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“There’s an app for that” is Apple’s catch phrase to promote the literally thousands of applications that can be downloaded to an iPhone. Whether you want to check the weather or traffic, bide time playing a game, or study a new language, there is likely a free or paid application that you can access. While Apple may be best known for mobile apps, BlackBerry, Android and other devices also have a huge range of apps available in their stores, as well as in those operated by mobile service providers. With smartphones expected to overtake feature phones in the U.S. by 2011, the popularity of mobile apps will only grow. To get a better sense of what’s popular and what’s not now, Nielsen recently launched its ‘App Playbook,’ surveying more than 4,200 people who had downloaded an application in the past 30 days.
Key Stats
Who is downloading what?
A while back we covered the first in a series of three whitepapers written by Mongoose Metrics CEO Bradley E. Reynolds, in which he details where the mobile marketing industry is right now and its future predictions.
The first whitepaper dove into the fundamentals of mobile marketing, current industry statistics, examples of “what’s working now,” current drawbacks and future predictions for the industry as a whole, while the second in the series focuses more on mobile technology and its role in the current state, and the future of the mobile marketing industry.
Dubbed “Mobile Marketing Macro Trends,” the new whitepaper is an insightful opinion editorial that aims to answer the simple question “how will mobile technologies change the way we live today?”
“Mobile technologies — though still in infancy — are positioned to provide an incredible value to humanity by offering immediate interactions with meaningful content from anywhere on the planet,” the paper states. ”Brands, corporations, political movements, religions and any entities which depend on interacting with the masses need to understand the progression and power of mobile.”
The whitepaper does a great job at explaining the underlying meaning and importance mobile technology plays in everyday life, and how that movement corresponds to what’s being done in the mobile ecosystem.
“With the availability of instant information anywhere, the challenge then becomes how to filter that information so that only the things which you value percolate to the top, other things are filtered out, and you can adjust the filters to such a fine level that no good things are getting filtered.
It's mid-morning in the mobile age, which has brought a lot of comparisons to 1995 and the first days of news on the Web. There are similarities: a new platform and a new way to think about content. But it took years and years to figure out the Web, while mobile is moving much, much faster.
"If I'm a local news outlet, I better get on board, because CNN and ESPN are coming in, scraping news, and serving it on their own. Local outlets need to fight back," said Wade Beavers, CEO of DoApp Inc. "It's an exciting time for those outlets, but probably pretty scary, too."
In fact, last week ESPN announced that it is launching mobile apps for Dallas, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. Nothing's more local than sports. Are you prepared to lose that part of your brand?
If you haven't gotten started with mobile, you need to. Right now.
"I guarantee today that if you don't have a site that is optimized for mobile, someone somewhere is putting your URL into a mobile device," said Annette Tonti, CEO of MoFuse. "The problem is, it's really not usable. What you've done in the past, squished into a one- or two- inch screen, doesn't work very well."
Fortunately, there are simple ways to get started. Unlike the early days of the Web, there are a lot of tools -- and companies -- that can help. Each of the executives at mobile development companies I talked to -- DoApp, MoFuse and Verve Wireless -- has different ways of working with news organizations, and each one said the same thing: You need a plan.
So with their input, here are 10 questions to consider as you build your strategy.
Who is your audience?
Mobile is local -- much more so than the desktop Web. Spend time researching your local market. What handsets do people own? Who are the largest carriers? What is the smart phone penetration in your area? My Mobile Media co-blogger, Damon Kiesow, suggests wandering the aisles at a local wireless store to see which handsets they're stocking. (These charts may help, too.)
You may even be able to find information in your own Web analytics, since most news sites already get 10 to 20 percent of their traffic from mobile, according to Tonti.
What does your audience want?
It's early yet, but here's what we know: Mobile users like local information, video, breaking news and weather. Tonti said one TV station moved the radar to the top of its mobile site after finding that weather was far and away the most trafficked feature.
Mobile users are socializing, multitasking, and passing time. And they're conscious of data rates and battery life, so they want it fast.
What will you provide?
Take inventory of what you have and how it's organized. Do your RSS feeds work well? Are they well-organized? Do you geocode your feeds so that you can deliver content based on a user's location? If not, what would it take for you to do that?
Do a competitive audit of your market. What are other news providers doing, and how successful does it appear to be?
Arthur Howe, CEO of Verve Wireless, said to remember the importance of video and photos on mobile, along with sports scores, traffic and coverage of major weather events.
His main recommendation? "Don't be afraid to experiment, experiment, experiment." Add social features -- such as sharing via Facebook and Twitter -- and ways for users to contribute content.
This will be an iterative process. Any site you create now will -- and should -- change as you see what draws the most traffic, Tonti said.
