Joyn (let’s just call it that, given it’s the brand name) lets customers IM each other and ‘enrich’ voice calls by tossing each other videos and files mid-conversation. It’s operator-agnostic, in the sense that you only need to be on an operator that offers it, regardless of the country, and Spain’s the first country in the world where the biggest operators all offer it.

Vodafone Germany also has it, as will Deutsche Telekom from December. In the U.S., MetroPCS has also introduced Joyn.

The GSMA says VoIP and IP video-calling is on the horizon too, as a function of Joyn. Here’s some marketing from GSMA chief marketing officer Michael O’Hara:

“This initial implementation of a new technology clearly required a major effort and strong leadership in the alignment of the ecosystem of manufacturers, developers and integrators, and operators. Consumers across the world will benefit from the leading efforts of these three operators in Spain.”

Still struggling to envision what sort of thing we’re talking about? Here’s a perky video that demonstrates the file-sharing capabilities of Joyn:

All this is based on the same embedded-deep-in-the-network IMS architecture as Voice over LTE. You need a special Android app to use it at the moment, although there should soon be ‘Joyn-embedded’ devices coming onto the market in early 2013. As it’s IP-based, of course, you can use Joyn services through the cellular network or through Wi-Fi.

Those Joyn-embedded handsets have to undergo rigorous interoperability testing and, once they’ve passed, you will know them by the bright yellow Joyn logo that shows up when you power the handset on. The same logo will be displayed next to contacts’ names in your phonebook

Why?

In case you can’t already tell, all this represents a severely major effort on the part of the carrier industry to get its act together. Why? Because the operators want to stay relevant.

The question is, are they already too late?

The last year or two has seen all sorts of seemingly self-defeating apps come out of major carriers – T-Mobile USA’s Bobsled, Telefonica’s Tu Me and, most recently, Orange’s Libon. These apps all offer free voice and messaging, and they offer it to any customer of any network.

In every one of these cases, the aim has been to stop customers thinking of services like WhatsApp and start remembering their operator again. The carriers have belatedly woken up to the fact that their customers increasingly think of them as flat-rate data providers, and that scares the living daylights out of them. There’s no differentiation anymore.

Now, the industry may just be pulling itself together. That fact alone betrays their desperation – it’s not like some players haven’t tried this sort of thing before (for a stunningly downbeat assessment of IMS’s chances a couple of years back, check out this 2010 post from Disruptive Analysis’s Dean Bubley).

The fundamental problem is that users already have these services. People are already invested in WhatsApp and Skype. The operators are now counting on Joyn becoming so ubiquitous that late adopters pick it up en masse, and it becomes a new standard in terms of usage as well as installation.

Do they themselves believe in it? Maybe. One might even look at Tu Me, Bobsled and Libon and see these ‘over-the-top’ services as a sign that the operators launching them don’t really have faith that Joyn will take off.

This is not to say that Joyn won’t be a success. These are huge companies we’re talking about, and if they manage to keep their my-enemy’s-enemy alliance together, they’ve got a lot of clout. But, in the worst-case scenario (for them), we’re looking at a last gasp.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Report: The Rise of Mobile Health Apps
• Where new opportunity lies in the mobile operating system space

Launched on Tuesday, the service’s virtual servers are optimized for mobile, enterprise and M2M applications. The infrastructure-as-a-service offering is the first product that Telefónica is selling to companies over the internet on a global basis, although the firm is already pushing its TU Me comms app directly to consumers.

“With the launch of Instant Servers Telefónica Digital seeks to meet the needs of thousands of businesses that require a cloud services platform that is easily scalable, with low latency and totally trustworthy, enabling them not only to rapidly respond to their own needs, but also to the expectations of their customers,” Telefónica Digital cloud and M2M chief Carlos Morales said in a statement.

Both of the Instant Servers datacenters at launch are in the European Union – one in Madrid, the other in London. They are, of course, plugged into Telefónica’s own global fiber network, as will the other datacenters be when they go online elsewhere in Europe and Latin America.

So what’s the advantage over Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud?

