Having lived in 7 countries, I can confirm from first hand experience, there are differences in telecommunications habits between each country.
1. No one levels VoiceMail in India, China, Russia and Thailand (first hand experience).
2. I do not have a landline and have not had one for 5+ years. In India, it seems many people by-passed landline tech and went straight to mobile. Landlines are not offered in many parts of the country. A friend told me recently, his family got their first landline phone in the mid-1980's in the USSR as his father was an on-call surgeon. No one else had a phone in the apartment block. Later they got an answering machine.
3. In Thailand they have unusual data plans tied to social media use including the very popular Line and We chat Apps.
4. In Russia. Viber is the most popular chat app. I have received text messages in Viber from Government Service (Post Office) and my bank. People will call via Viber as a first preference and send Voice Messages via Viber too. Perhaps an opportunity for NOR.
"US, Canada, UK, Europe, Aus, NZ, South Africa etc... Perhaps there will be no world domination but big enough for NOR to make a good crust..."
Agree. But then we should adjust penetration rates to reflect the same. As you point out, it would make sense for an Optus customer to deploy NOR VM independently or for Optus to roll it out. So why haven't people installed VM? Lack of marketing? And if it was an add-on subscription via Optus, what penetration rates would we be looking at?
"MTS offer VVM. If an old article I read is still valid, they licence the tech from a company called Silent Communication.... why couldn't this be NOR? So even though VM is not popular in Russia/India -- My Question, is there still money to be made? MTS have over 106m customers surely some are using VM? 2% VM usage gives more users than Spark NZ."
From a 'chopsticks to China' metaphor perspective, there is money to be made with MTS. However:
1. NOR VM doesn't have Russian language capability. Why? What translation engine is NOR using? I doubt it is Google Translate which is used by Viber for example, otherwise I'd expect the language sets to be identical.
2. I can get unlimited data with MTS for $6/month. What would you expect Russians to pay for an add-on? This is where it would probably make more sense for NOR to sell to MTS to give for a free value-add to their customers.
3. As stated, I have Visual VoiceMail with MTS. But header only info; without transcription. It is free. Silent Communications is/was an Israeli company. The web site is down. The founder/CEO is with a new company. Although I looked at the web site via Internet Time Machine. All articles re: "Silent VVM" are from 2010 and 2011. Except the following:
(20min delay)