How will you make money?
There are so many options: advertising, charging for an app, charging a subscription to use a free app, selling by the issue (which is mostly being tested on the iPad), and sponsoring sites and apps.
National ad networks are coming together, and Apple is set to launch iAd, its mobile advertising service. The Associated Press is working with Verve to create a white-label content and advertising solution.
The folks at DoApp recommend you think local. They're developing "adagogo" as a simple way for local advertisers to create mobile ads and choose the geographic area where the ad will be displayed.
Moreover, you should consider how your mobile site will fit into any current or future registration and paid content strategy.
Who needs to be involved?
Most likely you'll need a team of folks from news, sales and technology. Howe recommends that one person be accountable for mobile products. That person must have the support of the chief executive and be considered in high standing among all the departments involved.
What technologies will you use?
This is the big, complicated question. You'll have lots of decisions to make here. The first one is tough: You're going to develop a mobile-friendly site, but then what? Are you going to create native apps? For which platforms?
You'll find diverse -- and strong -- opinions on how you should invest your resources.
At Mofuse, the strategy is to get clients up and running as soon as possible and modify from there. "We're not anti-app; we chose to go after mobile Web," Tonti said. "Apps are fairly expensive, and complex to build and manage. You have to build and manage for many, many platforms."
On the other hand, Beavers of Doapp argues that "the era of the app is right now."
"Our numbers show that the app does much better than the WAP [wireless application protocol, which is used for mobile sites] -- 1,500 percent better traffic."
That correlates with NPR's experience. According to Kinsey Wilson, senior vice president and general manager of NPR Digital Media, mobile traffic increased tenfold within four months of launching NPR's iPhone app.
Still, it's not wise to build an app just because it seems cool. A logical process would be to get a good mobile site up and running, then begin developing apps for particular handsets.Don't forget that you'll need a content management system that talks to your main CMS, as well as a way to encode and serve video for mobile, since many handsets can't handle Flash video.
Who will develop the products or products?
The two extremes here are doing all the work in-house or farming the whole thing out to a development company. But there's a wide middle ground.
For instance, NPR employees designed and developed its mobile site, but for the iPhone and iPad apps, they did the design and had an outside company build it. NPR's Android app was developed by a Google employee, using his 20 percent time. Thomson Reuters, on the other hand, hired a design firm for all three of its iPad apps, but did the development in-house. The company did use an outside firm to develop the Android and BlackBerry versions of its News Pro app.
How will you promote it?
All the developers I talked to stressed the importance of promotion. You can't release a product and hope people find it. You can use browser detection and redirect people to your mobile site, but that alone won't be enough.
Use your newspaper or station to promote your mobile site or app, and make sure the information is easy to find on your website. If you're developing an app, you have a fairly small window -- about a week, according to some research -- to make a big splash on iTunes.
What are your goals, budgets and timetables?
Specific goals are important. Set traffic goals, which means you'll need good analytics and someone who watches those numbers. Don't forget to budget for ongoing development and sales training. Set up a timetable for development, release, promotion, traffic and re-evaluation.
What will you do next?
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Plan now for change and how you will adjust as new platforms and new technologies come along. Start thinking about what will you do on tablets. Stay current on what's happening and watch what others are doing. Who can you learn from and (using the sincerest form of flattery) imitate?
These are exciting days. It's a great time to dive in, create something new, and have fun!
CLARIFICATION: The original version of this post stated that Thomson Reuters developed its three apps in-house, which referred to Reuters' three apps for the iPad. However, Handmark developed Reuters' News Pro apps for the BlackBerry and Android platforms.
Textual and technical illiteracy is often cited as a barrier to the adoption of services and by default the benchmark for success is often set at ‘understanding and completing the task by oneself’. However if there are ‘literate’ people nearby to what extent does it matter that the user is illiterate?
‘Mediated use’ is simply recognising that part or all of a task or process is mediated through others. The mediator may be other family members, friends, peers, kiosk operators, agents or other dedicated service providers - with a range of benefits and costs associated with involving others. Mediated use exists in any country or context but is more prevalent in countries with high levels of technological or textual illiteracy. Common examples include telephone kiosk operators; mobile phone content providers; topping up pre-paid phones; and providing the authentification to sign up new customers.
From the user’s perspective mediation is driven by a desire to: complete a task without having the necessary skills to do it oneself; convenience - asking someone else takes less time and effort than the consequences of going it alone; reduce error rates; generate opportunities for social interaction; reciprocate; show off - the lack of transparency is a useful way to project one’s status or aspiration; and that asking re-enforces or challenges the power relationship between mediator and mediated. Mediation can also be considered as a first step to independent use by either party – the simplest way to learn.
