Month: December 2010

This week’s links:

• 2011 Consumer Internet Predictions: by Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Partners.
• Founder Control: by Paul Graham. Knowing that founders will keep control of the board may even help VCs pick better. If they know they can’t fire the founders, they’ll have to choose founders they can trust. And that’s who they should have been choosing all along.”
• NYTimes on GE: “Leadership by fiat when done in moderation, Mr. Immelt says, can drive change and set a course. “I think that if you run a big company, you’ve got to four or five times a year, just say, ‘Hey team, look, here’s where we’re going,’ ” he says. “If you do it 10 times, nobody wants to work for you. If you do it zero times, you have anarchy.””
• World in 2011: from the Economist
• India’s 2nd-generation Reforms: Pragati asks where they are.

7.       There is no reference to redress an issue to give a chance to aggregator/telemarketer to explain the reason for sending a particular SMS against which there has been complaint.  A competitor could complain and easily shut down a telemarketer’s business. The aggregator/telemarketer needs to be given a fair hearing and seek redressal.

8.       Finally, a couple smaller points:

a.       Only numerical sender id which can identify the telemarketer is unnecessary since (a) it takes away from use of sender id as a key marketing tool and (b) the current sender id helps a consumer identify that it is a commercial/promotional SMS and it is easy to trace the sender.

b.      A massive number of messages possible when a mobile number opts in to one of the seven categories. This proposal seems self-defeating, and will probably not end up being used. As a result, the list will be a binary one – all blocked or all enabled. This is where the concept of explicit opt-in to specific brands and companies needs to be taken into account.

The issues highlighted here need immediate action, else the danger is that come Jan 1, 2011 both consumers and telemarketers will be left unhappy – which was definitely not the intent of TRAI in drafting the regulations.

5.       Mobile number churn needs to be explicitly known and handled since it is a big source of complaints. This applies in the case of the opt-ins and transactional messages. Companies do not know when numbers churn. Therefore, what is needed is a Churned Numbers Database. When a number appears in this database, it will need to be deleted from all transactional message databases. This will ensure that the transaction database remains clean at all times.

6.       Shutting down an SMS aggregator’s business for two years for just six violations is too small in an industry where a large aggregator sends billions of messages. My estimate is that about 200 million A2P SMSes are being sent in India daily. That is a total of 6 billion a month. Aggregators need to be given much more leeway. An alternative can be that if there are 100 proven complaints against an aggregator in a month, they should be fined and suspended for a month. If the complaints go to 1,000, then the aggregator be fined a higher amount and suspended for 3 months. And so on.

Continued tomorrow.

3.       Content subscriptions and messages after explicit opt-in need to also be treated as transactional messages. This will be applicable if the above point 2 is not accepted. Content messages like what we at MyToday send have been excluded from the transactional messages definition. Also, what about explicit opt-ins? As a consumer, I should be able to opt-in to a specific brand / company without having to open myself to receiving messages from everyone in that category by doing a START <1-7 options based on the industry>. In essence, the Transactional definition needs to be extended by including a new category which involves an explicit customer OPT-IN for any form of content. Here, the onus is on the transaction message sender to have the log and prove the opt-in if there is a complaint. The operator or the aggregator should not be involved. Anyways, the penalty is very stringent so it doesn’t make sense for someone to violate the guidelines. This would then also be applicable to Community messages. Each of the opt-in content formats should include a requirement that there be a communication on how to opt-out at least once a month. 

4.       Advertising should be allowed on transactional messages. Given that (i) the customer has opted in, and (ii) the customer has the ability to opt-out, there should be no restriction on what is communicated on the transactional messages. It is between the consumer and the company. To limit this form of communication is not right. If the customer does not opt-out (after having opted-in) and then complains, that is not right. (Also: Is self- or cross-promotion construed as promotional content? For example, in MyToday, we should be able to promote other channels.)

Continued tomorrow.

1.       For transactional messages, the operator and the SMS aggregator need to be treated as intermediaries and protected from any connection stoppage. The information about the opt-in or the need for sending the transactional message is only known to the entity sending it. The operator or aggregator should be responsible, and the deposit and guarantee money should be paid by the end-use telemarketer and not the aggregator. The account which should be disabled should be that of the end-use telemarketer and not the aggregator. This is now possible because the operators will provide separate pipes for transactional and promotional messages, and there is even a separate agreement that the Transaction message senders have to sign with the Access Providers (i.e., the operators). In that event, the aggregator and the operators are just facilitators, and cannot be held responsible. So, if a bank messes up and ends up with 6 complaints/violations, why should an aggregator’s business be ended? Without this, no aggregator can take a risk with even a single transaction message sender because it has no way to validate the claim from the transaction message sending entity that all are actually transactional messages. For transactional messages, the aggregator and the operator need to be seen as “dumb pipes” with the final responsibility being with the end-use telemarketer. In fact, if the transactional rules are not corrected, it will bring all transactional messages via aggregators to a halt because no aggregator will want to risk its entire business for a single client who may make a mistake, knowingly or unknowingly.

