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These are very valuable individuals, says Rees, because they tend to influence other community members with things they bring in from outside of the community.

CSPs have most often approached Idiro to fight churn. He says that high churn rates tend to have a strong viral component that can be diagnosed and treated. “By overlaying churn data on top of community data,” Rees says Idiro can determine “who’s likely to catch that churn virus.” Where churn is low, he says there’s “a basic rate you can’t address; 1.3 percent of people die every year.” Using that as a floor, companies with churn rates in the low two percent range aren’t having a viral churn problem.

This all sounds somewhat fanciful, but all of this information is buried in billing and customer data. A social network doesn’t have to be a page on a website. All of the numbers you’ve called, all of the people you email, or chat online with, or beg for extra whipped cream on your Frappucino make up your social network. This is how Idiro sees it. What Idiro can present to the service provider is the major piece of this social picture that’s enabled by communications services. As a SaaS offering, it can do so without disrupting business or IT operations with a major integration, implementation, or migration program.

Gangster Business
I’ve been in more than one briefing where it was explained to me that organized crime groups love telecom fraud because it is lucrative and minimally dangerous. At some point, someone told me that it was second only to drug trafficking as a revenue stream for mobsters. With many new services come many new opportunities for fraud and bad accounting.

Al Brisard, vice president of marketing and business development, for Vertek, calls for more layers of authentication to help screen

a complete experience across them all, there’s a lot of “real estate” to monetize. “They have a concentration of applications, services, and capabilities,” says Brisard, “90 percent of it will be delivered by third parties, so how do they leverage that real estate?” That real estate should help users to share, refer, try, rate and buy services. And it should allow operators to monetize all of the relationships inherent in those actions.

Tally Crunching
One of the questions I hear old-school types ask (you know, bankers who wear flashy blazers and chew on expensive cigars,) is “if so many people use this social media business, how come companies like Twitter don’t make a lot of money?” I think there is an answer to this question: Twitter, among others, doesn’t have a billing system. While I’m sure that somewhere in their plan, someone put in some kind of charging infrastructure or other, but I’m talking about a full blown, bill-for-anything, carrier-grade tally cruncher.

Twitter is a good example because people have many business uses for its technology. Rather than encouraging and monetizing these uses, Twitter shuts down the