For the user the primary costs of completing a task through a mediator are lack of privacy, inconvenience and the cost of social investment.
Given that mediated use is likely to reveal the minutiae of the task at hand and thereby compromise privacy - to what extent does communication or a transaction need to be kept private? Research into mobile phone and kiosk practices in Kathmandu and Delhi taught us that whilst users value privacy and often expect it as a default a large percentage of day-to-day communication is not only fine being overheard with others, often it is pro-actively shared. There are of course significant personal, cultural and contextual differences in attitudes to privacy, and the sometimes unpredictable direction of say, a phone call can mean that the user rapidly wishes to switch from being overheard to complete privacy. Communication topics lean towards privacy include: medical and health issues; relationships; work; and money.
In situations where the user is required to use a mediator but still wishes to maintain a degree of privacy one strategy is to travel further afield and use an agent or kiosk operator from another neighbourhood or in a busy environment where their conversation will be just one of many. The larger the pool of potential mediators the less of an issue this will be, a simple example of positive network effects. Using an ‘alternative’ agent or kiosk operator is somewhat of a trade-off since the task requires pre-meditation, takes longer to complete and that using someone new can trigger a re-evaluation of risk.
Turning to friends, peers or indeed agents for help in completing a transaction requires different levels of social investment, for example spending time being sympathetic to the mediators long list of current ailments or in the context of an agent the implied promise of being a more loyal customer.
Whilst asking for help may be thought of as burdening others, from a task-flow design perspective it is very similar to having an assistant complete part of the task. Hence the illiterate and the reasonably wealthy share something in common – the ability to affectively delegate those parts of the task process that they don’t want to, or can’t complete themselves.
For any given service - to what extent should we assume that the user will complete the entire task process?
Next week: What the agents get out of the arrangment.
-Jan Chipchase
By Peter Goldstein, Project Director, AudienceScapes
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil --I’m at the mobile money summit organized by the GSMA, the global association of mobile operators. Mobile money (that is, the ability to transfer money, make payments and perform other financial transactions on a mobile phone) is clearly growing by leaps and bounds and its global coverage is widening at a brisk clip. The GSMA tallies 65 mobile money “deployments” by phone companies (who typically partner with banks) and 86 more launches in the pipeline, stretching across every developing/emerging region. The developed world is also getting into the mix through the conduit of international remittances, and the buzz here is that a number of European banks will soon launch mobile-based remittance systems targeted at customer sending money to various parts of Africa and South Asia.
As expected, there is plenty of discussion among operators and vendors about their ARPUs, marketing strategies, rollouts, profit margins and other typical concerns of commercial businesses. But mobile money is also a theme for the development aid community, with the likes of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank and the U.K. development agency (DFID) represented here. Their aim is to prime the mobile money pump in order to help the world’s poorest benefit from increased access to financial services. For example, Gates (through the GSMA) is sponsoring a number of “pilot projects” aiming to accelerate and stretch the boundaries of mobile money services.
This is intriguing in the sense that mobile money is in fact a commercial product, as shown by the huge number of companies present here and hawking their technologies, services and products. So what role are development aid groups actually playing? Are they providing venture capital? Are they providing subsidies? Are they providing incentives for mobile operators to enter parts of the market- for example, remote rural areas-which they wouldn’t otherwise touch?
When asked about this, Sriraman Jagannathan, the M Commerce CEO at India’s Bharti Airtel Ltd. (which recently acquired Zain’s African business in a massive $10.7 billion deal) highly praised the work of the donors and aid groups. But he also warned of a “pilot” mentality that such aid spawns. In other words, he believes that worthy mobile money projects are those which make business sense, and if they do make business sense, then they companies will develop them. I think he means that the presence of aid donors on the business side of the equation may risk distorting or diverting what is in fact a commercially-driven sector.
Jagannathan added that the aid community has a crucial role to play in so-called “financial literacy” – educating people about how to manage money and how to benefit from financial services, as well as how to avoid scams and bad deals. This is clearly a major issue in many developing countries where illiteracy is high, education levels are generally low, and trust in any institution – let alone a financial institution – tends to lag.
AudienceScapes Quantitative Research- National SurveysInformation at the Grassroots in KenyaMaking Connections in GhanaMobile Communications in PakistanResearch Brief: The Mobile Money Revolution?
Note that AudienceScapes research contains a pithy section asking people about their exposure to financial services as well as where their exposure to information about financial services, which would greatly benefit those looking at financial literacy issues.
For their part, the aid contingent wants things to happen quickly, and I heard some frustration about this. For example, Daniel Radcliffe, who works on financial services for the poor at Gates, lamented the fact that many of the 30-some deployments they are sponsoring have not yet shown anywhere near the promising early growth rates of the now-famous M-Pesa product in Kenya, which shot out of the gate in 2007 and captured the imagination of mobile operators and development agencies alike.
