GSMA- "The Bad"- Sony Ericsson IDOU

As I said in a previous post, I will be talking about what I consider ‘The Cool”, “The Bad” and the "Let’s See" of the GSMA 2009 in Barcelona. My previous post talks about the introduction of MIFI by Telefonica as “The Cool” however yesterday night I came across something that as of now, it seems that it deserves the not so cool title of “The Bad”.

It is the Sony-Ericsson IDOU, the new handset introduced by the Japanese/Swedish handset manufacturer (can’t wait for the news saying that this is the new iPhone Killer!... some journalists love to write that without even wondering why is it that the iPhone is so successful). Ok…so, lots of you might be thinking why is it that I consider the IDOU a bad product, it looks pretty cool on the pic; and the truth is that it does look really cool and I am sure that it has some awesome functionalities (I own a K790 and it is a very good phone).

Also, I should say that the IDOU is not even in the market yet, Sony-Ericsson is just showing it off at the GSMA (IDOU is not even the commercial name… most likely they will launch it as something else), so a good judgment of the phone cannot be made as of right now.

Now taking this in consideration, the phone does have a feature that I believe makes it bad…a 12.1 MegaPixel (mp) camera!!... yes I consider that a bad thing! Why?? Because the only thing that a 12.1 mp photograph does is occupy memory in your phone or memory card and increase the price of the handset. Photographs with such high resolution only are needed if you are going to print the picture in huge dimensions…let’s say a billboard or a poster…and I really doubt that you will be making a poster of the picture that you took of your colleague sleeping in his desk or you and your buddies in the middle of a bar.

Most pictures that are taken with a phone are for Facebook or your computer…that is if they make it out of your phone!… just think about how many pictures you have in your phone that you haven’t transferred to your computer. In fact, why don’t you try this…. Just start browsing right now, I promise you that you will laugh… it is like taking a drive down memory lane.

And even if the pics do come out of your mobile, how many have you printed? and of those… how many have you printed in a size bigger than a standard A4 piece of paper?...  Very few right?? So would you need a phone with a 12.1 mp camera?...don’t think so… a 3.2 mp camera is more than enough resolution for the use of mobile generated photographs.

So why pay the price of a high-resolution camera and need to buy a high capacity memory card to hold the super heavy photos of your drunk buddies? At least I don’t see the point… 

GSMA- "The Cool"... Telefonica launches MIFI

I am sure that most of us (if not all) have used WiFi at some point. The benefits of connecting wirelessly are enormous! You can work, chat or do whatever you want wherever there is WiFi coverage. However the big limitations are that somewhere near your laptop (or iphone, PSP, Blackberry..etc) there is a router or access point connected to an ethernet port (the access point is a device that transforms the internet that is coming from the small plug in your wall (Ethernet Port)  into a wireless signal so that you can enjoy it from your laptop or Wifi device, think of it as a lamp (which takes electricity from a plug in your wall and spreads it through the room as light), an Access Point does the same but instead of light it spreads data)

So Wifi has a physical limitation, you need to be near an access point and that access point needs to be connected to an electricity plug and an ethernet port, limiting where you access the internet. At the GSMA Mobile Congress, Telefonica has launched MIFI, a very interesting attempt to challenge the physical limitations of Wifi... and at the same time leverage the fact that the big Spanish Telco has invested millions of euros in a high speed network with coverage in almost every place in Spain (and the world if you think about all Telefonica's Operations worldwide) 

MIFI is the device that you see in the picture above, it is basically a small Acces Point that has its own rechargeable battery (4 hours of use) and uses the cell phone network to connect to the internet (nothing new right..?) ... the interesting part is that the MIFI creates a WiFi network which can serve up to 5 devices, meaning that you can just turn on one MIFI device in a train car or in the middle of the beach (wherever there is cell phone coverage) and let 5 laptops connect to the Internet using their WiFi capabilities. 

I love the idea because it is a simple one, Apple with its "Airport Express" already introduced the idea of a portable mini-Wifi network however even though you could take the Express with you everywhere, you still need to connect it to an ethernet port. So Telefonica has cleverly identified that they can take advantage of something that only mobile operators have... a big network with coverage. So if the speed of the MIFI is "good enough" and the prices are reasonable, the MIFI could be a product very attractive not only to business users but also to households. I would venture an say that most households have less than 5 laptops, so people could buy the device and use it for Internet access at home, and take it with them if they decide to travel, or go to a restaurant or coffee shop and want to continue browsing the net and what is best, they can share the connection wirelessly. 

So good job Telefonica! you will have an edge over the competition.... for now!!... I am sure that a MIFI device is being developed in China right now to sell it to the Vodafone's of the world! but for now! Very very Cool!

3GSM..."The Cool", "The Let's See" and "The Ugly"

I should start by saying that I should not be sitting in my room writing on the blog but in Barcelona walking around the exhibit hall in the GSMA Mobile World Congress (formerly known as the 3GSM). So for all of you that don't know what it is, here is my attempt to explain it:

Think about a HUGE supermarket of Mobile Technologies! everything from handset vendors, entrepreneurs hoping to get their big break to the big software giants, such as Microsoft, Google or the big Telecoms such as Telefonica or Vodafone. It is a great place to see what is going on in the mobile world and to take a peak of what is coming tomorrow!

