" ITREALMS: MEF gets new board for EMEA

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

MEF gets new board for EMEA

THE Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) at the weekend elected new board members for its Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), at a meeting held as part of the just concluded 2008 World Mobile Congress (WMC) in Barcelona, Spain.

At a general meeting on Monday, February in Barcelona, members of MEF elected a six-man board of trustees to manage its affairs.

They include Messrs Alberto Ciarniello of Telecom Italia Mobile, Thomas Current of Publicis, Ian Henderson of SonyBMG, Emma Kaye of Gate 7, Berna Samiloglu Acar of Turkcell and Raghu Venkataraman of du.

The expanded geographical coverage of the board reflected the chapter’s extended remit, which now includes the Middle East and Africa for the first time.

While Mr. Gerard Grech of Orange and Gerrit-Jan Konijnenberg of Comsys were both re-elected as Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the board some new members came on board.

MEF took the opportunity at the meeting to acknowledge that, while the industry is poised for further growth, there is room for improvement in the areas of user experience, consumer trust and metrics. These three themes were highlighted at the EMEA general meeting.

A press statement made available to Champion Infotel informed that MEF’s regulatory work has been focusing on the consumer: the publication of the first industry-wide frameworks on participation TV, agreed in both the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States, represents a milestone in industry collaboration to retain consumer trust and safeguard the future of interactive TV.

Among other policy and regulatory activities, MEF has responded to several European consultations on the issue of protecting minors from inappropriate content.

According to the MEF’s 2007 survey only one in every four users in the US and UK were satisfied with their mobile content services and warned that revenues were at risk from a substandard experience.

The group said that the next step for MEF’s initiative on quality of experience is to identify areas of improvement and establish industry-wide key performance indicators (KPIs).

Content Sales Reporting, according to the group is a newly launched initiative aimed at improving the quality of reporting in the mobile entertainment industry, they said, is critical to cut down the estimated 10 per cent revenue leakage and to help foster new business models such as Ad-Funded Mobile Entertainment (AFME), where the advertising industry is calling for improved metrics.

A new MEF report on AFME, which was previewed at the meeting, contains statistics on the UK mobile entertainment market and revenue forecasts up to 2012.

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