Jul

13

iPhone 3G MS Exchange sync pricing strategy

Filed Under business, entrepreneurship, marketing, mobile, product management, strategy | Leave a Comment

Unless someone knocked you out in a hockey fight last Friday and your consciousness has just returned, chances are that you have heard of this thing called the iPhone 3G launch. I’ve been going back and forth on my decision on whether to get it or not. There are 2 things that are holding me back from getting an iPhone 3G:

  1. MS Exchange synchronization pricing
  2. No tethering option

It’s a classic pricing strategy–their (AT&T’s) attempt to extract more value from the wireless consumer segment that well .. has more money to dispose. Not only have they hiked the price of the unlimited data plan by $10/month from $20 to $30, but they charge you an additional $15/mo if you want to synchronize with an Exchange Server.

I’m a price-sensitive customer *and* I’m a techie at heart, thus I simply balk at having to guarantee AT&T’s revenue for 2 whopping years merely to transfer a sequence of low and high electrical signals to some proprietary email server, as opposed to any other email server, or as opposed to just casually serving the web.

The techie in me knows that they’re simply charging more by discriminating against MS Exchange data from casual web surfing, or any non-Exchange email data.

From Wikipedia’s entry on Net Neutrality: Neutrality proponents also claim that telecom companies seek to impose the tiered service model more for the purpose of profiting from their control of the pipeline rather than for any demand for their content or services.

The entrepreneur in me knows that they are just playing it by the pricing strategy books. To that end, I say, all the more power to them. Maybe I won’t buy the phone, but seeing that they are so savvy and nickel and diming the segment I am in (the “tough” crowd), I’m considering buying their stock instead.

My second gripe is the inability to tether the iPhone 3G to a laptop (without hacking it). This point is important to me because when I travel with my laptop, and if I’m in a spot where I don’t have wifi access, I just need that option to tether my laptop to my mobile phone.

Maybe AT&T is worried about people starting to use the iPhone as a modem and thus cannibalizing revenues from their existing wifi hotspot sales. To that end, I feel like if I’m already putting up with the hike in price for monthly unlimited data, putting up with the extra monthly charge for their discriminating against MS Exchange data, it’s just simply un-polite to ding me again by forcing me to cough up even more for a separate wifi hotspot plan. Come on.

And I quote Bruce Scheier:

Anyone with wireless capability who can see my network can use it to access the internet. To me, it’s basic politeness. Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea.

I can see how they might have justified this impoliteness though. Corporate users probably have their companies paying for the bills anyway, and corporations have much deeper pockets and can easily justify such a cost as a business expensive. However, this pricing model obviously neglects the average work-for-a-corporation-joe-but-this-is-an-out-of-pocket-expense.

All said, here’s a message from a randomly-selected passionate early-adopting techie from the price-sensitive “tough crowd” segment, to whoever green-lighted this pricing strategy. You guys suck, and I hope you enjoy this video.


How to Get Broke by Buying an iPhone

Jun

8

Web 2.0 weekend roundup: Mashup (projected) money, Slide, plus mobile

Filed Under mobile, regular reads, web 2.0 | 1 Comment

Forrester reports that mashups are taking off. A trend/wave to take note of. This reminds me of what Greg McAdoo (VC with Sequoia) said, that the tiny companies have no power to change waves (technology trends), only the option of riding the wave. So here’s the wave, for those who want to ride it!

Mashups — custom applications that combine multiple, disparate data sources into something new and unique — are coming to the enterprise. Forrester projects that the enterprise mashup market will reach nearly $700 million by 2013; while this means that there is plenty of money to be made selling mashup platforms, it will affect nearly every software vendor. Mashup platforms are in the pole position and ready to grab the lion’s share of the market — and an entire ecosystem of mashup technology and data providers is emerging to complement those platforms. Those vendor strategists that move quickly, plan a mashup strategy, and build a partner ecosystem will come out on top.

