Neotel gears up for corporate launch

Only five years behind schedule, South Africa's official second fixed-line telecommunications provider Neotel will be launching phone and internet services for business customers from mid-March. Apparently Tata-managed company has already acquired more than a dozen large corporate customers.

They are currently putting together a cable/fibre network and a Wimax/CDMA infrastructure that has the ability to bypass Telkom's stranglehold on home phone lines. Neotel are promising to undercut Telkom's prices (how hard can it be to undercut the highest prices on the planet?) and to beat them on service (again, how hard can this be?).

IOL Technology Article

Personalization Desire Outweighs Security Concerns

It is hard to imagine that people who are neurotic about data loss and identity theft would willingly relinquish security for convenience. But time and time again we see consumers acting in a way that might make life harder tomorrow in order to make life easier today. In German supermarkets, people who would refuse to allow their government to capture their fingerprints willingly pay for groceries by pressing their finger on a fingerprint scanner at the till.

The recently publiched "2006 ChoiceStream Personalization Survey" found that over half of the respondents will provide demographic and other personal information in exchange for a personalized online experience.

Part of this is familiarity. Ten years ago when online sites like Amazon.com first started using cookies and subscriber data to customise the shopping experience, people were wary. Suspicions abounded about who might get hold of the information and how it might be abused. But if you don't provide the necessary information, and if you crush your cookies regularly, the online experience can be dry, tedious, and often irrelevant to your interests. Over time, people get accustomed to the personal service and become more willing to give away information. At the same time, they get more sophisticated and discerning, and they actually read privacy policies and make conscious judgement calls about who to trust and who to avoid. The more information consumers are exposed to online and the more decisions they are making online, the more dependent they become on personalisation as a data filter.

According to the report, in the past year, consumer interest in a more personalized experience has increased by 24 percent to 57 percent of respondents. Consumers willing to let a site track clicks, purchases, and other behavior increased by 34 percent in the same period. Concerns over personal data security remained high, with six out of ten people expressing concern.

Not surprisingly, younger age groups have less concern about privacy and more interest in personalisation. Comfort with the norms of social networking sites play a role, with younger people expecting sites to provide personalised recommendations.

original ClickZ article

Advertising Boosts Municipal Wi-Fi Ubiquity

There's nothing new about municipal WiFi. It has been around in the US for at least five years (that's 28 internet years), and longer in Japan and South Korea. Now it's available, or in process, in more than 300 cities across the US, and it is becoming almost the norm in major European cities.

The basic idea is that a municipality decides that broadband internet access is a utility, much like electricity or schooling, and that making it available to everyone within the city limits for free can only be good for the city's economy and education levels. The democratisation of information is a strong political driver, and a pretty powerful economic imperative. So the municipalities put up wide area WiFi networks that anyone in town can access with a WiFi enabled computer, phone, or PDA.

Typically these services are free, or at least they are paid for out of taxes, or they are advertising supported. And they are not that expensive to set up: Philadelphia budgeted only $10 million to WiFi enable the whole city, with ongoing costs of about $1 million a year. That's a small price to pay compared with the potential benefit to small businesses, learners, and government.

In South Africa, Knysna has muni WiFi, and there is talk that Gauteng may WiFi-enable the greater Johannesburg area in conjunction with iBurst. There are, of course, political considerations and pressure from internet providers who see their lucrative markets under threat. But inexpensive muni WiFi is inevitable even in South Africa.

Often muni WiFi is paid for by advertising: when you log on to the service, you see an ad. Often these ads are very local, for businesses within range of the nearest signal source. That produces great opportunities for advertising services for small businesses that otherwise would never consider marketing online: local restaurants, dry cleaners, finacial advisors, or car dealers can communicate with potential customers who are right there in the neighbourhood. Try that with TV or local radio.

In the US, a hotspot and advertising company called JiWire now plans to offer ad-supported Wi-Fi through a relationship with Ultramercial. The ads will appear prior to gaining free Internet access at hotspots. To avoid the initial ads you can simply pay a small fee to get online. Once WiFi providers and income generators like JiWire start investing in muni WiFi infrastructures instead of waiting for municipalities to take the initiative, things start to develop at a very rapid pace.

There's an article on JiWire here

Online Businesses Beat Offline Businesses in Customer Satisfaction

One of the prerequisites of successful online business is a commitment to customer satisfaction. The online customer simply doesn’t take the kind of abuse, disregard, or obfuscation that the offline customer is often resigned to. Online customers can go elsewhere at the click of a button; off-line businesses often perceive their customers to be captive because of the difficulty of going elsewhere, which can lead to habitually poor service by offline businesses.

The University of Michigan and ForeSee Results have just released the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which shows that customer satisfaction with e-commerce now surpasses that of offline business by 11.6 percent.

The Customer Satisfaction Index is a 100-point scale, and on that scale e-commerce scored an average of 80 against off-line businesses average of 68.4. Online retail scored 83 as opposed to offline retail’s score of 74.

Of course it is not necessarily a complacent attitude in offline businesses that is at the root of the problem. Online businesses have a major advantage in both information and flexibility. They are able to get really good insights into each and every customer’s behaviour and preferences, and can tailor a customer experience in a way that is so much more focused than any offline business could manage. Imagine trying to train, for instance, every in-store sales rep at HiFi Corporation to actually know and understand the products they are selling, and to develop the skills needed to understand the needs of every customer they deal with. Well, OK, that’s not so difficult. Maybe it is all down to management attitude after all.

Web 2.0 has played a big role in elevating online customer service. The ability to see multiple views of products, read and write actual consumer reviews, and seek out and provide peer recommendations has added tremendously to the enthusiasm with which consumers do business online. The transparency that Web 2.0 provides is a vital driver of the web as a window-shopping medium. Try to find out in-store exactly what the make, model, performance, strengths and weaknesses are of say the range of plasma TVs on the shelves, and you come away with snippets of information that may or may not be true. Online retailers encourage comparison shopping, and go to great lengths to provide extensive product information. Offline businesses often see informed customers as a threat; online businesses know that informed customers are an opportunity.

Of course, not all offline businesses do a bad job. In the US, many major stores have risen to the challenge and provide superb customer experiences. Multi-channel businesses like the giant bookstore chain Barnes and Noble have integrated online and offline services that pushed them up the Consumer Satisfaction Index to a score of 88, a little higher than Amazon.com.