My Article - Designing an Intelligent Mobile Strategy

My recent article.

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http://mobileenterprise.edgl.com/how-to/Designing-an-Intelligent-Mobile-Strategy66576

Posted Date: 2/4/2011
Designing an Intelligent Mobile Strategy
Author :By Vadiraj Aralappanavar -->By Vadiraj Aralappanavar
Not long ago, the terms “mobile” and “smartphone” were exclusively associated with the consumer world. All of the growth we have seen so far has been due to the consumer market, which consists of individuals ranging from homemakers to businessmen.
But as Bob Dylan sang, “The times they are a-changin.’” A decade ago, most enterprises were only beginning to explore phase one of enterprise mobility: voice, generally deployed on a basic feature phone. Phase two of enterprise mobility was more associated with the delivery of e-mail on a mobile device. This has changed significantly in the last few years with different mobile applications being explored for different scenarios. Companies in the transportation/logistics were the early adopters of handheld devices for specific business functions. These were primarily rugged handheld devices with expensive proprietary hardware and software.

The third phase of enterprise mobility resulted in these handheld devices being utilized in other industries such as consumer and packaged goods and manufacturing. During this phase, businesses started to recognize the value of enterprise mobility. As mobility benefits such as cost reduction, increased productivity, and customer retention started to emerge, CIOs got on the bandwagon.

Where We Are Today
We are now in the fourth phase of enterprise mobility, where smartphones are being widely used instead of their predecessors, such as PDAs that required proprietary software. The consumer and enterprise worlds are converging. The strategic decisions of some of the leading companies such as RIM and Apple highlight the trend. While RIM—traditionally a very strong player in the enterprise space—has reworked its strategy to provide consumer-oriented devices, Apple is a very strong consumer company that has been trying to gain a footing in the enterprise market with its recent software releases.

A few years ago, when mobile phones—and later, smartphones—were first introduced, enterprises expressed concern that employees would resent this change. Today, however, such concerns are largely irrelevant; staying connected has become essential, and employees and organizations have realized the value of this disruption.

Before just delving into enterprise mobility, however, companies need a sound strategy that outlines the benefits and value of a mobile initiative to the company as well as to the employee. Strategies should also align with the overall business objectives in terms of ROI and take into account economic and financial implications.

Who Needs Mobile Tools?
Enterprises also need to consider the potential users for any enterprise mobility applications. Workforce segmentation helps business leaders understand which employees requires enterprise mobility and which features and applications are required for each group. Though it may vary from organization to organization, workforce segmentation can be broadly categorized into two categories:
Customer-facing employees
Professionals spending 30% or more of their time out of the office
Professionals spending less than 30% of their time out of the office
Internal staff
Mobile internal staff who spend 10% or more of their time out of the office
Local support staff who spend less than 10% of their time out of the office.
Enterprises should also have a technological understanding of the various smartphone platforms available on the market today, as there is significant fragmentation in space.

A company mobilizing its business processes and workflows must also consider the nature of its transactions and the type of applications needed for specific worker segments. These applications also need to be customized for specific business functions.

When developing a mobile strategy, enterprises should be sure to consider another critical element—governance. It’s extremely important that businesses develop the right usage policies for the company and employees and consider the complex issues involved with security.

Executing Your Strategy
There are a number of different ways to execute a mobile strategy. Depending on the enterprise’s needs, the CIO office typically has to prioritize elements ranging from cost, control, time to market, maintenance/support, performance, and functionality.