Radcliffe’s main advice to mobile money operators: You can’t build a successful mobile money operation incrementally. You need to sink major funds from the get-go in order to reach the much-desired “network effects” – that is, gaining a critical mass of users and agents such that viral and other spontaneous marketing effects gain steam. Mobile money takes off when enough people and vendors tell enough other people and vendors that they need and want to use such a service. This requires, among other things, “heavy above-the-line [read radio, TV, etc.] marketing” and “greasing” the registration of new customers with payments to the agents who are doing the sign-up.
While Radcliffe’s suggestions were entirely logical and helpful, and were obviously built on extensive on-the-ground experience, I once again had to ponder why private companies needed an aid organization to tell them as much. On a related note, my impression here is that the economics of mobile money is still being worked out, even of those deployments (especially in Kenya and Philippines) which are perceived as success stories. And when push comes to shove, there seem to be very few cases in which a mobile money product is independently profitable. However, the operators say that they are paying off in terms of making their subscribers more “sticky” (i.e. giving them a reason not to switch to another operator) and cutting out the middle man when it comes to selling phone airtime.
At the end of the day, I think the jury is still out on the extent to which widespread use of mobile money applications will require ongoing pushes from the aid community. This is a very young industry, but a very enthusiastic and fast-growing one, and like others in the past, it may take a few years to discover what makes business sense and what does not – and whether a helping hand is needed to make sure the Bottom Billion have a chance to benefit from mobile money.
Photo Courtesy of Flickr and Rachel Strohm
admin
By Peter Goldstein, Project Director, AudienceScapes
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil --I’m at the mobile money summit organized by the GSMA, the global association of mobile operators. Mobile money (that is, the ability to transfer money, make payments and perform other financial transactions on a mobile phone) is clearly growing by leaps and bounds and its global coverage is widening at a brisk clip. The GSMA tallies 65 mobile money “deployments” by phone companies (who typically partner with banks) and 86 more launches in the pipeline, stretching across every developing/emerging region. The developed world is also getting into the mix through the conduit of international remittances, and the buzz here is that a number of European banks will soon launch mobile-based remittance systems targeted at customer sending money to various parts of Africa and South Asia.
As expected, there is plenty of discussion among operators and vendors about their ARPUs, marketing strategies, rollouts, profit margins and other typical concerns of commercial businesses. But mobile money is also a theme for the development aid community, with the likes of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank and the U.K. development agency (DFID) represented here. Their aim is to prime the mobile money pump in order to help the world’s poorest benefit from increased access to financial services. For example, Gates (through the GSMA) is sponsoring a number of “pilot projects” aiming to accelerate and stretch the boundaries of mobile money services.
This is intriguing in the sense that mobile money is in fact a commercial product, as shown by the huge number of companies present here and hawking their technologies, services and products. So what role are development aid groups actually playing? Are they providing venture capital? Are they providing subsidies? Are they providing incentives for mobile operators to enter parts of the market- for example, remote rural areas-which they wouldn’t otherwise touch?
When asked about this, Sriraman Jagannathan, the M Commerce CEO at India’s Bharti Airtel Ltd. (which recently acquired Zain’s African business in a massive $10.7 billion deal) highly praised the work of the donors and aid groups. But he also warned of a “pilot” mentality that such aid spawns. In other words, he believes that worthy mobile money projects are those which make business sense, and if they do make business sense, then they companies will develop them. I think he means that the presence of aid donors on the business side of the equation may risk distorting or diverting what is in fact a commercially-driven sector.
Jagannathan added that the aid community has a crucial role to play in so-called “financial literacy” – educating people about how to manage money and how to benefit from financial services, as well as how to avoid scams and bad deals. This is clearly a major issue in many developing countries where illiteracy is high, education levels are generally low, and trust in any institution – let alone a financial institution – tends to lag.
AudienceScapes Quantitative Research- National SurveysInformation at the Grassroots in KenyaMaking Connections in GhanaMobile Communications in PakistanResearch Brief: The Mobile Money Revolution?
Note that AudienceScapes research contains a pithy section asking people about their exposure to financial services as well as where their exposure to information about financial services, which would greatly benefit those looking at financial literacy issues.
For their part, the aid contingent wants things to happen quickly, and I heard some frustration about this. For example, Daniel Radcliffe, who works on financial services for the poor at Gates, lamented the fact that many of the 30-some deployments they are sponsoring have not yet shown anywhere near the promising early growth rates of the now-famous M-Pesa product in Kenya, which shot out of the gate in 2007 and captured the imagination of mobile operators and development agencies alike.
