mobile web africa

i went to the mobile web africa conference a couple of weeks ago. it was very illuminating in terms of the challenges, opportunities and methods of overcoming these that people are employing to get their product out (whether it is philanthropic or commercial). i took some notes, so excuse how rough and indstinct they are. let me know in the comments if i can explain anything.

vodacom
6.65% of Africa uses PC internet
Top 10 countries= 85% of market
15% of cell users use net globally= 500MM
Google & Facebook #1 destinations- PV in Africa increased 422% YoY
SA 25.7% CAGR- 2013-16.9MM (2/3 mobile)
Tier 4 (R20/day) is shrinking, Tier 3 has exploded(R20-R140/day)
LSM 1-6 never use data
Big peak in December
Vodacom Live has 3MM on portal
Smartphone usage = 39x data usage
3 things to get net to Africa-data pricing
Settings configured
Content adaptation

the grid-location based services
LBA_ push-enter a mall, get an ad
LBA_pull-GPS then trigger something
How to find you- GPS, cellular LBS (cell mast triangulation), wifi hotspot(US), IP address, user defined
Advertising- time of day/week
Susceptebility to message
Low value of ads, high ctr
The grid-80% java, 10% mobi site, 10% other
90% prepaid


samsung
Africa 32% YoY subscriber growth
Cellular drives business, not just communication
Nigeria highest global access to BBC sports channel


opera
Opera Mini 4.2 – sync with internet cafe- (bookmarks, history etc)
Wml dead- big for games, porn & ringtones
More mobile future- simpler code, minimal javascript, move less data, adapt better for everyone, use what is available- less battery usgae & data cost
Content is still king
Make mobile simple
Site, apps or widgets?
Apps- rewrite for each device
W3c widgets- specialised tools, html- easy to make
Websites- generic spaces
2 year cycle from phones sold in europe to trickle down to markets in africa

mxit
16MM reg users
1,940 phones compatible
Daily- 20-23MM logons, 10MM logouts, 2MM pictures, 600MM packets.
Demographic 42% 19-25, 27% 15-18
First thing people ask- what is you SLR (sex, language, race)
Very price sensitive audience
Things they do (some more speculative; dating, counsellling, ads entertainment (virtual goods etc),social development, radio & TV interaction, classifieds, LBS, social network, microtransactions (skins, chat rooms)
Classifieds 2,100 postings/day 330k subscribers
Mxit confessions
Roleplayers in ecosystem- Mxit, phone manufacturers, end users, mobileoperators, content providers, brands & advertisers, government & regulators, competitors

google
How to catapult mobile web;
Free & low priced data plans
Bring down handset costs- don’t compromise on user experience
Create lots of local content

nokia
More mobile phones than toothbrushes
Next 1BB is emerging markets
$4-$40/day=1.5BB=voice/SMS/internet
$4-$2/day=4BB=voice/SMS
$2-$1/day=2.7BB= nothing
Need to find solution-total cost of ownership<$5/month


panel
Peer to peer learning vNB for getting people to use new technologies
Age 25-50 are not English speakers, technical neophytes, below that more literate


connected action consulting
Social fabric will be digitised & available on mobile
2% of the population care about a topic, 0.5% are regular contributors
-start conversations
-answer people
-trigger discussions
20% of internet content is Q&A
Information wants to be copied
2pm & 2am tells who you are
Robin Dunbar says your brain can handle 150 r’ships

mary meeker 2009 internet trend report

read this, it will make you cleverer

Social media count

iGoogle.co.za

I wanted to check the weather this morning, so typed in my iGoogle page.this is what I got.

Plesk seems to be Russian webhosting software.it doesn't seem like Google would be using it, all in all pretty bizarre.

clever UI

i was looking at my Linkedin inbox recently and i saw this great pop-up menu over people who have asked to connect to me. previously it used to give you the option to connect to someone or not, now it gives you a whole host of options;
1) don't show me this person
2) i don't know them
3) i don't know them well enough
4) i prefer not to connect
5) other reason

this gives you the ability to nuance how you don't know someone, as opposed to the general brushoff (i'm not sure if this sis communicated back to the other person, i'd say not). i think it would also allow you to not link to more people which should make the links that you do have more effective, and therefore linkedin more effective (or is that too tenuous an assumption?)

the benefit for linkedin is that you have more data about people's linking behaviour, more to analyse...

when 301 redirects do funny things

we've put a number of 301 redirects in place for our new games site (please excuse gratuitous linking:)).

what should happen is that google should see the old domain as no longer existing and redirect all traffic back to the new domain. however that isn't happening here; it is still picking up both domains, however the meta tags that its picking up are the same for both pages and the links are going to the new site.

i'd expect that this is a blip in their indexing and would be remedied pretty soon, but it has me a little perplexed

Oneapp

Oneapp is a very cool concept. I met with them earlier today and how they encapsulated it is that it is “the appstore for feature phones”. Its a Microsoft initiative where they want to make crappy phones able to do cool stuff. You do this by downloading a thin client and they put the rest of the content in the cloud. It’ll give you the ability to have facebook, twitter (and other yet to be developed) crucial applications on your phone. Its launching through mibli, an existing application which is similar/complementary to mxit.

If you look at the below video you’ll see that it is the global launch of this application, so it’ll be intriguing to see how it progresses. To state the obvious, it seems interesting to me because there’s a hell of a lot more feature phones out there than smart phones.