Archive for June, 2009

After about 18 months, this is Tomi’s second visit to MobileMonday… still energetic and insightful, Tomi delivered his presentation titled “New Business Opportunities out of Mobile Social Networking”

So, here’s some key pointers:

Recession = it’s time to copy… copy proven and successful concept from other companies/countries/operators… launch it!

Great community services are built upon 4 principles: Connectivity, Culture, Commerce, Community. The ability to combine these attributes is the key to exciting services. Example: Sony Pictures Sofia’s Diary combines Connectivity (mobile voting via SMS) and Culture (teen’s interest in social/romantic dilemma) to create interactive mobisodic soap opera.

Then he shared the update and a lot of examples about Mobile as the 7th Mass Media (someone care to improve the Wiki page?) and the seven benefits of mobile, reminding us that mobile is different than other medias:

1. Mobile is the first personal mass media
2. Mobile is permanently carried
3. Mobile is always-on
4. Mobile has a built-in payment mechanism
5. Mobile is available at the point of creative inspiration
6. Mobile has the most accurate audience measurement
7. Mobile captures the social context of media consumption

Benefits number 1 through 6 is somewhat easier to grasp. Understanding the 7th is the most interesting – how recommendation, referral, viral, and WoM work and being enhanced using mobile. Obama’s m-campaign is taken as another example… it’s viral enough (SMS invitations sent to supporters, and can be forwarded to others as viral campaign), it’s social enough (twitter and iPhone apps that show poll result contextually – got to see it…)

Then, finally the business model for Mobile Social Networking. It’s a 100-million-plus-user service globally, and there’s a positive ARPU impact (according to Informa). There are six revenue models at this moment:

1. Subscriptions
2. Advertising
3. Personalization
4. Pay-per-view (with revenue share)
5. Gifting
6. Ego-services

The newest one is ego services… feeding on people needs to look good (virtually). Introduced by flirtomatic, if you don’t like your rating (5 stars etc), can now eliminate worst rating but pay for it. Or find out who gave you that rating (and pay for it too…).

Tomi convinced us that there are real business potential of new and creative mobile social network services. Adding value to the operators and to the consumers, creators as well. SeeMeeTV for example gives an average UKP 13 payout for content creator…

And lastly, don’t forget to make mobile fun! Gen-C will dominate the world in the future (and the mobile world now), so they all love having fun… (as much as we do).

Few links worth mentioning:

• Many of his examples are taken from Tomi Ahonen Pearls Vol 2: Mobile Social Networking, which just came out last month and has 50 case studies of successful mobile services. The eBook is not sold on Amazon or any other place, except directly from the website (which has free sample pages!!) so head on to: http://www.tomiahonen.com/ebook/PearlsV2.html
• Please join Forum Oxford, the free expert community of over 2,000 with over 40 of mobile authors and 16 of the 20 best-read bloggers in mobile. Check the details about this on his preso slide.

Slides? Oh yes, it’s available on our site: http://sites.google.com/site/mobilemondayid/

And… SPECIAL THANKS for Ericsson Indonesia – for sponsoring Tomi and for Telkom Indonesia/indigo for sponsoring the whole event (food, drinks, venue). Thanks a bunch guys!

Tonight’s event was titled “The New Revenue Models of Mobile Social Networking” featuring our special guest, Tomi Ahonen. And of course, joining him are two speakers who are also well known: Shinta “Bubu” and Widi Nugroho of Telkom/indigo.

Shinta started the exciting event with her dynamic presentation about Digital Marketing initiatives in Indonesia – “The Rise of Digital Era.” She shared her observation that the Internet must change the way we approach marketing, considering that media consumption has shifted to online (and mobile) media.

She mentioned that marketing must understand the social media as the means to deliver high-impact and accountable marketing. Shinta gave two successful examples of recent social campaigns that show the power of social network: Whopper Sacrifice and iPod Nick Haley TVC. Whopper Sacrifice is a Facebook campaign that is soooo viral (it’s also trackable, they can track who install and buy-in the concept). While the iPod TVC is created by an 18-year Apple enthusiast (or should I say fanatic) student for free, posted in YouTube, and gained popularity overnight (kindof…), creating  what-you-never-dreamed-of awareness and interest for Apple.

Shinta then explained about BuBu Awards V06 – celebrate the best practice of Indonesian online in order to improve the high impact of new trends marketing! They have some interesting activities lined up, from digital marketing competition, blog writing competition on Komodo Island (yay!), and Digital Conference with great spekers.

