smart phone stats

Some interesting bit of smartphone market statistics in terms of trends in usage vs geography vs devices. This has been published in a recent report from AdMob.

According to AdMob’s data, RIM’s BlackBerry 8100 Smartphone has the greatest percentage of worldwide traffic with 34% of Smartphone traffic share. Nokia’s Smartphones followed in second with 29% share of the traffic and Motorola’s Smartphones came in last with 1% traffic share. In the United States, iPhone traffic flattened slightly during the month of February, consistent with the theory that people use new devices a great deal in January, only to have traffic slow down in the following months.

Manufacturer share trends were included in February’s report as well. Nokia held the top spot worldwide with 29.4% of ad requests, in India with 66.7%, South Africa with 35.5% and Indonesia with 49.3%. In the United States, Motorola was the top device manufacturer with 35% of all ad requests and, in the UK, SonyEriccson claimed the top spot with 37% of all ad requests.

The BlackBerry remains the Smartphone with the highest traffic in the United States with 39% of US Smartphone traffic share. In India, the UK, South Africa and Indonesia, however, Nokia’s Smartphones become the clear leaders with 89%, 67%, 89% and 86% Smartphone traffic share respectively. The top devices in AdMob’s top five markets remained the same: the Motorola KRZR in the US, Nokia 6030 in India, Motorola v360 in South Africa, SonyEriccson K800i in the UK and the Nokia 660 in Indonesia.

Leadership

I liked the below definition of a leader that I read on the web.

We define leader as an ordinary human being
with both
• a commitment to produce a result whose realization would be extraordinary given
the perceived current circumstances, and
• the integrity to see this commitment through to its realization.


Leadership involves:
• Establishing direction
• Developing a vision for the future along with strategies for producing the changes needed to achieve that vision
• Aligning people
• Communicating the direction so that those who are needed to fulfill it understand the vision and are committed to it
• Motivating and inspiring
• Keeping people moving in the right direction despite the barriers by appealing to basic, often
untapped human needs, values and emotions

Aspects of Leadeship

CREATE VISION: Establish a vision that goes beyond what current know-how provides the means to accomplish and therefore requires breakthroughs for its realization
• ENROLL others in voluntarily committing to the realization of that vision
• IDENTIFY BREAKDOWNS: Create systems that identify and communicate the gaps between the committed vision and what will predictably happen
• MANAGE FOR BREAKTHROUGHS: Create an environment where people renew their commitment to the vision in the face of breakdowns so that breakthroughs can occur

SOURCE: John P. Kotter, A Force For Change: How Leadership Differs From Management, The Free Press, New York

Microcredits go mobile as loans for the poor head towards $25bn - Business Analysis & Features, Business - Independent.co.uk

The independent has a interesting article on Microfinance and how it is changing..This got my interest since there is something happening here in India itself..

Microcredits go mobile as loans for the poor head towards $25bn - Business Analysis & Features, Business - Independent.co.uk: "Microfinance – making loans of just $100 to people earning a dollar a day – was pioneered by Bangladeshi Professor Muhammad Yunus (pictured) with his Grameen Bank. So far, banks have lent to microfinance institutions, leaving them to advance money to the poor.

But now hundreds of Indians have become attached to a mobile bank manager, which means they can be in direct contact with lenders. Using smart cards and handheld biometric fingerprint readers, Indian banks such as ICICI and Punjab National are now taking their services direct to India's 350 million once un-bankable people.

These cards, made by an Indian company called Fino, are revolutionising microcredit. 'This has huge implications,' says Moumita Sensarma, head of microfinance in India at ABN Amro. 'The microfinance institutions aren't borrowers from the banks – they are agents to the banks. The record appears instantly on the books.'

ABN, which lends more to Indian microfinance companies than any other bank, began developing an electronic banking system for rural India last year.

