Available for Consulting & Speaking
Tomi Ahonen is a bestselling author whose twelve books on mobile have already been referenced in over 100 books by his peers. Rated the most influential expert in mobile by Forbes in December 2011, Tomi speaks regularly at conferences doing about 20 public speakerships annually. With over 250 public speaking engagements, Tomi been seen by a cumulative audience of over 100,000 people on all six inhabited continents. The former Nokia executive has run a consulting practise on digital convergence, interactive media, engagement marketing, high tech and next generation mobile. Tomi is currently based out of Helsinki but supports Fortune 500 sized companies across the globe. His reference client list includes Axiata, Bank of America, BBC, BNP Paribas, China Mobile, Emap, Ericsson, Google, Hewlett-Packard, HSBC, IBM, Intel, LG, MTS, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Ogilvy, Orange, RIM, Sanomamedia, Telenor, TeliaSonera, Three, Tigo, Vodafone, etc. To see his full bio and his books, visit www.tomiahonen.com Tomi Ahonen lectures at Oxford University's short courses on next generation mobile and digital convergence. Follow him on Twitter as @tomiahonen. Tomi also has a Facebook and Linked In page under his own name. He is available for consulting, speaking engagements and as expert witness, please write to tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com
Tomi, awesome presentation-- but a question:
why is the audience so silent ???
in the first 5-7 minutes I've seen; the audience is totally silent and invisible... even when you lean onto the stage-- there is neither a murmur, nor laughter nor applause.
Is audience totally quiet ? OR is it that they totally isolated your microsoft system from the audience chatter?
Just curious... would love to see you share more abt the conference...
Posted by: Prakriti | May 29, 2012 at 01:24 AM
tomi,
looks like no one understood you.
better speak in Muslim at least in the beginning of your speech.
Posted by: PeterElgin | May 29, 2012 at 02:04 AM
I think the culture of most non-english speaking is observative. If there were some english speaker, and they feel their english is not really good, they would go into silent mode.
They understand Tomi, they just to shy to respond or laugh.
(I also might be wrong)
Tomi, Thanks for sharing it with us.
Posted by: cycnus | May 29, 2012 at 03:32 AM
Thanks for linking the presentation - quite enlightening!
Mobile future - part of the changing landscape is that Microsoft (via its subsidiary Skype) is more and more strongly eating into carriers' profits: Skype totaled "100 billion minutes of calls in the first three months" of 2012, with "much of Skype’s growth (..) to come from (...) mobile devices".
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/technology/microsoft-at-work-on-meshing-its-products-with-skype.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Let's not re-start the "flame war" of past discussions, but this can't be considered good news to mobile carriers: at 15 cents per minute (Tomi - you probably know the average revenue per minute in mobile?!), 100 billion minutes would correspond to 15 billion US$ (Euro) of lost carrier revenue in the first three month of 2012!
Posted by: P910i - the original iPhone! | May 29, 2012 at 04:36 PM
Found some numbers on mobile voice revenue per minute (Tomi please correct in case I got them wrong):
According to Tomi's nice present to us (his 2010 almanac), mobile voice calls revenue in 2010 was US$ 615 billion. Mobile business briefing reports that "Total global voice minutes reached 1.6 trillion in 2010" - see http://www.mobilebusinessbriefing.com/articles/mobile-users-spending-an-extra-two-hours-per-month-making-calls-as-global-prices-plummet/17066/?elq=8f3ee0de80f14b62bae113ed54fc0acc
This yield a revenue of 38.4 US cent per minute. Hence 100 billion minutes would correspond to 38 billion US$ in lost revenue to carriers in the first quarter of 2012! Wow, just wow!
Granted, Skype calls from PCs might still predominantly eat into the profits of landline carriers, but with most of Skype's growth expected to come from mobile devices, the writing is on the wall (Mene mene tekel upharsin...)
Posted by: P910i - the original iPhone! | May 29, 2012 at 05:11 PM
@P9 The table one can find here http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobilfunk-Discounter#Deutschland indicates that market forces and regulatory changes caused the price of voice calls to crash well before the iPhone. (Discussion of other "smartphones" is irrelevant, since the iPhone is the point where the paradigm changed from "smart core" to "smart edge".)
To have something interesting here, you'd have to understand if Skype is mainly expanding the market or a substitute relative to the PSTN and then, since voice is low-bandwidth and networks are getting faster, what the price decrease would have been without Skype.