However, I am in school now so I cannot attend (I have had the opportunity to attend one Mobile Payments Congress in Amsterdam and two CTIA Wireless (The American version of the GSMA) and let me tell you....it is great, so if you ever have the chance...don't think twice and go!)

Even though I am not there, I will try to follow the Congress through the media so if you have any links or interesting articles about the GSMA please post them as comments so that we can all benefit from them, as for me, I will try to write about "the cool", "the let's see" and "the ugly" things I read or hear about (from my master professors or friends of mine that are attending the congress). So make sure you visit my blog for new posts if you are interested in this!

Mobile Marketing and Politics...

Although this might sound like a natural combination nowadays (Due to the success of Obama's Mobile Marketing Campaign), this is something that is far from new. I have to admit that I don't have an idea on who was the first politician to use mobile marketing tools to promote their campaigns, but the first time I heard of such a concept was from my good friend and business partner... Juan Carlos Holguin.

When I started this blog I said that I will have guest bloggers that will add value to "The Red Pill", and Juan Carlos is certainly a person that will add lots of value to the Blog. Since I always try to keep this blog very personal let me give you some background info on Juan Carlos (Juanca from now on!) and how we know each other. 

I have known Juanca since I was a kid, how I met him??...no idea... he is just one of those guys who I have know my whole life. Now, the interesting part begins when he calls me up to WashU( My undergrad school)  and asks me if I want to start a business with him...of course I said yes! and of course the company went bankrupt. However we learned a lot!!! and we tried it again..and again.. until we finally started a firm that today is successful (www.tuboleta.com.ec). However while we were trying to become the next Bill Gates, we worked together in a Mobile Marketing company (www.net-people.com), in fact he taught me everything I know about Mobile Marketing and Mobile Content, and in those days he told me about a mobile campaign that he did for a former Major of Quito. 

Juanca now is the General Manager of Net-People Ecuador and is one of the pioneers and responsible for introducing Mobile Marketing in Ecuador. Besides great entrepreneurial skills Juanca has always been passionate about politics (Hey! nobody is perfect!)  and when I was discussing Obama's Mobile Campaing in one of my classes I realized that Juanca would be the perfect person to describe to us what Obama did to successfully use the mobile channel in the road to become the most powerful man in the world. 

So Juanca.. Please in a few paragraphs (Believe it or not he writes longer than I do...sorry for the long posts!!) tell us what you think were the key success factors of Obama's Mobile Campaing....we will be waiting! (2 days at the most please!!) 

Monetizing Meneame... tell the users and sell the software!! (ok and some online ads as well)

Many of you might have visited www.meneame.net before or www.digg.com, or maybe you have seen the little elephant in the bottom of some news pages such as www.elcomercio.com or www.elpais.com  . Both Digg and Meneame bring enormous quantities of traffic to their sites as people go there to check the latest “news” or just plain interesting articles on the web as voted by other internauts (people that browse the internet)

So why am I talking about these pages? … first because one of the assignments for my “Web 2.0 and Customer Driven Innovation” is to talk about how could we come up with a business model that will make the page owners some money, so yes…I am obliged to do it because it is mandatory for my class, but I have decided to post it in my blog because I believe the meneame case represents a problem that many other Internet Portals are having nowadays…lots of traffic, lots of popularity but little money. Some examples of this are twitter, diigo and would even go out and say Facebook (For the amount of active users they have, they should be swimming in money) 

So let’s talk about meneame, just for you to know, this was a page that was developed by Ricardo Galli because he wanted to practice his programming skills. He did most of it in 10 days and the purpose of the page is to allow registered users to find interesting news or articles in the internet and publish the title of the story with some comments in the meneame page. Once the story is in the meneame page, other meneame users (you don’t need to be registered to do this) can vote for their favorite stories, the more votes a story gets the closer it gets to the homepage and to the top. The more votes a story gets, the more “Karma” (yes…that is how they call it!) the person that published the story gets…becoming a more respected “meneador” (This word…I did made up).

Today the page is getting around 200000 visits a day…however those impressive numbers are not translating into $$$$ for the founder. If you go to the page you will see that there are some Google advertisements (Using Adsense- Refer to my previous post about Adsense), so some of you might be thinking why a page with such high traffic does not get advertisers directly instead of doing it through Google, well it is because it is hard for a brand to say yes…I want to advertise and then having stories about sex, violence or complaints in the page (remember the users are the ones who vote what news go on the page and that cannot and should not be controlled) and potentially associating the brand to those stories. 

