Global top 10 mobile operators

The following list comprises the top 10 largest mobile operators in the world, according to Wireless Intelligence. The list ranks the world's carriers by total number of connections and number of markets.

Internet Marketing: The challenge in penetrating Asian and African markets.

A recent release of Internetworldstats.com detailing the world internet usage and population statistics (Q1, 2009) points to a compelling opportunity for internet marketers and portal designers in Asia and Africa. With a weight-age of 70% of total population of the world and a lower-than-mean penetration, the internet revolution is waiting to happen here in the next decade. The good thing about Africa and Asia is that barring a few countries, most of these states are supportive of efforts to increase the telecom and internet infrastructure. However, the internet conquest here will have a completely different set of rules compared to North America, Western Europe and Australia. While the big and long term opportunities lie in Asia and Africa, one must not be unmindful of Latin America/Caribbean and the Mid East (or even Eastern Europe), which are the medium term opportunity spots. While N America, W Europe and Australia are the first wave internet states, L America, Mid East and Eastern Europe will be second wave internet states and Asia/ Africa will be the third wave internet states.

The rules of the internet conquest will have to change and will require some fundamental re-thinking of re-packaging the delivery. Here are a few pointers towards the new rules of the game:

1.English got Internet, where it is today, but going forward, English may be limiting. It is not hard to associate a higher penetration of internet with the English world (North America, Western Europe and Australia).
This thus places emphasis on language of internet delivery: Mandarin, Hindi, Malaya, Tamil, Urdu, Swahili and more. English literacy will not drive economic and human development in these states. The mode of deliverance will be the local language.

2.The spread of internet in N. America, W.Europe and Australia has largely been acknowledged to proliferation of personal computing devices
Penetration in the second and third wave states, will depend on Telecom penetration and hence the mobile phone/handheld devices will become the harbingers of the internet revolution. By handhelds, I do not mean the fancy up-market smart-phones but basic $40/60 phones.

3.Existing subscription or ad based models may not be useful for these emerging markets. Revenue, Profitability and Sustainability models find the internet business space to be extremely slippery even in English speaking regions where culture, usages and habits are somewhat contiguous.
For the second and third wave states, customization to language, habits, cultures, money usage, and payment mechanisms will pose a significant challenge to marketers.

4.The first wave states browse the internet on computers, laptops, net-books, tablets and smart-phones. There is a high per capita consumption of content, ads, minutes of usage, search for information etc. High Def Content including text, audio, video form a part of the delivery mechanism.
Device limitations will influence content delivery. Content focus has to be sharp and light. One will have to judiciously use the knowledge of the local markets, mix them up smartly with business objectives and keep the content sharp and focused. Content delivery will also be a critical variable. Keeping in mind the infrastructural shortcomings, content delivered may only be uni-dimensional in nature (only voice or only text).

5.The business transactions in the first wave states are credit/debit card based and have a narrow bandwidth of services. Booking airline tickets, buying books, music and flowers, accessing paid information or content is only a privilege of the top 5-7% in the second and third wave states.
The challenge is to cater to the basic needs of the population better. The delivery medium here has to be much broader and involve more public utilities, health services, department of posts, Agriculture and Labour ministries or groups, banking groups etc. This involves a re-defining of the eco-system of delivery.

6.The problem of platforms, browsers and OSs is a vexing one even in the age of computing devices. The adaptabilities and compatibilities will be another challenge when the medium of delivery shifts to a basic phone.
Thus the delivery medium needs to be platform agnostic and will sit on a server preceding the mobile phone in the value delivery chain. For eg. a server that processes a consumer request, links up to the relevant website/portal, accesses information, downloads it on itself and then plays it back to the user after customizing the content. (Eg. The server receives a weather update, visits the local meteorological department portal, downloads data, coverts it into local language text/voice and plays it back to the user.)

7.The purchase mechanism and purchase price is primarily on credit card/internet banking basis. This is a high security risk situation but the most prevalent one because of the purchase habits of the consumer in the first wave countries.
The Second and third wave user is a very cautious spender and frugal as well. He does not own credit cards and the payment mechanism will have to involve the Telecom Operator. Such tie-ups would be critical in bringing internet enabled access to the user. There is a space for MVNEs and MVNAs playing a meaningful role here connecting the Solution provider, Telecom operator, Finance provider, Systems provider etc.

Internet Marketers are yet to meet the real challenge of deep penetration in the Asian and African markets, and the pointers given above would be critical for building sustainable depth.

Demystifying Twitter (Part II):Usage Charecterestics

Contd from earlier post http://technologyandtelecom.blogspot.com/2009/06/demystifying-twitter-one-way-one-to.html

Activity levels of Twitter Users

Data collected from Twitter Grader (4.5 million users) has some interesting inferences that need to be taken note of:

1. 79.79% users failed to provide a homepage URL

2.75.86% of users have not entered a bio in their profile

3.68.68% have not specified a location

4.55.50% of suers donot follow anyone

5.54.88% have never tweeted

6.52.71% have no followers

9.06% of all Twitter users are inactive (less than 10 followers, 10 friends,10 updates). Of the ones, who are thus classified to be active, and have a bio, loaction, hompage URL:

1. Average user tweets .97 times a day

2. An average user has tweeted 119.34 times in total

3. The average user has a following to follower raio of .7738

In terms of content of tweets:

1.1.44% of all tweets are retweets

2.37.95% of all tweets contain an @ symbol (mentions)

3.33.44% of all tweets start with an @ symbol (replies)

Most users stretch the 140 character limit to the max in an attempt to get as much content as possible into every update.The distribution of postings over days and times of day shows us that business hours during the business week in the US are the most popular.

