Mobile Europe 2.0, July 4th, Barcelona

Notes from Mobile Europe 2.0 in Barcelona, a great program prepared by Rudy de Waele, Gregory Gorman, Daniel Applequist, Peter Vesterbacka, Gregory Gorman. Rudy’s wrap-up says it all if you want to skip my in-extenso version.

Key challenges for mobile 2.0 include :
> Leveraging up Web 2.0 faster
> Attracting investors despite hurdles
> Bring together operators and service innovators
> Building on successful business models
> Bringing to market innovative user experiences from start-ups

Catching up with Web 2.0 ?
There seemed to be a bit of frustration in the mobile social media panel that mobile 2.0 is not yet booming. Tommy Ahlers, CEO Zyb (just acquired by Vodafone)advice: simply care about the end-user [experience], avoid filling the screen with ads, fix fundamentals and get services off the ground. Smaller operators are better at doing that and more innovative but he promised to change Vodafone for the better.
Charlie Schick, editor Nokia Conversations recommends to avoid the clash between web services for big screen/keyboard and those mobile on small handsets. No one is going to dominate the other.
Alex Romero, Director Yahoo! thinks it requires tuning the eco-system leaving room for MNOs and other players. And Doug Richards, CEO Trutap summed it up : We are only at the very beginning of the industry, openness will create better user experiences.

Attracting investors ?
Rudy de Waele invited me to join this VC perspective discussion with a corporate venturing view. What’s holding VC investments and IPO’s back ? One issue is the business scalability mentioned by Maximilian Niederhofer from Atlas Venture: the fragmentation is due to the number of devices, he gave the example of Atlas’s investment [32M$ with Partech] in Dailymotion, now 60 million users the web but too difficult to move to mobile. It’s clear that mobile 2.0 does not compete with web 2.0 investment opportunities. Imma Martinez, from Stradbroke advisors was very vocal about the channel friction issues such as revenue share agreements, low flat-rate data offerings, 9-12 months to negotiate carrier agreements, a view shared by the panel. In her blog, she refers to mobile services “corrida de toros” (bullfight).

I proposed a more balanced view between short-term business improvement with longer-term innovations opportunities. At this moment, corporate funding, M&A or simply business deals may be appropriate to mobile 2.0. This is because mobile 2.0 can immediately enhance today’s Telco or enterprise “brick and mortar” services which have a sound business model. A good example in the conference was Dial2Do that combine voice service monetization with web 2.0 services (see below). I mentioned the business model of mobilizing HP Snapfish, photo sharing offering 9c print in partnership with 12’000 outlets and used by 50 million on-line users in 20 countries storing 2 billion photos. Another example would be mobilizing publishing with readers social network services complementing on-demand order and printing industry enabled by HP’s Indigo printers. Around the consumer electronics and content businesses, there is value in adding connectivity to the various home devices, for example mobilizing the exchange of play lists and on-line content preferences.
At the same time, looking into the 3-5 years future, I foresee great opportunities for VC-funded breakthrough innovations that will exploit LTE bandwidth, new video processing capabilities and enhanced devices. This is where there is a need for innovative start-ups and the VC exits should be plentiful.

Understanding operators ?
The operator panel discussion exposed the misunderstanding between mobile start-ups and mobile operators. Mobile start-up innovation and users expect a fully open and cheap playground; in contrast operators focus on CAPEX/OPEX optimization to monetize scarce mobile broadband resources. Anastassia Lauterbach, EVP Strategy, T-Mobile International explained these issues clearly but bluntly : P2P mobile data is 38% of traffic (YouTube alone is 17%), with less < 200€ data revenues. Applying Moore’s law, the flat-fee business model does not scale : 5-year CAPEX required is 70B€ in Germany [~300€ /subscriber/year]. She also mentioned the impact across the value chain that supports mobile 2.0 : network > platforms > middleware > customer care and service. The subsequent debate with the audience was heated and inconclusive (despite Raimo van der Klein and Gregory Gorman’s moderation attempts). I would have suggested at least a differentiation of mobile 2.0 services based on their real-time bandwidth requirement and alternate access points such as Femtocells and WiMax for video streaming.

