"I must admit that I didn't see much value in mobile telephony when it first arrived in Sweden," says the chapter's author, Staffan Ljung. "Why would I need an expensive bulky mobile phone that was very expensive to place calls from?

"Now I can't live without one and I hardly use fixed phones. The lesson I learned is that it is very difficult to judge value from the first reaction to new technology."

Ljung – who is currently working on setting up a new unit within Ericsson that will focus on end-to-end services and enabler solutions from a user perspective – also says that early iterations of new technology are generally quite poor. He stresses that it is therefore essential to improve them based on constant consumer feedback in fast-paced iterations.

Chapter Summary
Chapter three, "Creating a Winning Service Offering",  explains how operators build service roadmaps, media companies evolve their offerings, adding interactivity, and developers try to collaborate with both to get their applications on the market.

The chapter begins by exploring the three dimensions of service creation, which are the integration of technology enablers, the translation of customer needs and the building of market channel access. The first is driven by the operators, the second by the media industries and the third by the users themselves. A successful service requires analysis and consideration of all three dimensions.

The first dimension is defined as "technology push". By combining technology enablers, new services can be created. A prime example of this is IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem). IMS can be used to create services such as Push to Talk (PTT), interactive gaming, instant voice messaging and multimedia sharing. The advantages and disadvantages of adhering to a standards-based approach to service creation are presented in detail in this section of the chapter. Although the technology push approach can lead to slower time-to-market, it ensures functionality across networks and platforms.

"Market pull" is the term used to describe customer-driven service creation. The message here is that simplicity is the key to the creation of successful market-driven services. A balance must be maintained between technical feasibility and commercial sustainability. Creativity and flexibility are of paramount importance, and care must be taken to support that.

The final section of the chapter looks at what goes into making the mobile channel attractive to media companies. The goal is to make the mobile channel as simple to use for content providers as their existing channels. A "creativity space" must be created where content owners and application developers can deploy their content and be confident that everything will work end-to-end.

Throughout the chapter, case studies of services such as Vodafone Live! and Terraplay server are presented to reinforce the main points. Processes and business logic are presented in large, easy to understand diagrams and charts.

"The first iterations of the mobile internet were poor, but in a couple of years many people won't be able to live without things like instant mail access and mobile instant messaging," Ljung says. "We, as an industry, need to grow the creativity space to allow new, non-voice services to take off."

Read more about the book 

By John Maxwell Hobbs