Radcliffe’s main advice to mobile money operators: You can’t build a successful mobile money operation incrementally. You need to sink major funds from the get-go in order to reach the much-desired “network effects” – that is, gaining a critical mass of users and agents such that viral and other spontaneous marketing effects gain steam. Mobile money takes off when enough people and vendors tell enough other people and vendors that they need and want to use such a service. This requires, among other things, “heavy above-the-line [read radio, TV, etc.] marketing” and “greasing” the registration of new customers with payments to the agents who are doing the sign-up.
While Radcliffe’s suggestions were entirely logical and helpful, and were obviously built on extensive on-the-ground experience, I once again had to ponder why private companies needed an aid organization to tell them as much. On a related note, my impression here is that the economics of mobile money is still being worked out, even of those deployments (especially in Kenya and Philippines) which are perceived as success stories. And when push comes to shove, there seem to be very few cases in which a mobile money product is independently profitable. However, the operators say that they are paying off in terms of making their subscribers more “sticky” (i.e. giving them a reason not to switch to another operator) and cutting out the middle man when it comes to selling phone airtime.
At the end of the day, I think the jury is still out on the extent to which widespread use of mobile money applications will require ongoing pushes from the aid community. This is a very young industry, but a very enthusiastic and fast-growing one, and like others in the past, it may take a few years to discover what makes business sense and what does not – and whether a helping hand is needed to make sure the Bottom Billion have a chance to benefit from mobile money.
Photo Courtesy of Flickr and Rachel Strohm
admin
In 1987 there were only 0.3 phones for every 100 Indians, now there are 51.
Analysts say mobile phones have affected every strata of Indian society like few tools ever have. Advertisers have portrayed the mobile phone as a household essential for the poor - alongside shelter, food and clothing.
Because mobiles do not require literacy they have become a powerful tool for poor, self-employed people such as small traders, farmers, fishermen and rickshaw drivers to get information that helps save time and boost earnings.
Studies have shown how mobiles have helped poor Indian farmers to avert losses and improve yields. With buyers just a phone call away, they can adjust their production to suit demand; easily accessible weather forecasts help with crop planning.
It's likely mobiles have also influenced electoral politics.
Read full article.
emilyWhat does mobile money cost for the unbanked and underbanked? CGAP releases pricing study across 16 providers in 10 countries
My colleagues Claudia McKay and Mark Pickens have pulled together a comprehensive global pricing study on banking services targeting poor, unbanked and underbanked people in Africa, Asia and Brazil (pdf). The study examines pricing for services targeting unbanked and underbanked poor people in 10 countries.The conclusion: mobile banking and other forms of branchless banking are cheaper than traditional banking, but the gap between the two may not be as wide as some may think.
On average, branchless banking is 19% cheaper than banks. Why isn’t the pricing gap wider? Mobile money providers might be keeping profits for themselves and not passing them on in lower costs. There could be a good reason.It is possible that establishing a successful, scaled branchless banking service could be more expensive than expected. Some branchless banking providers want to leave room to come down on prices as more competitors enter the market.
Other highlights:
1. Sending Money Transfer
2. Receiving Money Transfer
3. Short‐term safekeeping
4. Medium‐term saving for asset
5. Bill Payments
6. High Usage (as a proxy for financial inclusion)
7. Average monthly transactions per M‐PESA user in 2008
8. Average monthly transactions per Kenyan banking customer in 2008
-Jim Rosenberg
There are no magic wands in the digital transition. Everything has to be built slowly and surely, as with legacy media. And failure is as likely, maybe even more likely, than in the analog world. But you have to keep trying because cell phones, the first true mass digital channel in Africa, are getting faster and smarter; if you don't exploit the power of the new channel, you're toast because others will and are.
Grocott's Mail has been serving the small community of Grahamstown, South Africa with local news and information for a long time (140 years precisely on May 11). Grocott's Online -- which got going properly a year ago -- caters to those who prefer pixels to paper, but until now, locals with mobile phones haven't had a comprehensive way of being informed about what's on the go in Grahamstown.
Launch of Grahamstown NOWEnter Grahamstown NOW, the first concerted attempt by Grocott's Mail to provide news and real-time information to Grahamstonians on a mobile platform. It's part of the Knight-funded Iindaba Ziyafika project and is led by Michael Salzwedel, New Media Editor at Grocott's Mail. Here's what Michael emailed me when I asked for some info about the technical side of the project:
It's not fancy or shiny - on the surface it appears to be just another mobisite. But there's a lot of depth below that surface. What it lacks in glitz and glam, it makes up for in its ability to serve up a snapshot at any given point in time of what's just happened, currently happening, or about to happen in Grahamstown.
