Innovation/Strategy/The Narrative

This is not your father’s telecom industry – Part 3: emerging markets

Posted on by charlie

This is the second part of a talk I gave last year. It’s still relevant. I’ve written this from my notes.

This is a special topic of mine.

When I wrote this last year, there was a promise of 1 billion new subscribers on the way, of which most (80%?) do not have a computer. There was a promise of 3 billion subscribers (which we passed) by the end of last year, most text-voice phones.

When Nokia announced the billionth phone they sold, it was not without meaning when they said a woman in Nigeria bought a Nokia 1100 (which has sold over 100 million – a single device!).

To understand the scale, there are (were, the data’s from jun06):

  • 3.2 M Blackberries
  • 50 M PDAs
  • 70 M iPods
  • 190 M Gameboys
  • 820 M PCs
  • 1.5 B TV sets
  • 2 B Mobile phones [CS: and growing faster than all the others, I’m sure]
     

How does that impact what kinds of services we should offer? The web-heads have no idea.

And I want to see the development of more low cost, but ingenious service. Mobiles are transforming the developing world, it’s a leapfrogging technology.

Some anecdotes

  • Have you heard of phone ladies, who get a phone and an umbrella and sit in prominent area of town offering phone service for those without phones? Well, there are the wheelchair guys, too. I heard a story of two guys in wheelchairs that just couldn’t keep out of trouble until one day they both started offering phone service, like the phone ladies. How’s that for uplifting?
  • Grameen Bank, which revolutionized the world of credit in the developing world with micro-loans, worked with Nokia and others to develop a loan solution than included an antenna, phone, and start-up funds to create a local village operator.
  • Finally, remittances send back by emigrants, have held up many an economy. But, since so few have bank accounts, phone prepay minutes have become a money scheme on their own. not only can remittances be accepted as minutes, but minutes are used as a currency in many markets. Indeed, Nokia has created some solutions specifically to help users keep using this. [One of the people at my talk asked what would happen to prepay minutes as flat-rate spreads to other markets. Good question, reminding me of the law of unintended consequences.]
Innovation/Strategy/The Narrative

This is not your father’s telecom industry – Part 2: the fusion of the mobile and internet

Posted on by charlie

This is the second part of a talk I gave last year. It’s still relevant. I’ve written this from my notes.

I’m preaching to the choir here – we all know that we’re experiencing a burst in the creation of new services that run over the internet. But, what can we, in the mobile space, learn from what’s happening on other, more creative, networks?

A big contrast between the internet ecosystem and the mobile network ecosystem as it has come to be is that the internet is democratic, there is no lock on traffic or development.

On mobile networks, the operators control the access and the network and practically own the terminals. This is similar to AOL controlling what PC you use. This might have worked in the early days of telecom, but not today. How do we help the operators learn how to extract value from a layer other than transport?

To be fair, the internet regularly experiences threats by the telcos that run the big wires that carry internet traffic. Caught with an open network, they are trying to impose their control on the internet as well.

Openness, and all it entails, feels like it crashes into the standard telco business models, but it opens (no pun intended) up whole new worlds that we never thought of, a number of new ways of doing business that hunkering down and closing up would never reveal.

And, due to the openness of the internet, we have large service companies blurring the boundaries of network and service. Large companies are reaching, learning how to be big and strong yet sensitive and nimble, owning the network and owning the service, yet allowing for growth and democracy for innovation to flourish.

And internet companies, bred on open innovation, are making lurches into mobile. That is cause for concern, but they seem too busy with their internet properties. To maintain ones position in the internet, one needs to realize that competition can come out of unexpected places. In the internet world, the small can be nimble and burst out of nowhere.

Semi-closed and operator-dominated, the mobile world has left itself out of all this creativity. It seems a whole lot easier to build for web than mobile. Yet, with more folks accessing internet service from mobile devices than from desktop computers, the opportunities are big. All we have in the mobile world is a lack-luster market of ring-tones, wallpaper, and java game downloads.

How will this play out?

Strategy/The Narrative

The Register takes a wee too narrow a view of what we are trying to do with Ovi

Posted on by charlie

Discalimer: Ok, so I’m not the spokesman for Ovi, or for Nokia, for that matter, so what I am about to say may end up vague and not really what the company has in mind. I’m just the guy who’s deep into defining what Ovi.com will be like, especially all the stuff you don’t know about at this stage. Therefore, none of this is an official stance of the company, but a peek into a product manager’s head.

I highly respect the Andrew who wrote the article (link below) and the Andrew quoted in the article. And I don’t want to dismiss what was said. I just want to broaden the view beyond the sharp and narrow one taken.