So how do we make this page profitable?? First there needs to be a focus on CPM and not CPC. (For those of you who don’t know CPM is what online advertisers call Cost per Impression, meaning how much does the page charge for just exposing the brand in the page, While CPC means how much does the page charge per click each user makes on the advertisement- Cost per Click). Why CPM? Because the user does not spend much time in the page, it just uses the page to find interesting links…and then go to the page that hosts the story, making it very difficult to have people enough time to read the advertisement and then click on an interesting one. Meneame should focus on a brand that stays away from the mainstream and allows users to create or choose themselves, Linux pops to my mind, since it is a brand that is basically created and maintained by the users (just like meneame is) and since the users are choosing the stories in meneame I don’t think that Linux will have such an issue about being associated with what users voted on, since Linux always tries to position its brand exactly like that.

The next action meneame should take is tell the Meneadores the problem, tell all the users that meneame is not making money, communities are very strong for some brands and should not be underestimated, the only reason why Linux is alive today is because the Linux community has invested time and effort (Ok…IBM  has donated lots of money as well) to keep the brand alive, just think about all the donations that were given to Wikipedia(My friend Tamer made a very good comment about this, so please check the comments below). So meneame users should know that it takes money to develop and host the site that they use so much. Maybe a program in which users get more Karma if they get other people to donate money should be implemented, by doing so you meneame will stay true to the concept that users give the value to the page, it is just that the users will bring money instead of news.

My last suggestion has nothing to do with online marketing but more about selling the software (selling licenses or maybe provide the software as a service). More and more companies are beginning to use Web 2.0 tools to promote innovation, customer care or just stay ahead of its competition by pretending to be techie. Besides high web traffic, Meneame has another big asset, its software and experience managing the tool, this could be very useful for a corporation which wants to promote innovation by asking its employees worldwide to vote on interesting upcoming technologies that the corporation should look into (for example). By establishing a personalized “meneame” tool in the corporation’s intranet employees would be able to “publish” articles on specific topics or simply vote on what other peers have “published”, then the Karma that each employee has could be transmitted into…let’s say a bonus or some other incentive.

The concept can be applied to any industry (even in universities), and could be very useful for a company that wants to set up a process to hear what their employees are saying, both encouraging employee participation as well as potentially identifying trends or opportunities for the firm. 

Gmail...why is it free? phenomenal advertising!!

It came as a surprise to me, when in one of my Information Systems class last trimester many people did not know that Gmail "reads" your emails in order to better advertise to you... I know it may sound crazy that a big corporation is reading your emails. 

However don't worry, people are not reading your emails...computers are, why??? because they want to identify potential interests you might have in order to advertise to you better. The better they advertise...the more money they get...the more money they get, the more services they deploy to keep us returning to Google. So lets analyze this from a Gmail user perspective and from an advertiser's perspective. 

As a heavy Google user myself I have to admit that there has been sometimes when I have worried about my privacy, not because I have anything to hide but more because I sometimes read all this privacy advocates talking about how Google will destroy our lives in the future. However, it is important to remember that we (users) still have the power to decide if we want to use Gmail or not. We are just one-click away of protecting our privacy! we don't need privacy advocates protecting us, we can just close our accounts and that's it (Google does keep a copy of your emails in their servers, just for you to know)

So what happens if we stay in Gmail... how will Google use my info?... well its simple! to target me better. To bring me advertising that is relevant to me. Do I care? I personally don't, first of all it is not intrusive, sometimes is useful, and more importantly it lets me use Gmail for free!! in fact it let's me use all the Google Applications for free! Just think about how many times you have used Google Maps... no, even better.. think about how your internet experience would be without the search engine (Back to the Altavista days when the results where far from what you were looking for) 

So in conclusion, the advertisement that we get on the right side and  top of the pages is the price we have to pay to use Gmail, if you have studied economics I am sure you know that "there is no such thing as a free lunch" (nothing is for free!)... and Google needs to pay for all the servers that hold the thousands of gigabytes (A lot of storage capacity) where our emails (with all the pictures, videos and presentations) reside, and they pay with the money they get from the companies that are advertising to us. 

Now, from an advertising point of view, Gmail advertising is great! as you can see in the picture above Gmail "read" my email in which I was talking to some of my classmates about a project on Mobile Marketing. As you can see in the blue circles, I mentioned Mobile Marketing twice, and then, the next time I opened my email (53 minutes later- See Yellow Circle) I had 5 different advertisements from Mobile Marketing Companies (see red circles)... Just Great!! 

Just think about going to a supermarket and getting some Oreo Cookies, after walking around for 53 minutes you go to the cash register and you have 5 different types of milk for you to complement your Oreos with. It benefits you and the type of milk you decide to choose (and of course, if you don't want to, you don't have to get the milk) and what's even better, since you were "exposed" to the 5 different types of milk, you get the cookies for free! it doesn't matter if you buy the milk or not

So to me this is a model in which everybody wins, at least this applies to me because I use a lot of Google services, in fact my blog resides on Google servers since Google owns Blogger. Now if you don't like it, don't get mad, just don't use Gmail anymore... there are plenty of email services nowadays! as for me... I rather stay

If you liked this article I encourage you to check the video from this link:

http://epic.makingithappen.co.uk/new-masterfs1.html

The greatest part is that it was made around 2004/2005... when you see the last minutes think about the recent introduction of Google Latitude (an application that you install in your phone and you can broadcast your location to your  friends using your phone's GPS) will it come to this? you be the judge