Among other good comments, Martin Duval, CEO Bluenove and director Orange start-up program was positive on opening-up and offering flat-fee data services to bring ad-funded content services and rather than cannibalizing. Under the motto "together we can more" Orange wants to educate start-ups to develop mutually beneficial business cases. He also referred to Orange’s opening-up to Nokia Ovi. Gian Paolo Balboni, head of innovation Telecom Italia mentioned innovation by providing access to network assets through web middleware services. Unai Iturburu, head of Vodafone Spain R&D indicated that we need better industry alignment to combine web and mobile services and quoted Vodafone’s Betavine.

Already a successful business !
The open business models panel showed 5 successes ranging from off-deck, MVNO and on-deck approaches.
Chris Liu, of Fjord gave the example of Flirtomatik business model of “ego-services”. They have 120M PV/month, selling digital flowers and kisses. He referred to the challenged of supporting handsets.
Leif Fågelstedt, COO Blyk explained how they monetize their “understanding of users”. The 7th media is less about content than it is about context” . Blyck's 900 campaigns resulted in 29% response rate (up to 60% in some targeted campaigns). Most are “conversations” such as SMS > SMS response > MMS > WAP menu. He says the MVNO business model is a win-win for the operators and not cannibalizing as it brings new revenues from advertising, they are expanding in Europe in the fall. Blyck’s emphasis is on personal communications but there is room for expanding into content and social networking. But right now you can’t solve the handset fragmentation issue so it’s too early.
Ilja Laurs, founder Getjar sees it as an off-deck community of downloaders with an enormous diversity (10K applications, 200K download/month, example: flashlight replacing lighters in discos, battery drainer , Opera Mini 7M dl). For him, mobile billing is a nightmare so advertising sponsoring is a better solution. Ray Anderson, founder Bango said they combine off-deck and on-deck and see MNOs opening-up. Laurence Aderemi, from Admob now serves 3 billion ads/month 100% off-deck.

Awards winners and next wave
The team assembled a great line-up of start-ups. We met them the previous day at ESADE where they gave a VC-pitch. I’ve classified them in 3 themes because of my particular interest but presentations were grouped by financing stage.

Personalization, social networks
• Zipipop : they have invented “intention broadcasting” for your social life, casual meetings among friends and even for your “sex life”. It is a really cool user interface, a la T9 for broadcasting “Let’s meet for coffee at this place”. I enjoyed discussing with Helene Auramo, Zipipop CEO their monetization ideas and suggested “intentional advertising” like “the cook is in a really good mood at this place”. Viral marketing by SMS invites. Richard von Kaufmann gave an excellent pitch and had the T-shirt with the best logo Zipi-fish. *** Best Early Stage Start-up.
• Rummble, is a location-aware social networking for discovery of events and recommendations, with micro-blogging.*** They won an award.
• Aka-aki, proximity-aware networking. Personalize, on the go, share emotions and content, lifestyle; cross-media, location-based advertising. I like the fact that it gathers contacts along the way, kind of an active address-book. They have an excellent video pitch and I had posted about them earlier.
• Shout'em, mobile social media : White-labeled Twitter-like service, launched as Zrikka in Croatia, (200K subscribers) they also have a photo sharing site. Their ambition is to support Symbian, iPhone and Android handsets.
• YouLynx, mobile social media with geo-tagged upload/download and IM/VoIP. They address the PC/mobile convergence and synchronize address book, communications, content on both devices. On-portal deployment at O2, Vodafone, Telefonica, America Moviles, Orange, Airtel, DoCoMo . Presentatin by Jorge Gonzalez
• Taptu , mobile social-aware search Stefan Butlin, Taptu CTO, presented
• Mobiluck , mobile location based IM, chat and social networking. MobiLuck helps you share your location, spot friends nearby, and meet interesting people and places along the way!
• Nimbuzz, Free IM, txt, PC calls, mobile VOIP in progress. Client for 22 brands/500 models. Great functionality with Skype, Gtalk, AIM, Windows Live messenger, Yahoo!Jabber, Myspace, Facebook.
• Palringo, mobile IM client for sharing text, photos, and voice IMs with groups or individuals.