Financial institutions have invested $4bn (£2bn) in microfinance, a figure expected to hit $25bn by 2015. Private equity is also"

Further analysis on FINO suggests the following from the site www.fino.co.in

India’s only true Biometric enabled multi-application
Smart Card based e-Payment Sectoral Resource for Banking, Micro Finance, Insurance & Government Sectors

Financial Information Network & Operations Ltd. is a pioneering Application Service Provider (ASP) based out of Mumbai, India. Using cutting edge technologies like Smart cards, Biometrics and a basket of support services,FINO enables Financial Institutions to conceptualize, develop and operationalize projects for Financial Inclusion and support sector initiatives such as General Credit cards (GCC) and Kisan credit cards (KCC) aimed at enabling the rural and remotest un-banked parts of the country to enjoy the benefits of formal financial products and services.

Positioned to act as a sectoral entity and backed by hundreds of man-hours of knowledge capital & Financial Institutions,FINO today is helping many Banks, Micro Finance Institutions, Government entities to manage and support large integrated mission critical pan India project rollouts, at incremental costs, while sharing the benefits arising out of economies of scale with all its business partners.FINO through its contemporary and robust solutions aim to deliver three key benefits to its clients:

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

Picked this good split between ad spending Vs Medium from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

Google Gears / Mobile Browser

We have long struggled with mobile handset applications for issues such as security, signing of certificate, access to native applications/data etc. Some of the recent happenings on the Google Gears, Webkit etc will ease some of the above aspects. It may also lead to mass market applications without the overheads/headaches of the current application development-launch lifecycle.

Ajit, in his opengardens blog writes the following, which beautifully captures the context ..

In the mobile world, what have we done? We created a series of elegant technology platforms optimized just for mobile computing. We figured out how to extend battery life, start up the system instantly, conserve precious wireless bandwidth, synchronize to computers all over the planet, and optimize the display of data on a tiny screen.

But we never figured out how to help developers make money. In fact, we paired our elegant platforms with a developer business model so deeply broken that it would take many years, and enormous political battles throughout the industry, to fix it -- if it can ever be fixed at all.

Meanwhile, there is now an alternative platform for mobile developers. It's horribly flawed technically, not at all optimized for mobile usage, and in fact was designed for a completely different form of computing. It would be hard to create a computing architecture more inappropriate for use over a cellular data network. But it has a business model that sweeps away all of the barriers in the mobile market. Mobile developers are starting to switch to it, a trickle that is soon going to grow. And this time I think the flash flood will last.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm talking about the Web. I think Web applications are going to destroy most native app development for mobiles. Not because the Web is a better technology for mobile, but because it has a better business model.

Think about it: If you're creating a website, you don't have to get permission from a carrier. You don't have to get anything certified by anyone. You don't have to beg for placement on the deck, and you don't have to pay half your revenue to a reseller. In fact, the operator, handset vendor, and OS vendor probably won't even be aware that you exist. It'll just be you and the user, communicating directly.

Until recently, a couple of barriers prevented this from working. The first was the absence of flat-rate data plans. They have been around for a while in the US, but in Europe they are only now appearing. Before flat-rate, users were very fearful of exploring the mobile web because they risked ending up with a thousand-Euro mobile bill. That fear is now receding. The second barrier was the extremely bad quality of mobile browsers. Many of them still stink, but the high quality of Apple's iPhone browser, coupled with Nokia's licensing of WebKit, points to a future in which most mobile browsers will be reasonably feature-complete. The market will force this -- mobile companies how have to ship a full browser in order to keep up with Apple, and operators have to give full access to it.

4 Technologies for Portability in Social Networks: A Primer - ReadWriteWeb

Very interesting article on data portablity. The social networking space will have more of such formats/technologies to interoperate for easier exchange of information as well as use of usage. The formats discussed are

Hcard - Contact related
XFN, FOAF - Friend of a Friend
Google Social Graph related API
OpenID, OpenSocial

I believe that anyone developing social networking applications has to understand these technologies better and try to use the ones that suit their application/service purpose.

I would like to understand more about this in context to the mobile social networking angle..

I will post more when I read more :-)

4 Technologies for Portability in Social Networks: A Primer - ReadWriteWeb: "hCard: Providing Your Contact Information

MicroformatsUsers are tired of repeatedly entering profile information over and over again. This problem is solved by the microformat hCard. Leslie Chicoine, an Experience Designer at Get Satisfaction, talked about how her company had created a sign up process for their web application using hCard. (see screen shot below)

HCardGetSatisfaction
XFN & FOAF: Who are your contacts

SocialGraphAPIAnother microformat, XFN, and the FOAF project are techniques for embedding relationships in links. This allows social networks to recommend contacts that should be shared, without scraping web based email clients. Recently, Google introduced a Social Graph API, which 'index[es] the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections'.

