SFR’s Click To Call: Integration in Facebook

During 4 months, one thousand clients of the french telco SFR volunteered to test a beta version of their application “Click To Call SFR”. The purpose of the application is to offer to SFR mobile clients who have a facebook account a C2C service from their facebook page. a typical use case is the following: Bob is my friend on facebook, so i navigate to his profile, and i click on the C2C box to initiate a Web2Phone communication with him. the main idea of the application is to offer a way to an SFR mobile client to be called without giving out his phone number.

 SFR has understood the potential of social networks to increase the ARPU and thus their revenue. Last year,I had the chance to work with them on their RCS application “Mon repretoire Live”, when they wanted to enrich it by social networks’ functionalities. Voxalot is a VoIP application provider who proposes also a C2C application on facebook.

Since I am an SFR client, i tested the application on facebook. The quality of the communication is not very good, but that depends on a lot of factors, especially the Internet connection of the caller. The ergonomy is to improve, and they have to negotiate with facebook how to be implemented in the profile page. because as it is, it wont be discovered easily by facebook users. it should be placed for example in the contact information. When someone calls you, your phone rings, but you cannot figure out who is calling! this is a major drawback, but its not easy to be resolved using the actual technology (IMS as a solution ?? :) ). Security problems also must be fully examined, as you dont wish to be called by a Internet bot!! An advantage of this application is the possibility of make easy low cost international calls (SFR competes then with low cost VoIP providers?). Finally i ask this question: is facebook the adapted social network for this feature? in facebook we might have a lot of contacts, but we dont wish that everybody just call us! unless we can set the privacy of the application in facebook. I think professional social networks are the ideal potential for the C2C application.

We have to wait to see if SFR will commercialize this application, and in under what offer?

Achraf

Mind Mapping (& a Resume Example)

Mind Mapping is a technique for representing ideas in a hierarchical way around a central point. This technique was made popular by the British psychologist Tony Buzan in the 70s. According to Tony, it is a way to represent ideas as they really exist in the human mind.

The concept of mind mapping is creating hierarchical branches out of ideas. For example we start by the main idea “music”, than we create several branches: “instruments”, “style”.. Then we break the “instruments” branch into “piano”, “clarinet”…

The most important rule is to use only keywords, and use colors for main branches. Images for representing ideas are also recommended. Tony says that taking notes using one color is mono – tone, equivalent to monotone, which mean boring and the brain will be sleeping. You can find many software on the net to help you create such mappings, but I think using paper increases the efficiency of the method, although using software you can have a lot of cool functionalities, like adding multimedia content, check-out boxes, links...

Great uses of mind mapping are taking notes, preparing a speech, a presentation, brainstorming, creating a summary, preparing a debate, representing complex hierarchical data… Although I think it is made for personal use, but you can always adapt it to be used as a collaborative and communication tool. Bref, I think it is a very useful, but not the only, tool for everybody.

A very helpful usage I found is for creating a book’s summary. It allows to better memorize the book’s content, and to faster access certain information in your head. In this usage, each chapter will be represented by a branch, and it is recommended to try to redraw the mind map once you finish reading the book, to anchor once for all its ideas.

I will finally expose my first usage of mind mapping with an evaluation version of Mind Manager 8.0 to create my resume. I found it a funny idea to try, but interestingly it made me discover more the keywords associated to my profile. How would a recruiter or an HR would appreciate such a version?! :)