These approaches essentially fall under build-vs-buy buckets:

Buy mobile extensions from bigger players like SAP, Oracle: A large enterprise that has a sufficient budget and large-scale deployment would consider this option. The nature of the application and associated maintenance is complex. Also, the business requirements in this scenario likely will scale up in the future. Usually in such companies, there are existing investments in enterprise software such as Oracle, SAP, and others.
Custom/homegrown mobile solutions. This approach is suitable for medium-scale businesses that have a decent IT team and specific business requirements that need to be mobilized. Scale of deployment is not huge.
Custom solutions from a third-party provider. This is a similar scenario to the one above, but involves a small- to medium-size business that does not intend to increase its IT team, and the company would prefer to work with a third party provider. These companies also have worked with an outsourcing vendor in the past and realize the benefits.
Purchase specific product-based solutions. Such companies will be similar to the first bucket but they are usually not very large enterprises. These companies also would have a specific set of business requirements that need mobile enablement, and time to deployment is key. Though they might have sufficient IT staff, these groups prefer to invest in product-based offerings from smaller enterprise mobility platform vendors.
Hosted solutions. Companies would have lesser concerns of security and are usually small- to medium-scale businesses with a limited IT team and IT budget. They also have specific business requirements that are identified for mobilization.
Currently the decision to deploy mobile enterprise solutions is a double-edged sword. There are multiple mobility options, technology approaches, and potential benefits. However, the deployment process can be challenging given the fragmentation that exists in the mobile.

What’s Ahead
In the coming year, the enterprise mobility landscape will become more intriguing as there are increased operating system choices for enterprises in 2011, including BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, and Windows 7, not to mention the different tablet OSes. The addition of the iPhone to Verizon’s network in the U.S. will also add an interesting dimension to the decision-making process for the enterprise. Ultimately, the criteria for enterprise mobility will revolve around standardization, utility, security, ease of deployment, maintenance, and cost.
In addition, tablets will become increasingly popular in the coming year. The iPad form factor will continue to lead disruption in various segments of the enterprise. Tablet devices also will begin to displace desktops and laptops from the IT landscape.
Remote access, virtualization, and VPN solutions for mobility will also be hot topics in 2011 with regard to security and threats. Also, there will be slow but sure movement toward cloud-based mobility services. Internally managed and controlled cloud-based services will become popular.
Mobility will be essential to an enterprise’s competitiveness. The deployment timing may vary, but mobile solutions eventually will become and remain an integral element of enterprise IT strategies.

Vadiraj Aralappanavar is the head of the Mobile Applications Practice at MindTree Limited.
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Pt Bhimsen Joshi, INDIA

Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, India

The post card that this god gifted genius used to receive would only have the address mentioned in the title “ Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, India”. Such was his popularity across the breadth of India that even a rickshaw driver would know him and relate to his music. He was a musician whose voice and music skills transcended and admired by aam aadmi as well as the learned musicians of the era. It is sad Pandit is no longer physically with us, but his music will reverberate and echo in our ears and minds forever.

One is indeed lucky to have lived in the same era as of this maverick Hindustani vocalist. Infact, Panditji was not just a “Hindustani classical musician” but could be actually termed as “Hindustani musician” because his melody was liked by not just people who understood and liked classical music but also common people. “Mile Sur Mera Tumhara” in raag Desh was a testament to that fact. Even after almost 2 decades, the music just brings forth the indianism in each of us. I remember , while still in school, I would remain glued just to hear this particular song amidst all busy chores that I would be involved in and even amidst possibly a slot during the cricket match.

Such was the passion to learn music in the young Bhimsen Joshi that he left his home and parents at the tender age of 11 in search of his guru. He endured a lot of struggle in the quest for his guru and he travelled across north and east of India ( Gwalior, Kolkata ). It is ironical that his eventual Guru – Pt Sawai Gandharv was in Kundgol, which is just around hundred kilometers from his home in Gadag. In our present generation, we may not be able to even comprehend the difficulty during pre-independence and post-independence times – lack of financial resources, lack of connectivity/information. Anybody who has been successful in those times is purely because of their persistence, passion and skill. It is sad but we have indeed lost a few of them in the past few months – Gangubai Hangal, Gawai and now Pt Bhimsen Joshi. Infact, Gangubai Hangal and Pt Bhimsen Joshi learnt music together under Pt Sawai Gandharv at Kundgol and had tremendous respect for each other. Apparently, when he was a kid, he heard Ustaad Abdul Karim Khan singing on radio and that moment , Young Bhimsen had decided and had made up his mind to sing like him. It was probably the defining moment in his life.
Pt Bhimsen Joshi was also known for the actions, gestures and movements during the performances. Once someone asked him about the same and he responded saying that while he was performing, his actions were the means to connect to God. He used to get completely immersed in music and would very often continue on the ‘raag’ for 3 hours with different unique ‘taan’s’, which is extremely difficult by any standards for an accomplished vocalists. Panditji is also known for the fantastic breath control and was probably god-given gift. Most of the musicians of the era vouch for that.

