Half of the board and nearly all of the management committee have been replaced and the 112-year old company has traded its grandiose headquarters on Paris’ Rue La Boétie for a far more compact building near the Eiffel Tower. In lieu of an enormous office with plush carpeting and expensive art, Alcatel-Lucent’s chief now works from a simple office that anyone can use when he is not in. He ensures that employees talk with him and each other by mandating start-up style open office space and crowdsourcing input on a new internal social network.Read more

It has been 12 years since the first person famously bought a Coke from a specially adapted vending machine in Scandinavia using their mobile phone. Yet, the anticipated  mass market adoption of such mobile wallet services has not taken place.  Alcatel-Lucent hopes to change that, announcing March 23 that it will run a new global hosting service for mobile operators wishing to launch person- to- person payment, remote ticketing and mobile commerce services.Read more

It is no accident that Alcatel-Lucent will showcase its LTE connected car, which brings cloud computing to moving automobiles, at the industry's annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Feb. 15 to 18. This year marks the start of the LTE decade. But gear makers have to help drive the creation of money-making mobile Internet services or there will be little return for carriers on multi-billion dollar network investments.Read more

Networks that underpin Internet and mobile communications  emit 300 million tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere per year, an amount equivalent to the pollution of 50 million autos. But Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs and partners such as China Mobile, Telefonica and AT&T, have formed  a new consortium called Green Touch that vows to develop networking equipment that can cut energy consumption by a factor of 1,000, reducing emissions in the process.Read more

Plans by Deutsche Telekom and France Telekom to merge their U.K. phone units is a sign of further consolidation in the industry as financial pressure increases on European phone companies. The deal, announced Sept. 8, would create the U.K.’s largest cellular operator, catapulting the merged entity ahead of Telefonica’s 02 unit and pushing rival Vodafone to number three in its home market.Read more

Ben Verwaayen, chief executive of Alcatel-Lucent,  the Paris-based global telecommunication equipment maker, talks to Informilo about third generation mobile licenses in China, management changes at the top and how the company intends to work more closely with start-ups. Click to see the video.Read more