Something very interesting that I wasn't aware of until today's panel was that both Plaxo & Six Apart were working on something similar before Google announced OpenSocial, according to Joe Smarr and David Recordon. However, once Google started focusing on this they were happy to hand it over to them - because Google 'has the web on a hard drive', so it makes the crawling component of this far less difficult. For a good overview on Google's Social Graph API, check out"

Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless: Standalone Mobile Apps vs Web Apps on Mobile

I pretty much agree with Deans views wrt Native mobile applications. There are specific instances where native applications make sense like VoIP. Games is another area where Native apps might have certain advantage..

Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless: Standalone Mobile Apps vs Web Apps on Mobile: "In particular, the following use cases remain for native (or virtual machine) device applications:

* Pre-installed applications at the factory.
* Pre-installed applications by the operator or other service-provider (eg RIM)
* Pre-installed applications by the retailer or distributor
* Certain markets are a bit more application-savvy (eg the US, with its history of PDA users), although other markets still view installing (or even thinking about) handset software as a geek-only activity.
* Applications installed by enterprises for their end users
* Applications like VoIP that need access to underlyig device APIs and capabilities like codecs.
* Applications (maybe IMS apps) for which carriers are able to design & enforce a complex over-the-air automated download & install process. Likely to only work in situations where the user has a deeply-customised phone, rather than a 'vanilla' device.
* Games, and even then only by certain demographics.
* End-to-end services coupled to specific devices or a limited range, rather than generic handsets (eg BlackBerry, Amazon Kindle)"

GE - Green - Immelts idea

The Issue: Immelt's Unpopular Idea

Talks about how Green initiatives in different units in bigger org can come under one one umbrella/strategy..

Insurance Industry going Green

In my last weeks post, I had provided thoughts on the Greenery in Mobile sector..This week, I read something interesting thats happening in the Insurance business.

In a very interesting article by BusinessWeek, Anne Tergison talks about how the insurance industry is gearing up to the eco bandwagon.

It shows up in the auto sector, real estate, general insurance..

mobile data services - handset market segementation

We often have this discussion about the market size of the mobile software industry, mobile app market ..Most of the times we do not end up sizing the market correctly. My own feeling is that the market size is different from where we see it ..I mean are you a services company or are you a product company or are you system integrator or xxxx ??

One particular blog that caught my attention was wrt handset applications ..and how could the segmentation be ..

via mobileopportunity blog...

Here's a little detail on each of the three mobile data segments:

The entertainment-focused users are generally younger than average; many are in college or their 20s. They see a mobile device as a lifestyle choice, and they're willing to pay extra for a device that'll help keep them entertained. Different people want different forms of entertainment, so there are sub-segments in the entertainment mobile market. The biggest division is game-playing vs. media (music and video). But entertainment can also include things like social messaging with your friends. It's anything you do for fun rather than a paycheck.

The communication-focused users are extroverts who live to communicate with others. They're often in people-facing jobs like sales. They're willing to pay extra for a mobile device that lets them keep up with others in multiple ways. E-mail, SMS, voice, conferencing, video calling -- basically, anything communication-related is compelling to them, and they will pay extra for a device that does it well.

The information-centric users are more introverted. Rather than focusing on their dialog with others, they tend to do a lot of thinking on their own, and want their mobile device to be a memory supplement and a means to capture new information. They're not by any means recluses, but ideas rather than social interaction are what really gets them energized, and so they're willing to pay extra for features that help them capture and remember ideas and information. What they really want is a brain extender. They often work in information-heavy jobs like medicine, law, science, and academia.

Of course, there's always some overlap between markets -- for instance, you might have a doctor who also wants to stay entertained when off work. So if you draw the three mobile data markets, they overlap a bit, like one of those Venn diagrams you drew in primary school:

Green - CeBIT

This is my third post on Green-IT ..Hope to have more coming ..

iPhone SDK Beta release

The much awaited iPhone SDK has been released. This is the feature snapshot:

- Independent developers can develop applications. Apps can be free or commercial. Developers take 70%, Apple takes 30%

- Distribution of applications is ONLY through iTunes, AppStore

- No VOIP applications

- Push Email possible. Apple has licensed Microsoft's ActiveSync so that it can connect with the MS exchange.

