Gazing into 2010 (I)

Imagine Steve, Bill, Google Boys, Warren (Buffet) and myself get together to chat about 2010 and the Telco space. Warren is not really in the mood for TMT investments but he is listening. Bill believes that Windows will finally make a play in the mobile space with their first good mobile product Windows Mobile 7.0. The rest smile and say to him good luck because being good most of your handset suppliers like HTC are now with the Google Boys and Android.
Google boys look puzzled but excited. They brought to the chat more than 50 devices with Android for 2010. However not enough apps and transactions yet (why is Steve managing to do just with one device?) and it is still unclear how long it will take for mobile advertising to become a reality. There is still not enough money on mobile search, “… no worries we just bought AdMob and there is lots of room for smaller companies to play on this space and find interesting niches and then we will buy them. How many companies will they buy in 2010?
Warren is observing the Advercontent (advertising based games and applications) space, but just watching and learning and maybe China, India, Brazil and South Africa is where real scale will happen for this (pair with finally fast enough networks and accessible medium end handsets, we can see the big smiles on Huawei and ZTE fellas). The internet boys don’t make any money on social media but he does believe mobile in these territories may be the place to monetize social media (content, analytics, location based). He also took several calls to listen to some interesting ventures on m-payments and micro-transactions in Africa and the Middle East. Hmmmmm
Why we did not invite Nokia to the meeting? They are too busy sorting out their house. It is true, first they shout OVI for president, now Symbian is not good enough, and now instead of embracing Android or buying Palm OS you are going to create another Linux based OS!!! Now we start understanding why they did not come today or they are not going to WMC 2010
Hey the RIM boys got to the meeting late. The rest has already divided the mass market application space between them and some upcoming startups. However vertical oriented apps is going to be an upcoming segment and the blackberry device is king here. Can their OS and their app store be a business oriented apps thriving space and take upcoming tech young companies on the ride. Warren is listening and nods
Where is Steve? Did he leave to launch another apple phone (model) or they were just getting ready to open up the app store next year. We agree on gave him the 2009 champion, will he win again in 2010?
As we were walking out the room, Warren said what about the operators? I said we need together again for lunch to analyze that one

Sad things happen when you see what is considered innovation (From Enrique Dans blog on "Promusicae y el uso del dinero público")

Many of you may or may not know that there a number of options by the State in Spain to have access to public funding for innovative projects
In the past we have been trying to obtain such help and we have been finally lucky on obtaining some help
However it is amazing to see that on the "Plan Avanza", probably the most ambitious of the plans launched by the goverment, in which we invested quite a bit of time and resources to submit our application and were turned down because we were not innovative
When I read Enrique Dans Blog and see that a public association has gotten 1 Million Eur to develop a solution that mmCHANNEL and another handful of companies in Spain already have and that adds no value to the end user, one wonders
"Promusicae y el uso del dinero público". Si, el Estado es muy "sensible" a los lobbies de poder http://bit.ly/TzUkW

Social Media African Way - AKA Mobile, UGC and Local - Special AfricaComm 2009

The number of South Africans who use their cell phones to access the internet now exceeds the number of those who rely on traditional desktop means of connecting to the World Wide Web. This is a trend that we seen very much across the entire African continent—PC and broadband penetration rates are very low while mobile penetration keeps growing.

In Opera Software's October 2008 edition of the State of the Mobile Web report, South Africa ranks 6th and Egypt ranks 8th in the global Top 10 for mobile internet usage, ahead of many Western countries. Today almost 29% of South Africans use mobile UGC services/content on a daily basis and by the end of 2013, the total South African mobile UGC revenue will reach a total of $476 million (JBB Research).

