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.

Mobile Marketing / 2009

Mobile Marketing has been a hot topic in the mobile arena. Even during the worst of the times, this is considered to be growing.











Couple of important takeaways :

Mobile as a marketing channel is showing increased acceptance and hence growing
Number of marketers looking to leverage mobile is on the rise


Mobile Marketing as a market segment itself is growing
Rise of different mobile channels - SMS, Widgets, WAP, Bluetooth, Voice etc

Yahoo/Microsoft Deal

Yahoo and MS announced a partnership towards 'search'. Below are some useful pointers:

-The partnership is to provide an alternative to Google for Search. At the moment, Google has 80% market share.

-The deal leverages the strengths of MS and Yahoo, while allowing the companies to invest in other areas and can lead to innovation.

-Microsoft will now power Yahoo search, while Yahoo will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers

-The details on the Mobile Search is not crystal clear.

-The PC part is exclusive, whereas mobile is not—Yahoo can partner with other vendors in the future if it chooses

-Forrester’s U.S. Interactive marketing forecast shows that search spend is forecast to continue to grow at around 15 percent a year, to more than $30 billion in 2014 in the U.S. alone, which explains why Microsoft is so keen to play in this market.

-With the Yahoo partnership, Microsoft will increase its mobile search presence significantly, while Google is still dominating the market

-This is strategic attack from Microsoft to defend its core businesses, as Google is targeting its future growth from the software market( Chrome ! Android ! )

-Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10-year license to Yahoo's core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo search technologies into its existing Web search platforms

-Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo’s owned-and-operated revenue per search in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country

-At full implementation, expected to occur within two years following regulatory approval, Yahoo estimates that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual GAAP operating income of approximately $500 million and capital expenditure savings of approximately $200 million

CXOtoday interview

Link to the CXOtoday interview.

http://www.cxotoday.com/India/News/M-VAS_to_Emerge_Bigger_With_3G_Services/551-103375-908.html

Mobile Couponing G

View more presentations from rajaparmar.

Browsers vs. native apps: Vic Gundotra's comments - Ecosystems, HTML5 and Long tail ..

http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2009/07/browsers_vs_nat.html

Sent from TwitterFon

Regards,

Vadi

Sent from the smartphone

---

http://www.mindtree.com/email/disclaimer.html

iPhone / Enterprise push

For a long time I was expecting iPhone to catch up on the enterprise journey in order to effectively take on RIM in this game. The iPhone 3GS release probably provides the answers. Following features are surely enterprise targeted features:

- native support for Exchange and encryption
-Push mechanism / OTA

For now, am waiting to upgrade to 3.0 and see the changes ..Even from a consumer perspective, there are quite a few interesting features.

upcoming event - Embedasia / Speaking on Mobile Applications

I will be speaking at one of the events - Embedasia 09 in Bangalore on Mobile Applications( http://www.embedasia.com/speaker_info.htm )

Dataquest article

A reference to a dataquest article on enterprise mobility for which I was interviewed.

http://dqindia.ciol.com/archive/articledetail.asp?arid=111753&mode=disp

Newspapers and OPen APIs( NP as a Platform ?)

There is a huge transformation happening in the newspaper industry. We all have seen how the newspapers that used to cost nearly 5/- now cost 1/- or 2/-. Ofcourse, here am talking about the newspaper industry in India.There is a transformation happening globally as well and this industry is gearing itself up
towards the changes happening.

One of the recent announcenments was that of New York Times ( NYT ) opening up its API's for the development community. It might seem puzzling to us as to why a newspaper company is aligning itself with the software industry. Well, its gearing itself in the
new circumstances.

Just today, we also hear about Guardian opening up its API's. We are about to see a new business model arise from these happenings, which if I may call NP as a Platform (NPP ). It can lead to a lot
of interesting business models and thoughts. More on the interesting thoughts in an another blog..

My recent article in Indiatimes.

Please read my recent article on Indiatimes-Telecom section.

http://tinyurl.com/d2bajb

Rags to Riches story

What a moment for India and Indians ..Slumdog Millionaire has won 8 Oscars today ! Of the eight awards,A R Rahman, the magician from madras, the music sensation and one who has changed the music scene in India won 2 awards !!!

