Matt over at SaaS player to watch Mural Venture posted this, claiming that the phone bill is a soon to be extinct relic of the past. The gist of his post is that the “conversational web” is creating a bypass for a significant proportion of traditional telco income and that this will only increase, to the detriment of the aforementioned phone bill.
I sort of agree and I sort of don’t. Yes traditional revenue streams for telcos (POTS et al) are soon to dissipate. But BT Tradespace, the next generation platform owned by British Telecom (and developed by Mural themselves) is an example of a traditional telco finding viable replacement revenue streams to replace POTS.
In a way Matt’s post I guess intended to draw comments suggesting Mural products as a replacement to telco revenue streams and but Mural products aside, it is a telling comment on the future for telcos.
Disclosure – Diversity Limited is a consultant to Telecom New Zealand and its subsidiaries
Matt Howard here from SMBLive — developer of BT Tradespace. Thanks for the post. I think we’re ont he same page.
My main points are:
1. The gradual death of telco billing systems will occur because traditional monetization schemes will be overcome by new types of monetization schemes (credit card billed, transactional commerce commissions, advertising, etc).
2. BT Tradesapce is a great example of how future comms services can be creatively monetized — but it requires “out-of-the-box” thinking.