The mmCHANNEL team believes that the African social media scene will continue be mobile with the PC acting as a complement for only a small minority of the population. Which companies are leading the way? Although Facebook is the most popular mobile South African site today (case in point for other African countries population penetration of Facebook is 1,5% in Egypt, 0,17% in Nigeria to name a few (Unanimis March 2009), two local names MXit and The Grid have become a driving force for the South African mobile UGC services market today

MXit, which stands for message exchange, provides a free instant messaging application for both computers and mobile phones. It has also recently tried to extend the brand into what they call MXit lifestyle including music, social networking, and more. Their latest innovative entertainment product has been the launch of their first instant messaging book, ‘Emily and the battle of the veil’, which sells for an equivalent 50 euro cents. Since its launch in 2005, MXit has attracted more than 15 million users across the developing world. South Africa is by far their largest market with over 7 millions users.

The Grid is a location-based social network, enabling subscribers to locate their friends on a map, chat via instant messaging, and share geo-tagged content. Lately it has been focusing on creating social interactions around content. Although Vodacom Ventures is the The Grid’s main funding source, it is wisely open to use by all South African operators and is actually being launched in countries where Vodacom is not present. Today it has more than a million users after less than a year in operation and is expanding into Tanzania and Nigeria, among other African countries

The future? At mmCHANNEL we believe and invest in Application Protocol Interface (API) connectivity and building social interactions around content for these and similar social media sites (take a look at East Africa’s first mobile social media community, Sembuse). In our opinion, these social media sites are going to become key outlets for mobile advertising, customer surveys, content consumption, and financial services in the near future. Location-based services, pricing flexibility, and viral marketing make the mobile social media space an African story. Stay tuned.

Some of my colleagues, Damien Saunders and Pedro Domingues will be at AfricaComm this week in Cape Town and I hope they can meet with many of you and find ways to keep being part of this new and evolving African mobile landscape

Send them an email to arrange a meeting: damien.saunders@mmchannel.com & pedro.domingues@mmchannel.com

An interview with Mr. Murat Gurkas, Director of VAS and Marketing Division in Eagle Mobile on our recently launched 3D goals product

Please find attached a copy of the newspaper interview of Mr. Murat Gurkas, Director of VAS and Marketing Division in Eagle Mobile, published in sports newspapers “Sporti Shqiptar” today.

“Sporti Shqiptar” Newspaper is the best selling sports paper in the Albanian Market, mostly used by the young sports fans. It is the first published newspaper in Albania.

This is part of the coverage our joint recently product launch 3D video goals for Spanish and Italian league for SMS subscription

We have the full translation to English if interested

Good article on NYTimes.com: M.B.A.'s Guide Socially Concerned Entrepreneurs. Nice2see my school INSEAD leading the way

I found this article on NYTimes.com around how MBA students are teaming up with Socially Concerned Entrepreneurs and how my school INSEAD has created a program around it

PARIS — As questions go, it was short and to the point: “If you are so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

That challenge, splashed across her daughter’s T-shirt, inspired Una Ryan to leave a medical research career, developing vaccines, to start her own business.

“Being a medical researcher, I changed that statement to say, if you are so smart, why haven’t you saved more lives?,” said Ms. Ryan, at a lunch in Paris last month honoring finalists in this year’s Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, an annual competition for women entrepreneurs. Ms. Ryan was one of five winners of this year’s awards.

Read the full article on NYTimes.com

3D Goals Video - SMS subscription service just launched by Eagle Mobile - Powered by mmCHANNEL In partnership with Genera Mobile

Come on, get them to your market!! UK´s Premier, Spain's La Liga, Italia's Serie A

Minimal IT integration and resources needed and could be up and running in less than 6 weeks from today

Africa Cup, World Cup and more coming up soon (together with associated 3D games, rankings and community features)

Contact us for more information

Very interesting "10 skills leaders may have to thrill on the crisis" from Eduardo Navarro

I just have the opportunity to read an article (better said an excerpt from a book), of Eduardo Navarro, socio director (managing partner) of Improven (LINKEDIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/enavarrotandemcapital) a firm focused on helping companies on crisis situations. He has a new book just being published

I found his 10 skills leaders may have to thrill on the crisis to be interesting and worth always a reflection for many of us leaders of small and medium companies which have been facing a very difficult overall economic environment in the past 2 years

Here you have them translated (below you have a link to Eduardo Navarro's full post (in Spanish) and his company site)