Like the film itself, A R Rahman's story itself is a rags to riches story. He is a self made man and a real genius; Lot of inspiration to draw from ..

Born A.S. Dileep Kumar to a Tamil Hindu family, his father R.K. Shekhar, a composer who directed music for Malayalam movies, died when he was just nine. The family was forced to rent out musical equipment. Two years later, the 11-year-old budding maestro joined noted composer Ilayaraja's troupe as a keyboardist and computer programmer to support his mother and three sisters.

After working with several renowned composers like Vishwanathan-Ramamurthy, Zakir Hussain and L. Shankar, he set out on his own to compose jingles and scores for popular Indian television features and has composed more than 300 jingles.

During this period, he also earned a degree in western classical music from the Trinity College of Music, London and went on to set up his own in-house studio called Panchathan record-inn at Chennai, which is said to be Asia's most sophisticated and hi-tech studio.

In 1989, Dileep Kumar converted to Islam along with his family due to personal reasons. He became A.R. Rahman.

JAI Ho !!!! Jai Ho !!!!

Silver Lining in a Weak Economy.

We are continually hearing bad news on the economy front ( both domestic as well as global ). The 'light at the end of the tunnel' seems to be still far away atleast from the data that is being presented everyday.

However, there is some cheering news from a domestic front and this comes from the telecom industry in India. The latest TRAI figures state the following:

India added a staggering 15.41 million new mobile subscribers in January 2009, taking the country’s total number of wireless subscribers to 362.3 million, up from 233.63 million in the same month a year ago. The figure is the biggest monthly growth ever, according to data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)

Reliance Communications, India’s second-largest mobile company by users, registered the highest growth rate in January at 8.1%, followed by Idea at 5.4%, Aircel at 4.3%, Vodafone and Spice Telecom at 4% each and Bharti at 3.2%.

India is adding approximate 10 million subscribers per month, as against China’s addition of 8 million subscribers monthly.

Following are the takeways :

What this means is that the telecom industry is not facing as much of a turbulence as other industries.

The innovation and investments in this sector will probably continue in the coming year.

The markets have probably punished these companies more than what is required and there may be a re-rating soon on the telecom stocks. ( this probably is wishful thinking ! ).

Investments in startups in this sector will continue because there are opportunities to tap.

Middle Class

I was reading some interesting article on the middle class segment growth in the world and the numbers throw up some important elements..


We all have talked about this important segment of the population and most likely all of us probably belong to this segment..In india we talk about further segmentation into upper middle class and lower middle class.


As you see from the above numbers, in the last 25 years the % of middle class has nearly doubled and it currently stands at around 60% of the world population

The below figures indicate that for the first time, middle class population has increased significantly in Asia compared to the West.



The below figure shows how the middle class population is increasing its annual income levels.



So what are the takeaways ?

- Middle class is gaining strength across the world.
- Middle class is also having more money than earlier.
- It can be considered as a very important segment for any business opportunities.

Mobile AppStores

Most of us will be aware of the Mobile appstores ( essentially a central place to sel/buyl all mobile applications related to the OS platform. The trend has become very popular because of Apple whose Apple store has been hugely successful and popular.

Android has announced its own 'Android market'. RIM has its own ' RIM application center' .It is expected that, after the sucess of the apple store, we will have many phone manufacturers following the trend. Samsung and Nokia may soon annouce their own stores.

Some data on the iPhone appstore:

More than 5,000 new applications,
$30 M rev the first 30 days of operation,
200 M downloads in the first 100 days.

The success of the application stores will depend on the following factors:
-Business model of selling the application ( cost to list, developer commision )
-Platform Popularity
-Ease for the end user ( download, installation etc )
- Distribution
- Provisioning of applications

Mobile Apps in 2009

One of my articles recently appeared in Times of India, Economic times. Here is the link:

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Software/Mobile_apps_What_to_expect_in_09/articleshow/3925983.cms