Grahamstown NOW focuses on providing practical, immediately usable information directly related to the living out of the daily lives of people in Grahamstown. The idea is that Grahamstown NOW should become the central aggregator of as much as possible of Grahamstown's news and informational content, ultimately enabling citizens to make more considered decisions.
The launch version of Grahamstown NOW provides the following content:
The emphasis is on time and timing of events and specials and happenings around town. There is also an emphasis on freshness and "nowness." So while many sites allow you to see what's on in the next few days or weeks, or tomorrow's weather, Grahamstown NOW focuses only on today's happenings, weather, shows and commercial specials. If you want to know what's on tomorrow, check in with us again closer to that time.
All About NowThis approach might not work for congenitally forward-planning people, but it is, in testing at least, proving to be a great way to cut through the clutter of most sites, and curate information and news through the singular lens of currentness. Grahamstown NOW only gives you the very latest news story or two, not all of them. If you want to know what's coming up next on the local radio station, we'll tell you -- but not about the show after that.
Instead of comprehensiveness, Grahamstown NOW is much more like Twitter or a Facebook wall. It's about the latest, most current information. If you snooze, you lose that part of the stream.
Michael and his team are enthusiastic about how useful this could be.
"Most of the above can be displayed according to time (countdown until something begins or ends), so the home page and section pages are dynamic and never look the same," he said. "Users might see that a jazz concert is starting in an hour and 30 minutes, or that a 2-for-1 pizza special at a local restaurant started two hours ago, or that the next showing of a certain movie begins in 20 minutes, or that a public council meeting is scheduled for two days' time."
Grahamstown NOW is primarily meant to be accessed with a mobile phone, but there's also a desktop version. For now, that's simply the mobile version contained within a mobile phone graphic, with additional Javascript and AJAX functionality to enhance the user experience by allowing easier inputs and no page reloads. We are debating 'converging' our Grahamstown NOW website and the Grocott's Online Website.
Users can also interact with the site by leaving "chirps" (comments), submitting their own events and ride offers, and easily sharing content with friends via email or WAP pushes.
Integration With NikaI asked Michael to outline why Grahamstown NOW will work in our small town, and how it fits in with what we're trying to do with the Nika system we developed. He replied:
The average Grahamstownian is not rich, does not have an expensive phone, and is very conscious of how much they're spending on data. Thus, the first version of Grahamstown NOW has been designed to be accessed on even the simplest of Internet-enabled phones, and the HTML has been 'minified' to reduce bandwidth consumption.
Later in the year, Grahamstown NOW will be integrated with Nika. The aim is for Nika to become the central CMS for all Grocott's Mail's offerings: The print edition, Grocott's Mail Online, Grahamstown NOW, our SMS headline service and our upcoming instant messaging offerings (which will include selected Grahamstown NOW content).
Nika 2.0, which is now available as a free download, is evolving into a more comprehensive and mobile-orientated CMS. At its heart Nika is an editing workflow suite and digital content manager; but Nika also has additional functionality for community newspapers in that it can take SMS and instant messages directly into editing streams, and send SMS and IMs back to cell phones. Overall, Nika is great for generating user generated content and for easily getting headlines (and soon whole stories) back out to users' cell phones.
Future versions of Grahamstown NOW will have more differentiation between what is served up to PCs and to mobile phones, will include geo-location functionality so users can see business or event locations on a map or tag their social networking interactions or content submissions with their location, and will have tighter integration with Facebook.
For now, we think Grahamstown NOW offers immediate benefits for citizens -- with a particular emphasis on "immediate." Grahamstown NOW will launch officially in mid June 2010.
Harry Dugmore10279196002647881816
Opera has released their monthly State of the Mobile Web report which tracks market penetration of Opera Mini, their mobile client. It includes information like the fact that Opera Mini users doubled between November 2008 and November 2009. This months report spotlights growth on the African continent.
Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner writes…
In Africa, for example, we saw triple-digit percentage growth in mobile Web usage in just one year. Page views in the top 10 countries increased by 374%, unique users increased by 177%, and the amount of data transferred increased by 183%.
Some highlights from the report:
You can read the rest of this report, which includes the most popular handsets per region here.
© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.
Share and Enjoy:I am still frankly gobstopped by Facebook’s announcement. I vaguely caught the news of Facebook Zero but assumed it was just another mobile interface to Facebook. It was only when I read Erik Hersman’s post about it that I got the whole story. Not only have they launched a very lightweight mobile interface to Facebook but they have done something only a company the size of Facebook could… they’ve made it free.