Panditji also is credited with the creation of the annual Sawai Gandharv music festival. It is one of the best events in the cultural circuits in India, wherein many renowned musicians play and enthrall the audiences every year. Apparently, Panditji also attended the same the last event a few months back in a wheel chair and almost everyone present were on their foot and some of them were into tears.

Panditji was also known for this interest in automobiles and cars. He had acquired a second hand Mercedes during his career and was very often seen driving himself in his hay days. He had travelled across the world to countries such as USA, Italy, Canada, Holland where he enthralled the audiences. However, he had struggled in the initial part of his life but remained persistent on the quest of musical knowledge. It is said that renowned singer Begum Akhtar had recommended a job for him at AIR ( All India Radio ) , Lucknow on monthly salary of 35/- which actually was the beginning of his masterly musical innings that will be forever etched in history. He had a great voice and great breath control and tremendous hardwork and riyaaz only made his music magical.

It is also a matter of pride for me that I belong to the same region of North Karnataka / Hubli-Dharwad where Hindustani music possibly was ingrained in the culture in the olden days. I have had only one opportunity to actually hear Pt Bhimsen Joshi sing in 2004 along with L Balamuralikrishna, renowned carnatic vocalist in Bangalore. It is of even more pride to state that we lived in the same era.

Talk on " Evolution of Mobile technology"

I was a speaker in one of the mobility events at Leela Palace, Bangalore on Dec 17, 2010. I was speaking on "Evolution of the mobile technology"

Executive Travel interview

One of the recent interviews that I had given with one of the leading magazine in the travel space. Below is the article, where I have been quoted.
http://executivetravelmagazine.com/articles/packing-lighter-on-business-travel

am also including the article below for reference:

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Packing Lighter on Business Travel
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© Marek Haiduk
By Peter Barnes Nov/Dec-2010 New mobile technology lets baggage-burdened business travelers lighten their load.
Few feel the impact of new technology quite like business travelers do. Just ask Ben Trowbridge, the CEO of consulting firm Alsbridge, who spends three of every four weeks on the road with a laptop, a smartphone, an iPod, a Bluetooth headset and a bird’s nest of accompanying chargers. “I was separating my shoulder from the weight of carrying that briefcase through airports,” he says.
Luckily, the same gadgets that seem to be multiplying in carry-ons now give executives more ways than ever before to cut back on the gear. “I’ll do a day trip without a laptop, depending on what I’m doing,” Trowbridge says. While he still prefers a keyboard for creating documents and writing detailed email, he and his staff of outsourcing and benchmarking experts have turned their iPhones, Droids, BlackBerries and even iPads into pocket-size workstations. Trowbridge’s firm also gives employees access to the company’s CRM, knowledge-management and message systems on their own mobile devices. By doing so, they’ve avoided the phenomenon common at larger companies where many employees carry both a company issued BlackBerry and their personal smartphone of choice.
“That’s something that I think is just waiting to be disrupted and consolidated,” says Chris Fleck, vice president of community and solutions development at Citrix. Between viruses and lost phones, corporations have good reason to restrict their data to company-issued devices. Fleck sees that changing, though, as mobile virtualization makes it easy to store files and software remotely. Since its introduction last year, the Citrix Receiver iPhone app, which pulls up a desktop or a program in the virtual environment popular on office networks, has been downloaded by more than half a million people. With the latest smartphones sporting slots for video cables, Fleck envisions workstations with monitors and wireless keyboards where frequently traveling employees can use their phones like CPUs. Tat said, he doesn’t see laptops disappearing entirely anytime soon: “Executives are just going to have more choice. It might be the iPhone, it might be the iPad, it might be a laptop. They’ll probably have all three, but they won’t need to lug all three.”
To some extent, that’s already true. By 2008, 71 percent of business travelers carried smartphones, says Norm Rose, president of Travel Technology Consulting, and he estimates that that number has risen to 90 percent today. While he thinks cheap, lightweight netbooks have “come and gone,” Rose predicts that the raft of tablet PCs manufacturers plan to introduce in the next year will earn the respect of business travelers. “Tablets will become a viable alternative for many replacing a laptop,” he says.
This is already the case for Sanju Bansal, the chief operating officer of MicroStrategy. His company decided to outfit 400 workers with iPads soon after the device came out, and nearly half the staff will have one by the end of this year. The selling point for Bansal was the way in which the device can share information. MicroStrategy staff working with clients often use the tablet to pull up documents, videos and interactive demonstrations of the firm’s business-intelligence software.
“The iPad feels like the first mobile device that is a reasonable substitute for paper,” Bansal says. He notes that it’s particularly useful for keeping up with the 50 to 100 approvals he has to review every day in his executive role. Using a program developed in-house, executives at MicroStrategy can sign off on purchase orders, hires, promotions and other routine management decisions while taking a taxi or waiting for an elevator. “We’ve found it dramatically speeds the decision cycles in business,” says Bansal.
Games and social networks may rank among the most popular downloads in Apple’s App Store, but developers have also scrambled in the past couple of years to show businesses that a well-equipped smartphone is more of a tool than a toy. As apps track inventory, legal approvals, purchases and other data, “many enterprise prise systems are now getting enabled on the smartphone,” says Vadi Aralappanavar, the head of mobile applications at MindTree.
Over the past few years, Aralappanavar has watched the apps for travel become more intuitive and more integrated with each other. Beyond booking flights or managing an itinerary, he says, apps will soon know that a user is at the airport and will automatically provide him with fliight information and personally tailored promotions from airport merchants.
Within his own company, Aralappanavar points to web-based conferencing as another technology that has considerably improved coordination with employees on the road. “I think telepresence is making a lot of impact,” he says, and will continue to grow in popularity. He adds that MindTree has seen significant cost savings over the past two years by using Web services for large conference calls with employees spread across three continents.
Just as Internet voice services such as Skype threaten to change the way in which smartphones make calls, improvements to mobile browsers could challenge the dominance of the smartphone’s defining element: downloadable applications. When Mandarin Oriental hotels approached Siteworx to build an iPhone app, developers took a look at improvements made to Apple’s latest iPhone browser and convinced the hotel chain to add a mobile website instead. The resulting site functions just like an app, making use of the phone’s GPS and gesture functions—but with no download required.
For Siteworx president Tim McLaughlin, the technology that helps him travel has progressed as rapidly as the techniques used by his company’s programmers. These days, when he lands in an unfamiliar city he pulls up a digital map and nails down the logistical details of the trip in minutes on his phone. He still stows a laptop at the hotel on most trips to handle the inevitable lengthy contract or email. His latest computer, though, weighs less than three pounds and stays charged for 10 hours, creating a lighter burden and less incentive to leave it behind.
New mobile technology lets baggage-burdened business travelers lighten their load.
“I think the problem right now is that we’re still tied to keyboards until voice interaction gets better,” McLaughlin says. He tried the iPad but found that its interface and productivity software fell short of his needs. Still, frequent travelers spend more time away from the computer than ever before. As McLaughlin points out, “I can go days on my iPhone alone.”
The latest business software has finally caught up with the explosive advance of mobile technology, leaving sore-shouldered executives with better tools to do more work with less stuff.
Lighten up: Six tricks for easier travel
1. Untangle: Even the sleekest new device can still weigh you down if it comes with a bulky charger. Power up your phone, headset, MP3 player and other devices at the same time with a multicharger, such as the Chargepod. The $60 model can connect six mobile devices at once, and the more expensive version handles laptops as well.
2. Go (Geo) Local: Many cities vying for visitors now offer smartphone applications that take advantage of GPS technology. Singapore’s new app, for example, can give users custom directions to dozens of businesses, as well as perks such as priority reservations at restaurants.
3. Transcribe: Try trading paper notes for one of the steadily improving voice-to-text programs, such as Dragon Dictation or—for text messages—ShoutOUT.
4. Organize: Keep your flight, car and hotel reservations in one place with a digital itinerary manager such as TripIt, WorldMate or Rearden Personal Assistant.
5. Forget Receipts: Recording expenses is as easy as snapping a picture, now that a growing number of expense-reporting systems make use of smartphone cameras. Expense2GO and Expensify are two of the apps available to make travel spending less tedious to track.
6. Make like a Marine: If all else fails, Trowbridge recommends this tip he learned in the military: Take each item out of your laptop bag every few weeks and ask yourself if you absolutely need it. You’ll be surprised at what you leave behind.
PETER BARNES can hunt down an electrical outlet at an unfamiliar airport in two minutes flat.

