We’re back from a very successful presentation at the Tele Management Forum 2008 in Nice, France, where we were invited to introduce our answer to the problem of the crumbling walled gardens.At the Forum, we exhibited our solution to Tier 1 telcos in the Content Encounter, sharing a booth with Amdocs.

It was gratifying to see the thought leaders of the telecom industry respond so positively to our vision and innovative business model that uniquely enables Telcos to monetize the open web using their existing billing and customer care infrastructure.  

With over 3,600 registered visitors, including a wide representation of Tier 1 telcos and their suppliers, the TM Forum provided a cooperative atmosphere in which we began planning technical interoperability with the Telco back office systems of industry leaders such as Telcordia and others.

The interest in what we’re doing is far reaching and Telcos are beginning to recognize the potential of monetizing the off-off-portal marketplace. It is easy to appreciate a solution that allows Telcos to share a $15B boost in highly profitable revenue (2007 figures for content downloads) rather than the $6-700M they currently share in the walled gardens with a tenth of the effort.   

Our financial settlement partner is MACH S.a.r.l. in Luxembourg the largest clearing house for the mobile industry, serving 650 operators worldwide. So, we have a very strong foundation that uses existing settlement processes to further benefit merchants and Telcos.  One of the big differentiators of using this  payment processing strategy is that it allows internet commerce to extend past the current limited credit card solutions into the regions of the world such as China, India, Eastern Europe etc where international use of credit cards have not penetrated in any depth.  It also plays to the fact that some 2B of the current 3B mobiles are in developing countries and this will rise to 3B of the 4.25B projected for 2011.  

We will be following up on interoperability of our solution with the back office systems from this event in the following weeks.