Yesterday, I watched with interest some of the sessions at Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live.  Telco 2.0 run conferences on telcos business models, and their analsysts have a lot of great ideas; their Best Practice Live is a virtual conference, held online, and I think it's the first time that they've done this.

I enjoyed Dean Bubley talking about "Happy Pipers", which is a term a only heard for the first time a few weeks ago.  The concept of a "Happy Piper" is basically a telco that embraces the opportunity of mobile broadband, having found a strategy to provide connectivity but without being trapped in a cycle of falling prices and being a flat-rate, commodity bitpipe.  What Dean (and Telco 2.0) are saying is that there is a good business to be had there, and it's a question of correct execution to avoid being a "dumb pipe".  [ By the way, Dean remarked that whoever coined the term "dumb pipe" is responsible for countless millions being wiped off the value of cellcos, and I think that this must be true ].

Telco 2.0 have created a number of strategies for happy pipers. I won't list them all here: it wouldn't be fair as none of them is my idea, but I do encourage you to check out Telco 2.0's own website and conferences if this topic interests you.  One strategy was called "Comes With Data", and the idea was that an e-book (like the Amazon Kindle) could come with data included.  In other words, the e-book customer would get some pre-arranged data allowance for downloading some books, without having arranged this themselves with the telco.  This seems like a pretty neat idea to me, as any deal that includes the necessary connectivity while freeing the end-user of the fear of high charges, seems likely to be successful. 

I'm a big enthusiast for location technology on phones, but some of these platforms like Foursquare, Gowalla and Google Latitude could be fiercely expensive if you used them while roaming away from your home country.  Apply a "Comes With Data" strategy here, and again could you free the user from these troubles, while creating a new and valuable service?  For example, location-informed search, or mobile marketing with location.  When you're away from home in a strange city, this is when you can imagine these services being of more value to the customer.

Take-up of data plans is a pretty low percentage among mobile users.  Ideas like this could bring more customers on-board and create new data opportunities.