Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

March 12, 2010

Bubbly, twitter of voice?

Filed under: Media, Mobile, Trends — Raja @ 3:03 pm

bubble Motion, the voice SMS developer is trying to do be the twitter of voice messaging with bubbly.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — In India, thousands of consumers are going from tweeting to bubbling.

Bollywood stars Kareena Kapoor and Aamir Khan began using Bubbly and talking about it ahead of the premiere of their hit film 'Three Idiots.'
Bollywood stars Kareena Kapoor and Aamir Khan began using Bubbly and talking about it ahead of the premiere of their hit film ‘Three Idiots.’

A hot new social-networking service dubbed Bubbly, which is essentially a voice-based Twitter, is quickly gaining popularity among Indians. And thanks to Bollywood celebs being early adopters, Bubbly is growing virally and with virtually zero marketing spend.

Bubbly is the brainchild of 5-year-old mobile and social app firm Bubble Motion, which is based in Silicon Valley and Singapore. Its first product was BubbleTalk, a person-to-person voice-messaging service that, instead of SMS, sends mobile audio messages and has about 100 million users now.

According to Bubble Motion’s CEO Tom Clayton, after devoting time to BubbleTalk and other mobile voice-messaging services, “along came the social-media boom and we started to play with a lot of social-media applications.” That led to the idea of audio messages going not just to one person, but to a much larger audience of followers.

In rolling out Bubbly, Mr. Clayton plans to skip North America and Europe and focus on fast-growing, mobile-savvy markets such as India, Japan and Brazil.

Here’s how Bubbly works: Anyone can sign up to follow a friend, family member or favorite celebrity or brand. Posting messages and following is free, and once a new message has been recorded and sent out, users get an alert. If they choose to listen, they pay for the airtime.

Most messages are less than 30 seconds long, and there is currently a cap of one minute.

To post on Bubbly, a user dials a short code, like *7, records a message and hangs up. To listen, tap in another code, like *2. It works on any handheld device, and messages can be posted to Bubbly while still withholding phone numbers for privacy.

Bubbly hasn’t launched officially, but the service saw an estimated 500,000 users in about four weeks after some of Bollywood’s biggest stars started using it, including Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor, who were talking about it ahead of the premiere of their hit film “Three Idiots” (which recently swept India’s Filmfare Awards). “It’s personal and it’s easier for a celeb” to connect with their fans using Bubbly rather than a web-based service in which an agent or PR firm might be writing messages, said Mr. Clayton.

Media networks in India are showing signs of interest too; the first major media brand to sign on there is the BBC, which is experimenting with the service as a way of disseminating breaking news. And other networks are in talks to potentially follow suit.

Bubbly’s business model is based on its revenue-sharing partnerships with telecoms. In India, that includes two giants, Reliance Communications and Bharti Airtel.

In a country where many have access to cellphones but far fewer to the web, this type of mobile blogging service seems to make sense. By some estimates, India has the fastest-growing population of mobile phone users in the world as cellphone operators add millions of new customers each month. By 2012, India may have 650 million cellphone users.

To use Bubbly for brand engagement and promotion, a celebrity spokesperson could record messages about brands or send a “bubble” from the set of a forthcoming movie to build buzz. Brands themselves can also bubble short radio-like ads over cellphones, although it’s up to users to opt in.

Bubbly has been beta-tested in places such as Egypt, where BMW bubbled a promotion to visitors to a retail location, and Citigroup used it to send out ads and Vodafone to deliver the latest ringtone.

But Mr. Clayton said Bubbly is targeting five major global markets — India, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Brazil — because they all offer large, mobile-savvy populations whose telecoms and cellphone users are “also open to cool, new innovative stuff.” A web component may have a role in the launch of Bubbly in Japan, but in most markets the focus will remain on a mobile-only version of Bubbly for now.

In countries such as India this actually could fly.

March 11, 2010

When platforms change, opportunities beckon

Filed under: Internet, Mobile, Trends — Raja @ 6:02 pm

Awesome post from Seth godin:

When the platform changes, the leaders change.