The maximum concentration of Twitter use is in US, followed by Canada and UK. Australia is the next in the list.

Demystifying Twitter (Part I): One way, One to Many Publishing Service

Twitter has attracted tremendous attention from the media and celebrities, but there is much uncertainty about Twitter's purpose. Is Twitter a communications service for friends and groups, a means of expressing yourself freely, or simply a marketing tool?

Here's sampling two independent studies on the Twittersphere (The Twitter eco-system):

1. A study on the user demographics and usage phenomenon by Harvard Business Publishing (Sampling about 3 lakh Twitter users)
2. Another study by Hubspot on activity levels of Twitter Users. (Sampling about 4.5 million users)

User Demographics and usage styles
Compared against other online social networks; 80% Twitter users have atleast 1 follower/following. This is in contrast to the online social portals, which register 60 - 65% single friend status. The other marked departure from social networking standards is the following/follower pattern. Most of the online social networks activity is focusssed around women, where as in Twitter, the activity is centred on men.

It might point to the fact that content produced by Men on twitter is perceived to be more compelling than a typical social network and content produced by women is less compelling (because of lack of photo sharing, detailed biographies etc)

The Twitter usage pattern is also very different from a typical on line social network and a Twitter user contributes very rarely --> The median lifetime tweets per user is one which translates to over half the twitter users retweeting less than once every 74 days.
At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits ii. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

Contd...

Microsoft Morro on the Horizon

Microsoft Corp in a quest to provide complete security to its OS users would soon be launching its own antivirus app Code named-‘Morro’ at the end of 2009.
This news assumes significance as this antivirus would be completely free and would provide higher level of security due to close knit approach with Windows OS.Microsoft may be able to provide a great solution due to control over anonymous usage statistics of millions of PC’s.
This has sound alarms for commercial Anti-virus companies like Symantec, Kaspersky and McAfee, earning majority of their revenues by protecting Windows PCs all these years. These companies also have significant presence in enterprise security market and attract huge revenues from it.
Today many users are forced to buy paid anti-virus to fight higher level of threats unleashed by malicious programmes and viruses. The availability of anti-virus app by Microsoft itself would avoid the security dilemma faced by OS users and may also increase its legal OS sales in emerging markets.
Microsoft through this initiative is trying to ramp up confidence amongst its customers, at the same time opening up a new revenue stream in future. The move may be late timed but indeed serve great purpose for users craving about better anti-virus integration in windows OS.

Indian Telecom Story (Part X): Gartner's predictions about the Indian Telecom Industry

Gartner has made public, its future growth prediction for the Indian Telecoms market. Here's presenting a few highlights of the same:

1.The Telecom sector revenues would touch $30 billion by 2013 registering a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.5 percent between 2009-2013. In other words the Indian Telecom industry with its low double digit growth numbers is now maturing as any other industry would.

2.The Telecom subscriber base is also expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.5 percent and would cross 770 million by 2013. This is somewhat in disagreement with DoT's figures of 900 million by 2013/ and 1.1 billion by 2015. http://technologyandtelecom.blogspot.com/2009/05/dot-in-first-ever-forecast-of-mobile.html

3.Mobile market penetration is projected to increase to 63.5 percent in 2013 from 38.7 percent in 2009. The main resons for this would be increased focus on the rural market, entry of consumer durable and electronic companies into the mobile handset segment, and cheaper handsets.

4.The churn rate - the rate at which a subscriber switches their operator - would cross 59 percent in 2013 from 53 percent currently. The churn rate is also not expected to shoot to a high level despite introduction of Number portability.

5.The number of people with prepaid connections,accounting for 93 percent of the subscriber base in 2008, will continue to swell to exceed 96 percent by 2013, surpassing 740 million. The postpaid to prepaid ratio will not see major up move as it is forecasted to exceed 29 million by 2013 just a small CAGR growth of 2.5 percent from 23 million in 2008.This could be a big dampener as it reflect the inability of Telco’s to garner post-paid users.

6.The revenues from data services will significantly contribute to mobile services in India, with a CAGR of 16.8% from 2009 to 2013. Growth will be triggered by increased adoption of value-added services, which are relevant to both rural and urban markets.The introduction of 3G in future could well land a helping hand in increasing Telecom sector’s revenues.

Quick Bite: Steve Johnson on Twitter (Covered by Time)

Twitter’s key elements — the follower structure, link-sharing, real-time searching — are here to stay. And every major channel of information will be “Twitterfied” in one way or another in the coming years.

Steven Berlin Johnson’s Time cover story: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1902604,00.html