Mar 08, 2010 10:49 PM
 While developed markets are still trying to find ways to make Web 2.0 really pay off, it's actually the emerging markets that have already managed to successfully put innovative Web business models into practice. Unlike Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace who depend mostly on advertising to generate revenues, Asian social networking sites in emerging markets are already making serious money through additional models.
They've discovered that their users are happy to pay for content related to "emotion, status and entertainment" and the numbers are quite impressive: from virtual clothes to e-pets, Asians spend an estimated $5 billion a year on virtual purchases via websites such as Qzone (the leading Chinese social network), Cyworld in South Korea and mobile-phone based network Gree in Japan. Qzone's Tencent Holdings made over $1 billion last year, with just 13 percent coming from advertising revenue.
It's definitely helped along by a massive increase in mobile phone adoption and mobile Internet usage in emerging markets. Keep in mind that Brazil, Russia, India and China (the top four emerging markets, (known as BRIC) combined are home to over 40 percent of the world's population and have an emerging middle class that will reach over 1 billion people by 2015. More than 1.7 billion mobile phone subscribers are expected to live in these four countries by 2012, and at least 680 million will have access to the mobile Internet – this means the rate of mobile Internet use in these markets will be similar to or might even exceed the rates seen in the U.S. and Western Europe.
These days, when looking for inventive ways to make money out of using new technologies, it's clearly vital to think "outside the box", but the answers may well already be there in emerging markets.
Feb 28, 2010 12:53 AM
 We're all aware that healthcare costs are spiraling out of control. Is relief just a text message or webcam visit away? The answer is yes: the emergence of machine-to-machine (M2M) technology is propelling the healthcare industry into the digital era, enabling it to not only address escalating costs but provide more effective medical care. By using a connected approach to medical services, healthcare professionals can remotely monitor, diagnose and consult with patients.
Take Simon, for example, who is plagued by a chronic heart condition. Recently Simon was prescribed a cardio device that lets his doctors remotely monitor his condition – regardless of his location – allowing them to rapidly detect any changes and provide proactive care. And with Simon still able to get the support he needs without having to find time to physically visit his doctor, this offers him a better quality of life.
Deutsche Telekom are taking M2M in healthcare even further – one of the pilot schemes they're running not only allows patients with heart problems to undergo regular health checks at home, but they can also interact with doctors via the TV which functions as an interactive interface.
Today, there's a broad, ever-growing array of mobile health applications that help consumers to proactively self manage their healthcare. From wellness applications, such as physical fitness, hearing tests and maternity, to programs designed for chronic conditions, such as glucose monitoring for diabetics, wireless health services are changing the healthcare landscape and transforming lives through improved medication adherence, disease prevention and early intervention. The result? Reduced treatment costs and improved interaction with healthcare providers.
Thanks to our ubiquitous smart phones, along with more than 2,000 health-related applications, the potential for connected health is massive. While still in the early stages, anytime-anywhere medical care provided though a mobile doctor visit which connects physicians with at-home patients and hospital-based medical teams could soon become the norm rather than the exception. Feb 23, 2010 08:28 PM Back at Mobile World Congress again after a two-year break, and it was easy to notice a dramatic change in the event's focus compared to previous years: everything now seemed to be about putting anything you could possibly think of on a mobile device. Serious apps, silly apps, and those apps "you never thought you would need but are actually quite useful once you start using them." The mobile device is truly now the home for everything you could ever want to do. Even the rather mundane world of document scanning has evolved – just download the scanner app which uses your phone camera and converts files into PDFs to create a very handy pocket-sized equivalent. I spent some time at the App Planet pavilion, which had the major players (like Blackberry, Google, Vodafone and Motorola) and many tiny companies trying to impress service providers with their offerings. The best part was seeing some of these apps in action. I watched a cool demo of presence and location on the One API showcase by Rogers Wireless' Larry Baziw – three different devices accessing one service, all acting in the exact same way (hence the reasoning behind the One API name). And then there are initiatives like Vodafone 360 which looks at apps through the prism of a person's contact book and social networks, which I personally found really appealing because it brings together all the aspects of my social environment. Even Google looks at