Understanding the Emerging Market

I recently gave a talk on some emerging market trends and themes and I figured it’d be good to share them here. With all the focus on 3G data caps and smartphone penetration, we still forget that regions like Brazil (beyond emerging market) still only have 4% data penetration and some parts of Africa (eg Nigeria) have near-4G networks but much of the rural population is still lacking a phone.

The Microprenuer

Many of you have probably heard this story but the government in Uganda wanted to enable two things: 1. Provide mobile phones and thus voice and data access to rural villagers and 2. Create more female entrepreneurs since culturally females were home wives and not enabled to work. To do this, the government in conjunction with Grameen Phone and MTN did something very clever, they recruited females from various rural villages and gave them a mobile phone, known as the VillagePhone. The females instantly became the sole owner of a mobile phone (Village Phone Operators) meaning others at the village would pay her some small fee to use her mobile phone. In one move, villagers were able to call friends and family (or the doctor!) and get limited information in real-time (imagine what it would be like without internet access) and additionally, females were now a working class, a microprenuer. The story of the phone tethered to a single pole in the middle of the village with a line to use it is not a joke – it is real!

USSD (binary SMS) and Voice Services

A search box on your home screen seems like a no-brainer and it’s definitely one of those features you don’t realize how much you appreciate until it is on your home screen. I rely on this search box all day to get information on various things whether it be local services, events and so forth. Anyways, in rural markets, unfortunately data access is often not available and thus you have to rely on alternate forms of transport. Voice is often thought of as a 1:1 communication service but can also be used as a way to broadcast information. Companies like Lexy allow content producers to broadcast channels over voice in the US and projects like the Spoken Web Project take the same concept but apply it to basic information for the third world. For example, I would call a phone number and hear an automated operator tell me the major news around me, the sports scores, the weather and so forth.

Alternatively, how do you offer a information access through an application without being able to send data. It sounds like a trick question but the answer is to use SMS for transport. USSD is effectively a fancy term for binary SMS. When you press #MIN on your mobile phone in the US, you are sending a binary SMS message from your phone to the network; the network then responds with an SMS message that appears as a popup dialog on your phone with the number of minutes available for your plan. Well imagine if you could create a simple J2ME application with a rich UI that uses SMS for transport – great idea and this is what a number of startups are doing for various emerging market operators. See solutions like Shorthand Mobile, MobileXL, Spectrum Mobile and Eyeline.mobi. The UIs feel like portals with access to various text based content. Until data access become available, this is a great interim approach and a great way for these companies to establish their brands with these users.

Mobile Payment

Not sure about you, but I completely rely on plastic (credit/debit cards) and often carry little or no cash. I only take cash out of the ATMs (cash machines) for basically the few times when I can’t pay by card in my average day usually when I know I’m going to San Francisco (and need to pay for parking :). Paying by card generally makes sense since I get an automatic log of the transaction from which I can categorize, archive and reference as a receipt. In any case, the one assumption here is I do have a bank account and I do trust my bank. Well, what do you do when you don’t have access to a local bank or a bank that you can trust.

This problem is encountered by millions of folks in rural populations everyday – welcome M-Pesa that has initially been deployed in Kenya in partnership with Safaricom and Vodafone. Effectively, a rural villager can use their mobile phone account (SIM) as a way to pay other villagers by sending money from one mobile phone account to another. This has been incredibly successful because in many cases the villager trusts their mobile phone operator more than the national banking institutions and are willing to deposit real money into their mobile account via the mobile network operator agents (of which their are an abundance of in rural regions).

In some ways, this makes absolute sense and in advanced markets such as Japan, we are beginning to see banking institutions partner with network operators to allow subscribers to make non-digital purchases via their mobile phone. That being said, even in advanced markets, we still don’t have elegant P2P (person-to-person) payment solutions although many startups are attacking this problem (eg Paypal being the incumbent). I guess once your mobile phone becomes the plastic, do the operators eventually move down-stream and become the banks? Scary thought…

Family Browsing

Having worked on browsers for the past 2.5 years, I’m always amazed at how much browsing usage comes from emerging markets. South Africa is often a top 10 browsing country in terms of usage as reported by Admob which is insane considering their population. Anyways, given the cost of data in some rural villages, it’s too expensive for every family member to have internet access and/or maybe the family has to share one phone so how do you browse the internet as if you had a PC and a larger screen. Well, duh, you get the mobile phone with a built-in projector! Samsung Galaxy Beam is one example but there are several other lower cost devices entering the market. Imagine taking it a step further and connecting your projector-enabled mobile phone to a Bluetooth keyboard or maybe a Bluetooth Zeemote. Now, you effectively have a home PC but using your mobile phone, not a netbook but a mobilebook – very cool!

Above are some example of some of the amazing innovation that is happening in the emerging markets – looking forward to seeing what is developed next!

Understanding PDE (Positional Determining Entity)

In the past 2 years, the industry has finally moved beyond LBS as a category to LBS as a feature. As stated previously, “What app wouldn’t be more useful with location?”! What’s misunderstood in all of this is how location is retrieved by the app and what this means.

E911 (government mandated subscriber location lookup) in the early days was the initial motivation for opeartors to introduce network-based location lookup. This location is acquired through a combination of network triangulation technologies and is delivered to the requested entity (eg person or app) via a positioning server. This approach is often referred to PDE or carrier-based location lookup.

The challenge with PDE has been in business models; operators have been charging for PDE location queries and a variety of middle-men and/or aggregators have been trying to sell this access (eg Wavemarket, Autodesk’s former mobility group, Alcatel Lucent and others). Most developers obviously can’t afford to pay 5-10 cents per location lookup and have thus resorted to the many free alterantive ways to get location such as determining location by the cell tower or getting location through WiFi or most obvious, getting location from GPS (readily available through APIs in smartphones today.

You may ask, why PDE if you can get location in other means? The challenge with the alternative solutions, is that the app can only get location for you (and you only). This is great for use cases like Google Maps but what if you wanted to get the location of your buddy or what if you wanted to send an SMS when one of your friends walked by your house – yes, that would be kind of creepy but advertisers love this scenario (proximity marketing). Unfortunately, the only way besides doing a FourSquare check-in to get the location of one of your buddies or a passerby is using carrier-based location lookup.

To entice more developers, many of the carrier location aggregators have been trying to offset the 5-10 cents per query pricing via alternative business models. For example, a developer can receive subsidized queries in exchange for sharing advertising revenue from their app. Unfortunately as much as mobile advertising is growing, it still cannot offset even a 5 cent query. The better question to ask is why is there a charge at all – if PDE was free, there would be a whole new set of apps that could be enabled built leveraging real-time location. For example, without needing an app running in the background, I could track the entire life-path of a user – an advertiser’s goldmine in terms or profiling! Well, as with most things, the reasons things are the way they are is often not the most logical:

1. Without naming operators, some can’t scale PDE. I’m pretty sure they want to open it up, assuming the right privacy features were in place but the query volume would kill the network infrastructure. Let’s see what happens as initiatives like GSMA’s OneAPI continues to push forward – this is a solvable problem.

2. Some operators are restricted by their licensors. For example, CDMA operators use Qualcomm’s QPoint to power the PDE and likely have licensing fees based on volume that inhibit their capability to open it up.

3. And of course the biggest problem is that there are a handful of developers (eg Family Locators) who are actually paying 5-10 cents per query. Unfortunately, when somebody is willing to pay, then let them pay even if it inhibits innovation. I guess we’ll have to wait for Google to make it free (somehow)!

In any case, let’s see how this evolves. Carrier-based location lookup can open-up a whole slew of new applications that cannot be achieved effectively today. It moves the problem from getting location to the larger problem of privacy which many others are trying to tackle.

Has the Power Shifted Back to Operators?

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the OEMs (including platforms) take a more and more facing role to end-users. The OEM controls the App Store; the OEM has the direct consumer app billing relationship; the OEM is launching new services that often are in direct conflict with existing services that operators have managed for years; the OEM is dealing with customer service directly (ie call ATT regarding the iPhone and you are directed to Apple customer support) – the list goes on. Ask any developer today where do they go to build and distribute their apps – they go to the OEM for development support, for distribution and most importantly, for their checks!

With that being said, ATT’s and now O2′s recent announcements of moving to metered data plans has created a potential shift-back in control to the operator. In Google’s perfect world (although not admittedly), operators are dumb pipes, building infrastructure to enable voice and data services. Operators focus on their networks, leverage their phone retail distribution channel and deal with billing and customer service as it relates to voice and data. For services, the OEM takes charge – part of a broader concept that in the new world order, OEMs will pay operators a percentage of their services revenue and not vice-versa (a la Blackberry receiving a percentage of operator’s data revenue).

In any case, with operators imposing data tariffs (expected for quite some time), app developers may now need to rely on the operator more than ever. If I have a data hungry app (eg Qik), I want to sell that app with unlimited data. To include features that tell my users to curtail their usage because of data caps is a non-starter. Does this mean smartphone apps could be sold with data packages (eg when you buy Hulu later this summer on your iPhone for $10/month, it includes unlimited data?) – that’s a deal that can only be done with the operator putting them front-and-center again.

This is not a first, premium feature phone apps on operator catalogs have often been zero-rated (made data-charge free) but most feature-phone apps never consumed that much data to begin with. If the next generation services are expected to be data-heavy, it’ll be interesting to see how OEMs and operators deal with special data privileges for certain apps (ie are we returning to the walled garden?)

Wholesale Application Community

As many of you know, the App Store landscape is becoming quite fragmented. There are scenarios where a device may have an OEM App Store, Platform App Store, Operator App Store and maybe even a 3rd Party App Store – as a developer, this is a challenge and you really have to think about where to spend your time to prioritize your energy. It’s not uncommon that the vast number of downloads come from one particular App Store or maybe even your own website. Gone are the days that being listed on an operator deck meant a gold rush unless of course you are still very feature phone focused.

In any case, as much as I’ve wished for reduced fragmentation, I haven’t seen it yet in 11 years in the mobile industry (and philosophically, it can be argued both ways as to whether fragmentation drives or stymies innovation). That being said, Apple’s success with the iPhone in some ways demonstrates what happens when you have 40M phones that can all run a single version of an app (ie no porting required). Nokia’s plans (at least what I heard) to focus on fewer devices that are cross-compatible going forward is consistent with this view (ie do you rememer J2ME’s original goal of write-once, run anywhere!?)

Anyways, my long-time friends at WIP have led a charge to ask operators and the WAC (Wholesale Application Community) to be cognizant of developers needs in an open letter to the ecosystem. Caroline Lewko is seeking additional comments/endorsements and had asked me to make this post, please check out the letter and provide your feedback – the goal here is to solve the App Store fragmentation problem – thanks in advance.