1. Analyze the situation with some distance and accept the new reality
   
2. Take great decisions firmly
   
3. Focus your time and your efforts on the key issues
4. Transmit sense of urgency: speed even above precision
5. Be obsess about short term results, its planning and follow up
   
6. Transmit "positive realism" to your team
7. Get your team committed
   
8. Go back to austerity and effort
9. Be truthful: always tell the truth even if it is hard
10. Never forget your corporate social responsibility
    
    
    Read the full article from Eduardo Navarro (in Spanish)
    
    

Interesting post coming from the UK: need for integrating the mobile channel into advertising agencies value proposition

I just got some time to read an interesting but brief article from Alex Furber (twitter alexfarber, Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alex-farber/1/965/49a), from new media age that covers mobile, music and portal, on the need for advertising agencies or even online/interactive agencies to integrate a mobile offer into their value proposition and the need for integrated across all the screens campaigns.
Interesting the title of the post is Mobile agencies needs to diversify..., funny enough the ones I think really need to diversify are traditional and specially online ones

Having been this week in talks with agencies in different places such as UK, Turkey and Macedonia, I can tell you that a huge proportion of the mobile / marketing agencies even the online ones do not understand mobile and their customer needs on the mobile space

So we and our partners such as Unkasoft and Starfish do understand this need and we are investing on preaching to the chorus and walking the talk

Enjoy the excerpt and click the link for the entire article
"The issue of mobile campaigns conceived by traditional or digital agencies undermining pure-play mobile agencies is hotting up as clients increasingly demand integrated campaigns....


Read post from Alex Furber

Interesting to read the reactions to SImyo mini survey on our portal in facebook

Simyo yesterday posted on their facebook page a question about what the customers think about our multimedia portal

Very interesting to read, there are good and bad things don't get me wrong but I like to hear real people talking about it

There is a group with no interest (mostly think they can get this content for free on the internet), other that like it and others that will like to see improvements in other service areas before having a portal
A final group is asking for more content, including the free games

I would love to have instead of 20 responses, 100 or 200 and read them all

Go and express your opinion!!!

Online advertising bigger than TV!!! How will mobile advertising change the game?

Excerpts from UK´s Advertising Bureau (IAB) & PricewaterhouseCoopers, TechCrunch and Kelsey Group (see Kelsey´s figure on the top)

This week for the first time ever online advertising passed TV advertising in the UK. It is thought that the UK is the world's first major economy to pass the media milestone.
This event was predicted last year but the difficult time on advertising overall have made the prediction look doubtful.

However a record £1.75 billion sterling - nearly a quarter of the total ad market - was spent online in the first half of this year, compared with £1.64 billion for TV. The study, carried out by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, showed overall advertising fell by 16% in the period as firms slashed costs in the recession.

Online advertising is classified as email campaigns, classified adverts, display ads and search engine websites such as Google. The IAB data showed that 60% of the online advertising was spent on search engines, with 22% on online classified ads.
The milestone is not really that important but clearly marks the transition over the last 10 years from printed and TV advertising to the online media. There are 2 big questions remaining: what is the effectiveness of this new shift on advertising towards online or better said digital? Has this maybe be a result of firms cutting cost towards cheaper advertising (online) or just to more effective advertising? Will talk about this on a future post
The second question and closer to my heart (and company :-) is how will mobile advertising shift the current picture