The full report costs $775 ( ouch! psst .. can someone share? :) )

I got that link from Dion Hincliffe’s report on the mashup industry. An interesting read, do check it out — I do no justice in summarizing it here. It’ll get you a quick overview of the state of the mash-o-sphere (did I just invent yet-another-useless new Web 2.0 buzzword?) Plus, it features cool San Diego tech startup by two cool people I know; shoutouts to my friends Steve and Aaron from MindTouch!

On another note, Slide reports that they are doubling down their efforts on their current top widget properties to make them even better, .. implying that they are going to slow down on churning out new and potential “disruptive” widgets. I’m all about focusing on your core business for sure, but I hope they still carve out some time (as a percentage) throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks, since there’s no time better to encourage innovation than during hard times. Maybe this is all just an investor-relations fluff .. in which case, fine.

Max Levchin is no stranger to innovation, and I am sure he knows what he is doing. He is definitely someone I admire, and I’ve covered him previously on my blog here before.

Someone I spoke to this weekend was blindingly oblivious to the revenue opportunities in value-added services for mobile, so I thought including this pretty picture from this very worthy blog post from Alec Saunders here was in order.

Silly wabbit, of course you can make money writing apps for mobile :) — just google for {iPhone, Android, Blackberry} fund.

mobile value added services: long tail

May

11

iPhone apps for healthcare technology — plus some robots

Filed Under changing the world, healthcare technology, innovation, mobile, regular reads, technology | Leave a Comment

Cell phones, mobile phones, hand phones, whatever they are called, wherever they are in the world–can change the world! We already see it help drive economic development in microfinance, and now, we’re making strides with healthcare technology, another field I’m interested in because I love seeing technology change lives. The convergence of sophisticated UX-centric mobile devices, Internet/Web 2.0, Software as a Service, cloud computing — not to be missed!

From the article:

Despite all the advances in medical diagnostics, two-thirds of the world’s population has no access to imaging technologies. Worse, about half of the imaging equipment sent to developing countries goes unused because local technicians aren’t trained to operate it or lack spare parts, according to the World Health Organization. But thanks to the proliferation of cellular and other wireless networks, researchers are stepping up efforts to deliver crucial medical services from afar. “You go through India, anywhere, in the middle of the road, there’s someone with a cell phone. A friend calls me from the jungles of Costa Rica,” says Rubinsky. “I can see so many applications in which the cell phone becomes an integral part of a medical device. A cell phone can cut the cost of almost every [diagnostic] device.”

We have the $10Mil fbFund for Facebook apps, $100Mil iFund for iPhone apps, $10Mil for Google Android apps, and the to be announced $150Mil Blackberry apps fund — will we see a fund to drive healthcare technology apps?

With the iPhone spurring more handset makers to introduce similarly robust devices, the U.S. market for medical cell-phone software is expanding rapidly. Sales of phone applications for medical professionals are expected to rise from $111.8 million last year to $276 million in 2011, according to consultancy Ambient Insight.

On the “heavier” tech side, we’re definitely making huge strides in having robots that can now operate on people.

Consider this: Suppose there are only 10 surgeons in the world that specialize in this really complicated brain disease, affected by not that many people, but the number of victims dying from it is significant enough (say, 5,000 deaths a year worldwide). There’s only so many surgeons to go around, and with that many victims around the world, even if these surgeons worked themselves to death to save the world, they can’t possibly help everybody with just two hands and only 24 hours in a day. Seriously, it takes almost a day to just travel halfway across the world, and that’s just a one-way.

The solution: remote surgery. In terms of supply and demand, the supply is scarce (the Ph.Ds in this very narrow field) and the demand far exceeds the supply, and the number of victims is probably going to grow at a rate faster than the rate Ph.Ds in this field can be minted. Technology here serves to increase supply, that is, not by letting universities churn out more doctors (although that would work too), but rather by increasing the “utilization rate” of the existing doctors by allowing them to perform their work anywhere at anytime, by saving on travel time and expense. Even if we had an infinite amount of money to spend on the fastest jets, nobody can buy more than 24 hours in a day. 10 hours on a jet spent traveling is 10 hours that could be spent operating on a patient.

“If you are looking at the future, it’s hard to envision a hospital not offering robotics,” said Robert Glenning, chief financial officer at the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey

Technology, changing lives and making the world a better place–I love it!

