By Jem Janik, Enterprise community manager, Alcatel-Lucent

Not so long ago, Engage, the Alcatel-Lucent employee social network and collaboration platform, celebrated its third birthday. With more than 25,000 members actively interacting each month, Engage has been a big enough success that it’s been the subject of external articles, and often those of us who helped launch it will go out and speak about what aspects contributed to that success. Hindsight is still 20/20 and what it takes to successfully launch an enterprise 2.0 community is fairly well-known now.  Today I want to tell you what I suspect you really want to know about.  As the enterprise community manager for Engage, after three years in, what are the top 5 things I wish we (and I mostly mean me) could do over?

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By Patrick Tan, General Manager, Network Intelligence, Alcatel-Lucent

In this installement of Analytics Beat using our 9900 WNG network analytics platform, our focus turns to comparing LTE and 3G usage trends in the video category.  Consumers love Internet video across all screen types: Americans watched a total of 33 billion videos in February 2013, with YouTube reaching 1 billion unique users per month in March 2013, Facebook raking up an all-time high of 558 million videos watched and subscription-based video provider Netflix’s appeared on comScore’s top 50 US Web Properties with 28 millions visitors monthly watching episodes and movies.  And OTT players are monetizing this trend, generating 9.9 billion advertisements monthly.  So, how do these multi-screen numbers translate to mobile-only usage?

Video trends on mobile networks

As reported in our previous Analytics blog post, video monopolizes the highest traffic share of all applications categories in mobile data networks. In North American LTE networks, video generates 35% of all daily traffic volume.  The top three video applications in LTE are YouTube (19 %), followed by video downloads (6.3 %) and Netflix (4.1 %).

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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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