2.       Transactional messages need to be defined as everything that is not promotional. This way, we do not require to define further categories every time in transactional. Right now, there is a definition for both promotional messages and transactional messages – but they leave entire categories like content and opt-in responses undefined. So, define promotional (and that’s been done) – and treat everything else as transactional.

Continued tomorrow.

Last week, TRAI announced new rules for telemarketing in India in an effort to combat spam. I have written on this topic many times before, since NetCore is a key player in both the transactional and promotional SMS business (as part of our Digital, Real-Time Communications vertical).

On the whole, the rules are a good step forward, but they are also flawed on a few counts. I will address these issues in this series. To start with, here is a backgrounder:

• TRAI’s New Regulations
• Medianama has a good summary
• TRAI chairman interview with Hindustan Times
• Medianama raises some key issues
• My writings: Ending SMS Spam, Backgrounder on A2P SMS

There are multiple issues with the TRAI telemarketing guidelines that were introduced recently. Given our love for detail in India, the TRAI document is very well crafted with an incredible amount of precision. Yet, despite having had many months to think it over, TRAI has been either not addressed or glossed over some key issues. If not rectified within the next few weeks, they have the potential to substantially hurt the use of SMS as a genuine medium in India.

And that is a key point. SMS has emerged as a big winner for information access and dissemination. During the period before and after the Ayodhya verdict recently, the only medium that was banned was SMS! And it was then that people experienced two kinds of extreme feelings – relief that their SMS spam was eliminated, but also pain and frustration since they could get travel updates, bank passwords and breaking news!

So, how can the TRAI regulations be improved? In my writings, I will focus on the SMS issues, and not the voice calls.

Continued tomorrow.

From a post a couple years ago:

One of the principles I have followed through my career as an entrepreneur is an openness to talk about the business I am doing. I have found that this has more rewards than risks. Yes, there is a risk that someone may ’steal’ an idea but if it were that simple to create a replica, why bother doing it in the first place!

For me, the biggest reward is that talking to others helps me refine the way I think about what we are doing. The best ideas come when someone challenges what we are doing or asks a question on a track which we may not have thought much about. To get the right inputs, it is important to be willing to share what one is doing. Openness gets you more than you have to give.

This week’s links:

• Mobile OS usage around the world: from Royal Pingdom. A split verdict!
• Why Algorithm and Crowd are not good enough: by Rand Fishkin.
• Economist’s List of Best Books for 2010
• McKinsey report on the world’s Schools: “Systems with similar education spending have widely varying levels of performance…. a few rays of hope penetrate this bleak landscape.”
• The challenges before a rising Asia: by Ranil Wickremesinghe of Sri Lanka in The Hindu. “The time has come for Asian leaders to capitalise on the shift in global political power that accompanies the ongoing shift in global economic power so as to wrest control of the future.”

Here are some of the other points made by the panelists:

• The NeGP (National e-Governance Plan) is the cornerstone of the initiatives
• NeGP is complemented by SWAN (State Wide Area Network) which provides the backbone connectivity across a state
• The CSCs (Common Service Centres) are the service delivery points for e-Governance
• Three key challenges: Power, availability of Broadband at the village, and support for Local languages in the various applications
• BSNL needs to use the USOF (Universal Service Obligation Funds) to rapidly provide broadband to villages (June 2011 is the new target date)
• Availability of 3G and broadband wireless should help in improving the underlying connectivity that is needed for computing and applications
• Cloud computing is something that governments should look at for their applications
• Besides rural India, another segment of people whose needs that need to be addressed are those living in urban slums
• The DNA of transformation is Devices, Networks and Applications – and all are changing (evolving) simultaneously
• There is a need for Business Process Re-engineering more than just computerisation – the government needs to think what is the best way to deliver services and benefits of schemes to the ones who need them. For this, flattening government and changing the decision-making processes is critical.

Incidentally, Gujarat won the CSI-Nihilent award for the best e-governance across all States for 2009-10.

3.       Government needs to involve app developers and content providers via a Challenge portal.

This was another idea from the Gov 2.0 Summit – that of a Challenge.gov-like portal. “Every government department has some key challenges. They should put them out on a common Challenge.gov.in portal. This will help capture the imagination of Indians. For the first time, we will have a government actually doing something more than random “open houses” to get citizens and experts involved in thinking together about the problems we face, and then coming up with innovative solutions.”

This can be a part of the public-private partnership. Citizens and companies can take up both the data and the challenges, and participate in creating mashups and solutions. India has a large pool of software developers who would relish creating spending time beyond their working hours thinking about some fo the challenges we face. It also helps bridge the “India-Bharat” divide – as one of the panelists termed it.

An additional angle here is to ensure that software developers and content providers can get paid for what they create. Here, we need to learn from Docomo’s i-mode service and get telcos in India to offer billing as a service.  In fact, the UID project could have an Aadhar App Store, with the UID linked with a person’s identity and supporting micropayments.

Continued tomorrow.