mobile apps as the way forward. Besides some very impressive demonstrations of Google Voice Search and Google Earth (you could hear the oohs and aahs), Google's CEO Eric Schmidt declared at Mobile World Congress that "the new rule is mobile first in everything". So how concerned should traditional service providers be about Google? Well, Google has the mobile market squarely in its sights and a reputation for quickly turning strategy into market-changing activities, so watch this space. What also interested me at Mobile World Congress is how the emphasis on how to extend the capabilities of your device is being accompanied by a shift in mindset. Take World Film Collective, a charity that uses "sustainable equipment" (read: video-capable mobile phones) to teach filmmaking to young people living in very challenging circumstances around the world. I've had video capability on my device for a while and although I dabble in editing video content, I have honestly never considered using my phone to make a short film – it's initiatives like these that make it exciting to think about the possibilities which are opening up to us in the connected world through the once-basic mobile device. Feb 17, 2010 05:00 PM
 It's a global marketplace out there, even for the smallest of manufacturers. Alec Ross, senior adviser for innovation to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has a favorite story he likes to tell to drive home the message of the connected world.
"I have a dear friend who works at the World Bank" he told the Brookings Institute, "and she travels regularly to Togo. And every time she goes to Togo, she goes to the same village and the same street corner and visits the same young man, who always has two or three toys on display. And she buys one of them. These are the toys made out of scrap metal.
"And the last time she went there, she went up to this young man and he said, madam, every time you come to my country, you come to my village and you come visit me here and you buy one of the two or three toys I have on display. In the future, why don't you just e-mail me and commission what you'd like. And if you have a smart phone like me, you can take a picture of the image and send the file over the network."
As Ross concludes: "The breakthrough innovation here is connectedness. When the teenage tin toy maker from Togo is connecting to the global marketplace using global networks, we are past the tipping point." Feb 08, 2010 07:01 AM The massive outpouring of aid to Haiti through text messages sent by US citizens for relief efforts provides yet another example of the power of the connected world. Over $25 million has so far been donated by text, far outpacing the charity's previous record of $400,000 for emergency relief using similar technology. At one point, the Mobile Giving Foundation which organized the mobile donation network said it was receiving up to 10,000 text messages per second pledging $10 to the American Red Cross. Around one-fifth of all American Red Cross donations for Haiti have come from the text campaign. Service providers, such as AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile USA, have meanwhile played their part, waiving fees for customers wishing to send mobile donations and letting users know they are not taking a cut of the donations. Interestingly, this cellphone campaign was initiated by the US State Department, which is becoming increasingly aware of the possibilities the connected world provides for US diplomacy. As Alec Ross, senior adviser for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Washington Post: “It’s about the ability to connect, which is possible because of the proliferation of our global networks. It’s about using the tools of the 21st century to innovate in our diplomacy.” In the emerging connected world, where trillion of devices will be connected to the network, the US or any other government, can directly connect with the people whose hearts and minds they want to win. The obvious example of this is President Barack Obama’s online video for the Iranian new year which went viral, but there are other, less well-known examples of how the connected world can tie in with diplomatic efforts to stem violence or eradicate disease. In Congo, for example, e-mails and text messages are being used to warn women and children of attacking rebels nearby. In sub-Saharan Africa, text messages are instructing people how to take HIV medications. As Secretary Clinton noted in her landmark speech on internet freedom recently, “the spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet. When something happens in Haiti, the rest of us learn about it in real time – from real people. And we can respond in real time as well.” Indeed, this real-time response to the earthquake in Haiti by millions the world over, enabled by the power of the network, showed just how connected our world has become. Jan 26, 2010 08:26 PM I came across an amazing statistic in the paper recently – the article stated that by 2013, (that’s just three years away), global consumer internet data traffic would exceed 32,000 exabytes per month. At the time, I didn’t actually know what an exabyte was, but it sounded impressive. And as it turns out, it is: an exabyte is actually a billion gigabytes, and as you probably know, a gigabyte is a billion bytes of data. So we’re talking about more than 32,000 billion, billion