Wordperfect had a virtual monopoly on word processing in big firms that used DOS. Then Windows arrived and the folks at Wordperfect didn’t feel the need to hurry in porting themselves to the new platform. They had achieved lock-in after all, and why support Microsoft?

In less than a year, they were toast.

When the game machine platform of choice switches from Sony to xBox to Nintendo, etc., the list of bestelling games change and new companies become dominant.

When the platform for music shifted from record stores to iTunes, the power shifted too, and many labels were crushed.

Again and again the same rules apply. In fact, they always do. When the platform changes, the deck gets shuffled.

Think this only applies to software?

The platform for healthcare changed from independent doctor’s offices and small practices to hospitals and hmos.

The platform for TV changed from airwaves to wires (so HBO and ESPN win, NBC loses).

The platform for cars is changing from gas engines to alternatives.

The platform changes. Insiders become outsiders and new opportunities abound.

The dominant internet access device  is changing from PC to mobile. There WILL be new winners (and losers).

March 10, 2010

Evolution of enterprise software

Filed under: Internet, Mobile, Trends — Raja @ 3:25 pm

Marc Benioff pioneered SaaS with salesforce.com. He says he started salesforce.com prompted by a simple question: ‘why isn’t all enterpsirse software like Amazon.com?’. He sees another evolution now prompted by the questio: ‘why isn’t all enterpsirse software like Facebook’?. He calls it the facebook imperative which inspired salesforce chatter.

I quit my job at Oracle in 1999 because I couldn’t stop thinking about a simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?” Why couldn’t applications be run from a simple website, without software or hardware to install, and pricy consultants to hire? Why couldn’t we just compute in the Internet, or the cloud, and get away from the data center and all its complexity. Simply put, I wanted to simplify the enterprise. It was a pretty straight-forward idea, but from the confines in which I sat, there wasn’t anything close to a straight-forward solution.

That vision led to the founding of salesforce.com. But the enterprise world wasn’t ready for Amazon.com, or eBay, or Yahoo, or any of the innovative services that were changing the way consumers bought, sold, or communicated. I tell this story in my book Behind the Cloud and can’t help but note that the factors at play 10 years ago—an inspiring service, wide skepticism, and phenomenal potential—mirror where we are today. But it’s no longer Amazon that frames the questions or gives us the answers.

In this decade, I’ve become obsessed with a new simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” As we were focused on bringing enterprise computing into the modern age, Facebook redefined the values of consumer computing and helped ignite the social phenomenon. The compelling aspect of feeds, profiles, and groups, amplify the service’s stickiness. So does its functionality on a mobile device like an iphone—necessary to secure a service’s status as a “killer app.” Facebook is where I start my day to find out what my friends and family are doing. It’s where I go to see the important events in my social life. Everything I care about and need to know is pushed to me—and it requires no work on my part.

What does the social revolution mean for business, though? So far it hasn’t meant much. Currently, our methods of collaboration are defined by Lotus Notes or Microsoft SharePoint, but these tools haven’t kept up with the changing times. They were conceived before anyone knew what a “newsfeed” was. (In fact, Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg was!) Today, realtime information is possible, which has changed everything: How people consume information has changed, how people learn things about each other has changed, and how people stay current has changed. Most of all, our expectations around immediacy have changed.

He has a follow on post in which he says the following:

I’m living in the post-PC revolution. I’m in a desktopless world that is about feeds and profiles running in all my browsers and mobile devices, and interacting in exciting new ways. It doesn’t matter if I am in the office, at home, or at Starbucks—I am productive wherever I am. The enterprise is not just going to the cloud, it’s now going social, and it’s going mobile. Facebook and Twitter have shown us the way. Like Microsoft, and IBM, not everyone has to get it yet, but eventually they all will. As they say: Shift happens.

I agree that the future (nay the present) is social and mobile. Mark is a good salesman and he is obviously trying to pitch his product, but there is merit in his observations.

