By Debbie Fisher, Alcatel-Lucent.

As Marshall McLuhan popularized in his writings from the 1960’s, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), the world has been transformed by ICT – with instantaneous, ubiquitous access to information.  Change also spilled into social spheres as humans who moved from individualists to a collective identity, formed a new social organization which was called the Global Village.

Yet, what I find most interesting as I reflect on this notion and completion of my study of smart cities and the citizens who live there is the term McLuhan started to use later — the term Global Theater.  What’s the difference between people who are part of Global Village vs. a Global Theater?  It’s simple.  They change from consumer to producer, from acquisition to involvement.

This is the key I’ve highlighted in my global study of 4 smart cities:  Chattanooga TN in the USA, Zurich, Switzerland, King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, and Wuxi, China.  Cities around the globe are grappling with social, economic, and environmental challenges.  Also, city leaders, large and small enterprises, and private public partnerships are beginning to address these challenges in a way that respects local cultures and traditions.  But what we heard was that one voice was typically missing:  the voice of the citizen.

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By Ajay Pande, Director of Customer Experience Solutions Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent.

Customer satisfaction is vital for a mobile operator’s reputation as well as its profits. Happy customers make for good business especially when one support call has the potential to wipe out all profit from that subscriber for a month, eroding already razor thin margins.  And if that customer is unhappy with the experience and turns to social networking, the damage to the brand can be even more far-reaching.

As more people use their smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices to stream video, play games, and shop, customer care becomes an even hotter topic. With a proliferation of connected mobile devices using different operating systems– and its expected that by 2015 there will be 2.5 billion smartphone connections alone – together with a seemingly endless combination of apps – the margin for user, device and network error rises dramatically as does the potential number of customer care calls and even further revenue erosion.

Calling a helpdesk can be a frustrating task – figures show that 21%[1] of helpdesk calls take an hour to resolve – and that just isn’t good enough from a customer perspective.  Today’s customer care agents don’t have a unified view of the network, device and application. They have to trawl through 40-50 screens across different systems to get to the bottom of an issue – but knowing that doesn’t limit the customer’s frustration.

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By Marco Malfavon, Americas Communications, Alcatel-Lucent.

Being uprooted from their countries and having to deal with a unknown and a lot of times hostile environment is just the beginning of the struggle that many kids and young adults face as they become part of the ever growing flow of migrants looking for new life opportunities. In Barcelona, Spain, hundreds if not thousands of disadvantaged youngsters who should be attending school or working in stable jobs, are left with minimal opportunities due to their difficult socioeconomic conditions.

The Fundacion Adsis, with the support of Alcatel-Lucent, is working to help these disadvantaged youngsters go back to and stay in school, or acquire the basic skills to look for a viable job.  Since the launch of the “Youth with Future” program, close to 150 boys and girls have participated in group workshops and individual or tutoring sessions. For those participants who have not completed secondary studies, the focus is ensuring that they reinsert themselves in the educational system. Those searching for a job start with an individual assessment to determine their interests, motivation, and skills. The program includes computer training, skills development, job search techniques, interview workshops and others. The training is complemented by a series of group activities to foster self-esteem and social interactions.

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By Xavier Martin, VP Corporate Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise.

Last month, Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise activity hosted its annual global industry analyst conference. We welcomed more than 30 analysts to Annapolis, Maryland to spend a day and a half with us. We also invited a few of our partners and four of our key customers who qualified for the fifth annual Alcatel-Lucent Dynamic Enterprise Awards program. To read more details about what went on at the analyst event, please take a look at our Storify. For this post, I wanted to profile our customers. We were honored to have four customers from across the globe join us at our industry analyst conference, which has served as the platform for recognizing our Dynamic Enterprise customers over the past five years.

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By Nick Cadwgan, Carrier Wi-Fi Marketing Lead, Alcatel-Lucent

Wi-Fi® is hot right now and there’s no mistake that telecom operators are aggressively looking to make it a key component of their offerings.

Operators are turning their attention to Wi-Fi technologies for both a competitive advantage and revenue generation as part of their mobile broadband strategies. They are contemplating community Wi-Fi, venue coverage and extended hotspot strategies — each of which has unique business implications — to meet objectives. By integrating Wi-Fi with their cellular network, mobile and converged operators can provide subscribers with secure and trusted connectivity across Wi-Fi hotspots and cellular networks for a seamless mobile broadband experience.

This is such a hot topic that Light Reading has asked me to participate in a Webinar moderated by Heavy Reading’s Gabriel Brown on May 14th at 12 noon ET.

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