They’ve negotiated deals with over 50 mobile operators around the world to make access for Facebook Zero free. Even as we speak MTN have announced that they plans to expand Facebook Zero from the eight countries they have launched in to all of the territories they operate in. This is huge. As Erik says… this is game changing.
Why is that? Why is this so amazing? Because access to communication is not just about increased efficiencies, better access to market information, etc; it’s about innovation. But innovation only happens when the cost of failure is so low that people keep trying things even though they fail. And that’s what Facebook Zero is… a zero-pain failure environment for the bottom of the pyramid.
And why is that important? Because connectedness has transformed the world into a place of serious unpredictability. And the best plan by the brightest minds in the world is doomed to failure because the world is so unpredictable. Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, argues that trial and error is the only way to cope with an uncertain world. He says “we are a lot better at doing outside the box than thinking outside the box”. He goes even further than that saying:
This is my mission for the rest of my life: figure out how to build a society in which people can make mistakes that are inconsequential. Want to encourage small mistakes, a discovery; an option.
But don’t just Taleb’s word for it. Here’s what Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks has to say:
[The] basic driver of what makes the net so innovative, creative, and fast-moving is the low cost of effective action: experimentation, adaptation, failure–very cheap. [The] model of innovation is not the long-term R&D lab in three organizations that are the major players and which one of them wins, but rather tens of thousands, millions, of experiments that are very cheap to try out and cheap to prototype and then implement and then fail and try again.
Not to mention Clay Shirky (apologies for recycling this quotation, it’s just too good not to):
You need a very low cost of experimentation, right? If things are expensive to try people will hold back from trying them and they’ll spend all their time trying not to fail. If the cost of experimentation falls though, and I mean falls precipitously, then people will spend a lot of time experimenting, and instead of not failing, the goal becomes to fail informatively to learn something from the things you tried.
and finally Matt Ridley, author of the recently published “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, who comes up with the beautiful meme of innovation being like “ideas having sex”. He says:
Evidence suggests that cultural evolution depends on exchange and trade to bring together ideas in much the same way that genetic evolution depends on sex to spread genetic mutations, or in the case of bacteria, on horizontal gene transfer. When starved of access to a large “collective brain” by isolation from trade and exchange, people may experience not just less innovation, but even regress. The capacity for ideas to have sex on the Internet is likely to accelerate cultural evolution still further.
If you can share ideas with friends on Facebook Zero, form groups, propagate memes, then you have an innovation medium that has been custom designed for the bottom of the pyramid.
The irony is that I despise Facebook. I hate the way they’ve been eroding the privacy settings on my account and I fear what they are doing with my personal information. But hey, I hate rapacious mobile operators too but they were/are game-changers too. Facebook is problematic, no question, but the opportunity that they are creating for people who can’t generally afford access trumps those issues hands down.
Erik points out in his post that the mobile operators are laughing all the way to the bank on this deal. That may be true but I predict they won’t be laughing for very long. How long will a company like Facebook put up with the costs they are being charged before they decide to do something about. This is a trojan horse inside the walled garden of the mobile operators.
Finally, what rankles with me is that Google, who have been in Africa for over two years, and in spite of being told (gratuitous “I told you so” available here), have missed the boat on the whole cost of access issue. Usage of their innovative SMS project in Uganda plummeted as soon as the operators started charging for the SMSes. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, “It’s the cost of access, stupid!” and Facebook have figured this out. All is not lost though. There is still a chance for Google to do this for voice in Africa. Operators are standing by.
Mxit is a massive mobile social network that was started in South Africa a couple years ago. Today, Safaricom announced a partnership with them, using their marketing muscle (7 pages of ads in today’s newspaper) to import Mxit into Kenya.
[For the time being, we'll ignore the complete ripoff of Twitter in their marketing...]
Mxit is a free instant messaging platform that uses the data network, thereby making it cheaper per message than sending an SMS. They claim 19 million users, most a younger demographic, who spend time chatting with friends or in chat rooms. MXit also supports gateways to other instant messaging platforms such as MSN Messenger, ICQ and Google Talk.
Local apps and entrepreneurs reactThis should be a slap in the face to Kenyan programmers and tech business entrepreneurs. The model to build the same type of mobile social network has been openly working and available to do for at least three years.
To be fair, Mbugua and the Symbiotic team tried to create something like this a year ago, called Sembuse. Both he and Idd Salim aren’t very happy about this latest move, claiming that Kenyan entrepreneurs can’t get the same access or opportunities as their South African counterparts.
From Mbugua:
“The issue is not that they have a partnership with Mxit but that from personal experience, local developers and companies suffer greatly in their quest to have such partnerships.”
