We are now onto part 4 in our little mini series. In part 3, Keith described our Technical Operations and Engineering set up. Seeing as we are making this up, I could ensure this is staffed with enough resources to enable me to develop what until now, has been a very meet-too product set.

LUI tries to be very simple for its customers. We don't differentiate on speed - we just give everyone as much capacity as their line can handle - and we bundle together all the components that we provide into one of two (soon to be three packages). We are planning a fourth bundle including IPTV for "early 2008" - which as you know is industry code for August.

So what we have at the moment (Bundle 1 and Bundle 2) are pretty basic. The bundles include components which I will describe below, but in essence, Bundle 1 is our basic internet access service, while bundle 2 includes our voice services alongside that connectivity.

Bundle 3 is where we are trying to stand out. It wraps in some basic social networking components because as a local ISP, with all the associated scale disadvantages that Keith talks about, we need to exploit what is otherwise a weakness. We are going to be pivoting our future development around this community philosophy.

Being small means we can be local and we can be a part of the community. Until we launched Bundle 3, that just meant that our customer normally had a friend of a friend working here - and most of our signups have been via our rewards scheme. Now we are going to try and exploit that local community feel that we have that our larger, national competitors cannot hope to match.

In fact, Bundle 3 in many ways replaces Bundle 2. Bundle 3 customers must have the voice services and they don't have to pay any extra to get Bundle 3 in place of Bundle 2 because we make our money in other ways. Bundle 3 is where we start to make money from revenue share and advertising deals, which although they won't allow us to offer a free access product for the forseeable future, certainly looks necessary to mitigate the scale disadvantages we face.

The added components in Bundle 3 give us something "rich" to give away for free to encourage people to take up our boring old voice products. In summary the Bundles consist of the following components, which are defined in detail below:

Bundle 1 = components 1 + 2 + 4
Bundle 2 = components 1 + 2 + 3 + 4
Bundle 3 = components 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5

Bundle 3 will also include components 6 or 7 (depending on customer niche) and bundle 8 when these components are ready. Our IPTV Bundle 4 is still in the planning stages and will be the subject of article 6, back here on ipdev.net, next week.

Unconstrained by the dramas involved in actually delivering all this, we can be highly idealistic in our product set. Having been there on the inside doing product development, you don't know how good it feels knowing that all the resources you need will be there at the meetings and will deliver on their commitments ;-)

Component 1 - Secure, Managed Internet Access
LUI is an internet access provider. Without that element of its product the service is nothing, so we have to get that right. Getting it right means no hidden charges or reduced quality if the customer actually uses the connection. We don't want to stop that because it is the future, so there are no caps, fair use policies or traffic management.

Getting it right also means that our services get delivered to customers through a managed gateway router. In theory, we hand off to the customer via eithernet or wifi, although of course things are never as simple as that - we know that you often need to help customers connect their equipment to the network if they are ever to use either the equipment or the network.

That managed router that we ship to the customer site provides full wireless, firewall and parental control functionality which we manage for them based on templates in our configuration database. The customer thinks that they are getting a specialised service because it is managed but in fact they are getting the same as everyone else. It's an old trick that has worked in the business market for years now and consumers are ready for it. Plus TR069 has made it all affordable to implement.

Component 2 - Content Filtering
There is a lot of bad stuff on the internet. Rather than hiding from that fact and hoping that the mud doesn't stick when politicians raise the subject, LUI is being proactive. We automatically block the IWF's watch list.

We are not judge and jury, but we accept our role policing the "rules" laid out by those in authority because to not do so would destroy our ethical, community based business philosophy. This is over and above a strong adherence to industry standard "notice and takedown" procedures. This means that when content deemed illegal by the authorities and residing on our network is notified to us, we take it down or block it immediately.

There is also a lot of stuff that although not illegal, many would prefer to avoid. For them we offer a service on the managed gateway router that filters content as determined by the customer's profile settings. Our customers have found this to be a better way of dealing with the problem than client software based services as the main offenders are teenagers with far more technical ability to bypass controls than most parents have to implement them.

All the parent needs to do is call us and we will (upon verification of their identity) implement controls on the router for them that their not-so-angelic offspring cannot touch. We also offer browser plugins for younger internet users and training materials for parents that create age-appropriate walled gardens for them to use safely.

