Karan’s in charge of growing the content side of Celcom’s offering. The appearance of 3G and the related demand for content makes his position all the more important. The MW team catches up with him and gets his views on 3G.

Oon Yeoh

Q: What do you do at Celcom?
I am responsible for product management and development of all new value added services and products. It is an exciting area to be in, and my portfolio encompasses quite a number of technologies, ranging from multimedia, such as Internet Access and web/WAP technologies, through to Messaging (SMS, MMS and IM) and finally to voice and video products. It’s a great synthesis of my background, which is from the data and Internet world, with my academic background, which was in wireless engineering. So in many ways, it’s getting to do stuff that has really interested me throughout my career.

Q: How did you first get started getting in the telco industry?
Serendipity! After Stanford, I really was looking at working with technology that had relevance to the ways people did things. So I ended up working for HP in a variety of countries developing software and hardware systems for wireless products. Anyway, there was this call from a friend of mine saying that there was a US-WEST joint venture start up called Binariang that was looking for technical managers who were keen on starting up a telco. So I ended up, in early 1995, working for what became known as Maxis.

Q: What attracts you about this industry?
In many ways, this is an industry where you have to become a fresh grad every few years or so. I still remember my first lecturer at Stanford who said “Everything I teach you will be out of date when you graduate…It is more important to understand how to tell the difference between what’s important and what is not.” In many ways, the older I become the more true that statement is in our industry, and the more valuable the lesson becomes.


Q: What’s so exciting about 3G?
I think we have to look beyond the straitjacket of pinning terms to technology and look at the underlying trends that can be discerned.

In some ways, this thing that we call 3G says so much more about how society is evolving (just witness the fact that in the early 90’s hardly anyone had a mobile phone) and how powerful technology is in changing the way people behave.
The most exciting thing about this is that we now have the ability to take what was one of the most significant revolutions in human behaviour (the Internet) and apply it to a mobile context. This is going to make a lot of change to the way we carry out many common place taskes.

Q: How do telcos differentiate themselves?
I would take a look at the brief history of the Internet to provide some pointers. No one had even conceived of the need for say, Google. When it came, there was an inflexion point. Much of the same phenomenon is happening, albeit at a smaller fundamental scale, in the telco world. I can tell you that whoever wins, it will be because they were able to catch and understand the psychographics of the consumer earlier than the others.

Q: What type of content works on 3G?
Sometimes it’s a sad statement on the state of the world that so many people are willing to pay so much, for so little. I think our experience has been that some of the content that we thought would be required, like the branded channels, have proven to be disappointing, and some content that was in many ways low budget, have proven to be a hit. Many factors, like the homogeneity (culturally, demographically) of the market go into determine what works, so what’s a hit in Korea may not be one here. I think the concept of the long tail, where you have to aggregate many minor hits, has some resonance.