Archive for February, 2009
Mobile Monday Singapore Peer Award
The first ever Mobile Monday Singapore Peer Award is coming soon and I’m excited to take part as one of the judges for the event!
If your company is an early stage mobile startup based in Singapore, be sure to get in touch with the organizers with your presentation before 20-March to enter. Judging will be held on 30-March at the Geek Terminal.
All finalists will be able to showcase their technology at the IDA pavilion at CommunicAsia this coming June which is an excellent opportunity for regional exposure.
For more details on how to enter or to see the presentations, check out the event listing on Facebook.
BuzzCity Research on Mobile Web Browsing Habits Posted
A few weeks ago, Peggy Anne Salz on the MSearchGroove blog wrote to say that BuzzCity would be making a “raft of announcements” at Mobile World Congress in her blog posted titled, “Face-Off With Facebook? BuzzCity CEO KF Lai Talks Apps, Advertising & Ecosystem.”
I had a chance to catch up on the week’s MWC news and look for more info on what BuzzCity has cooking. In addition to launching a developer program to open up the company’s myGamma mobile social networking service to developers, I was excited to see the company also announced the publication of their latest industry trend report titled ”Who uses the Mobile Internet? And what do they do?“
The 75 page PDF document compiles the results of surveying BuzzCity Ad Network viewers in fourteen countries including Brunei, Egypt, Indonesia, India, Kenya, Lybia, Nigeria, Philippines, Pakistan, Romania, South Africa, Thailand, Tanzania, and the USA. I haven’t had a chance to look at the report in-depth yet, but will be taking a close look at the sections relevant to Southeast Asia markets over the next week.
For entrepreneurs looking for new opportunities on mobile, I highly recommend looking over the recommendations on page 71 for several ideas, especially in the areas of m-commerce.
Mobile Money for the Unbanked
The GSMA and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced an innovative program that will expand the availability of financial services 
to millions of people in the developing world through mobile phones. The Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) program, supported by a US$12.5 million grant from the foundation, will work with mobile operators, banks, microfinance institutions, government and development organizations to encourage the expansion of reliable, affordable mobile financial services to the unbanked.
“There are over 1 billion people in emerging markets today who don’t have a bank account but do have a mobile phone,” said Rob Conway, CEO and Member of the Board of the GSMA. “This represents a huge opportunity and mobile operators are perfectly placed to bring mobile financial services to this largely untapped consumer base. Based on the initial findings of research conducted with the microfinance centre CGAP and McKinsey & Company, we believe that mobile money for the unbanked has the potential to become a US$5 billion market opportunity over the next three years.”
MySpace Interested in Reaching India and China Mobile Users
Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace outlined the company’s mobile strategy in his keynote presentation at Mobile World Congress. According to MoCoNews.net, MySpace is keen to target India and China due to the large number of mobile users in those markets. The article went on to say that MySpace plans to monetize its mobile user base via advertising and that it would extend its Hypertarget capabilities to the mobile as well. I also checked out the company’s press release and found that the company recently updated its wapsite and has a Nokia Series 60 client in the works.
From my experience, Nokia Series 60 handsets drive a large percentage of consumer data usage in Asia, so the launch of the new app should go a long way to add reach in emerging markets. I would also recommend that the company check out the opportunity in Indonesia where mobile browsing, social networking and mobile advertising are all shooting through the roof.
Is Japan the model of evolution for Mobile First markets?
There’s a great story from On the Media about how Japan’s internet consumption on the mobile phone evolved very differently as compared to the US. I was especially struck by the comment on people’s perceptions of email on the PC. Here’s the key message:
Satoshi Tanaka of DeNA, a company that creates content and portal sites for cell phones, explains:
SATOSHI TANAKA VIA INTERPRETER: When you say email to today’s young people, they would never think of emails you do on the computer. To them, cell phone emails are emails. There are even some users who would say, oh, I didn’t know you could do email on a computer, too.
MARK PHILLIPS: This brings up one of the biggest differences between U.S. and Japanese cell phone culture. While most Americans use computers to develop an intimacy with the Internet, the Japanese access the Internet primarily through the cell phone. U.C. Irvine’s Mizuko Ito:
PROFESSOR MIZUKO ITO: Broadband Internet came in relatively late compared to, say, the U.S., and the mobile Internet came in relatively quickly. You saw in the late ’90s that people were really starting to orient towards the mobile phone as their primary portal to the Internet, and this bias still persists today.
MARK PHILLIPS: Many Japanese actually say they prefer the cell phone keypad over the computer keyboard because they can type faster on it. And perhaps, most importantly, they don’t have to share their phones with anyone else. That’s why the pager fad exploded in the ’90s, because it was so personal. DeNA’s Satoshi Tanaka.
[JAPANESE]
SATOSHI TANAKA VIA INTERPRETER: With computers, although there may be one per household, it’s unlikely that it would be your own. With cell phones, on the other hand, it would belong to you exclusively. Thus, you have the freedom to access anything, whenever you want.
MARK PHILLIPS: This has produced two different trajectories for cell phone evolution. In the U.S. we’ve been upgrading our cell phones with the hope of recreating the Internet experience we’ve had for years on the computer. In Japan, since the cell phone has traditionally been the gateway to the Internet, the evolution has instead been in the incremental improvement of the cell phone network and hardware.
But even if our cell phones are on different paths, some of Japan’s hardware features may start popping up in our phones soon.
via On The Media: Transcript of “Moshi Moshi” (January 30, 2009).