More Acquistions : SAP buys Sybase 5.6B

The enterprise mobility market has been hot in the last year or so and the recent news of the SAPs acquisition of Sybase will make it even more interesting.

SAP is one of the leaders in the enterprise software space and mobility is being looked as a very effective channel in this space in the last few years. SAP already has been toying around with different strategies to explore this market ..SAP Netweaver program was one such initiative which, I understand was not very successfull. Subsequently, they have a created a SAP ecosystem for mobility where it has mobility partners such Syclo, Sybase and few others.

Few random observations :

Sybase provides a mobile middleware platform for developing and customizing mobile solutions. However, it in itself does not have the mobile applications.

Sybase rev would be around 400 M and hence the acquisition has come at a steep price !

For large enterprises running SAP, the mobile solutions naturally would be based on Sybase iAnywhere platform and the customization could be done through the third party vendors.

SAP will benefit from the license fees that Sybase used to charge earlier. It may be possible to bring down the overall cost of the mobile solutions for the end enterprise.

It needs to be seen how Sybase iAnywhere platform will be changed to accomodate different customer segments that included non-SAP users as well.

The other vendors like Syclo, Sky will possibly need to re-work their strategies without SAP now ..

Overall, I would rate this as right move that will add the required arsenal for SAP in the long term. For Sybase, its a great exit and a great partner who can take them higher ..

Apple : change in licensing agreement

Apple recently announced OS 4.0 with some major functionality changes. I have covered in high level the functionality additions in my previous post.

One other interesting addition is the change to the licensing agreement. Apple now prohibits any of the cross platform toolkits in its platform. Example would be the Adobe toolkit, there may be several others too who fall under that bucket. Let us analyse the same:

Earlier, any third party vendor with a cross platform toolkit would have been able to develop iphone native apps. With this change, iphone native apps can only be developed by iphone SDK and native objective C through the Cocoa API's provided by Apple.

Why this change ?

• Apple does not want to loose control
• Apple wants to maintain the quality of applications
• Apple does not want the third party vendors( like Adobe ) to benefit at the cost of Apple.
• Apple Appstore is growing and has close to 180000 applications as of now and it will only grow based on the growth in the industry. With this change, Apple would be the sole beneficiary and will not let any other companies take advantage and create another monopoly appstore that could potentially also have iphone apps.

What is in it for the Developers ?

• No change for the iphone developers.

What is in it for the cross platform toolkit providers ?

• They cant have iphone apps as a part of the toolkits. They will have the ability to build other apps from other platforms, if they do so.
• They will loose on the investments that they would have done so far.

What is in it for the other OEMs ?

• Some of the other platform providers may take cue and prohibit cross platform toolkits on their platforms.

