EU Caps Roaming Data Charges

STRASBOURG-In a welcome move from the European Parliament, it was announced yesterday that a law was adopted that will cut by up to 60 percent the price of using a mobile phone to send text messages or download data while outside a home state in the European Union.

Downloading data while roaming will cost a maximum of EUR1.0 per megabyte at the wholesale level compared with about EUR1.68 today. The BBC states that this cap will fall to EUR0.50 by July 2011. The same report adds that the current price cap of EUR0.46 per minute for an outgoing voice call will also fall to EUR0.43 in July, whilst the cap on voice calls received abroad will fall from EUR0.22 today to EUR0.19 in July and EUR0.11 by July 2011.

The caps on data roaming had already been approved by EU telecoms ministers in November last year. The initial proposals to cap data roaming charges were made by EU telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding. The BBC notes that the idea is not to fix an EU-wide price, but to set a cap below which telecoms firms can compete by offering lower prices while still earning a "reasonable" return.

Data roaming charges have been often cited as a barrier to growth in mobile VAS, such as mobile social networks and location based services, due to the prohibitive cost of accessing these services when beyond national European frontiers.

The regulatory move announced, together with the ongoing trend of cheaper, flat rate mobile data tariffs, will give a further boost to young players in the mobile space to extend their reach beyond their front yard.

European Entrepreneurship & Social Media @Plugg

BRUSSELS-The first couple of themes from Plugg this morning focused around European Entrepreneurship (and differences with US entrepreneurship) and Social Media.

Inma Martinez , founder of Stradbroke Advisors (and speaker at Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona last summer) marked out three categories of European Entrepreneurship: Clueless, Pirates and Super Bad.

The Clueless category includes entrepreneurs with great ideas but no idea as to how to market them (see Collaborative film making experiment Wreck A Movie and their great trailer www.ironsky.net), the Pirates include entrepreneurs not afraid to break the rules (PirateBay from Sweden was quoted) and the SuperBad includes those with cheeky ideas but not much more.

The key message? It is good to be cheeky and also European Entrepreneurs should focus on product and not on technical excellence.

Jo Caudron from ONE agency stated how the Web 2.0 era has now moved us from a model of media consumption of 'feeding fish to penguins' to a 'birds and the bees' model, where the bee is spreading the word and has the real power in the social environment.

He also emphasized how Web 2.0 companies can make money by understanding that they are dealing not merely with social media but all-encompassing social business, where the social element effectively permeates all parts of traditional business spheres.