Let´s take a look at recent predictions reported on Techcrunch

The rising market share of smartphones (please note that this is more true in the US than in Europe so far.
,mobile browsing has grown through the roof within the last year, With that in mind, mobile advertising promises to be a huge growth area.
For more data and analysis on smartphones I recommend reading
Read post from JT Klepp (COO Storyz in Australia) on latest analysis on smartphone and handset trends
The Kelsey Group, a market research firm, projects that the mobile advertising market will balloon from $160 million in 2008 to $3.1 billion in 2013.
The amount here is not that relevant but clearly there is a large growth potential in mobile advertising in four years, quoting TechCrunch
"...perhaps even ten to 20 times bigger than it is today. Where will all of that mobile ad money go to? Here I think the Kelsey group is more on target. It projects that mobile search will go from 24 percent of the total mobile ad market last year to 73 percent of the much larger pie in 2013, according to a recent research note put out by Citi analyst Mark Mahaney, which is where I’m getting all of these numbers. Display ads are projected to go from 13 percent of the total to 18 percent, while SMS ads will decline as a percentage from 63 percent to 9 percent (see charts). So once again it looks like search is going to be the big winner...."
So I guess the odds are that Google will be a big winner here. Room for more, well at mmCHANNEL we clearly believe so and our work on the advergaming field together with our partner Unkasoft is just one proof of this
The game has just started
Good night and good luck :-)

Has vodafone finally got it right in the content arena: Vodafone 360

Yesterday the whole TMT and overall business press was full of coverage of Vodafone's launch of the 360 strategy and related products

A lot of the coverage was more targeted towards the LiMo (Linux Mobile) handset launch with integrated products, but through our different clients in the Vodafone World, we have been exposed to the real service, and there are a lot of things that I like about the product

To complement the launch, this moments marks also the movement from Vodafone Live to MyWeb (both for mobile and pc/WEB), which is also a huge move, as Vodafone Live! has been with us for over 7 years and the world has evolved since

To summarize the 360 product, we are talking about a social media aggregator together with a universal (aggregation wise also) address book. But the address book is at the heart at the service, making the always requested but never really well implemented address book backup already an issue of the past. The address book is an extension or a huge improvement of the Zyb product but it has used this acquistion to build part of the product (and justify their investment for this company)

The service is fast, good user interface (simple but attractive and user friendly) and very easy to use. The client for the address book is also easy to use and its functional value is clear as it is capable of integrating all your address book across emails, social networks and mobile phones and bring it together in one place (which you can install in many / all your devices). On top of that there are different big and small cool details to add to the bigger picture.

The big question and where the battle is for Vodafone going forward (apart from distribution of the client and handset reach but I believe they will be able to handle both) is if they will convinced users to use this address book and all its related functionalities and leave the phone own address book on the side. I believe there is one big answer to this key question: speed or how fast will the application be vs. the real time (almost) phone address book

One more really interesting feature and that shows that Vodafone is starting to "get it", the service is open to all internet users, not just Vodafone subscribers. This is a real winner. Of course Vodafone users may get specific / special perks, but this is how you start playing properly on this environment


So far, Vodafone is finally making sense of their investment on people, resources and money with 360.

More to say on MyWeb service, but that will come soon.
mmCHANNEL is already developing apps and integrated into the new MyWeb service, so the future is exciting ahead of us (Vodafone and mmCHANNEL)

Our good friend Julio Alonso, CEO of Weblogs, cover of ElPaisSemal!!!

It is funny and at the same time it make us proud and feel very happy to see our good friend, former DCI colleague, excellent professional and a successful entrepreneur be the photo cover of El Pais Semanal this week on an article dedicated to "Los Amos de Internet" (the internet owners)



Read full article of El Pais Semanal (in Spanish)

The article features some of the most successful entrepreneurs on the internet space that after 5-10 years have consolidated their businesses and initiatives among the very best in Spain
Also the list features Jesus Encinar from Idealista, another well deserved nomination and excellent professional

By the way on my opinion Bernardo Hernandez does not belong to that group. Yes he helped on Idealista, but he is an executive (yes a very good one but there are many other Spaniard abroad with very important executive posts) and he seems to have a good smell as an investor but not an Spanish Internet top influencer

Reflections from today's office day - Listening to our employees thoughts

We tried to get together with the entire team (although sometimes we miss getting Tunc from Turkey here) one day a month and discuss the developments of the company. Also since this year we did tie a portion of the salary to the overall fulfillment of the BP (revenues and EBITDA) we have started sharing with the team these numbers. This initially poised different challenges starting with explaining the concepts behind those financial terms, how we have build the business plan and so far so on