Multimedia user interfaces
• Dial2do, a great application that uses voice to connect to web 2.0 services. It goes beyond traditional unified messaging (e.g. SpinnVox) or voice activated dialing and let’s you Twitter or Facebook in addition. Other services include : Jaiku, Tumblr, Jajah, Zimbra, etc… And voice allows immediately monetization. The US market seems ready for this : 60% of wireless calls while driving 87 min/day. Their go to market includes packaging in retail with Plantronic, Jabra and other plastic telephony appliances. Ivan McDonald , the CEO has a very convincing pitch. ***They won an award.
• Kooaba,is a revloutionalry cool image search engine that fits perfectly with cameraphone capabilities. “Shoot a picture of a record cover and get the music” kind of experience. Herbert Bay is an alumni of ETH Zurich.
• Via mobility, they developed a mobile widget execution platform to leverage the 150K widgets on the web and adapt them to 100K phones. You get your customized idle screen for notification and contents. This was presented by Serge Crebassa. This is important if your bet is that widgets are the way to innovate without handset fragmentation issues. The core skills of the company is in the embedded AEE and again this is critical.
• Clicmobile: Alex Kummerman, CEO presented a really impressive visual city guide with celebrities launched for Louis Vuiton, walk with celebrities for 12 € in Shanghai, Beijing. The foundation is a social network but it’s really the user interface and the quality of content that attracted my attention
• ViiF, video enabled mobile entertainment : Most of the service is via download, but the services can be tried out by video call 22557 in Germany, easy to customize with a web interface. They have revenue-sharing agreement with content providers. A welcomed competitor to iTunes video.
• Secufone, developing specific user interfaces for iPhone for safety/security applications. They transition from a custom-handsets business for elderly people and security firms. A good example of business cases from focusing on user experience within a niche.
• Mippin mobilizing web by adapting sites. This blog can be viewed there.

Monetization with advertizing• Unkasoft, mobile sponsored gaming : Repurposing mobile games catalogues for advertising campaigns e.g. Pepsi Max (a game of saccharin vs. sugar) Contact : Jaume Lanchares

Mobile web 2.0 summit, June 2008, London

Questions of the day at mobile web 2.0, 11th June London :

Finding monetization in the next phase of mobile web services,
Innovation in user experiences
New technologies

Monetization of mobile web is small
At the end of the day, the money around mobile web is still small compared to the substantial revenues of mobile voice and messaging. Perhaps 30 B$ content and 3 B$ advertising compared to over 600B$ voice, SMS and data access. But you can’t milk a calf and the business will grow.

Tony Fish, CEO, AMF Ventures & Author, “Mobile Web 2.0” presented the opportunity in monetizing the mobile digital footprint (user profile and behavior ). The new world focuses on the [UGC] creation side and posting mobile content to the web. Advertising revenues complement value-added service charging models. This is a transition from the old world mobile industry focused on consumption, centered on payment for services, applications and content. But thee new world will not wipe the old word it will improve it.

The monetization opportunities coming from uniqueness of mobile :
Mobile payment, complementing credit cards and cash ; in the old world you get back services and content.
Mobile footprint : (data follows you all the time leading to accurate digital footprint, advanced personalization, beyond identity protected by AAA (bank and credit card details), location) ;. in the new world you give your footprint to the community and get in return reputation, enhanced search algorithms and results; the ownership of this meta-data is a new battle ground.


Nick E. Heller, Strategic Partnerships, Media & Publishing, Google. He also sees mobile advertising complementing overall advertising with unique features :
Location remains the top unique selling proposition, despite the fact that this is a 10-years old idea.
Usage pattern : 8:00 (commute), 12:00 (lunch) and most important 22:00 (bed time).
Device interaction : primarly SMS (CPM) today – evolving to web searches (CPC) and user interaction (CPA) using cameras such as Android scan (taking pictures of barcodes to trigger searches).
User authentication was one aspect when discussing privacy protection, safe search, personalized advertising (context sensitive)

Stéphanie Hospital, VP Marketing, Orange online advertising : said the priority is to establish basic metrics for mobile advertising and expand the main inventories in WAP banners and messaging. Current CPM/CPC rates are not significant at this stage. Experimentation with video or interaction (with Adidas to win tickets in France) shows the future potential for branding campaigns and later we will improve at user profiling.

