T-Mobile, with Duea’s help and energy, is aiming to change that.

It seems to be working. In recent days, T-Mobile – obviously with the mega AT&T merger still hanging over it – has nonetheless managed some moves that definitely fall outside the norm. Examples include its Bobsled VoIP service, which offers free calling and messaging on other networks (CP: Bobsled app lets T-Mobile cozy up to iPhone, iPad users); and a $30 per month, data-centric mobile plan it is offering via Wal-Mart (CP: T-Mobile and Walmart announce 4G no-contract offer).

Duea, in charge of the app, wholesale and device teams that drive many of these innovations, noted that the industry is entering a third wave in how they view carriers – and how carriers ought to view themselves. A few years ago (not even that long ago, to be honest), the carrier “walled garden” ruled the day. In the past few years, more open devices and app ecosystems have come into vogue, carriers be damned (or at least routed around).

Today, yet another “shift” is happening and “it is forcing carriers to use new muscles and do things differently.” At issue: the fact that app stores are today crowded with hundreds of thousands of applications, with the customer experience (especially outside of early adopters) suffering as a result. In response, the mobile ecosystem is starting to ask how mobile operators can help sort through the mess. “It’s been fascinating being inside a carrier” as this change has taken place, Duea said.

The answer for an upstart like T-Mobile has been to adopt the agile development and product creation approaches of the Internet industry, Duea said. That means two-week development cycle and trying out new features in the marketplace, rather than in the lab – versus typical telco development cycles that can span months if not years and run through, at times, multiple “waterfall reviews.”

“We figured out a way to go around” such heavy processes, Duea said, focusing on working with partners and sending services over the top of its own network – and the networks of others. That’s not to say Duea’s team ignores telco assets. For instance, T-Mobile is one of the first operators out the door with a strong carrier billing play, an approach that Duea described as “one click to the bill.”

What do we mean? For starters, the Bionic seems to be a pretty slick device in its own right: Dual-core, big screen, even a (Atrix-like) laptop dock. Reviews on the gadget sites seem a bit mixed – they are already looking at next generation devices, like the Samsung Droid Prime. But for users looking for the next hot new device right now, the Bionic could be a draw (even against the iPhone).

But the appearance of the Bionic also starts to give Verizon a nice portfolio of LTE smartphone devices, including the Droid Charge and the HTC Thunderbolt.  More phone choices on Verizon’s LTE network could be the tipping point for moving the average consumer off its 3G network (where there are a wider variety of devices) and onto 4G.

Here’s a quick look at the Bionic, courtesy of Engadget. And look for CP’s Kevin Fitchard to look at its capabilities as a media hub later this morning…

According to Diane Meyers, IMS lead at Infonetics, several key drivers account for that growth (documented in two reports: IMS Equipment and Subscribers and Service Provider VoIP Equipment and Subscribers), including:

- Large service providers in China and Europe (and a broad swath of U.S. carriers too) undertaking significant class 5 switch replacement projects – out with digital switches and in with IP softswitches, media gateways and the like.

- New subscribers being added to existing IMS networks, including growing VoIP wireline deployments

- IMS infrastructure deployments supporting today’s mostly data-only LTE networks, with plans to deploy more IMS elements to support voice over LTE in 2012 and beyond

Given the mixed focus on supporting both Class 5 replacement and VoLTE deployments, the IMS market is likely to still be a hard-to-peg market for some time to come.

Carriers certainly face end-of-life concerns with their old voice switches, but the timing of those swap-outs will continue to depend on macro-economic conditions and the ongoing evolution of customer cord-cutting behaviors.

Meanwhile on the LTE side, it seems unlikely that anything will slow that juggernaut. Still, carriers face a slew of architecture decisions – including when to move voice to IP on their wireless networks and how to leverage small cells and mobile data offload – that will impact exactly when they roll various IMS network elements into their networks.

Strikers reportedly chanted “What’s disgusting? Union busting” and held a candlelight vigil. Police reportedly said the event occurred peacefully.

McAdams most likely is one of the five top executives, whose combined pay has been more than $250 million over the past 4 years, has been a rallying point for the strikers (CP: Verizon unions could face tough sell on their demands).

And although Ivan Seidenberg has stepped down from the CEO position and is now Verizon’s chairman of the board, he has not been able to avoid strikers’ wrath either. Verizon strikers held a protest outside his suburban New York home when the strike started nearly two weeks ago.

“Digital Innovators” who work for non-government or non-profit organizations are invited to submit ideas for ways in which ICT could help further environmental sustainability, eliminate poverty, or improve access to health care and education or digital accessibility. In addition, young people age 18 to 25 with creative ideas developed independently of any project with a current employer are invited to enter a “Young Innovators” category.

Three winners in each category will get a trip to Geneva to attend ITU Telecom World 2011 and share a cash prize to help “realize their digital dreams.”

If you’re too old or don’t work for the right type of employer, there’s also an opportunity for large enterprises or citizens whose connected project made a real difference to their community to tell their stories online through short films. The most popular stories, as voted for and commented on by ITU Telecom’s “global constituencies” will be “fed into” ITU Telecom World 2011. Materials can be uploaded at http://world2011.itu.int/get-involved

The deadline for submissions to the Digital Innovators or Young Innovators competitions is September 15.

Connected Planet has covered various efforts to use ICT to relieve poverty, improve access to healthcare and education, and make a difference in a community. And we’re looking forward to seeing any new ideas that come out of the ITU competitions or from the video project. Perhaps some of the people we’ve written about would even be interested in submitting videos or, if applicable, entering one of the competitions.