Posted by: Louis | May 29, 2012 at 07:35 PM
@Louis Thanks for pointing out the table - quite impressive decline in terms of "lowest" price per minute from 2004 to 2011!
I'd guess that the average revenue per minute still might be considerably higher due to monthly charges for post-paid accounts, unused "free minutes", higher price-per-minute costs for calls to other networks, and charges for incoming calls in quite a few countries?
P.S.: My "handle" alludes to the fact that with the P800/P900/P910 SE had the first "big" ecosystem with hundreds (in 2002/2004!) of apps (all running Symbian UIQ 2), the P910 was an "all touch" phone (keypad could be removed), and that one Steve Jobs was spotted with a P910 quite a few years before the iP was announced (P910 could even wireless sync contacts and appointments with Macs).
Of course, sadly, SE gambled its "leadership" away when they didn't provide app developers and users an upgrade path to UIQ 3 (P990 being underpowered for UIQ 3, and a step back in industrial design contributed to the decline of the former smart phone "leader" as well). There might be a lesson to be learned here, though the "powers to be" seem to prefer to ignore it (thinking of WM/WP or Symbian/Maemo/Qt)
Posted by: P910i - the "original" iPhone | May 29, 2012 at 09:54 PM
@P9: All the ones in the small table are prepaid, pay as you go, plans, so that is the real price, modulo wastage and international calling. The only reason I brought up pre/post iPhone is that the "ZOMG Skype" theory seems to be that the post iPhone smartphones allow "smart edge" (or "end to end") services like Skype that use the carrier for data transport but not as a packaged service, and that this is making prices crash. The point of the table is that prices started to crash before any users at all had devices that were specifically designed to enable end to end apps.
Posted by: Louis | May 30, 2012 at 04:27 PM
Tomi,
Very nice keynote you put together. It was actually straight to the point: mobile is the future, period.
There's no discussion anymore.
It would be very nice to meet you personally one day. Hope I ever have the pleasure ;-)
Cheers
Posted by: Felipe Balbi | May 30, 2012 at 08:47 PM
Hi Tomi,
Off topic but of great interest to Nokia watchers. This report from Seeking Alpha delves into some dark secrets of Nokia's Q1 financial report: http://seekingalpha.com/article/624971-tales-from-nokia-patents-kidnapped-by-wicked-trolls-or-saved-by-kindly-godfathers-part-two
Take note of the following paragraph hidden in the footnotes:
"Note 6: Relating to average selling prices (ASP): ... Devices & Services Other net sales includes net sales of Nokia's luxury phone business Vertu and spare parts, as well as intellectual property royalty income. Smart Devices ASP represents Smart Devices net sales divided by Smart Devices volumes. Mobile Phones ASP represents Mobile Phones net sales divided by Mobile Phones volumes."
This means that revenue from sales of phones are even worse than what it appears and Nokia massaged the figures by adding in income from sales of assets and patents into the average selling price of phones. Isn't this cheating to hide poor sales? Furthermore, Nokia may have already sold most of its valuable patents just to survive.
"There is no argument to be made along the lines of: "OK, Nokia is losing money on phones, but at least it has the patent income to keep it afloat." No, the patent income is already folded into the loss on the phones.
In the event of bankruptcy the notion that Nokia's patents are worth billions is in question, because it doesn't look like they own the title to them any more."
Posted by: Kenny | May 31, 2012 at 02:49 AM
Kenny: Thanks for the link but you should put it on a Nokia post by Tomi such as Paging Truth Police, etc. Anyway, Seeking Alpha is a typically terribly written site but this article you cite is an exception: the author is truly trying to make sense of Nokia's tortured balance sheet. The topic is very important for investors: how much IP has Nokia sold to patent trolls and how much of the reported ASP of nokia handsets is actually patent royalty income ladled in there for Nokia knows what reason? Good questions. It's going to be a long wait until WP8 rolls out with nothing good to report by Nokia in the next two quarters. It's going to be ugly.
Posted by: Eurofan | May 31, 2012 at 05:01 AM
Eurofan, yes I understand this is off topic but posting this is an old thread will get very few views. Sorry about this.
Tomi should make an analysis of Nokia's real ASP for Lumia after deducting the one-off non-related incomes and determine if Nokia is actually making a loss from each Lumia phone.
Posted by: Kenny | May 31, 2012 at 05:19 AM
Very nice post about 3G mobile phones. Thanks for sharing these ideas with us.
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