provider handled their subscription.

Interestingly, service providers aren’t expecting to make money from mobile payments. “Telcos aren’t interested in payments, what we’re really talking about is loyalty, offers and engaging the consumer,” said Kilgour. “We’re  facilitating payments, not making money from it. It’s about bigger picture of mobile commerce and what people can do with their smartphone. There’s no money in it for us.”

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Wireless is the fastest-changing industry in the world, says Patrick Parodi, a VP at Lightsquared and head of its innovation sandbox. But it still needs to change more, he told TM Forum’s Management World Americas in a keynote. The wireless industry in the US is not keeping up with demand, and Parodi argued that the US wireless industry is falling short in delivery.  

 Lightsquared,  a provider of 4G/LTE mobile broadband network using satellite, believes it has the answer to this. Unlike other carriers, who are scared of turning into a “dump pipe,” Lightsquared CEO Sanjiv Ahuja has recently gone on record as wanting his company to be “the dumbest broadband wireless pipe.”  The Lightsquared business model is to commoditize connectivity and outsource other areas of the traditional service provider business: customer experience, billing and devices.

Today’s carriers have concentrated on consumers and Parodi argued that they would find it hard to enter other sectors and open up their network to third parties, which is where Lightsquared see the future being for the wireless industry.  So far, Lightsquared, whose network covers all of North America,  is offering pure connectivity to be sold throught partners such as Sprint Nextel, Leap Wireless, Best Buy and several other service providers.

We want to be “the dumbest pipe with the smartest partners,” Parodi said. The future will tell if this is going to be the next game-changing business model for the wireless industry.

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TM Forum’s Management World Americas kicked off with a press breakfast this morning at which TMF president and CEO Martin Creaner announced Frameworx adoption was at an all-time high. He said according to a TMF survey of 90 service providers, four out of five were using Frameworx and three out of five had already started mandating it in procurement activities. Good job then that Amdocs has already received the TMF’s congratulations for “achieving Frameworx product conformance certification. Creaner used the occasion to announce the launch of Frameworx 11.5 which also includes a quick start pack.

One interesting titibit from the press breakfast: the CTO of NATO has joined the TMF board. Given that NATO comprises 27 independent countries, there’s a need for them to standardize their communications IT. We shouldn’t forget: with NATO, the issue is not about avoiding dropped calls, but “friendly fire”, which certainly puts the importance of communications into persepectives.

Jeff Barak will be blogging live from Management World this week in Orlando Florida. Follow @AmdocsInc for more live updates from the show.

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