March 6, 2010

The new color of money

Filed under: Business, Internet, Mobile, Trends — Raja @ 12:15 pm

Social media is making all transactions, even financial ones, frictionless.

Money

A simple typo gave Michael Ivey the idea for his company. One day in the fall of 2008, Ivey’s wife, using her pink RAZR phone, sent him a note via Twitter. But instead of typing the letter d at the beginning of the tweet — which would have sent the note as a direct message, a private note just for Ivey — she hit p. It could have been an embarrassing snafu, but instead it sparked a brainstorm. That’s how you should pay people, Ivey publicly replied. Ivey’s friends quickly jumped into the conversation, enthusiastically endorsing the idea. Ivey, a computer programmer based in Alabama, began wondering if he and his wife hadn’t hit on something: What if people could transfer money over Twitter for next to nothing, simply by typing a username and a dollar amount?

Just a decade ago, the idea of moving money that quickly and cheaply would have been ridiculous. Checks took ages to clear. Transferring money from one bank account to another could take days, as banks leisurely handed off funds, levying fees nearly every step of the way. Credit cards made it a little easier to pass money to a friend — provided that friend owned a credit card reader and didn’t mind paying a few percentage points in fees or waiting a couple of days for the payment to process.

Ivey got around that problem by using PayPal. Since 1998, PayPal had enabled people to transfer money to each other instantly. For the most part, its powers were confined to eBay, the online auction company that purchased PayPal in 2002. But last summer, PayPal began giving a small group of developers access to its code, allowing them to work with its super-sophisticated transaction framework. Ivey immediately used it to link users’ Twitter accounts to their PayPal accounts, and his new company, Twitpay, took off. Today, the service has almost 15,000 users.

That may not sound like much, but it sends a message: Moving money, once a function managed only by the biggest companies in the world, is now a feature available to any code jockey. Ivey is just one of hundreds of engineers and entrepreneurs who are attacking the payment ecosystem, seeking out ways small and large to tear down the stronghold the banks and credit card companies have built. Square, a new company founded by Twitter cocreator Jack Dorsey, lets anyone accept physical credit card payments through a smartphone or computer by plugging in a free sugar-cube-sized device — no expensive card reader required. A startup called Obopay, which has received funding from Nokia, allows phone owners to transfer money to one another with nothing more than a PIN. Amazon.com and Google are both distributing their shopping cart technologies across the Internet, letting even the lowliest etailers process credit cards for less than the old price, cutting out middlemen, and figuring out ways to bundle payments to sidestep the credit card companies’ constant nickel-and-diming. Facebook appears to be building its own payment system for virtual goods purchased on its social network and on external sites. And last March, Apple gave iTunes developers the ability to charge subscription fees through their applications, making iTunes the gateway for an entirely new breed of transaction. When Research in Motion announced a similar initiative last fall at a session of the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco, programmers crowded the room, spilling out into the hallway. About 20 percent of all online transactions now take place over so-called alternative payment systems, according to consulting firm Javelin Strategy and Research. It expects that number to grow to nearly 30 percent in just three years.

March 4, 2010

Tectonic shift to mobile platform

Filed under: Mobile, Trends — Raja @ 3:21 pm

Don Dodge talks about the massive platform shifts and the next big one - the mobile platform and why the leaders fail to make these shifts.

Platform shifts happen every decade or so in computing. The leaders of the previous generation are rarely successful in dominating the next generation platform. IBM dominated the mainframe business. They didn’t lose their dominance because another company built a better mainframe. They lost it because the market shifted to a new platform…Mini computers. Digital Equipment, Data General, and a few others dominated that market. Another platform shift is happening today, from PCs to Mobile devices, and another industry leader will be left behind. John Herlihy of Google Europe says “In three years time desktops will be irrelevant”

The future of computing is that your cell phone will become your primary computer, communicator, camera, and entertainment device, all in one. The exciting new applications are running in the browser, with application code and data in the cloud, and the cell phone as a major platform.  I think in the near future there will be docking stations everywhere with a screen and a keyboard. You simply pull out your phone, plug it into the docking station, and instantly all your applications and data are available to you. You can connect to the Internet via your cell phone service, WiFi hotspot, or wired connection.  Your phone will have enough storage so you can decide which applications and data are stored on your phone, and which will be in the cloud. Replication will work seamlessly in the background so that you always have a backup copy of your data in the cloud. Where does that leave the PC industry leaders? Scrambling towards mobile.