From Idd:
“Most likely, the marketing retards at Safcom were convinced to believe that Mxit will increase data ARPU for Safcom. Mxit is meant to be a replacement to SMS. … So Instead of sending an SMS, you will use Mxit. Safaricom will lose KSHS 3.5 per SMS, but gain KSHS 0.003 per data exchange over Mxit. Talk of Safaricon Conned! Pwagu amepata pwaguzi.”
The issue with SafaricomOn one side, the Sembuse team have a point. Safaricom has been promising to open up their API and platform for real extension. This has never been fulfilled. They have promised to (honestly) engage with the local programming community, and this hasn’t happened either. They were publicly called out on all of these facts and more at the Mobile Web East Africa conference this year.
In many ways Safaricom walks arrogantly through the Kenyan market, lying, stealing and cheating their way to even larger profits. However, they also push the edges. While others are happy to sit back and make their current margins, Safaricom takes risks and eats their lunch. Innovation, whether it’s home built, bought or stolen still has the same effect.
Business realityFor whatever reason (marketing, value add, etc), Sembuse didn’t catch on – it hasn’t reached critical mass. Numbers of users, rather than technology ability even when it’s better, are the things that larger companies are looking for in this type of play. If you don’t have half a million users, you aren’t even in the game.
Though I’m no Safaricom apologist, I can’t fault them for making a decision to go with a tested product from an established business. Yes, SMS is currently a cash cow, especially here in Kenya. However, everyone can see the writing on the wall: data is the future, and controlling the channel is more important than anything else.
As David Kiania from the Skunkworks list noted, “Rule No. 4 in business: Cannibalize your revenue and business model before your competition does it for you.”
I’m more disappointed that no Kenyan company has been able to make a go at this by themselves, just like Mxit did years ago. You don’t need Safaricom or any other mobile app provider to be successful in this space, Mxit if anything, has proven that.
Like I said 2 years ago, this is a sure win if you can pull it off correctly. The technology to do this is not new, as Idd Salim points out as well, neither is the model – so you know that the strategy here is on marketing and communications to show the value add to potential customers.
More than anything else, Kenyan entrepreneurs should be upset with themselves for missing a sure opportunity, not upset with Safaricom for making a good business decision.
In early 2009, Grameen Foundation went to Uganda with the idea of creating a fluid and effective two way communication channel between rural farmers
CKWs in training
and the world of agricultural experts, development agencies, traders and commercial players. Through this loop, rural small holder farmers would be given livelihood saving agricultural information generated by the experts and the big players would keep informed on conditions on the farm from adoption of best practices to available produce for sale.
If you know much about agricultural extension services in rural Africa, you could have called such a ambition, well, ambitious. Traditionally, taking agricultural extension services to these farmers who live in far and hard to reach places is slow, expensive and inefficient because it is riddled with bottlenecks such as poor or no road infrastructure and few extension workers spread thin over vast areas.
Grameen Foundation’s technology center had a plan – harness the power of the mobile phone, a technology that is oblivious to such bottlenecks and combine it with a network of human intermediaries that can be trained to fully leverage its capabilities for the benefit of the farmer. The Community Knowledge Worker concept was thus born but would it work? That remained to be tested.
In nine months of testing the concept, Grameen Foundation built recruited, retained, and provided ongoing training, support, and monitoring to 38 Community Knowledge Workers operating in two districts. The foundation partnered with 7 organizations to pool expert agricultural information onto a central database and was commissioned by three organizations, including the World Food Program, to collect grassroots data on farm conditions. Together with MTN Uganda, the country’s leading mobile network operator, the foundation prototyped, tested and deployed eight mobile applications to deliver information to and from rural farmers.
The result of all these intricacies? The network of 38 community knowledge workers reached rural farmers in more than 14,000 instances either providing information to them or interviewing them for surveys commissioned by leading players in agriculture. That is; more than 8,000 times, a farmer received livelihood improving information such as organic agricultural tips and advice developed using local knowledge, agronomic best practices as prescribed by experts, market opportunities and market prices, location and contact numbers for agricultural input dealers. On the other hand, institutional agricultural players touched based with more than 6,000 rural farmers on such crop disease incidence, potential to supply to lucrative markets like WFP and farmer’s knowledge of disease control methods.
Google G1's charging up
From the promising results of the test of concept and guided by the insights got, Grameen Foundation is moving ahead to expand this network of community knowledge worker to reach the rest of the country. Here in the Community Knowledge Worker pilot report, the foundation shares some of the lessons learned on what it takes to sustainably build and expand such a network of information intermediaries.
Posted by: Lydia Namubiru, CKW Partnership Analyst
The Bunyad Foundation established a program to help teach them basic literacy. At the risk of ridicule from their families, they enrolled in a program where they could learn the alphabet, buy a cheap cell phone and then get text messages on the phone to practice.
Read full report.
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