Title: 2004 Annual Report
Source: Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Telecomunicaciones (CMT)
Date: July 2005
Abstract: La Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Telecomunicaciones (CMT), the Spanish Telecommunications watchdog, has just published its 2004 Annual Report. This states that the revenues of the Internet provider companies rose by 53% to 1,297 million euros, of which 78% were directly related to DSL products. Throughout last year, the telecommunications operators gained 1.3 million new customers, 63% more than the previous year. Once again, this can be put down to DSL that accounted for almost three quarters of them (77%). Broadband services were undoubtedly the most dynamic market as they rose by 63% as against the 3.7% in mobile telephony and the 1% in fixed line phones. Mobile voice communications continue their growth in both minutes (18%) and income (16.3%).
The number of Internet users went up by 19% to 5.8 millions, which means a market penetration of 13.5%. In spite of the rise in broadband (with 3,465,000 lines at the end of the year), the penetration rate of high capacity lines in our country —8.2 connections per 100 inhabitants–, is still below the European average. The report points out the increase in competition in the retail market, characterized by the fall in prices (with an increase in the connection speed) and the launching of integrated services packages. According to the CMT (the communications watchdog), this breaks the tendency of the previous years and favours the indirect access operators.
Telefonica still corners the broadband market (52% of all customers) but lost six points in 2004, while retailers increased their customer portfolio by 145%.
All in all, 2004 was a year “of consolidation with stagnation in investments” for the Spanish telecommunications sector, according to Reinaldo Rodríguez, president of the CMT.

Read

France Telecom has reached an agreement to take over Amena, the mobile arm of the Auna Group. The French company will pay out 10,600 million euros, more than half in cash and the rest in shares with a guaranteed price. Amena has debts of 2,500 million euros, so the effective price comes to 8,100 million euros.
With this purchase of Auna, France Telecom will become the third mobile telephony operator in Spain behind Telefonica and Vodafone. The main shareholders of Auna (Santander, Endesa and Unión Fenosa) preferred the French operator to other bids from investment groups led by KKR and Carlyle. KKR offered some 12,500 million euros for Amena and the other company of the Amena Group —devoted to providing fixed line, television and Internet services–, while Carlyle only bid for the mobile telephony operator.
Now the only remaining thing to do is to choose the buyer for the fixed line division of the group. ONO, the cable company, whose last bid stood at 2,400 million euros, is looking stronger than ever.

News in Baquía, Cinco Días, Computing and El Mundo

There are new winds of change for publicity agencies. While the big advertisers are starting to question the real effectiveness of their investments in television publicity (Proctor&Gamble has decided to drastically cut back its expenditure on TV), spectators are showing themselves to be less and less receptiveness. They are in fact completely fed up (and rightly so) with advertisements.
Greater subtlety and precision in the design of advertising campaigns is being imposed. This has never been more so than in television because of the rising competition from the Internet —where it is possible to gain attention in just one second and at a ridiculously low price in comparison to a TV ad— and the growing popularity of Personal Video Recorders (PVR) like TiVo, which lets the user skip the ads without problems.
Proof of this is the recently launched campaign by a Belgian publicity agency where one second commercials are broadcast. The product in question is a mouthwash called One Second. The advertisement is naturally an exercise in getting to the point. It is something like the banner concept for the small screen. Moreover, for the series that are being produced nowadays for mobile phones in one minute episodes, this type of advertisement may be just the thing. Quite possibly in the near future, we may be able to identify a brand or product with a still photograph, syllable, chord or gesture.
But just in case, publishers are studying alternative formulae. One of them is what is trying to restore the reviled publicity by making it less inopportune, more acceptable. Paradoxically, TiVo has been behind this new concept of commercial and General Motors and Warner Bros., Network are testing it out. While the spectator is using the fast forward button on his TiVo control, a pop-up type advertisement appears in a corner of the screen. The user can, if he so wishes, access the expanded content by clicking on an interactive symbol or tag.

Articles in TechNewsWorld, BusinessWeek and Financial Times (payment service)

The average office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, an e-mail, an instant message or some other distraction. The question is that, for the brain to start to be creative, it needs a minimum of eight minutes of uninterrupted work.
This is the paradox of modern life: new technologies enable us to do several tasks at the same time and so, more often than not, they have reduced productivity.
Although workers are beginning to be aware of this, it doesn’t look as if they can solve it. A study by Hewlett-Packard pointed out that 62% of British adults are addicted to electronic mail and consult their accounts at meetings, after working hours and during their holidays.
Some companies have decided that it is time to put an end to all this. The marketing department of Veritas Software, for example, brought in “email-free Fridays” last year. They decided that nobody in that department would send each other mails. As a result, the quantity of messages they got in their mail-boxes on that day was cut in half.
Apart from initiatives like this, software can (paradoxically) be a solution. It can, say, allow the worker to receive messages from his or her boss or family. It can also help to manage the time devoted to each project and only filter those communications connected with that project.
Sources at Microsoft – the developer of applications that in fact cause interruptions, such as new message alerts – assert that the new version of Office, called 12, will provide some tools to deal with them. Meanwhile, IBM is looking for better ways to manage scheduling in the next version of Lotus Workplace.

Article in News.com
HP Press Release