Quick hit:

Most of the patent uproar lately has been around mobile patents — including the Nortel patent cache sell-off and even Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility. ActiveVideo’s patent claims cover interactive applications and video-on-demand functionality on TV platforms. It’s a dispute worth watching in today’s litigious times.

More from Broadband Reports…

Surely these are not people likely to forfeit the iPhone 5 for an Evo 3D.The survey additionally found Americans to these days be more willing to go a week without sex, a hot shower or wearing shoes — shoes! — than without their phones. And while smartphone owners were every instance more “dedicated” than feature phone owners, iPhone owners were the arguably the biggest nutters. While 22% of overall phone owners would rather give up their toothbrush for a week than their phones, among iPhone owners the figure rose to 40 percent. (Only 27% of Android owners would choose their phones over shoes, versus 43% of iPhone owners.)

More sadly — more than 1 in 5 smartphone owners said they’d rather go a week without seeing their significant other than give up their phone for the same time. Bad form, people!

But then, what do you expect from people who’ve ended a relationship using technology (18% of smartphone owners), check their phones at the movies (31% of smartphone owners and (more than a third of iPhone owners, versus 15% of BlackBerry owners) use their phone at the dinner table.

NetCracker, with the help of the TM Forum, surveyed 50 global service providers to get some answers. Among the raw results: 28 percent of service providers identified the need to reduce problem resolution times and 22.7 percent indicated that there is a need for increased self-service capabilities. Meanwhile, 45.5 percent acknowledged a need to provide intuitive and personalized offerings.

Those numbers point to three important components of customer experience management:

1. Business optimization, which translates into an acknowledged need to create an easy to use environment for customers, highlighted by integrated self service capabilities.  Now that the inertia around self care is disappearing – driven away by the rise of the app and the new energy around creating a personal experience – self care is the next logical step. Simplicity, however, will be critical to the success of this strategy.

2. Personalization. Again, with the customer now in the driving seat when it comes to personalization, service providers need to improve the use of analytics within their organizations, which is more than simply a technology issue. They also need to improve their product lifecycle management processes.

3. Data consistency across multiple touch points. As the industry learns the lesson that a new customer channel does not replace others, it simply adds to the list of channels, then it is important that a customer’s information can be accessed consistently across any channel.

Takeway: Customers demanding more personalized service and self-care channels would seem to be at variance with the other major telco aim of improving business operational efficiency.

Ironically this is not true.

Increased and better use of analytics, investment in self care portals and greater personalization go hand in hand with a greater control over the fundamental business processes of a modern telco.

Microsoft launched Office 365 yesterday, and Apple has opened its iCloud.com Web interface to developers.  Tech site 9 to 5 Mac, apparently giving the bird to Apple’s NDA, has posted a number of images of the beta site, which reportedly features a very iPad, iOS-like interface and includes a number of new Web apps, including Mail, Calendar and Contacts. There’s even a Find my iPhone Web app, underscoring how Apple — in way that neither Microsoft nor Google has or perhaps can — created a cloud solution that feels to be very much about users’ devices, not just their software. The more iOS-running devices you own, the more of a boon iCloud is likely to be (CP: With iCloud, Apple changes definition of ‘cloud’ to fit own needs).

There are reportedly no ads in iCloud (an area where Microsoft last week took a nice jab at Google for its related links-style text ads in Gmail) and pricing, Apple revealed, will be as follows:

• take up less than 5GB of storage and it’s on the house;

• add 10GB, for 15GB total, and it’s $20 a year;

• add 20GB, for a total of 25GB, and it’s $40 a year;

• add 50, for a 55GB total, and it’s $100 a year.

While Apple will have millions of consumers to court when it publicly launches the iCloud in the fall, Microsoft will more aggressively be going after the enterprise set — where it may face conflicting ideas between executives and IT professionals, according to a Marketing Solutions survey sponsored by Dell.

The survey found 57% of IT respondents to harbor fears about security in the cloud, 32% to be leery of industry compliance or governance issues, and 27% to harbor disaster recovery concerns — and they’re the ones more excited about the cloud.

More interestingly, the IT professionals were asked about their thoughts — and their perceptions of the thinking of the senior executives around them. For example, while 47% viewed the cloud as an “extension of long-term trends toward remote networks and virtualization,” only 26% thought their “business leaders” felt the same.

Just as personal smartphone use (hello, iPhone) prepared business professionals for mobile deployments (and in many cases increased their likelihood) perhaps the arrival of iCloud in homes will help to make off-duty executives more aware of and comfortable with the idea.

This could help to bridge what Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell services, calls a “lingering disconnect in expectations between IT professionals and senior business executives,” in order to “drive transparency and focus on business results and outcomes to help bridge that communications gap.”

How much its Kunming store in southwest China contributed to the iPhone’s 142% year-on-year growth is unclear. Not quite the knock-out its Shanghai store is, the Kunming location, complete with the latest devices, signage, employee name tags and signature architectural details is — completely unbeknownst to the store’s employees — a knock-off.

According to the lady of the house behind the Wordpress BirdAbroad blog who broke the story:

This was a total Apple store rip-off. A beautiful rip-off — a brilliant one — the best rip-off store we had ever seen (and we see them every day). But some things were just not right: the stairs were poorly made. The walls hadn’t been painted properly.

Apple never writes “Apple Store” on its signs — it just puts up the glowing, iconic fruit.

Whether the iPad 2 tablets and other devices on display were as fake as the store front and whether — fake storefront or not — they contributed to Apple’s bottom line, is anyone’s guess.

“I…may or may not have told them that we were two American Apple employees visiting China and checking out the local stores,” she continued. “Either way, they got friendlier and allowed me to snap some pictures.”

Photo courtesy of BirdAbroad