It’s supposedly more reliable, for one thing. According to Telefónica, Instant Servers comes with a service-level agreement (SLA) promising 99.996 percent availability, compared to EC2′s 99.95 percent.

The telco claims that its virtual servers will be able to scale instantly by 400 percent if needed. Instant Servers also uses the ZFS file system and volume manager, which is supposed to guarantee 100 percent data resiliency.

Then there’s the optimization angle. Although there’s a bit of rebadging going on here – Instant Servers is based on Joyent‘s infrastructure – it makes complete sense for a telco to be offering virtual servers that are primed for mobile and M2M services. Particularly services that are hooked up to Telefónica’s network.

Also, as with other big carriers such as Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica is trying to find revenue streams beyond its declining voice offerings – a lot of that involves cosying up to promising app providers, and Instant Servers may provide an extra hook there.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• Emerging trends in the non-relational database market
• Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud

But, although the service sees no problem heading to emerging young markets, high costs will keep it out of Germany for the foreseeable future.

“We’re about to launch in France, Spain and Italy,” international VP Nic Jones told Informa Telecom & Media’s Industry Outlook 2013 conference on Tuesday.

“The one missing country is Germany. Germany is very, very hard to gain digital rights to be able to build a digital business.”

License rates required of digital services by royalty collectors are still relatively high in the country.

“They (rightsholders) genuinely believe they are protecting the music industry,” Jones said. “They need to embrace the future without being so scared of it.”

Jointly owned by Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Abu Dhabi Media Company, Vevo has so far launched in six countries, including Brazil. Whilst that choice might raise some eyebrows, the territory is growing up fast.

Jones said Vevo aims to launch in countries where people are most passionate about live music: “Actually, there is a market to monetize premium videos in Brazil – and Mexico, too.”

Such expansion will see mobile become Vevo’s primary distribution device.

“UK growth is far greater than on mobile than anything else,” Jones said. “Asia s a bit down the track for us. But we don’t see Vevo as a desktop proposition

“We are talking with various potential partners in India, where Indians many will only ever see the internet as a mobile proposition.

“Eastern Europe is going to be a high priority for us next year- places like Russia are incredibly important.”

But, as mobile becomes the majority, free content operators are posed with a challenge – advertising models are playing catch-up.

“Monetising mobile is much more hard,” Vevo VP Jones told Informa Telecoms & Media’s conference.

“The formats aren’t clear yet. The idea from agencies that mobile should be treated separately is a mistake. There is a view that mobile should be sold at a lower CPM. Most advertisers buying VOD are thinking about the laptop or the PC.

“There is a very big job to educate the advertisers and agencies. Not to educate the users – they are naturally emanating toward mobile.”

The challenge of emerging markets being mobile-first is one recognised by others like Facebook, which conceded in its IPO filing that it is increasingly well used in developing countries on handsets, where its business model is virginal.

But what Jones was also speaking to was a growing grumble I am hearing, from content services, that – even in the west – mobile advertising effectiveness just isn’t yet cutting it.

Jones speculated that Vevo may float on the market “one day”. And he said, in future, it would innovate around presenting live music gigs. He cited an example of a Led Zepplin concert which attracted two million applications for 20,000 tickets as proving there is a ready audience of people to pay for online gig streams.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• How to manage mobile expenses in a BYOD world
• One year later: Fukushima and the Japan cleantech opportunity

An example emerged this week in a partnership between two of the largest carrier groups in the world: Telefónica and Telenor. Telenor is shoehorning its own network APIs into Telefónica’s BlueVia developer program, which presents developers with a potential audience of nearly 400 million customers.

The two operators aren’t creating a new operating system or runtime environment. Instead they’re starting out small, exposing a mobile billing API that works the same way across all of their dozens of individual carrier properties around the world. That means developers can design smartphone, feature phone and even mobile web apps, but they can all tap into a single unified interface for charging in-app purchases to the customer’s bill.