Let’s go to bubuawards.com, and see if your company/yourself can participate (you should!)

Then Pak Widi of indigo-Telkom, our sponsor for this event, explained their initiatives the “Indigo Fellowship” – for brighter Indonesian digitalpreneur.

Indigo Fellowship aims to foster enterpreneurship in the digital business. They provide facility from creation, ideation, seed capital ($$$), coaching, and digital playground (utilizing Telkom’s vast resources)… helping Indonesian creative people to succeed as digitalpreneur.

This program is launched now since May 2009, and will go into selection/recruiting phase until August 2009. Screening will be conducted in September 2009. Key judging criteria will be: People (yeah, joining MobileMonday will help you in this criteria), Profit, Planet (yeah, you should do good for others, man!)

So, what are you waiting for: plasaindigo.com

I’ll save the second part of the recap for tomorrow or the next day. Haven’t got the slides….

Update: Special thanks to our sponsor: Ericsson Indonesia and Telkom Indonesia. Thanks guys, without you we can’t get this event done.

Apology for my delay… nevertheless, here’s the recap for May event. Selular magazine also wrote a nice article about it as well – can’t find it on the web – will scan & post.

One of the main attraction for today’s Internet/mobile Internet is video. We know that it is big, but how big?

So Cisco launched “Visual Networking Index” initiatives to sample the traffic in Internet. Ichwan F. Agus, the SP Sales Director of Cisco explained about this VNI initiatives… Cisco is deploying probes on major ISP globally to measure what’s really happening there.

Key findings of VNI are: video as the key driver of IP growth with high-def and on-demand content as major use of today, but collaboration & mobility in future networks. Video now is dominated by Internet Video to PC, but future will be Internet Video to TV (hmm…) and Interactive Video.

Based on the VNI, in 2012 video is predicted to occupy up 90% of consumer Internet bandwidth. This reflects 65% growth annually… This is enough to create a challenge in the current operators’ network.

Mobile data traffic, he continued, will double every year… (yipee!!), so in 2012, mobile data traffic will be twenty times what it is today. Amount of mobile data traffic per month in APAC is about 230 Petabyte (PB). To put this into perspective, one Petabyte is 1000 Terabytes or 250k DVDs…

Then, Jeff Teh… represented by me explained about a key trends in the mobile industry acros Asia.

Here’s the executive summary:

• Moderate growth in premium content market of 37.4% over 2007.
• Operators seeking alternative revenue streams: Mobile Data services (YES!!). Mobile voice is now 74% of operators revenue, but by 2014 it will be only 62%, so representing 10% of revenue shifted to value added services (at the current market, it’s about 8 trillion Rp)
• Messaging remains key revenue contributor to mobile data services in APAC and even global. It’s no surprise that basic information services & news alerts are still strong. He referred to RedNano in Singapore as a new business model for info services.
• Mobile entertainment key to growth with Music and Video services leading the way. Music is driven by RBT. Popular new music services are: Mobile Karaoke and Music TV. Mobile video should be redefined, content needs to be adopted to what users want.
• 3G, Mobile Internet and handset trends key to growth of mobile data services and premium content. Frost & Sullivan believed by 2014, 47% of all devices are capable of Internet access.
• Mobile advertising, search, commerce are new areas of growth of premium content.

Highlighting on the mobile video, I quotes Jeff that what users want are not simply TV translated to mobile format but rather (try that please):

• bite-sized chunks of entertainment as fillers during free time
• no full movies (painful to watch on the mobile screen)
• viral video campaigns for mobile marketing alternatives
• mobile cartoons

Then you know exactly that we need to understand more about Mobile Advertising. And to make sure that it remains non-intrusive, targeted, personal, immediate. Ad-sponsored model can be the new revenue stream and expected to improve consumption of premium content.

Ad is related to the Social Networking trends. But they didn’t see yet the form of revenue in SocNet… (Tomi’s got answer for that).

Other than that… vertical search is interesting trend. The promise of vertical search (specialized search, focusing on a certain type of content, e.g. images, hotels, shopping, …) is to deliver content in fewer clicks… The less click the happier the user will be.

Lastly, try to look at Voice IVR/VAS. Voice portal that helps user to select and get content (instead of browsing through WAP pages). Usable for RBT selection, conference, voice chat. Really big in India, China, and Thailand. (I know that some operators & VAS ops are looking into this).

Enjoy & happy selling

Some of the May & June Mobile Monday slides are available. Please go to our slide page @ http://sites.google.com/site/mobilemondayid/

Tomi’s slide is not yet there. Just a bit more patient please…