Component 3 - Voice
Because we offer internet access, we decided a while back to bundle CPS voice and in 2006 also added Line Rental as an option for customers taking broadband. That was very successful on the revenue front, but caused us no end of headaches on the cost side of the equation especially with regard to Billing something that we never had a problem with before as our data bundles were simple fixed monthly prices.

When we unbundled, we were forced to keep the voice on CPS and use Shared MPF instead of full unbundling because we did not want to deal with rolling out a softswitch at the same time as everything else.

Keith is going to go into much more detail on the voice network and its commercials in part 5 back on Telebusillis...

Component 4 - Core Second Level Services
No self respecting ISP goes to market without the basic second level services: mail and web space. Rather than build these from scratch, we chose to outsource these from day 1 of our existence, which has given us a huge boost in terms of ever more advanced features coming out in quarterly releases from our supplier. These started off with basic AS/AV facilities but quickly grew with the addition of web mail, SMS alerts and more recently hosted exchange.

Where the internally developed versions of our competitors may have been easier to get up and running (and no doubt are much cheaper to run), our managed mail service has been getting better and better while theirs looks ever more tired.

The same is true on the web space side. That too was outsourced which meant that our customers now have had ever-growing space allowances and the ability to purchase and simply integrate domain names with their FTP space. Where some of our competitors are stuck in time, our outsource partners are helping us to develop a range of Web 2.0 services for our customers. If we'd had to develop all this internally, it would never have reached the top of the priority list and we would be stuck in the 1990s.

Component 5 - Web 2.0 Photo Services
We launched this not long ago. Well... to be fair, we "announced the intention to launch" these not long ago, but that seems to be the way the game is played. The city certainly liked it anyway, but then they don't have time to figure out that actually what we said is that we are taking pre-registrations for the next wave of products. They will surely ask how we are doing next time, but we can always give them a "too soon to tell" response if we aren't quite there yet. The Chairman was happy anyway, so that's all that counts.

Anyway, what we announced was that we were going to bundle in a Photo Blogging upgrade that our hosting partner is developing. The Photo Blog comes with a full online backup solution that will allow our customers the peace of mind that their treasured pictures are safe from the dreaded PC crash. They can also create public and virtual private albums allowing them to share their snaps with others.

One of the most exciting elements of this component is that our partners have bundled in Microsoft's Photosyth application into their service. This means that our customers public photos will be stitched together to build a tapestry of Leeds that will grow as more and more photos are posted. We think that this will really encourage our users to post their shots of Leeds onto our service and get them coming back for more, as the community builds a 21st century photographic record of the city in our time.

Another neat extra feature around the Photo Blog is the Photo Printing service. Again, our partner is doing this for us but we are set to get a 25% cut of any printing fees that they charge to our users and it will all be billed through our systems boosting total revenue growth numbers which should be nice.

Component 6 - Web 2.0 Social Networking Services (Locals)
Here we plan a big push in 2008. We are preparing to launch a set of partner delivered services that build upon the local communities in our catchment.

For Leeds residents we offer a set of social networking services, on the Leeds Community Channel. We are partnering with local media to deliver news, sport and current affairs bulletins that users can take part in to through the next generation of the Photo Blogging service, due out in Q2 2008. The local media is embracing user generated content and mashing itself up with local community and social services to provide a wide array of localised information and entertainment for Leeds residents.

Leeds businesses will be able to target their services at the Leeds Community Channel through BT Tradespace. Here, consumers will be able to find merchants, tradesmen or special interest groups that are local to them, visit their blog, read reviews by other customers and find recommended suppliers.

We considered launching our own copy-cat service in place of BT's Tradespace, but realised that we would be diluting our marketing by addressing consumers and businesses. Furthermore, businesses have requirements that could quickly escalate beyond what we are able to provide on a production basis.

All this is ad-funded and LUI is set to receive a 15% share of ad revenues on the community channels whether these ads are placed via the traditional media, via online agencies or through Tradespace. This is all gravy for us as all we need to do is provide access to our customer's internet usage data to allow advertisers to build and target specific profiles that improve their click through rates. Our privacy policy says we can, unless the customer checks the box when they sign up and agrees to pay higher access charges instead.

Component 7 - Web 2.0 Social Networking Services (Students)
For university students, we have struck a deal with Facebook to create every subscriber to the student package an account on that network. Facebook liked the way that we were able to bulk pre-provision the sign up and initial data entry of the customer's basic information (name, address, email, student ID etc) from our billing records.