It doesn’t solve the problem of developers building once and deploying all over the world, but 400 million customers is nothing to scoff at. We’ve seen other operator collaborations in Europe though not to this scale. The three largest French carriers have formed a program called YouConnect using Alcatel-Lucent technology that allows them to expose a single unified API for subscriber data to m-commerce app developers.

Like the French operators, Telefónica is bringing outside help to cement these disparate APIs together. Last year, it signed a deal with mobile payments provider Boku to handle the back-end integration across its different properties. That probably explains why carrier billing is the first API to have a big impact for BlueVia, with Google, Facebook, Microsoft and RIM already tapping into it.

Telefónica said it would expose more BlueVia APIs shortly, though it didn’t identify which ones. In addition, Telefónica extended an open invitation to carriers around the world to join it in Telenor in building its common API platform. It’s still far too early to tell, but maybe Telefónica can accomplish what the WAC couldn’t.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user John Picken

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter

It’s stuffed with factoids that may well induce depression. For example, not only were most of Europe’s biggest companies were built out of the industrial revolution but in fact continental Europe has produced just one of the world’s top 500 companies over the last 30 years (California alone, by comparison, has produced 26).

Europe produces plenty of corner shops, hairdressers and so on. What it doesn’t produce enough of is innovative companies that grow quickly and end up big. In 2003, analysing Europe’s entrepreneurial gap, the European Commission cited a study which showed that during the 1990s, 19% of mid-sized firms in America were classified as fast-growers, compared with an average of just 4% in six European Union countries.

[…]

If Europe were more entrepreneurial, says everyone from the commission down, it would not have been such a poor producer of big businesses. And it would have produced more successful new technology firms. Entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be channelled through the tubes of the internet, but over the past few decades a great deal of it has been. That an economy so copiously provided with the technically educated as Germany’s has not produced a single globally important business-to-consumer internet company suggests a big problem with entrepreneurship.

So why exactly are things so dismal?

The article identifies a set of familiar problems: Europe suffers from a lack of risk-taking; its entrepreneurs have an inability to access larger funding rounds; there are more restrictive labor laws.

But it also identifies a few bright spots, such as the fact that governments are actually starting to take a more active — and actually helpful — role in promoting startups.

Go, read!

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past
• 11 steps for scaling a startup
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity

It owes a big part of its success there to operator partner Softbank Mobile, one of Japan’s largest carriers with 25 million subscribers. Softbank gives every customer who buys a smartphone or tablet a Wi-Fi router, which Fon calls a Fonera, and automatically configures all of its devices to access Fon’s network. Considering Softbank for years was the only carrier in Japan to sell the iPhone, you can imagine how considerable that traffic is. Fon was originally launched to connect laptops, but today in Japan 80 percent of its traffic comes from either the iPhone or iPad.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, Fon was born in 2006 with the aim of building the world’s first global community Wi-Fi network. Fon members, or Foneros, buy a Wi-Fi access point or router that hosts both a private network for the user’s home or office and a public network. Members get free and automatic access to all other Fon access points, and Fon sells access to non-members via subscriptions or day passes.

Fon was a pretty revolutionary idea when it launched, and consequently it attracted some impressive investors – Google, Skype and Sequoia Capital all invested in the beginning, and later Skype co-founder Nikas Zennström’s Atomico and British Telecom signed up for a piece of the action. Fon didn’t exactly take off for the clouds though. Its business model depended on selling hardware to customers, which made viral growth difficult. It competes against the likes of Linksys and NetGear on store shelves. While it offers a community network those two companies don’t, the value of that network depends on reaching a critical mass of members, which it failed to achieve.

In May, Fon announced it had 6 million access points in 100 countries, which may sound like an awful lot. But to put that in perspective, in April, French telco Iliad launched a community Wi-Fi network with 4 million access points with a mere flip of a switch – that’s in a single country. When you’re talking on a global scale, 6 million access points is paltry. The biggest complaint I have heard from Fon users is they can never find a Fonera to connect to.