On a general note, what might possibly happen is that we may only end up having only a fewer application stores from bigger vendors ( Apple, Microsoft, RIM etc ) that will become popular.

While we can continue to argue on Apple's strategy and what it does for the ecosystem, it certainly seems to be a well thought of strategy by apple considering the longer term growth that this industry provides.

My Article in IT Next - April edition

The link to my article on Enterprise Mobility in the April edition of the IT Next magazine.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/29424645/IT-Next-April-2010

iPhone OS 4.0

It was quite some time since I had posted my last post. However, there have been some interesting events in the past few weeks wrt Apple that I thought require a post ..

First event was a the release of much awaited iPAD. This device surely has a disrupting potential in the publishing/ereader industry. Since the release on Apr 3, abbout 450,000 iPads have been sold to date.

Second event has been the announcement wrt iphone OS 4.0. It comes with several new APIs ( 1500 or so ). The major new functionality could be bucketed as follows:

• MultiTasking
• Enhanced Email / Additional Exhange account provision.
• iAD
• iBooks
  
• Enterprise features

Each of the above probably deserve a seperate post, that possibly I will hope to post ...

Quote : DQ Channels

Link to my quote to DQ channels:

http://dqchannels.ciol.com/content/space/110011406.asp

Voice & Data Interview

Here are the links to my recent interviews to VoiceNData that appeared in Print in the new year special edition

http://voicendata.ciol.com/content/service_provider/110010504.asp

http://voicendata.ciol.com/content/top_stories/210010402.asp

Express Computer : Interview links

Recent interview links of mine on Mobile Unified Communications..

http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20091130/unifiedcommunicationsspecial04.shtml

http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20091130/unifiedcommunicationsspecial01.shtml

Sunil Gavaskar

Well, I had a chance to meet the legend - Sunil Gavaskar today in the office. He was here as a Deutche Bank sponsor. It was a great opportunity to see him in person, infact he was just sitting in the row ahead of me before going on stage.

He lived upto the expectation and infact he also does great Mimicry. He did the same of Javed Miandad and Geoff Boycott.

Interview / Voice and Data

One of my recent interviews wrt smartphones and mobility. It has been published in the latest version of Voice and Data.

http://voicendata.ciol.com/content/service_provider/109110204.asp

Mobile Coupons

There has been lot of activity and ( hype ) in the mobile coupon space. It may be good to understand what is a mobile coupon at the first place. 'Coupon' is a marketing terminology.

According to Wikipedia..

In marketing a coupon is a ticket or document that can be exchanged for a financial discount or rebate when purchasing a product. Customarily, coupons are issued by manufacturers of consumer packaged goods or by retailers, to be used in retail stores as a part of sales promotions. They are often widely distributed through mail, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, and mobile devices such as cell phones.

Before Mobile Coupons, Internet based coupons were in vogue. Internet coupons typically provide for reduced cost or free shipping, a specific dollar or percentage discount, or some other offer to encourage consumers to purchase specific products or to purchase from specific retailers.

Mobile Coupon is a coupon that leverages the mobile channel for delivery/redemption. There has been a recent interest in this space because of possibly the following reasons:

• Mobile industry has exploded;
• Mobile data services are on the rise;
• Mobile as a marketing channel is getting increasingly popular and has better statistics in all forms of click rates
• In US, the paper coupons are estimated to be 300 Billion every year. Mobile as a channel surely can replace a certain % of this.
  
• Paper coupons are expensive and the results are not as good as the Mobile channel
  

Here's a breakdown of what percentage of U.S. consumers get their coupons from each medium, according to Scarborough Research:

• Sunday newspaper: 51 percent
• In store: 35 percent
• Direct mail: 31 percent
• Loyalty programs: 21 percent
• Circulars: 20 percent
• Weekday newspaper: 17 percent
• Product packaging: 16 percent
• Magazines: 15 percent
• Email/text messages: 8 percent
• Websites: 7 percent

Please note that in India, these figures might be much different.