Mar

29

Technology and Changing the World: Trends roundup - March 29, 2008

Filed Under business, changing the world, entrepreneurship, microfinance, mobile, passion, poverty, regular reads, startup, technology, things to ponder about | Leave a Comment

This post consists of my “value-added” thoughts on David Kirkpatrick’s article on Fortune here.

Since I love all things technology and passionately believe that it wields the power to change the world, these numbers are just plain interesting to me. I’ve overlayed on the data some general technology trends on Web 2.0 startups, venture capital, microfinance and poverty, all cleverly slapped into one big fat blog post. Why? Because they’re all inter-connected, and I haven’t written anything all this week (been so darn busy lately!) Off we go.

Indonesia:
- 1 in 100 owns a PC
- 1 in 1,000 has broadband Internet
- 63 million cell phone subscribers, representing 27% of the population (of 234 million)
- Annual cell phone subscription growth rate: 36%

India:
- 166 million cell phone users
- Last year’s cell phone subscription growth rate was 84.5%

Switzerland:
- The Swiss have 85.1 PCs per 100 persons, beating the United States at 80.3 PCs per 100 persons

Global PC penetration is 12.9 for every 100 people. Room for growth? You bet. Many of PC owners are obviously in well developed countries, and not poor countries with lots of people. OLPC’s efforts to reach the billions at the BoP will move the needle here, if they succeed. Not forgetting the “middle” market, more of those who are neither rich nor poor will also buy computers and get on the internet. (Better start loading up on some PC stocks!) But wait, am I sure that the middle-class is not going to get poorer and not buy computers? Well the stats from Hans Rosling’s TED talk show that the overall trend here is that the world is slowly digging itself out of poverty, and I take comfort in that. Actually, read on below as I describe another trend that supports that.

Now, for some cell phone stats:

United States:
- 77.4 subscribers per 100 people
- Everywhere in Europe (except Turkey) exceeds penetration in US. Italy is at a whopping 135.1 cellphone subscribers per 100 persons.
- Hong Kong beats the US in penetration too, at 135.3

The global average is 41.6 per 100 people.

Cellphone usage growth in fast growing markets last year*:
- Peru: 57%
- Vietnam: 114%
- Pakistan: 170%
- Ukraine: 185%

*numbers might be fuzzy, but they show a general trend

What’s also important to note about this upward trend in adoption is that mobile phones were the crucial piece that first enabled the poor in Bangladesh to get out of poverty (see section on Village Phone). Women built business models around it and turned it into a source of income. These days, mobile phones are also playing another role in microfinance: enabling the transfer of money and information over, well, mobile phones! In poor countries, a brick-and-mortar bank branches with ATMs are hard to come by (ditto for computers and broadband), so mobile phones are serving this unmet need, facilitating microfinance and thus helping reduce poverty.

Other interesting stats:
- 1.3 billion of global population connected to the Internet, compound annual growth of 20.3% for past 8 years.
- Internet ad spending of $40 billion is only 6.6% of global total of $605 billion and is growing at 33%. (Ha, I should double down on this little company while I can!)

Data from 2008 Global Internet Snapshot compiled by Imran Khan, senior analyst at JP Morgan. (hmm, can anyone get me access to that full report?)

That’s why medium and big tech companies can weather the unfavorable US economy trend by going abroad. Fruit trees in your backyard not yielding? Then go after the greener pastures outside of your backyard too. It’s called diversifying. That’s the other thing I love about software is that it’s not a physical object–a computer scientist can create value with merely a laptop (and some coffee!) The cost of making that first software copy is the most expensive, then every other subsequent copy ad infinitum is basically free. This is just the nature of information economics, and has obviously served Microsoft very well. Actually, tiny tech startups can do this too — by leveraging the distribution power of this thing they call the internets.
Read more

Jan

28

Unbundling production from delivery can change the world

Filed Under business, changing the world, did you know, innovation, mobile, product management | Leave a Comment

From this article from the McKinsey Quarterly,

Technology helps companies to utilize fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components, measuring and metering the use of each, and billing for that use in ever-smaller increments cost effectively. Amazon.com, for example, has expanded its business model to let other retailers use its logistics and distribution services. It also gives independent software developers opportunities to buy processing power on its IT infrastructure so that they don’t have to buy their own.