There are signs, though, that Fon’s fortunes are changing, in large part due to the smartphone explosion and carriers’ new willingness to use Wi-Fi to relieve their congested mobile broadband networks. Nowhere is that more evident than in Japan. According to Fon, Softbank has cut its 3G mobile data traffic in half during peak hours by offloading that traffic onto Fon routers.

Fon’s network density in Tokyo neighborhoods

Since Softbank has every interest in making Fon’s network as big as possible, it distributes Fon’s routers to all of its customers for free, which solves the critical mass problem. In the U.K., BT has uploaded software into its home routers that turn them into “soft” Foneras.

Those carrier deals are starting to drive a growth spurt for the company. Fon says it’s adding 1 million members every three to four months. The typical smartphone user redirects 500 MB to 1 GB — depending on the country — over Fon’s networks and connects on average once very 36 hours. Those are some mighty tempting figures to an operator looking for ways to conserve 3G and 4G capacity.

Japan is by far Fon’s most successful market, but Fon could easily repeat that success in other countries if it finds the right partner. My bet is that Fon is eyeing France, which is embroiled in a vicious price war sparked by Iliad’s Free. All of France’s big three are looking to Wi-Fi as a means of combating Free’s ultra-cheap voice and data plans. Bouygues recently signed a deal with Devicescape to gain access to its virtual hotspot network. Orange is leaning on its public Wi-Fi hotspots. And, of course, SFR has contracted with Fon.

Update: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Softbank was the only carrier in Japan to offer the iPhone. Softbank lost its exclusivity in October when KDDI began offering the iPhone 4S over its CDMA networks.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• How to deliver the next-generation web experience

Roku’s 4.8 firmware, which started rolling out Thursday, comes with an interesting new feature. From the announcement blog post:

“Expanded language support, adding Spanish and German to the user interface (To change your language, just go to Settings from the Roku home screen.)”

Roku previously only supported English and French. We reported earlier this week that Roku’s website contained traces of an expansion to Spain and Germany. A company spokesperson didn’t want to comment on its plans for continental Europe at the time, but Roku definitely took notice: The revealing HTML code snippets have since disappeared.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Smart TV forecast: gigabit Wi-Fi in the living room
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Connected consumer third-quarter 2012

Asked about its plans for continental Europe, a Roku spokesperson simply told me this morning that the company hasn’t made any announcements about further international expansion. But that didn’t stop the company’s web developers from adding Germany and Spain to the site’s source code:

Roku started out only serving customers in the U.S., but the company expanded to the U.K. and Ireland in January, and to Canada in April. In both cases, it went to market only after Netflix had launched a local service. The U.K. and Ireland launch actually happened two days after the video subscription service opened its doors in these countries.

And Roku has emphasized in the past how important Netflix is to its business, even blaming its own lower-than-expected sales last year on Netflix’s stumbles. In other words, it would make sense for Roku to tie its further international expansion to Netflix.

The video service, on the other hand, put its international ambitions on ice last year in the wake of its domestic struggles. But as things are picking up in the U.S. again, Netflix is now looking to further expand internationally. A spokesperson told me today via email that Netflix will expand to another international market in Q4 of this year, but that further details haven’t been announced yet.

That announcement could be made as early as later this month, when Netflix will share its Q2 earnings. The company initially forecasted a seasonally weak second quarter, but a recent streaming record may point towards better-than-expected results.

Where will Netflix go next? It’s definitely testing subtitles in many different languages.

Netflix has in the past been gone to great lengths to obfuscate its international expansion plans. A job offer posted last year looked for translators in a dozen languages, including German and Spanish, but also Hindi, Turkish and Russian. And in recent weeks, subtitles in languages like Chinese, French, German and Zapotec have popped up on the site.

Of course, it’s also possible that Roku could tie its further international plans to other partners, like Amazon’s Lovefilm or even Hulu to make itself less dependent on Netflix. Late last year, rumors intensified that Hulu is looking to launch in Germany.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Connected consumer third-quarter 2012

In an announcement in London on Thursday, the Spanish company, faced with turmoil in its core markets and witnessing turbulence in mobile sales all over Europe, seems to be pinning its future on its internet-focused arm, Telefónica Digital.

