Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Embarq needs new ideas; you too.

KansasCity.com has the headline: "Hesse says new services to determine Embarq’s future"

Seems pretty obvious to me. Same old, same old, will not work well any more. Cable is in a bloody fight with telco and DBS. Telco is in a battle with CLEC's and ISP's. Mainly it's Wall St. Growth must continue. Revenue must go up. Kind of hard in flat markets like TV, phone and Internet.

The prevailing thought about the next generation of consumers is that they won't have landlines or use a PC -- it will be devices, handsets, VoIP, cellular, and mobile.

Embarq, the nation’s fourth largest local telephone company, continues to see the telephone lines at the heart of its business erode and produce declining sales. In the third quarter, for example, sales from Embarq’s voice business dropped by 5 percent.... His company has a strategy to overcome these trends with a series of new services... For one, Embarq sells its own brand of wireless service that is closely tied to the home phones of its customers. It recently rolled out a service that uses an automated computer system to translate text messages sent on a cell phone so they can be received on a landline phone.... Embarq, which is increasingly is depending on its growing high-speed Internet business, now has a branded Web-page portal with the potential to produce online advertising and search sales.

Read the comments on this article. Apparently, layoffs -- the first salvo of the creatively challenged telco exec - has reduced morale to zero. And Hesse made $5M while laying off and losing 5% of the business. Nice.

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