Interesting, but that (Amazon Web Services) seem like an obvious application since IT assets are consumed remotely/virtually, i.e. one isn’t actually physical interacting with it. Does unbundling apply outside of the virtual world too?

Unbundling works in the physical world too. Today you can buy fractional time on a jet, in a high-end sports car, or even for designer handbags. Unbundling is attractive from the supply side because it lets asset-intensive businesses—factories, warehouses, truck fleets, office buildings, data centers, networks, and so on—raise their utilization rates and therefore their returns on invested capital. On the demand side, unbundling offers access to resources and assets that might otherwise require a large fixed investment or significant scale to achieve competitive marginal costs. For companies and entrepreneurs seeking capacity (or variable additional capacity), unbundling makes it possible to gain access to assets quickly, to scale up businesses yet keep their balance sheets asset light, and to use attractive consumption and contracting models that are easier on their income statements.

Read more

Jan

12

Poverty myths busted by Grameenphone

Filed Under changing the world, microfinance, mobile, poverty, things to ponder about, wokai | Leave a Comment

Myth: Government needs to provide economically viable services
What Grameenphone proved: Private companies can provide them

Myth: Government needs to subsidize private companies
What Grameenphone proved: Private companies can help government with taxes

Myth: Poor people are recipients
What Grameenphone proved: The poor are a resource

Myth: The poor are uneducated and can’t do much
What Grameenphone proved: They are eager learners and capable survivors

Myth: Poor countries need aid
What Grameenphone proved: Businesses raise GNP far more than aid

From the a slide at Iqbal Quadir’s TED talk.

Coincidentally, Courtney from Wokai has just posted her thoughts on this CNN article about mobile money transfers taking off in Kenya–where not everyone has a bank account or even a home address. I believe the saying that creativity can’t flourish without constraints is true. In well off countries like the United States, *everyone* has a bank account and home address, so it’s quite natural to see why the average normal person would care much about being able to conduct banking sans a bank account or home address.

Mobile/cellular technology is a great example. What cell phone users are offered here in the US make us look we’re still living in the stone age–when compared to oh say, Japan.

Sometimes having good things in life can be a burden, in the sense that they might block you from seeing other opportunities. Ever felt that way?
Read more

Oct

5

Schedule wake-up calls to your mobile phone from Skype

Filed Under automation, mobile, technology | 3 Comments

Lifehacker has this post on a command line feature that will invoke Skype to call a phone number. Looks like it works! Now you can schedule wake-up calls to your cell via Skype. The command (for Windows) is:

c:\Program Files\Skype\Phone\Skype.exe /callto:001XXXXXXXXXX
(replace X’s with 10 digit phone number)

1. Run command

2. Skype initiates outgoing call

3. Phone rings!

Cool stuff. Now all you gotta do is write a script that will initiate the call at a certain time to fully automate it. Maybe throw in a web based interface and hook it up to the web so that you can schedule these “reminder” calls from anywhere with internet access.

* At time of writing, Skype offers free PC-to-phone calls to US and Canada

Jun

12

Mobile web servers

Filed Under geeky, mobile, technology | Leave a Comment

Now isn’t this a cool hack? Nokia has successfully ported the Apache httpd web server to their cell phones running the Symbian OS (Symbian is an operating system for mobile devices owned by Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens AG, Panasonic, and Sony Ericsson). This is possible because of Symbian’s POSIX layer that provides some of the UNIX hooks needed.

And the obligatory cool pretty diagram from Nokia’s page:

Historically, web servers are huge clunky machines — loud, noisy, and live in a cold “server rooms”. Imagine now the possibilities: that the website you view, being served up in real-time from a mobile device, say a cell phone .. owned by someone running across the street to grab a bite at Subway for lunch. Imagine the web server also telling you in real time where it currently is, the location of its owner. Granted, it is ripe for abuse by stalkers, but some form of security/access control would be implemented.

Neat stuff.