Tag: nokia
Mobile in India – Jumping Ahead to the Future
December 1, 2009 Anjali1 Comment
This is a re-post from BBH Labs, where I co-wrote this post with Chandrashekhar L from BBH India and Ben Malbon from BBH Labs.
Image credit: Dipanker Dutta (cc) via Flickr
Brands in India are still struggling with advertising on the internet, even as mobile services steadily explore new territory.
Both mobile and the internet comprise what is popularly known as 'digital', yet unlike in Western markets such as the UK or the US, the former is much more powerful and prevalent than the latter. The reason for this is primarily the drop in the cost of mobile usage over recent years, versus the increasing cost of broadband usage. As this blogger says:
"What the Indian telcos should do is adopt a model that was instrumental in driving mobile usage in India. Drop the price points so that even the average person (living on Rs. 100 per day), would find Internet usage compelling, useful, and not frustrating. If they were to adopt a mass usage policy and not price their broadband products based on margins, I believe that in 5 years, India could have at least 100 million broadband users (via DSL, cable modem, Mobile 3G, wiMax, etc.)."
The mobile industry in India is witnessing rapid changes, with voice and messaging charges dropping drastically. Tata Docomo started the concept of "pay per second" not too long ago, which was replicated within a fortnight by all other major players like Vodafone, Reliance and Airtel. Less than a week ago, Reliance (the largest CDMA player) introduced the option of choosing between 1 paise per sms (a measly 0.02 cents) or 1 rupee for unlimited SMS per day (2 cents per day).
The interesting paradox is that while basic call and text charges have dropped to unbelievably low prices, GPRS costs have yet to come down. Therefore, the trend suggests that the evolved value-added services (VAS) will definitely grow at a much lower pace, as those costs aren't coming down as steeply: accessing services on the phone still costs a lot in India, even though phone tariffs are amongst the lowest in the world.
As more and more people in the country jump on the mobile phone bandwagon, from small villages to large metros, innovation is growing apace. Consider, for example, the new business deal between DirecPay, a bank-neutral payment aggregator service from Times of Money (part of the Times Group, India's largest media conglomerate) and PayMate, a wireless transactions company. The deal will provide an extended mobile payment facility to merchants who sign up, and with the current rate of penetration of the mobile device in the country at 35% (the number of GSM users alone is at 335.5 million currently), it is likely to bring even more consumers into the considered set of e-commerce users, as Avijit Nanda, the President of Times of Money says.
Image credit: Ken Banks (cc) & Kiwanja.net via Flickr
Mobile phones in India are also extremely powerful social and commercial tools. Nokia handsets are the instruments of choice of the majority of the population in the country (the company owns about 65% of the market share).
Where educational iPhone apps are less than 1000 in number (737 in November 2008) and certainly not as popular as gaming and entertainment apps in the Western world, in South Asia, Nokia has understood the market and is investing in Mera Nokia, a tool that provides farmers with useful crop-related information, Nokia Life, which offers agriculture, education and entertainment service apps specifically targeted at the market in smaller urban and rural areas, Nokia Tej, a mobile order management system, and Nokia Point and Find, a context-aware service that recognizes objects through barcodes and GPS. (Nokia has embarked on the last two as part of the Progress Project, in partnership with Lonely Planet). Airtel (another popular Indian mobile operator) and Thomson Reuters also offer services similar to Mera Nokia.
If the market offers a completely different set of challenges, the only way to counter them is to understand how to leverage the instrument that is clearly succeeding. We imagine something along the lines of the Blyk model would work well here: where advertisers subsidize the cost of mobile usage via targeted advertisements. It may even be possible to build a two-tiered offering like Spotify has for it's Premium and regular (free) offerings. What Hugo Barra, a Product Manager at Google says is particularly resonant in this respect:
"People will not want to pay for services that they can get for free, and the services will be free because there is a massive opportunity for advertisers to come onto the mobile platform. This is still untapped. Thanks to the proliferation of location information, specific advertising, and I mean non-intrusive advertising can easily come onto the mobile."
Another opportunity that can be tapped into is the growth of social networks in the country. India is now only behind the US in Twitter usage, and it is 5th in the world in Facebook usage. An interesting model would be to explore a hybrid that combines the extensive usage of mobiles and social networking.