Paul Goode from m:metrics confirmed the success of SMS advertising campaigns with 50% of EU and 20% of US subscribers having received messages. He estimated mobile media audience being 25% of all EU5+US subscribers (~ 106 million, > 6% growth) with a >3X greater usage by the 10% smart phone users (~ 37 million, 0% growth). The biggest growth is seen in social networks, used by ~ 4% of subscriber spending 1:30 hours/month on facebook.com or myspace.com, ranked in the top 5 visited sites. US now leads over Europe in mobile media consumption and web access : Americans spend 4:30 hours/month browsing, British spend 2:25 hour/month. Demographics show 45% of 28-30 year old with the biggest usage of mobile content. On the topic of smart phones he noted that N95 outsold iPhone 1:2, the iPhone being bought by those who can afford it.
Innovative user experiences
More than the money, the passion of both users and developers alike seems to fuel the development of new user experiences, whether for self-expression, social networking and the holy grail of location-enhanced services.

Carl Taylor, Director of applications and services, Hutchison Whampoa Europe : stated the priority is to improve the interaction between users, devices and content to make the experience more relevant. This involves more psychology than technology and aims at enabling consumer peer review and viral marketing. [ Carl has been an advocate of applying semantic web mark-up such as W3C Powder to ensure better relevance ]. Hutchison has made the 3 mobile broadband offer attractive to consumers and had the courage to launch Skype phone at £12 / month. They see premium content and advertising business model expanding, provided there is tuning of the delivery value-chain across operators and content providers.

Christian Lindholm, Partner and Director, Fjord : he told the story how he came late at Radisson Edwardian May Fair Hotel because his search for london mayfair hotel brought 400 results on mobile Google Maps excluding the right one. In this user experience, “places” are different than “street addresses”. He joked that London black cabs is the best LBS system because they have contextual and semantic information.

Matt Jones, Co-Founder and Lead Designer, Dopplr.com
Commenting further on looking LBS user experiences he said he liked the topic because it's so difficult and bad things can happen. Dopplr is about describing interesting parts of places and the social aspect of places. For this you may want to increase fuzziness rather than accuracy of the location.

Anja Kielman, Founder aka-aki demonstrated their innovative social service piloted in Berlin, uses bluetooth to alerts users with similar profiles logged within 20m in bars, shops and crowds. Anja says it’s designed to take your social network to the street and create connections in the real world. The web version has all the standard features like profiles, friends and messaging. The mobile version is a small Java application that you can send to friends, one connected phone can serve as a hub for the other, therefore reducing the cost of data connections.



New technologies
Virtual and real devices are also fueling innovation.

Anders Elleby, Swisscom Participation : innovative services can be launched with devices such as the Ogo2 devices adopted by (~100’000?) Swiss teenagers who can connect to MSN IM, call and now browse the web. Also mentioned, Starfruit virtual phone booth in Second Life allows SMS and offering flowers to the real world. In general MNO can innovate with network enablers (for all access networks), device applications (despite the fragmentation of platforms) and overall services, rather than focusing at declining premium content revenues.

Thomas van der Zijden, VP of Marketing for Polymer Vision: presented the “Readius” a pocket sized reader with a 5" rollable display and 3.5G connectivity. Readius uses organic materials in all elements of the display and can be rolled.

Mobile youth marketing, London, May 2008

Thanks to Josh Dhaliwal, of Mobile Youth I was invited to the workout in London, May 2 2008. Graham Brown, CEO of Mobile Youth who wrote about the 7 challenges of mobile marketing proposed 3 challenges of mobile youth marketing for this workout :

Charging : from free-content to new business models
Relevance : user profiling allowing intimacy and privacy,
Trust : social dialogue between brands and consumers