That said, I’d like to point out a simple thing: We haven’t forgotten that, in the end, it’s about communication between people.

The mobile phone is the damned best social networking device ever created. Now we want to have that great personal social networking device fuel what you do through the internet.

Ovi is more than just about selling downloadable-sideloadable content (the kind of content that is the trigger for connections, mind you). It’s about fusing the mobile, Web, and desktop worlds. It’s about you and yours – content, people, and places.

Ovi will evolve as we respond to the users and the market. That’s what any decent 2007+ collection of services would do. It’s no joke we say Ovi is the door to services, ours and other’s services. And playing with others is key to our success.

As for the internet being a ‘graveyard for wealth creation’ (quote from article below), we just should all just pack up and go home and admit that everyone, including The Register, is failing as a business. Right.

Eh, it’s not that simple. We’re not making any sort of pure play here. We haven’t forgotten our roots – the device. We’re not trying to create walled gardens, or closed portals. We’re not trying to rehash the past or shut out our major customers.

It’s just about setting up a door (pun intended).

Who goes through it will be the thrilling part.

Link: Where’s Nokia going? | The Register:

And today it’s still communication, not content, that remains king. Because the content is text and pictures and audio, some people get terribly confused. But what gets called “content” – the funny clips and Chuck Norris jokes we send each other – is still really just chatter, and isn’t considered worth paying for. We’ll subscribe to services that make it easier to communicate with each other, but we won’t pay a premium for “content” any more today than 90 years ago.

Strategy/The Narrative

This is not your father’s telecom industry – Part 1: The future of connecting people

Posted on by charlie

This is the first part of a talk I gave last year. It’s still relevant. I’ve written this from my notes. 

The Mobile Lifestyle

What is the Mobile Lifestyle?

The phone is now part of the things that every adult carries (along with keys and wallet). Everyone who can afford one has one. People can’t live without their phones, reporting them lost much faster than losing a credit card.

The phone is the most personal device. It collects our messages, contacts, behaviour, and location. We use it to take photos and videos of more personal and spontaneous moments than with dedicated cameras.

It is part of our Flow.

It is part of our Mobile Lifestyle.

But, do we really know how people use mobile devices?

At Nokia, we spend a lot of time studying how people use mobile devices. For the most part, the bulk of the use is around 5 functions – messaging, call-logs (it’s about communication!), alarm, camera, and media gallery.

Also, folks tend to communicate (SMS and voice) on average with 5 people. And most calls are placed from work or home. People even use their phone from their work desks, so it’s not always about mobility, even with advanced mobile devices!

In one study in the UK, they found that about 9 in 10 can’t get through the day without their mobile phone. And folks 18-29 tend to message more then talk.

I also feel that we have some preconceptions based on geography that tend to make us miss opportunities in other areas. Think of Brasil. The first thought is about low income and low internet penetration. But Brasilians dominate the use of Orkut and some photo sharing social sites. How is that? What is our opportunity there?

And what we offer folks is changing dramatically. There’s a vast integration of business services, ‘e-tertainment’, games, music videos on the mobile and desktop computer. So much of telecommunications is going IP.  Convergence convergence convergence!

How do we bring all this to a level that fits into the way folks use mobile devices? Design and usability will always be key.

Mobile computing

What is mobile computing?

When is a mobile device a computer or not? Rapidly the distinction is getting blurred – the processing, memory, network channels that a mobile handheld device can handle is increasing.

Yet, there is a distinction between Mobile Computing vs a Mobile Lifestyle.

Mobile Computing is two-hands, two-eyes, lean forward, flat surface, stationary, broad-band, big screen, big keyboard, mouse, multi-window, multi-button.

The Mobile Lifestyle is one-hand, interruptive, back-pocket, walking, in and out of attention, focused (not necessarily simple).

Now, are phones becoming computers or computers phones?

My feeling is that phones are just becoming more capable. To me, the N95 is what ‘phones’ have become.

The dark underbelly

You know what this is. Cost cost cost.

To the average consumer costs are never clear. Service providers cut of cost-free options, such as locking Bluetooth or only being able to remove items from the phone via a costlly network mechanism. Also, service providers talk in a language that is not human, focusing on bytes, rates, over-segmentation (why so many plan options?!), and hidden metering.

WiFi will change all this, so long as that isn’t killed too. Along with the meteoric rise of sideloading, I hope there will be pressure for all rate data plans and more Skype-like services to circumvent SMS and voice charges.

Part 2, next.