We are working with the Universities in Leeds to align with their social and sporting groups, which they love because provides each interest group with their own site for their members. In exchange for all this free stuff that the Student Union gets, we get a very high profile during freshers week and mitigation against payment default by SU members. We are planning a beta launch of this when term starts in September for a small number of computer oriented societies - let's see how this goes...

Of course, we appreciate that these students are transient, so we have had to think hard about contracts, payment terms and guarantees. Most of them have 12 month lets on their houses or residencies which we are aligning with by working with the letting agents. In many cases, the default is that the rented property already has our service installed and the agents actually collect the money on our behalf as part of the rental fees. Every time a new resident moves in, the agent notifies us and they get paid a commission.

For the individuals themselves, their facebook profile needs to be detachable from our service when the individuals move onwards and upwards and leave Leeds at the end of their studies. We are laughing however, having agreed a 5% share of ad revenues, not just in year 1, but as long as the user has the facebook account that we created for them.

Component 8 - User Generated Video
We are going to keep this discrete from Video on Demand or IPTV. The difference being mainly that User Generated Video runs on a flash enabled web browser, while IPTV runs on the family room television set. VoD sits somewhere in the middle across both PC and TV platforms as a jack of all trades.

Once we have the Photo Blog services established we will build around that Video Blogging capabilities. This is likely to take us in two directions - mobile phone footage and video camera productions.

Mobile phone footage is a simple step up from the Photo Blog, quick and easy to post and share. This is great for contributions to news and sport media as well as within closed user groups. We should have this up at the same time as the Social Network upgrades in Q2 2008.

Video Camera Productions are much more complex as they require significant editing and we are looking for tools to help our customers process and create professional looking media and integrating that with the network and the private sharing facilities. We are preparing an RFP from various industry leaders to start the development of this, although it means that we may not go to market until the end of 2008 or even the beginning of 2009.

We strongly believe that there is a future here to be considered. Many people make film of their children that they would like to share with relatives but would be terrified of falling into the wrong hands. Our service will implement digital fingerprints onto user generated media so that only people that the user says can view their films, can see what they have produced.

On the other hand, these films may offer an alternative to mainstream media. DIY Productions Ltd might have a talent, but no route to market. We will provide one because they can upload their work for viewing on an unrestricted basis, potentially supported by advertising that we broker for them.

In order to prevent this sharing capability being abused for copyright infringement, the service will build in copyright detection software. We have to do this or we are toast...

Component 9 - IPTV
Don't look for this on the web site today. This is another project that won't be available, even on private beta until 2009, but IPTV offers us a huge opportunity. We are going to be well placed to promote, sell and install (remotely) the glue that holds the internet and the TV together: the IPTV network operating system and the set top box.

IPTV is also a major threat to us from a networking perspective because if we don't do it we won't be able to control traffic costs, so we are prioritising this for two reasons: to add value and to mitigate costs. Right now we are evaluating the best way forward. Part 6 of the series, which will be back here, will look at our considerations in this area.

Labels: ISP Products, LUI, Photosynth, targeted ads

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I recommend that you read this excellent argument that "the iPhone is not the next iPod" on fastcompany.com. While I disagree with my interpretation of the headline - I believe that mobile phones, including the iPhone will eventually render your standalone iPod surplus to requirements - that is not in fact what the article argues.

The conclusion of this excellent, balanced analysis is that "The iPod set an impossibly high bar, one that the iPhone will not match or even come close to. But the new device could still be very successful, particularly in the long term." Like I say, well worth the read.

In the piece, Steve Jobs is quoted as saying "we are all born with the ultimate pointing device - our fingers" which links well to something else you should make 10 minutes to think about. Jobs may be right about our fingers being good for pointing at things, but we are also (hopefully) born with the ultimate browsing device - our eyes. I saw this link on The Register which for me at least, certainly had the wow factor. Seadragon, Photosynth... Microsoft. Remember those names.

The application reminds me of the old fashioned micro-fiches that you used to find in libraries. There is also a bit of James Bond about it, but most of all it's Dirk Gently's fundamental interconnectedness of things. I won't say any more - have a look for yourself!

Labels: iPhone, Photosynth, recommended reading, Seadragon

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