Monetizing free-content with new business models
Mobile Youth marketing is about winning the heart and mind of the youth and content, music for example is a great way to succeed. It’s one reason iPod brand is such a reference. We talked about brand that fell such as Levi’s ® (from 50% market share in 1996 down to 9%) as they lost their sexy / rebellious shrink-to-fit image [yet they launched an award-winning mobile campaign promoting user-remixed ringtones and 501 jeans in 2005]. What’s the business case for free content and capped data plans ?
Music : some great examples of the free economy. Fans downloaded Radiohead’s new album Rainbows at the prices they wanted, 38% paid a total rumored to amount 9M$. Similarly, Prince's album Planet Earth was released as a freebie but the 21 London concerts sold out for 23M$. Gerd Leonhard calls this the “tap water music” vs. “bottled music” and published 3-years blog history : Music 2.0. Damien Saunders, head of music at Vodafone agreed there were lots of opportunity to monetize mobile music. But he made the point that it is about creating user experiences with lead users and rather than promoting content with advertising which is counter-productive.
Video : there was less buzz on mobile video but Rhys McLachlan of Mediacom reminded us that youth still consume 3 hours/month of TV. Other panelists saw a smaller opportunity there. [yet 3 UK had 600’000 subscribers downloading 6 million video clips sponsored by advertising and announced a sponsored music video service – and 32 million have been downloaded on 3’s SeeMeTV and O2’s LookAtMe!, from 60,000 user-generated submissions].
Graphics : an order of magnitude of mobile entertainment revenue was given by Tal Dagan, from Comverse (ring tones 10B$, ring-back tones 5B$, graphics 3B$, other 0.5B$) [I attempted to complete the picture with other publicly available figures from MEF(25B$), IDC (highest revenue from ringtones, ringback tones, mobile television and video services, 2011 forecast of 40B$), Portio Research (music 9B$, games 3B$, video 1 B$, others 17B$)]

By comparison, eMarketer estimates mobile advertising at 2.8B$ [growing to 19.1 B$ by 2012 ]. As an example beyond ringtones, Comverse’s Klonies is a solution to push avatars during call establishment (J2ME client software) instead of the CLI / phone address-book user interfaces.

User profiling driving relevance and protecting privacy
My presentation in the user profiling panel triggered lively discussions. : how far should we drive user behavior analysis and targeting ? I explained the potential for dynamic profiling with network information : your phone address book is your social graph, call and location history, presence and device information are additional dynamic profile information’s typically available in databases such as HLR/HSS, XDMS etc… And dynamic device detection can help adapt to the preferred format and channel.

On the pro side, user profiling serves both advertisers and users. Jupiter surveys that 50% of 16-25 year old youth are happy to be targeted by advertising in exchange for free content and Blyk’s 100’000 subscribers are a testimony of this. Jack Wallington of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) representing over 86% of online advertising in the United States, gave views on the normalization of the mobile advertising profile data and related metrics.

On the opposite side privacy protection is key to maintain trust with consumers. The audience recalled the controversy around Facebook’s social advertising and Beacon Facebook Ads, an engine for sharing profiles with advertisers that lead to 50’000 users joining the MoveOn.org group until explicit permission and opt-out was enforced. On the privacy issue, IAB best practices include the opt-in opt-out facilities to give control to the user. In addition strong authentication profile should assist in enforcing child safety, such as mobile operators code of practices brokered by the European Commission to prevent bullying [15% of under 16] , access to pornographic [ #1 destination is adult, peak usage time 9pm-11pm] and violent content, and inappropriate use of camera phones and location services. I was asked about authentication mechanisms beyond USIM and passwords – my belief is that only biometric (fingerprint, face recognition) authentication can properly identify a child using a device. A related issue is SPAM which affects 80% users with 23 billion messages/year.

Matthew Snyder, now CEO of the consulting company ADO strategies has a great experience in this mobile advertising industry and provided some comments on how advanced profiling can practically be implemented with multi-channel ad-serving platforms. From the discussion I attempted to list some of the main aggregators and players in this new industry.

Nokia’s media network (Nokia’s ad Business led to the acquisition of Enpocket in 2007, a mobile campaign management with multi-modal SMS, MMS, WAP, and video delivery with analytics).
Google’s Adwords for mobile
DoubleClick Mobile (works with ad networks to deliver combination ads, road blocked ads and jump pages)
Microsoft’s subsidiary Screentonic (early leader in mobile ad serving technology for European operators)
AOL’s Platform-A Advertising.com , Quigo (content-targeted advertising), Tacoda(behavioral targeting), Adtech (online ad-serving), buy.at and Third Screen Media (platform and mobile advertising network)
Admob (home of evangelist Russell, co-author of MobHappy)
Amobee(dynamic ad insertion in multiple channels : videos, music, messaging, games, WAP)

Trusted social dialogue between brands and consumers
Can mobile social networks enhance customer relationships ? The question was debated in the panel led by Ged Caroll from Waggener Edstrom and blogger who said that customer insight can be obtained with a mix mobile marketing and traditional PR+advertising. He’s a professional advocate of blogging for marketing as he explained in a video.

Helen Keegan, from Beep Marketing raised thie issue that as of today, those who master "the black art of communication and persuasion" at major brands cannot justify the ROI of mobile marketing. How much do Brands really benefit from this ? Truth and honesty are universal values that consumers recognize said Ed Homes from Haygarth. You have to decode the responses and non-responses of customers, for example in Twitter feeds. That’s the value of on-line community moderators such as Dominic Sparke’s company Tempero which also provide information tagging. Looking for successes, everybody agreed on Japan’s mobile social networks :

Moba-ge-town by Dena [statistics : 10M mobile users, 65% 0-19, 28% 20’s, 18 B PV/month, members earn virtual Moba-Gold from watching ads, FY07 sales of 15B¥ ~ 144M$] and
Mixi [statistics : 14M users, 63% early 20’s, 22 hours/month, 20’000 advertisers, mixi mobile advertising since 2006, 8B PV/month at 0.05¥ on mobile out of 13B total, at 0.1¥, FY07 sales of 10B¥ ~ 96M$]

I commented on this in last blog . For further reading, Helen edited Tanla Mobile’s excellent guide that you can download here, she blogs on mobile marketing and runs Swedish Beers mobile gathering.

Blyck is live, September 2007

This is the Blyk go live ! A great idea and defining moment for mobile services.
Services :
Blyk starts with a messaging-focus. It offers f r e e 217 SMS and 43 min voice / month to 4.5 million invited 16-24 years old members in UK. This resulted from market research covering 3,000 16-24 year olds across Europe. They will charge additional 10p/SMS, 15p/min top-up rates with mobile data 99p/ Mbyte (except from adds clicks).

Blyck invites advertisers to go beyond adds and create dialogues not demographics stats and click-thru. Advertisers get unprecendented feedback from members, who get relevant information. 45 brands were announced at the launch including Boots, Coke, Flirtomatik, L'Oreal, McDonalds, MasterCard, Natwest, Sky Broadcasting, Sony Ericsson, Microsoft's Xbox.
Infrastructure :
Nokia Siemens Networks provides a full mobile virtual network operator (MVNO)hosting connected to Orange UK radio network. First Hop provides the messaging software. TietoEnator, manages the BSS, web portals and services.Blyck has an elaborate customer care, in particular for subscriber authentication and ad campaign management. Xtract supplies consumer analytics (See my notes on Xtract founder Jouko Ahvenainen) . Mermit develops advertising and CRM systems. Plans are for for a pan-European deployment. Blyk is conisdering 12 deployments including France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands.


The press conference with Blyk’s co-founders, Pekka Ala-Pietilä (former president of Nokia) and Antti Öhrling courtesy of VPOD TV.



text WHISPER to 82595 to get your code to join Blyk in UK if you qualify

Telecommunications in the BRIC economies : India, August 2007

Will cheap voice reach 500 million users by 2010 ?
I visited India August 19-22, at the end of the monsoon, to study 3G multimedia services potential. We all know that 190 million mobile subscribers (+ 7 million/month) were signed in 5 years, as a result of lower rates, cheaper handsets and networks expansion into rural areas. On the fixed line side, there are 2.5 million broadband out of 40 million connections and these are not growing at all. India has 12 telecoms operators competing for world's extreme blended ARPU of 7$ and MOU approaching 400 min. according to regulator TRAI. TRAI's approach is to license 10 operators per state but there is no sight of number portability. Current mobile penetration below 20%, given a population of 1.1 billion, but with huge industry investment it should grow this to 60% by 2010. The government plans targets 500 million subscribers by 2010.

Will the boom lead to multimedia ?

During this visit, I was happily surprised to hear about the interest for 3G instant messaging and mobile video services as I had not expected from market focused on subscriber/MHz optimization. Several operators offer mobile video streaming and download services or are planning for this in 2008.

Hera also industry investments are neeeded. On August 23rd, Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was also in New Delhi announcing $100 million investment by Nokia Siemens Network in Nokia's $500 million Chennai facility which produced 60 million handsets for India's market since 2006 and operates managed networks. And Vodafone is bound to introduce Vodafone live multimedia services after deploying the cheaper handsets.

Incredible India mobile operator's tour
Encouraged by India's advertising motto's my HP hosts arranged for a tour of operators : Vaibhav Sahai, Delphine Reffet and Jagdeep Jagdeep Sekhon . Up to date subscriber statistics are available from the cellular operators association of India (COAI)





Reliance Communications, Mumbai.
Business overview :>35 million subscribers, expanding to cities of 5K inhabitants.
Network : 97% on CDMA, 3% on GSM. ARPU is at 9$ (370 INR). The network supports CDMA 2000 EVDO 1xRTT. The evolution plans for a migration towards 3G WCDMA. Reliance acquired FLAG http://www.flagtelecom.com/ long distance network for 450M$. Reliance independent tower company RTIL plans to deploy 20,000 multi-tenant/technology towers in 2007.They have an IMS / SIP network test bed with softswitches from Alcatel-Lucent. Video : Have installed mobile video streaming (Apple Darwin). Reliance broadband offers Adlab

Tata Teleservices, Mumbai
Trying to convince Tata requires enthusiasm...
Business overview : > 18 million subscribers (Indicom brand) and a postpaid that let's you choose your number.
Network :CDMA 2000 1xRTT network
Video : interesting discussions on video for CDMA2000


BPL Mobile, Mumbai
Business overview : 1 million premium subscribers from urban Mumbai. BPL mobile is a great brand, strong in value-added data services. They introduced Voice SMS and ring-back-tones on the Indian market
Network : GSM
Video : offer a Mobile TV and music service on GPRS (37.52 Kbps) with WAP menu and Realplayer in handsets (30 models from Nokia, Motorola and SonyEricsson) Tariffs are : real-time streaming 0.05-0.1$ (2-5 INR/min up to 15 min), download
PPV 0.25-0.5$ (10-15 INR). Content includes CNBC, AajTak, CNBC, Aawaz.

Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL), (not visited)
Business overview : 31 million mobile subscribers (CellOne brand) + 34 million fixed lines including 2.5 million internet subscribers, 0.5 million broadband subscribers. BSNL is the state-owned incumbent operator and consequently focuses on reach to rural areas (7000 cities, 5 million villages).
Network : GSM (20 million) , 18000 BTS, 37000 SSPs, plans to expand to 125 million fixed lines.

IDEA Cellular, New Delhi
Business overview : 17 million subscribers; blended ARPU is 9$ (450 INR). Operates in 11 circles covering 45% of population. Idea completed an IPO to finance growth.
Network : GSM EDGE moving to WCDMA
Video : plans to introduce Mobile TV and personal mobile video calls at 3G roll-out

Spice Communications (not visited)
Business overview :3 million subscribers, operates in 2 states. 46% ownership by Telecom Malaysia.
Network : GSM/GPRS

Developping multimedia value added services in India

So with the charm of Bollywood and the most cost-effective mobile network infrastrure in the world, could we expect value-added services growth? Currently it's more below 10% of ARPU including data charges. But several of OpenCall partners expect to change this.

Kirusa
Voice SMS has been supplied by Kirusa to BPL and Idea and is extremely successful in India. It delivers value add SMS feature over voice. And it's so simple : Sending :dial *recipient's phone number, record a 30 second message, hang-up. The message is delivered in the SMS inbox. Retrieving : dial *0* to listen to all new Voice SMS


Bharti Telesoft
At Bharti Telesoft with Vaibhav Sahai
They provide VAS platforms worldwide such as m-entertainment solutions, messaging. With HP OpenCall they developed a mobile surveillance with streaming live/stored video to handsets. Their platform VDP facilitates multimedia (audio/video/data) content hosting, distribution, and delivery.

One97 Communications
With Vijay Shekhar Sharma
One97 is a king of ring-tones and traditional value-added services they supply to most operators in India. They have a 3G video dating service. A new way to speed date, through one single video call the users gets to date five persons. on WAP of with an SMS, participants select a category, then participate to 5 one-on-one video calls 1 minute each, all set-up by the service. And obviously, they rate and send messages the most interesting dates. And with had great discussion about mobile advertising, social and content services. We coined the expression the phone address book is the largest social network .

