Mobile Business Models

Telecom Asia writes:

The mobile world has divided into two camps: on the one side are the industry elders struggling with a lack of fresh customers, and the headache of how to get more out of existing one. On the other side are the emerging market operators, whose biggest problem is rolling out networks fast enough.
…
Analysts believe the ecosystem and the overarching business model is where mobile’s problems lie.

My view on the article: India can be thought of as two markets — Mature (Urban) and New (Rural). This is akin to how Vodafone probably views the world — Mature (Developed Countries) and New (Emerging Markets). In Mature markets, the focus needs to shift to Services. For New markets, the focus has to be on Devices and Voice. So, in India, the “i-mode” equivalent with its Internet-like business models needs to be the focus for the Mature markets. The ARPU ratios will be something like this (in my opinion): Developed Mature will be 4x of Emerging Market Urban, which will be 4x of Emerging Market Rural.

SMSing

Tomi Ahonen writes a letter to American executives to start SMSing. “I have the biggest key to your professional success, if you are an American executive today. Join Generation-C (Community Generation). Then the defining ability is not that you can Google, or set up a profile in Myspace or LinkeIn, or create an avatar in Second Life create user-generated content. No. Like we wrote in our book, the defining characteristic of Gen-C is addiction to SMS text messaging.”

iPhone vs Other Mobiles

Paul Kedrosky outlines five reasons why he thinks iPhone will win. Among them:

* Mobile browers are awful. The Treo isn’t bad, and it’s the best of the above three, but the Samsung and Blackberrry browsers should be outlawed. They are that bad. They are so bad that Blackberry users’ opinions about mobile services, mobile startups, etc. should be summarily dismissed.

iPhone: Browser is reputedly very good.

* Mobile interfaces are thoughtless. The bizarro combination of escape key and menu key on the Blackberry — neither of which are labeled in a way that gives any indication what they do — is maddening. Controls are highly modal, which means something that works one way in one app works totally differently in another. A little thoughtful UI design would transform the market in a heartbeat.

iPhone: You can accuse Apple of many things, but thoughtless interfaces aren’t one of them.

TECH TALK: Reflections from a Dubai Trip: A Choice Not Made

Brain-dead thinking is not just the prerogative of the people in power in the government. Consider the admissions process for Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. Cathedral is, arguably, one of the best schools in Mumbai. So, to get admission for a five-year-old, one has to apply when the child is a one-year-old. There is a small window after the child turns one during when the parents are expected to submit the application. Think about it again: the application needs to be made four years before admission.

I realised this a couple of months late. I went to the school last year (I think it was in September) when I should have gone in May or so for admission for Abhishek (who had just turned one in April) in 2010 or thereabouts give or take a year. I was denied entry by the watchman saying the time for collecting the form had passed. I asked to speak to someone appropriate so I could explain that I had not realised that forms needed to be submitted so many years in advance. But there was no way they would let me in.

Thats not all. The watchman also told me of a workaround. All I had to do was to submit a letter stating that I was not in Mumbai during that period (with some documentary evidence, presumably) and I would then be able to get the form. Presumably, I was not the first person they were giving this unsolicited advice to.

As I walked away from the school that morning, I could not but be disappointed by the experience school which has given some of the citys finest alumni. How could I look Abhishek in the eye and tell him that I lied to try and get him into a school? And why should one have to get to that? Because of a brain-dead admissions process created presumably when one had to wait a decade to get a telephone connection.

The India that we want to build is being corroded by ourselves. We can bask in the glory of the 9% growth rate, the rising Sensex, the $200 billion forex reserves, the glitzy malls coming up all around. Or we can, as a society, start and fix whats wrong at the grassroots in our neighbourhood which is really the core for a Sustainable and Livable India of tomorrow. For now, most of us arent even thinking of the second option.

Personalised Search

WSJ writes:

Search engines have long generated the same results for queries whether the person searching was a mom, mathematician or movie star. Now, who you are and what you’re interested in is starting to affect the outcome of your search.

Google Inc. and a wide range of start-ups are trying to translate factors like where you live, the ads you click on and the types of restaurants you search for into more-relevant search results. A chef who searched for “beef,” for example, might be more likely to find recipes than encyclopedia entries about livestock. And a film buff who searched for a new movie might see detailed articles about the making of the film, rather than ticket-buying sites.