The big players are already realizing the opportunities for promoting social networking services. For instance, Aircel Telecom launched the biggest advertising burst in the telecom category (before Tata Docomo) by showcasing Facebook on mobile while Airtel has launched a campaign of 4 TVCs promoting the use of Twitter. Here is some of the creative from those two campaigns:
According to a 2009 Trendspotting report, online ad spend is only 3% of the total ad spend in India, compared to 8-20% in developed markets. But advertisers are evolving in their use of the online medium by going beyond banner and keyword advertising to creating campaigns that leverage social networks and connectivity, while the use of the mobile phone for advertising is still very rudimentary (mostly used for text-based promotional offers). The increasing use of the internet and especially social networks on the mobile would automatically mean that the online advertising approach gets extended to the small mobile screen as well: 63 million Indians already access internet on mobile as compared to 45 million on the PC (Source: IRS and TRAI estimates).
What's fascinating – and perhaps instructive – for those involved with making sense of all this in Western markets such as Europe and North America, is how telcos and marketers in India seem to simply be jumping over some of the phases and issues the typical North American marketer might face. Despite the fact that in many ways the technologies at their disposal are less sophisticated than in Western markets, they seem further ahead in terms of mobile utility, mobile commerce & micro-payments, and in many cases more adventurous as far as advertiser-funded mobile platforms are concerned.
We have much to learn.
Bubblino bubblin
September 22, 2009 September 19, 2009 Anjali2 Comments
Absolutely loved watching Bubblino spout his bubbles at Interesting (I promise this will be the last Interesting-related post!). It's a bot built on Arduino that blew bubbles whenever anyone tweeted anything with #interesting09. It soon became part of the surroundings – I almost felt it would be unnatural if it was suddenly taken away. Thankfully that didn't happen.
Reminded me of Baker Tweet. I think there's something to be said for bots that use human-powered data to create something useful, or in Bubblino's case, entertaining. I think they're the future. Michael Arrington says something along the same lines here, where he speaks about Toy Bots. Also, I enjoyed reading this list of appliances that could potentially be much more fun ro use if they had Twitter integrated.
While on the subject of Arduino, I was at the launch of Nokia's PUSHN900 event last week – the sample project built by Tinker.it which involved hacking four '80's objects with the N900, used Arduino too. (The N900 itself is built on Maemo). I think we'll be hearing more of the platform in the coming months.
[Image via nuttyxander on Flickr]
The future – by Nokia
September 15, 2009 September 12, 2009 Anjali1 Comment
Nokia's take on augmented reality. I wonder how far away some of this is from actually coming true. Will TV and the iPod become completely redundant? Even phones, for that matter. You'll see not a word is spoken. I guess Nokia's going to be phasing out their phones then, and focussing on the creation of AR glasses!
Via Swiss Miss
India Rising
August 23, 2009 August 23, 2009 AnjaliLeave a comment
Some interesting stuff related to India I spotted on the interwebs lately, one a BusinessWeek article that tracks the massive increase in the already huge number of people in rural India that are accessing the web via mobile (such as through services like Nokia's MeraNokia) and the consequent competition amongst service-providers and vendors. Service-based mobiles are empowering farmers and fishermen by giving them valuable access to information related to the weather and crop pricing (among other things), slowly lifting them out of the poverty that they have been accustomed to for years, and they form a huge percentage of the market that is taking to mobiles in a big way. There is also a mention of how India will need to shift to low-rate unlimited data plans, which was responsible for a huge market shift in the US in 2007. An excerpt:
The rush to get into services cannot be explained by the need to make money, says Gupta, but to increase sales of core offerings. According to Simon Beresford-Wylie, CEO, Nokia-Siemens Networks, the "business of pipes", i.e., plain vanilla products, will exceed $1.2 trillion (Rs 60 lakh crore) this year globally. The current estimate of $100 billion (Rs 5 lakh crore) in mobile services annually is a drop in this ocean but it is not a number to be scoffed at, particularly since India is expected to lead the services revolution.
Second, a summary of key internet statistics from Trendsspotting:
Trendsspotting Handbook of Online India
View more documents from Taly Weiss.