Digital CEO Matthew Key (previously head of Telefónica’s U.K. network, O2) suggested the company’s future may lay in a range of offerings that go well beyond mere mobile services — including cloud computing and the Internet of Things.

If it does it right, said Key, the division could drive up to €5 billion ($6.2 billion) in revenue by 2015, double its current size. That’s still only around 10 percent of the entire company’s business, but it could prove significantly more valuable than the fickle mobile market.

So what are they actually talking about?

Here’s a basic outline of what it’s up to:

More billing from your phone

A series of global agreements with technology and internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and RIM, mean that Telefonica customers will now be able to use direct billing to buy goods and services. That gives people the chance to purchase items inside a Facebook game, or apps on Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry without ever having to set up a billing service with those individual companies.

Telefonica made its aim here particularly clear, mentioning the fact that 60 percent of customers in South America (where the company is particularly strong) don’t have a bank account — but they do have a phone.

More support for Mozilla

In an attempt to unshackle its fortunes from systems like Android and iOS that it can exert very little control over, the company has already worked with Mozilla on its Firefox OS (formerly known as Boot 2 Gecko). That collaboration will continue, and Telefonica plans to launch its first devices running the system next year.

Global expansion and partnerships

As Western markets reach saturation and struggle with the fact that their growth in the past has been built in large part on flimsy economic structures, Telefónica Digital sees great value in younger, expanding markets like Brazil and the Middle East. To capitalize on those regions it will be working with Etisalat, the telco based in the United Arab Emirates, to partner on a number of initiatives including machine-to-machine networking. At the same time it said it plans to pump millions into Brazil’s digital advertising market to help it expand rapidly.

So will the company succeed? Telefónica boss Cesar Alierta admitted to Businessweek that “the forecast for digital isn’t easy” but it’s also a matter of evolution not revolution: the company is not claiming any of these individual areas will be slam dunks, but will grow above market rates over the next few years.

And let’s be honest, the company has got little to lose by pushing harder in digital: over the last year it saw profits drop by an astonishing 47 percent. Whatever it can find to plug the hole will surely be welcome.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• The new IT manager, part 1

One day after Philipp Humm’s surprise resignation from T-Mobile, Vodafone announced he has joined its ranks. Humm won’t just be supervising one of Vodafone’s numerous European subsidiaries – he will take charge of eight of them: Germany; the UK; the Netherlands, Turkey, Ireland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania.

That explains Humm’s sudden departure. T-Mobile USA’s parent company Deutsche Telekom is one of Vodafone’s biggest competitors. In fact, by running Vodafone Germany Humm will be going head-to-head with T-Mobile Germany, the DT subsidiary he once led.

Vodafone announced the appointment as part of a larger European reorganization. Vodafone is splitting the continent into two operating regions. Italy CEO Paolo Bertoluzzo will run the second region which encompasses southern Europe and includes Vodafone’s carriers in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Albania, and Malta.

The move is definitely a step up for Humm. While T-Mobile USA is a huge operator by European standards, it’s the smallest of the U.S. Big 4 by far. In several of the countries Humm will be supervising, Vodafone’s carriers are the No. 1 and No. 2 players. He no longer has to assume the role of the scrappy challenger.

Humm won’t assume his new Vodafone mantle until Oct. 1, which is the day after his contract with Deutsche Telekom officially ends. It’s now pretty clear Humm isn’t being punished for his role in the AT&T-Mo debacle. Quite the opposite, he’s being rewarded with an even more important job (albeit by a different company).

That leaves T-Mobile in a bit of turmoil. It needs to scramble to find a permanent CEO while in the process of overhauling its network, launching LTE and executing its new “challenger strategy.” As I wrote yesterday though, the last thing a new T-Mobile CEO should do is try to ‘shake up’ the company, as new chiefs are wont to do. Humm and team had put together a compelling plan to take on T-Mobile’s larger rivals, and whomever winds up running T-Mo should give it a chance to work

Image courtesy of Flickr user LGEPR

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro