By Florent Stroppa, General Manager Europe of Value Added Service Provider OnMobile
Why did you choose to sponsor TADS?
We chose to sponsor TADS because we believe that this conference is important for the Telecom industry as it is bringing something new. While there are many generalist conferences in the Telco and Internet space, TADS is the only conference bringing the two worlds together across all relevant technologies.
What excites you about TADS?
There have been many discussions about creating a developer ecosystem around the telecom infrastructure but there were never a conference bringing all the parties together in one place: operators, platform providers and app developers. Everybody will be there. The TADS conference is really unique. We are truly excited to be part of the first conference of this kind.
What does OnMobile do?
OnMobile is a global leader in telecom Value Added Services (VAS). With offices across the globe in the USA, LATAM, Europe, Africa, Middle East and Australia, OnMobile reaches over one billion mobile users every month. We deliver a range of products such a mobile entertainment, cloud services and music. Our largest service is Ring Back Tones (RBT) and this is what we would like to talk about.
What are the important topics you want to discuss about TADS?
The big topic for us at TADS is the vision for reinventing RBT.
As an end-user, RBT has allowed you to express yourself through music during the period between the phone ringing and you picking up the phone. Whenever someone calls you, they hear the song you have selected for them. The song you select becomes your “telephone profile”, an extension of your personality. The RBT market is big. As the world’s biggest and most established RBT provider, OnMobile already manages more than 72 million subscribers using RBT and has 50 operators trusting us on Managed Services across 35 countries.
We are reinventing RBT by opening the ringback airtime to developers, i.e. allowing third parties to fill the 6-7 seconds of airtime with anything they want: music, information, audio promotions or ads. Whilst six seconds may not seem a lot, when you put it into the context that tweets are under 140 characters and can have such a significant impact, you can only imagine the opportunities that could be unleashed with opening those 6-7 seconds with alternative forms of communication.
An example of a new application of RBT would be to provide information about the user’s availability. When calling me, for example, instead of a standard dial tone or music you would hear an automated voice stating that I am in a meeting and will be free in 20 minutes. There are countless new opportunities in this market; the only limit will be the imagination of developers!
With plenty of exciting opportunities available, it is a revolutionary time in the telecoms and application developers and OnMobile is looking forward to help drive and facilitate those discussions at TADS in November.