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).
More “Everything is Now” Coverage
Kip Kniskern from LiveSide.net blogs about the fact that the world is a very different place outside of Redmond after reading our write-up in The Nation.
Aggressive spread of Windows Live on mobile – Nationmultimedia.com
Craig, Chris (me) and Tik hamming it up for the camera at the Everything is Now press briefing
At the “Everything is Now” press briefing, I spent a good deal of time speaking with Asina Pornwasin, reporter for The Nation, Thailand’s largest business daily paper. I was really happy to see this great write-up on the Mobile First “phenomenon” as she describes it:
This large online community has provided significant revenue for Microsoft from online advertising. The jump from the PC environment to mobile phones offers much bigger market opportunities for generating online revenue. Penetration of mobile phones in Thailand is about 86 per cent of the population, with 65 million mobile devices in use around the country.
Microsoft’s strategy is to convert these subscribers to Windows Live and MSN services without the need for a personal computer. It pursues a phenomenon called “mobile first user”, in which people are gaining their first experience of the Internet on mobile phones, rather than personal computers.
The phenomenon will soon be dominant in emerging countries like Thailand, where the mobile penetration rate is higher than that of personal computers, according to the marketing director in Southeast Asia for Microsoft’s Online Services Group, Craig Law-Smith.
The full article can be found online at The Nation website.