bytes of data. That’s 32 billion trillion, or to put it another way, 32,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data – per month! The demand is clear – it’s driven by millions of users of new, bandwidth-hungry applications on their mobile devices, PCs, and home entertainment systems – and it’s going to keep growing. So how exactly are service providers going to deal with such a massive amount of data? An ability to predict the future would help (at least as far as data capacity demand is concerned). And the more accurately service providers can do this, the more efficient and competitive they will become. That’s because it’s simply too expensive to over-engineer the network in advance of the demand curve, and too late to try and catch up by adding the network resources after demand has already grown. Service providers need planning tools that can “look both ways” – back in history to see and understand the trends in demand that have taken place, and also into the future to predict the required resources needed in the next 6 or 12 months, “just in time”, in line with demand as it grows. The communications world is changing faster than we can imagine and the winners are going to be those who have the right vision and strategy to plan ahead and build the networks we need to handle all those exabytes... Jan 19, 2010 06:35 AM There’s no doubt that the Kindle was one of the successes of 2009, even if the extremely secretive Amazon steadfastly refuses to say exactly how many have been sold, preferring instead to restrict itself to describing the Kindle as the online retailer’s best-selling product. But while Amazon throws a heavy cloak over its numbers, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is happy to discuss his company’s philosophy, explaining to Newsweek how Amazon evolved from being just a retailer to a company that’s also selling computing services, and is now in the consumer-electronics business with the Kindle. The Amazon CEO argues that if a company wants to grow, it has two options. The first is to look at what it does today and ask: OK, with this set of skills, what else can we do? The second and more long-term orientation, he notes, is “rather than ask what are we good at and what else can we do with that skill, you ask, who are our customers? What do they need?” The crucial point Bezos is making is that while executives have a tendency to think that the right course of action is to stick at what you’re good at, “the problem is the world changes out from under you if you're not constantly adding to your skill set.” This is exactly the situation service providers face today. As we evolve towards the connected world, in which, by 2017, there will be 7 trillion networked devices in the world – most of them not phones – service providers will become no more than dumb pipes unless they add to their skill set and seek new business models. The Kindle itself showed one new business model for service providers, with Sprint and then AT&T providing the connectivity for the device, without the end user being aware of who was providing the network for their electronic book reader. Other business models involve entering new industries, such as health care, in which service providers can enable real-time, remote monitoring of patients. Indeed, the increasing cost of health care and the aging population in US and Europe will undoubtedly lead to huge growth in the market for wireless devices that monitor patients’ conditions and report the data to healthcare providers. Service providers have a large amount of data concerning their customers; if they are to thrive, they need to ask themselves what will these customers want in the future, and then seek to deliver it. Jan 14, 2010 09:42 AM Do you remember, not so very long ago, when the only reason for using a cell phone was to make a call? That seems almost quaint now that you can text, surf the Internet, watch a video, or enjoy an almost endless supply of downloadable applications. But it’s not just phones that are moving on. From laptops to cars and GPS, lots of everyday devices and appliances are evolving and making our lives easier each day. But the device that has captured my attention right now is the smartpen. My tendency to use multiple notepads, with no logical way to index meeting notes or efficiently share information, put this new device on my Christmas wish list. With its built-in computer and flash memory, it can store audio and handwriting, and synchronize the two. Its infrared camera lens lets you capture words, as well as diagrams. It allows you to save notes of meetings (including audio) via Facebook or community websites, making team collaboration easier than ever before. And why work all the time when the smartpen can also educate you, with programs that include language translation. Or it can even entertain you with games, in addition to musical applications such as the “paper piano” which lets you sketch a keyboard and play it by tapping the pen on the keys. Today there are already more than 30 applications, ranging from productivity and reference tools to travel, education, games and entertainment. Its open platform means developers can create, publish and share applications, promising a future of new and innovative smartpen capabilities. The smartpen is yet another example of the connected world that we’re hurtling into, where, in just a few years, trillions of different devices will connected to the network, providing us with an unimaginable number of applications, services, connections and customer experiences. As we continue the evolution to anywhere, anytime connectivity with access to information and applications through any device, I believe we’ll see even more low- or no-tech devices, such as pens, obtaining intelligence and enriching our everyday life experiences. Jan 08, 2010 10:00 AM My friend came over and complained about his mobile service provider. “What did they do this time”? I asked. He said that although he’s been a customer for over 5 years, it appears that his service provider still doesn’t know him. “What do you mean?” I asked. Apparently, his service provider recently launched a campaign to persuade customers to switch over from paper bills to online electronic bills. The offer included 50 free text messages if you agreed to receive an online bill. My friend, who’s fairly eco-friendly, would have switched anyway for “green” reasons, i.e. saving paper. However, he was annoyed by the e-mails, text messages, and even a phone call he received from the service provider, trying to promote their e-bill campaign. He explained that he gets a mobile phone from his work place (as a corporate customer) and therefore, doesn’t pay his bill himself. “Don’t they know that it’s not me who pays my bills? Why do they think offering 50 free text messages will tempt me to sign up for their campaign when I obviously don’t pay my bill anyway?” my friend wondered. And yes, you would expect that the service provider would use the valuable customer information it has to try and tailor special promotions to fit different customer segments. And yes, this could mean using advanced data and business intelligence analysis, but it could also mean using the most basic information they have (like who’s actually paying the bill). Using this information wisely could greatly increase the uptake of campaigns launched, providing it’s combined with some thinking on the side of the service provider as to what would tempt each specific customer to sign up. So while a special discount in the bill might not work for corporate customers who don’t pay their own bills, perhaps offering them new ringtones, songs or games might have the desired effect instead. When such a long-term relationships are involved, service providers should really make sure they know who their customers are… Dec 31, 2009 12:02 PM I’m a keen Internet “traveler” and frequently visit and contribute to forums and blogs, but I find the 2.5 inch display on my mobile phone, combined with trying to input information using a T9 interface, to be pretty restrictive. So, I’ve been thinking about buying a smart phone instead, which at the moment means taking into account a potential phone’s physical properties – such as battery life, display and touch panel properties or wireless capabilities – as well as its “soft” properties – such as its operating system, usability features and available applications. But the criteria upon which decision-making is based is about to change, and possibly faster than we think. And it’s PCs that are paving the way: Google's Chromium currently offers technical boffins the ability to test a new thin operating system through which users can only access applications stored online, as opposed to installing them on their own computers. (The official version is expected mid 2010). And online operating systems will soon be finding their way to mobile devices. At the moment, it’s your phone’s operating system that provides the interface that allows you to run all the services and applications you need on your device. But we’re moving towards a future where you’ll be able to choose different applications for your mobile device just by going to the respective website to access it. So, for example, you won’t have to have an actual iPhone device to enjoy the iPhone interface or the iPhone apps. The mobile device that many of us refer to as a “smart phone” will simply serve as a platform to run the online service of your choice, and to consume the online content of your choice. Sounds too futuristic? Not really – we’re already doing it on our PCs with email and productivity applications, such as Gmail and Zoho. And with Flash technology coming to mobile devices, some existing web operating systems used for PCs, such as g.ho.st can be a perfect match for mobile devices too. So when I can run a thin iPhone-like interface on any hardware (whether it be Nokia, HTC, Apple, etc), and change to, for example, an Android look and feel without having to backup or restore anything, what will actually affect my purchasing decision? For most, it’ll come down to price. For others, it’s style and status. And for business users, the differentiators might be durability and performance. And while some device manufacturers have started to recognize and follow this trend by choosing to invest in the content and applications that will help them to differentiate themselves, others haven’t yet demonstrated a compelling offering that will keep their current customers in a device-agnostic environment. But they shouldn’t wait too long if they don’t want to lose out, because what we now know as the smart phone arena will end up much like what the “stupid” phone arena is today – a commodity market.
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