Apology for my delay… nevertheless, here’s the recap for May event. Selular magazine also wrote a nice article about it as well – can’t find it on the web – will scan & post.

One of the main attraction for today’s Internet/mobile Internet is video. We know that it is big, but how big?

So Cisco launched “Visual Networking Index” initiatives to sample the traffic in Internet. Ichwan F. Agus, the SP Sales Director of Cisco explained about this VNI initiatives… Cisco is deploying probes on major ISP globally to measure what’s really happening there.

Key findings of VNI are: video as the key driver of IP growth with high-def and on-demand content as major use of today, but collaboration & mobility in future networks. Video now is dominated by Internet Video to PC, but future will be Internet Video to TV (hmm…) and Interactive Video.

Based on the VNI, in 2012 video is predicted to occupy up 90% of consumer Internet bandwidth. This reflects 65% growth annually… This is enough to create a challenge in the current operators’ network.

Mobile data traffic, he continued, will double every year… (yipee!!), so in 2012, mobile data traffic will be twenty times what it is today. Amount of mobile data traffic per month in APAC is about 230 Petabyte (PB). To put this into perspective, one Petabyte is 1000 Terabytes or 250k DVDs…

Then, Jeff Teh… represented by me explained about a key trends in the mobile industry acros Asia.

Here’s the executive summary:

• Moderate growth in premium content market of 37.4% over 2007.
• Operators seeking alternative revenue streams: Mobile Data services (YES!!). Mobile voice is now 74% of operators revenue, but by 2014 it will be only 62%, so representing 10% of revenue shifted to value added services (at the current market, it’s about 8 trillion Rp)
• Messaging remains key revenue contributor to mobile data services in APAC and even global. It’s no surprise that basic information services & news alerts are still strong. He referred to RedNano in Singapore as a new business model for info services.
• Mobile entertainment key to growth with Music and Video services leading the way. Music is driven by RBT. Popular new music services are: Mobile Karaoke and Music TV. Mobile video should be redefined, content needs to be adopted to what users want.
• 3G, Mobile Internet and handset trends key to growth of mobile data services and premium content. Frost & Sullivan believed by 2014, 47% of all devices are capable of Internet access.
• Mobile advertising, search, commerce are new areas of growth of premium content.

Highlighting on the mobile video, I quotes Jeff that what users want are not simply TV translated to mobile format but rather (try that please):

• bite-sized chunks of entertainment as fillers during free time
• no full movies (painful to watch on the mobile screen)
• viral video campaigns for mobile marketing alternatives
• mobile cartoons

Then you know exactly that we need to understand more about Mobile Advertising. And to make sure that it remains non-intrusive, targeted, personal, immediate. Ad-sponsored model can be the new revenue stream and expected to improve consumption of premium content.

Ad is related to the Social Networking trends. But they didn’t see yet the form of revenue in SocNet… (Tomi’s got answer for that).

Other than that… vertical search is interesting trend. The promise of vertical search (specialized search, focusing on a certain type of content, e.g. images, hotels, shopping, …) is to deliver content in fewer clicks… The less click the happier the user will be.

Lastly, try to look at Voice IVR/VAS. Voice portal that helps user to select and get content (instead of browsing through WAP pages). Usable for RBT selection, conference, voice chat. Really big in India, China, and Thailand. (I know that some operators & VAS ops are looking into this).

Enjoy & happy selling