-Parental controls will be coming in the next releases.

- Native Application Access possible.

- One of the VCs Kleiner Perkins has announced dedicated 100M fund for iPhone apps.

Green and IT services ?

New business ideas always are crafted and one such thing could be the one that links Green movement and IT.

Just like Y2K era of the last decade, there may be some business potential in the overlapping space of IT consulting and Green. I believe that there is a business landscape for 2 kinds of companies

1) The IT tech majors who have consulting practices. They can create a new consulting practice on "Green IT"

2) Niche startup companies whose core expertise lie in advising, consulting its customers towards 'Green movement', Carbon credits etc ..

The above market is expected to be around $ 4.8 Billion by 2015 and this year around $500 M.

From the Zdnet Blog -

Forrester’s green IT analyst, Christopher Mines, believes there are three primary stages to green IT projects:
- An assessment to collect information on energy usage and carbon footprint; this can take two to 10 weeks and cost between $30,000 and $100,000 depending on scale
- A planning engagement to set parameters for green IT procurement, data-center efficiency measures and other IT projects that could feed into a company’s larger corporate agenda. This phase would take six to 20 weeks and could cost from $50,000 to $400,000
- And, finally, implementation, for which your company might pay $300,000 to $2 million for the services alone. (Not including the moo-lah you would have to lay out for new hardware and/or software.)

Isnt this a big enough to bet your horses on ??

Google Gears - New approach to offline mode of working

Google has released 'Google Gears Beta' - It is a open source browser extension for web applications that can work in offline mode.

It can help solve the following issues:
- Caching
- Latency
- Offline to Online
- Sync

It currently is available for Windows mobile 5, 6 devices, MAC and Linux while it may surely be available on Android in the coming months..

From the google website FAQ -

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features:

• A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
• A database, to store and access data from within the browser
• A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

Google Gears is currently an early-access developers' release. It is not yet intended for use by real users in production applications at this time.

If you're a developer interested in using Google Gears with your application, visit the Google Gears Developer Page.

If you wish to install Google Gears on your computer, visit the Google Gears Home Page. Please note, however, that Google Gears is not yet intended for general use.

ZOPA - refreshing look at banking

I came across an interesting company - ZOPA that's existing in UK and it talks about a new model of lending, borrowing ( banking ). It takes a audacious step of eliminating banks !!!

I became more interested in this when I tried to think retrospectively in the Indian context and how it applies here ..

From its website ( http://uk.zopa.com/ZopaWeb/public/about-zopa/big-idea.html )

Social Lending is a smarter, fairer and more human way of doing money. It's like borrowing and lending with your friends and family - except there are thousands of people you can lend and borrow with.

Both lenders and borrowers get better rates, because Social Lending is more efficient than the traditional banking model. Banks have massive overheads, with thousands of employees to pay and hundreds of branches to maintain. So they have to take large margins on the money that passes through them.

An online marketplace where people meet to lend and borrow has huge cost advantages – which is why Zopa members get a fairer deal when it comes to their money.

Zopa was the world's first lending and borrowing marketplace. By demonstrating that Social Lending works on a large scale, Zopa has changed the financial sector for good.

In Zopa's wake, copycats – such as Prosper in the US, Smava in Germany and Boober in the Netherlands – have sprung up across the world.

Social Lending is a financial category of genuine and increasing importance.

Green Mobile Networks

An interesting read that caught up my attention. There has been lot of discussion and debate on green, renewable energy. I was reading something for the first time that connected this with the mobile networks.

With the pace of growth that is expected in the coming years in the developing economies, green energy is something that will have a lot of impact in these times. The developing economies are the places where there is severe shortage of energy

Read on this interesting article ..


http://www.mobile-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=58495&bcsi_scan_CD03E7C163FF38A2=0/udJcHy+AlMNov2YnFGYwMAAABbkaAA&bcsi_scan_filename=story.xhtml