Microsoft and Barcodes

The Pondering Primate writes:

Microsoft, using a mobile phone, is actually starting to link objects in the physical world, to the Internet.
…
In the last few months Microsoft has introduced a:
speech recogntion browser
1d barcode scanner
2d barcode scanner
mobile image recognition engine and an
RFID browser

Is Microsoft developing the operating system for the “Internet of Things”?

India in 2040

An excerpt from Ajit Balakrishnan’s convocation speech at IIM-C:

By [2040], some say, India’s GDP in US$ terms will exceed not only the European countries and Japan but also, perhaps, the United States.

But what these reports also say, and this part is often overlooked, is that in 2040, India’s per capita GDP will be just 15% of that of the United States and a third of that of even Russia.

Another way of putting it is that even thirty five years from now, the average Indian will earn just Rs 5,000 a month. On this income he will have to feed and educate his children, look after their healthcare needs, afford entertainment and life insurance.

This means he must have a place to stay with clean water supply at, say, Rs 200 per month [18], uninterrupted electric power, perhaps at 50 paise per unit at the consumer level, medical insurance at, say, Rs 10 per person per month and life insurance perhaps at Rs 5 per person per month.

Mobile Advertising

mocoNews links to a post by Chetan Sharma and writes:

Chetan Sharma…chaired at the PAN-IIT event on Mobile Advertising – Technical Challenges and Business Opportunities. An interesting thing to look at is what the mobile advertising industry was forecast to be by 2005 by analysts at the turn of the centurybetween $890 million and $6.8 billion. In 2006 the actual mobile advertising market was $421 million. On the panel everyone was bullish about the industry (not surprising since theyre all in the industry, Infospace, Medio, Google, Voicebox) but they cautioned it will take time because the reach is not there yet.

A comparison was made with Japan: Japanese Mobile Advertising market: Clearly, Japan has had more experience with Mobile Advertising than rest of the markets. In 2006, the average revenue/user/year stood at around $4. For US, this figure was less than $1.

Gaia Online

GigaOM writes:

Gaias online world aspect (which launches in a separate Java-powered window) is a series of virtual towns where Gaian avatars can socialize (up to 100 in a single space), with apartments they can own, and treasures they can find. (No combat, however.) Its just that 10% of total user activity takes place in the world itself.
…
The world is just a conduit to the larger activity on Gaia, says Sherman: in addition, there are website arenas where users can upload and rate each others artwork and other content (7-10% total activity), or play multiplayer Flash mini-games with group chat (10-15% total activity.) The largest cohort of activity (wholly 30%) takes place in the Gaia forums, and heres where the truly staggering numbers come in: Averaging a million posts a day and a billion posts so far, Gaias message boards (with topics running the gamut from pop culture to politics) is second only to Yahoo in popularity.

TECH TALK: Reflections from a Dubai Trip: Imagining Chaos

Dubai now is about scale and size. They are trying to attract the worlds best with their custom-created vertically-focused cities (Internet City, Media City). They recognise their limitations and are working around it to create a region which combines brainpower and capital. The oft-quoted answer for why Dubai and Singapore can do it and we cannot is that they have lots of money and their populations are small as compared to India. But we are barking up the wrong tree.

Once upon a time, Dubai and Singapore were just spots on a map. It is someones Imagination that has created the modern-day wonders we look up to. And that is perhaps the biggest differentiator. Imagination and the ability to envision a future that doesnt exist today is what has and will set apart the winners from the also-rans. Of course, Imagination has to be combined with Capital and Execution but the starting point is the ability to make big plans and dream big, along with the ability to learn from others who have faced similar situations in the past.

Take the way we construct our roads in India. Even after all these years, we cannot build them right to withstand the monsoons. Of course, ask any person on the street and the response will be that the municipal corporations is hand in glove with the contractors so building (the same road) becomes an annual ritual. And we sit by idly and watch as the money is wasted again and again.

I write this because even as India needs new cities, we have to worry about our existing cities. There are tens of millions living in these cities. Can we create a better lifestyle for them actually, ourselves? Or will we just accept the traffic jams, the inadequacy of the schools and playgrounds for the children, the lack of green spaces, and take things they way they are because we cannot imagine anything better? Can we imagine the equivalent of a Snow Park (see the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai) in the desert that urban life in India threatens to become?

Tomorrow: A Choice Not Made