Usually I really put a lot of effort on preparing these events. However it is also true that is difficult to have the team truly engaged and interative and sometimes it is difficult to generate questions from the team.
So after we finished today we have a little session of Q&A with the usual results. I decided at some point then to ask the team one question: "when you look at the slide of the results, define in one word what you feel? I was really grateful that people did share their minds in that sense to us even if some of the words did surprise and even dissapointed me as I internally I was hoping to get better words

So hear is what I did hear and the actions I believe we can do around those words and individuals to try to turn around those words:

- "not relevant for me" - should I leave this individual alone and just focused on his day2day job (in which he is really good) or should I ty to engage him one more time. Or should I ask him would anything work for you to engage on this part of the business
- "negative" (2 votes) - Will just improving the numbers turn their word into positive, is there something else?
- "Blurry" - Is this blurry as lack of trust on our direction or lack of understanding of the picture
- "Uncomprenhensible" - I need to sit down with this person and ask him what it is not undertable in the numbers. I am sure there is a more simple way to present the numbers
- "Transparency" - well this is one of the key objectives of doing this exercise
- "Challenge" - Indeed lots of things to do, even more important to do better things than doing more
- "Optimism" - Indeed there are a number of facts / events that invite us to be optimistic
- "Most important thing" - Indeed at the end we need to reflect all our actions into numbers

It will be interesting to reflect on a similar exercise after talking to some team members individually, change a number of things and have another quarter under our belt

Finally a bluetooth headset I am happy with - Jabra JX10 Serie II

I have tried to use many bluetooth headsets during my life. I remember being in Belgium , working with DCI on a project for Proximus in 2002 and trying some of the first bluetooth headsets for SonyEricsson. In general initially the sound was terrible and the devices huge. Then the size did improve was the quality was still not very good (and you know people don´t understand me enough already with my speed to make it even more difficult :-) I forgot about bluetooth devices for a couple of years. Then the fact that by joining mmCHANNEL I did expose myself to some of the bluetooth headsets for the mobile music (which they have never take off) and the fact that one of the key players in the industry SouthWing was founded and lead during many years by my INSEAD colleague Bart Huisken
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/bart-huisken/4/888/60a

I did then try some other models and landed into some American design companies like Jawbone, which had excellent reviews. I thought this was it. Good quality, good design but the part that tights into your ear is super fragile and keep breaking, so I ended up leaving the device (even If I still have it and I have try to find the broken part sold individually but no way (or not easy way)). However in the past some of the cheap models of Jabra did the job OK (for their value). So when I saw an offer for the Jabra JX10 Serie II, I decided to give it a try. The fact that you could pair it up to two devices at the same time (I usually carry with me two phones on at the same time), the size, the fact that it is very easy to pair it up and it robustness even being small did the trick. And I am very happy. The quality is superb (very few times people notice that I am using it and it does work better than the bluetooth in the car) and It does not bother me to have it on my ear for hours while in the office

So I am very happy and the product get a buy, buy recommendation

Doing some research on twitter and how it can be use as a tool for our company

during the past week I have been having several discussions with one of my guys in the team, Fran Valseca around twitter and the value for myself and for the company. He is a huge believer and also very active on twitter (http://twitter.com/technalia)

I was talking this morning that I still really not find that much value on twitter and what we can get out of it as mmCHANNEL (as an individual and a blogger maybe I can have some more readership and more instant feedback or conversations)
Fran has sent me several links to read


Read post on 5-reasons-your-company-needs-be-twitter

Read post on consejos para twitter-para-empresas (ESPAÑOL)


They were both interesting reads although still not (fully) convincing, but clearly one of the main learnings is that we have to cultivate discussions with our customers (in our case I think it is even more interesting to hear from the end users of the services we power like Simyo in Spain or Si.Mobil in Slovenia to give examples)

So will keep engaging through twitter (I like to see for example how Simyo is engaging with their customers). Just post it the same question in several social media outlets both personally and as mmCHANNEL (Which WAP portals (not Iphone or Android apps) you like or you don´t and why?) and will be doing similar exercises for learn and improve. Will let you know how it goes