The process that is involved in launching Mobile Coupons would be :

Begin to have a database of Opt-in users ( Opt-in users are the ones who are willing to receive mobile marketing message / coupon their mobiles ; It is like a email subscription in the desktop world ! )

Analyse the profiles of users

Design marketing campaign ( delivery means, timing, content, Awareness etc )

Launch

Analyse the results ( Reports of CXX statistics ).( There are so many statistics CPM, CPE, CPO, CPA, CPL CTR, CTV etc ). This subject can be a seperate post in itself. The thing to note is most of these statistics are used by companies in a manner that can benefit them :-)


Without digressing too much, below are the defintions :

• CPM (Cost Per Mille), also called "Cost Per Thousand (CPT), is where advertisers pay for exposure of their message to a specific audience. "Per mille" means per thousand impressions, or loads of an advertisement. However, some impressions may not be counted, such as a reload or internal user action. The M in the acronym is the Roman numeral for one thousand.

• CPV (Cost Per Visitor) or (Cost per View in the case of Pop Ups and Unders) is where advertisers pay for the delivery of a Targeted Visitor to the advertisers website.

• CPC (Cost Per Click) is also known as Pay per click (PPC). Advertisers pay each time a user clicks on their listing and is redirected to their website. They do not actually pay for the listing, but only when the listing is clicked on. This system allows advertising specialists to refine searches and gain information about their market. Under the Pay per click pricing system, advertisers pay for the right to be listed under a series of target rich words that direct relevant traffic to their website, and pay only when someone clicks on their listing which links directly to their website. CPC differs from CPV in that each click is paid for regardless of whether the user makes it to the target site.

• CPA (Cost Per Action) or (Cost Per Acquisition) advertising is performance based and is common in the affiliate marketing sector of the business. In this payment scheme, the publisher takes all the risk of running the ad, and the advertiser pays only for the amount of users who complete a transaction, such as a purchase or sign-up. This is the best type of rate to pay for banner advertisements and the worst type of rate to charge.
  • Similarly, CPL (Cost Per Lead) advertising is identical to CPA advertising and is based on the user completing a form, registering for a newsletter or some other action that the merchant feels will lead to a sale.
  • Also common, CPO (Cost Per Order) advertising is based on each time an order is transacted.
  • CPE (Cost Per Engagement) is a form of Cost Per Action pricing first introduced in March 2008. Differing from cost-per-impression or cost-per-click models, a CPE model means advertising impressions are free and advertisers pay only when a user engages with their specific ad unit. Engagement is defined as a user interacting with an ad in any number of ways.^[3]

• Cost per conversion Describes the cost of acquiring a customer, typically calculated by dividing the total cost of an ad campaign by the number of conversions. The definition of "Conversion" varies depending on the situation: it is sometimes considered to be a lead, a sale, or a purchase.

Enterpreneur Statistics

Below are some interesting stats that I had saved ( and forgot the linke ) regarding founders/entrepreneurs :

1. The average and median age of company founders when they started their current companies was 40.

2. 95.1 percent of respondents themselves had earned bachelor’s degrees, and 47 percent had more advanced degrees.

3. Less than 1 percent came from extremely rich or extremely poor backgrounds

4. 15.2% of founders had a sibling that previously started a business.


5. 69.9 percent of respondents indicated they were married when they launched their first business. An additional 5.2 percent were divorced, separated, or widowed.

6. 59.7 percent of respondents indicated they had at least one child when they launched their first business, and 43.5 percent had two or more children.

7. The majority of the entrepreneurs in the sample were serial entrepreneurs. The average number of businesses launched by respondents was approximately 2.3.

8. 74.8 percent indicated desire to build wealth as an important motivation in becoming an entrepreneur.

9. Only 4.5 percent said the inability to find traditional employment was an important factor in starting a business.

10. Entrepreneurs are usually better educated than their parents.

11. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.

12. The majority of respondents (75.4 percent) had worked as employees at other companies for more than six years before launching their own companies.