Vijay on mobile advertising video
Whatever your personal interest in dating, I recommend you start with Vijay. He gave me an insight into the success of Indian start-ups. He has vision, energy and most important he is fun.

My phone's favorite ring tone now includes Jhoom Barabar Jhoom.

Mobile advertising in Japan

I with Peter Vesterbacka who made the case why Japan is an exceptional country for early-adoption of video-enabled social networking service (SNS).
1. Social networking users : 7 million, estimated 2 million using mobile
2. 3G adoption : 60 million users
3. Critical mass of mobile advertising : 50% of users, 300M$
4. Mobile video usage is emerging

1. Social networks in Japan growing to 2-3 million mobile users
Online social networks membership exceeds 7 million and expected to grow to 10 million in 2007 [Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications]. Some examples of online services going mobile described below :
- Mixi has 4.8 million users, 70% logged every 3 days, 1 million groups and and 7 billion page views /month, 3rd behind Yahoo and Google (July 2006). Mixi mobile was released in December 2006 and forecasted to reach 2 million subscribers. Mixi name refers to mixing with other, it is an invite-only network with product reviews, blogging, photo sharing, and music clone that lets you buy tracks from iTunes.. Demographics estimated 15% 17-19 (18 minimal age) and 70% 10-29. The company was founded by Kenji Kasahara, revenues around 9 million $ and IPO forecast above 1 billion$.
- S! Town on Softbank is designed like a mobile 3D virtual world where avatars walks around, chats, shares photos, shops for music and video, personalizes a room, plays games. eXplo community platform from Gemini has been adopted by SoftBank Mobile in Japan; SmarTone-Vodafone in Hong Kong; FarEasTone in Taiwan; Nextel International in Central & South America; and Sferia in Poland. Gemini was founded in 2001 by Hiroshi Ota, Michael Tso and Scott Driggers, Gemini and over 20 million $ in two rounds, it is profitable. Japanese game company Bandai did the S! design.
- http://www.gorotto.comfunctionality includes a blog, networking, personal profile, picture/media library, calendar and newsgroups. It has a mobile version, a GIS/Google maps mash-up feature, an open architecture for integration of other services. Registered users can invite contacts.
- Love-Getty . This service was deployed in 1998 and used by 1.3 million users. I list it as a comparison point and an interesting case study. Love Getty was an oval device on a key-chain programmed the to look for others in the same mode. There were 2 sexes boys and girls looking out for each other; and 3 modes : karaoke, chat and meal. A girl’s Love Getty on karaoke mode would sound when another boy’s karaoke Love Getty was around. The inventor was Takeya Takafuji currently president senior associate of IMJ Mobile. My HP colleague Nicolas Raguideau worked on that project at the time to implement a real-time database using HP OpenCall technology.

2. 3G adoption >50 million and 40% penetration by 2007
Mid-year statistics :
. DoCoMo 30 million subscribers (WCDMA)
. Softbank 5 million subscribers (WCDMA)
. KDDI 10 million subscribers (CDMA 1XRTT)
ARPU statistics : 70 $, 65% non-voice




3. Mobile advertising reaching 60% of users with revenues of 250 million $ In 2005-2006, revenues grew 50%, from 250 million $ to forecasted 300 million US$ in 2009 (or >5$ per subscriber, on operators portals only) . This amount is similar to that of internet advertising revenues in 2000, they grew to 2 billion $ in 2006. The penetration of mobile advertising is estimated at 60 % (InfoPlant survey on usage of mobile coupons and discounts : 2-3/month 27%; 1/month 25%;1/2-3 months 20%). One of leading mobile advertising agencies is D2 Communications, jointly established in 2000 by NTT DoCoMo, Dentsu and NTT Advertising for the DoCoMo i-mode service (Takayuki Hoshuyama, COO).

4. Usage of video messaging is 9%
According to Mobile marketing association the mobile usage is
Mobile internet 76%
Picture messaging 42%
Text messaging 39%
Digital music 16%
IM 15%
Video messaging 9% (this is low but probably 3 times above usage in Europe).
Mobile TV 4.4%