Why do leaders fail to adapt? The Innovators Dilemma, made famous by Clayton Christensen, clearly explains why market leaders fail to make the leap. Innovation usually happens at the low end of the market where the products are simple, prices are low, margins thin, and the market totally undefined. The industry leaders have great margins, high prices, and customers who want more features and are willing to pay for them. The industry leaders always move up market and leave the new emerging market to smaller innovators. The process usually follows these 6 steps;

  1. The disruptive technology is discovered, often by the market leading company.
  2. Marketing people seek reactions from customers and industry analysts.
  3. Established companies decide it is a better strategy to speed up the pace of sustaining technical advancement in their own product rather than go down market with the disruptive technology.
  4. Start-ups learn about the disruptive technology and see opportunity. They keep their cost structure low, build the technology, and find new markets through trial and error.
  5. The start-ups get some initial success and then move up market and eat away customers from the market leading company.
  6. The market leading company finally jumps on the bandwagon reluctantly with a half hearted attempt and fails. It is too late.

I actually think apple and google are well positioned for this mobile wave (with iphone and android platforms). But there are large open opportunites for startups to make their mark.

March 3, 2010

Mobile boarding passes take off

Filed under: Mobile, Trends — Raja @ 10:26 am

Mobile ticketing can make travel a lot more convenient.

Apparrently this trend is really taking off.

Alright, lets pat the pockets and run through the mental checklist one last time before security: Passport? Check, front pocket. Headphones? Definitely in your backpack. Boarding pass? Uh oh. Where’d that boarding pass go?

Oh, that’s right! It’s on your phone – because you, like a rapidly increasing number of other people, opted to have it sent straight to your handset. Security scans the barcode right off of your handset’s display, and you’re on your way with one less thing to lose.

Trinity Mobile, one of the leading companies behind the mobile ticketing push, is today announcing a 1200% year-over-year increase with their mobile boarding pass offerings.

 

In 2008, Trinity Mobile saw 50,000 users opt-in to receive mobile boarding passes rather than the more traditional options. In 2009, this number shot up to 600,000. That’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the number of people flying with ol’ fashion boarding passes each and every day – but considering that that growth is almost entirely driven by users picking the option when its offered to them (without any real marketing push by Trinity or the airlines they’ve partnered with), it’s pretty impressive.

Jupiter Research backs up the fact that the trend is skyrocketing; according to their 2010 Mobile Ticketing report, over 2 billion mobile boarding passes will be sent out in 2010, with that number expected to blast up to 15 billion by 2014.

March 2, 2010

Message from your medicine

Filed under: Mobile, Technology, Trends — Tags: — Raja @ 8:43 am

WSJ has a feature story on growing trend of medicine reminders and its benefits in increasing the medication adherence.

[PILLS]

Vitality

The GlowCap gives electronic reminders and collects data on habits.

Much of the medicine prescribed to treat chronic conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes doesn’t work—because patients neglect to take it.

But what if someone, or something, called to remind them every time they were due for a dose?

Express Scripts Inc., the big St. Louis pharmacy-benefit manager, is about to test an electronic pill container that issues a series of increasingly insistent reminders, in a national study among patient members.

The container—actually a high-tech top for a standard pill bottle called a “GlowCap”—is equipped with a wireless transmitter that plugs into the wall. When it is time for a dose of medicine, the GlowCap emits a pulsing orange light; after an hour, the gadget starts beeping every five minutes, in arpeggios that become more complicated and insistent. After that, the device can set off an automated telephone or text message reminder to patients who fail to take their pills. It also can generate email or letters reporting to a family member or doctor how often the medication is taken.

It is one of the high-tech ways companies are grappling with medicine noncompliance. Only about half of patients who are prescribed a medication for a chronic condition are still taking the drug regularly after a year, says Daniel Touchette, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Mobile technologies are going to play an important role in healthcare. Our company MDava provides technology that enables healthcare organizations to send such reminders and alerts to their patients.

February 18, 2010

Social networking bigger on mobile than desktop

Filed under: Mobile, Technology, Trends — Raja @ 4:54 pm

From Readwriteweb:

A recent study from Ruder Finn revealed that Americans are spending nearly three hours per day on their mobile phones. And what are they doing there? Educating themselves, conducting business, managing finances, instant messaging, emailing? All of the above, as it turns out, and then some. But perhaps the most interesting finding from the new data is the fact that more people are using the mobile web to socialize (91%) compared to the 79% of desktop users who do the same. It appears that the mobile phone is actually a better platform for social networking than the PC.

As I say soon mobule web will just be web. Mobile will be bigger than desktops for many web services.

February 17, 2010

Eric Schmidt reveals Google’s mobile first strategy

Filed under: Internet, Technology, Trends — Raja @ 12:24 pm

Eric Schmidt’s speech at MWC reveals google’s mobile first strategy:

He  read off a flurry of statistics highlighting the growth of the mobile industry, pointing out within three years sales of smartphones will surpass sales of PCs. He noted that in developing countries such as India, Google searches were more likely to be made on a mobile phone than on a desktop computer; he highlighted the rescue stories from the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake and called the mobile technology that enabled some of them fundamental to the human existence. “This is all part of the same view that information is fundamental, and the joint view that mobile communication is ‘it,’” he said.

In Schmidt’s view, he explained, the current mobile ecosystem and its future incarnation are the result of three intertwining factors: computing power, connectivity and cloud computing. “The Internet is humongous. The notion of publishing and microblogging is an explosion that will drive networks further into everything we do,” he said. “Today’s generation doesn’t call it a mobile phone; they call it a phone. That’s a win for everybody sitting here.”

The mobile phone is the meeting point of these three trends, he said, and furthermore, any device that is not connecting in this way is considered not interesting, but lonely. As the mobile phone is the high-volume end point of these trends, it becomes the defining product in that space, he said. “It’s like magic,” he said. “All of a sudden there are things you can do you never even believed were possible.”

This led to his belief in the “mobile first” doctrine, as Google programmers are doing work on mobile applications and technology first, because “mobile apps are better apps” and that’s what top programmers want to develop. “It’s more specific, more human, more location-aware, more satisfying to them,” Schmidt said.

Eric Schmidt’s vision of the power of combination of internet and mobile is something we also share at our company.

February 14, 2010

Skype on Verizon Phones

Filed under: Mobile, Technology, Trends — Raja @ 10:48 am

Verizon is planning to put skype on its phones according to reports.

Feb. 13 (Bloomberg) — Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. wireless carrier, will include Skype Technologies SA’s Internet- calling software on phones to stave off competition from AT&T Inc., according to two people familiar with the matter.

The service will let customers make Skype calls over the company’s 3G data network, said the people, who requested anonymity because the agreement hasn’t been announced. Verizon and Skype said yesterday that they will hold a joint press conference Feb. 16 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The companies gave no further details.

Verizon is relying on 3G data plans for growth as demand slows for voice calls. Teaming up with Skype could draw new users, who might boost spending on extra features. The agreement sets the stage for similar deals with other carriers, said Vanessa Alvarez, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan in Boston.

“It’s a big win for Skype,” Alvarez said. “The wireless operators and incumbent service providers are starting to think differently and accept these types of partnerships. Others are going to follow.”

It is good to see carriers getting out of their comfort zone and thnking beyond their old business models. This is the future. If you have 3G on yoour phone it is like your computer with broadabnd connection. If you can make skype calls on your computer why not on your cell phone. If the carriers don’t offer this someone else will. Why lose customers to others when you can kee them yourself? Kudos to verizon.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress