Mobiles offer more than voice in developing markets
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(InfoWorld) - In mature economies, the mobile phone started out as a luxury item, a convenient way to talk to friends and family from anywhere. But in emerging markets, first-time users are turning to mobile phones for more than convenient chatter. They're using their phones as the only way to access the Internet, to use banks for the first time, and to start small businesses. Opera Software, Vodafone Group, Google, and Nokia are among the companies that have recently offered evidence of the use of the mobile Web and other non-voice applications in emerging markets. In general, the use of mobile phones in developing economies is booming. The number of mobile subscribers in developing countries grew five-fold from 2000 to 2005, reaching 1.4 billion and accounting for 70 percent of the total global market, according to a recent report from Vodafone, The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor and World Resource Institute. Those subscribers are doing more than talking. "Mobile is becoming a significant way to access the Web and a growing number of people will get their first experience of the Net on a mobile device," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, president and chief executive at Nokia, during a recent investors conference. He says it makes sense that people in some emerging markets would use their phones instead of PCs to access the Internet. In India, for example, 136 million people have mobile phones and fewer than 20 million have PCs, Kallasvuo said. Nokia has evidence of the predominance of mobile Web users outside of developed regions. Its mobile-enabled Web site gets around 90 million hits every month and 60 million of those come from users in China, Kallasvuo said. Google has also recognized the trend. "Mobile devices in India and China are the primary devices for users to experience the Internet," said Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of global sales and business development for Google, speaking during a recent conference. With 1 billion Internet users and 2 billion mobile users around the world, it makes sense for Google to tweak its offerings for mobile users, he said. Browser developer Opera says that downloads of its Opera Mini client also demonstrate the widespread use of mobile phones to access the Web in developing economies. While Opera has primarily marketed Opera Mini in developed markets, India, South Africa, China, and Russia are among the top 10 regions for Opera Mini downloads, said Tor Odland, an Opera spokesman. Worldwide, 8 million people have installed Opera Mini, a small browser that users download onto their phones. The software communicates with Opera servers, which strip down Web sites so that they'll load quickly and fit nicely onto the small screens of mobile phones. Opera Mini is popular in Bangladesh and has lead to increased usage of Grameenphone Ltd.'s EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) network, said Shakil Ahmed, an engineer at Grameenphone. More than 1 million people subscribe to Grameenphone's EDGE offering with 250,000 of them regular users of the mobile Internet, he said. Grameenphone customers like Opera Mini because it lets them access the Web without owning a PC, he said. Because Opera hosts the servers that the phone software connects with to access the Internet, it can track where traffic is coming from. Recently, traffic in Africa has been growing, Odland said. Those African customers could be using Internet connections on their phones to do banking. Vodafone's recent report concluded that while using banks makes poor people less vulnerable in times of crisis, low-income people in Africa often don't bank because branches may be far from their homes and because transactions at cash machines and branches often incur fees. South Africa is an example of a place that could be ideal for mobile banking. Among people in South Africa who don't use banks, 19 percent have a cell phone and an additional 11 percent have access to a friend or family member's cell phone, the study found. The research also found that 94 percent of low-income people in South Africa who already do mobile banking say it's valuable because it's more affordable than traditional banking. Opera reports that despite not marketing Opera Mini in South Africa, 200,000 people in the country have downloaded the client. In 2005, just under 10 percent of the population of South Africa had Internet access, according to Research4Business, a research firm. Anecdotally, Opera is also seeing increased usage of Opera Mini in Nigeria. The company has been receiving e-mails from Nigerian users with questions on using the browser and other comments. One enterprising Nigerian, who e-mailed Opera with his story, found that people were asking him for help downloading and starting to use Opera Mini, said Rolf Assev, chief commercial officer for Opera. The Nigerian entrepreneur put an advertisement in the newspaper and now charges a fee for instruction on how to use the Internet via Opera Mini on cell phones. "He said, 'this is beautiful. People don't have computers but a lot of people have phones,'" Assev said.
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Vodafone is to kick-start a global push into 3G with an array of mobile phones that is likely to outstrip the range of handsets being sold by many of its rivals.
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Vodafone sees its customer base rise more than expected in the last quarter of 2006, thanks to emerging markets.
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Indian labs churn out technologies to help users in developing countries keep up with the information age even if they can't afford a computer, don't live near a phone or speak a language that can't be typed on a standard keyboard. By Manu Joseph.
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From banking to education and even  organized crime, mobile phones are revolutionizing the lives of  ordinary Africans as foreign phone companies scramble for a  share of the world's fastest growing market.
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Fragmented industry still needs a consistent framework for mobile advertising.
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Mobile phones are expected to generate greater revenue this year than traditional land lines with the nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America driving growth, a U.N. agency said Thursday.
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Cell phones may be the next battleground for companies offering internet phone services that don't depend on your desktop and router. By Randy Dotinga.
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A combined PC, telephone and television is being used in aid projects in India.
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IDC study of mobile phone habits from major world markets finds, among other things, that applications drive competition.
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Largely because of the mobile phone boom in developing countries, telephone service has quadrupled in the past decade to 4 billion lines worldwide, according to a report Tuesday from the U.N. telecommunications agency.
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The global mobile phone market is set to  grow to 2 billion subscribers by the end of 2005, fueled by  strong demand from developing economies in Asia and Latin  America, Deloitte & Touche said on Tuesday.
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The wide variety of operating systems on mobile phones is hindering the growth of cool mobile Internet applications, according to Arun Sarin, CEO of network operator Vodafone.The success of a mobile Internet application can be influenced by how easy it is to develop for a particular software platform, and how attractive the resulting application is to use.&quot;The first imperative for us is world-class user experience,&quot; Sarin said in the opening keynote session of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday.&quot;The easier the interface, the more you use it and the more you get onto the Internet.&quot;Mobile phone operating systems are key to that experience, he said, but there are too many of them: as many as 30 or 40, Sarin estimated.&quot;We have to reduce that number. There&#39;s no way that developers of cool applications can develop for that many operating systems. If we had three, four, five, that would be better,&quot; he said.&quot;Note, I didn&#39;t say one!&quot; he said, with a nod to the market for PC operating systems. &quot;We&#39;ve seen that movie before.&quot;One reason for the proliferation of mobile phone operating systems is that, historically, handset suppliers offered their own proprietary code to make the best use of their phones&#39; limited processing and memory resources. Developing applications for such closed systems is difficult.Today&#39;s high-end phones, though, have as much computing power as low-end PCs, spawning a new market for operating systems such as Symbian OS or Windows Mobile that run on phones from multiple manufacturers.That ought to reduce the number of software platforms in the market, but more are still arriving, including several based on the open source operating system Linux.Vodafone distributes and supports phones with many different operating systems, but not the one that for Sarin proved the importance of the operating system: Apple&#39;s iPhone.&quot;Apple has raised the bar with the iPhone, and we all now know how important user interfaces are,&quot; he said. &quot;We as an industry will have to raise our game to provide the kind of user interface that our customers are now becoming accustomed to.&quot;Apple changed the market with slick software and a closed design tied to its own hardware, initially making it difficult for developers to add applications. The company plans to open things up a little with the release of a software development kit (SDK) later this month.Another new arrival in the mobile phone operating system market is Google, which hopes to change the market with a different approach: making it easy to build and use compelling mobile Web applications.Google began by releasing the software development kit for&#160;Android, an application framework built on a Linux base, and founded an industry group, Open Hardware Alliance, to encourage its use. Several chip makers are&#160;demonstrating prototype phones running Android&#160;in Barcelona this week, and Google hopes that manufacturers will release handsets based on the software later this year.Naturally, Google hopes to profit from this move by driving greater use of its services on the Web. But other companies will benefit too, if their sites are usable by more phone owners.For Sarin, that&#39;s good news too: more Internet use means more revenue-generating data traffic on his network.
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While young people embrace the Web with real or virtual friends and their cell phone is never far away, relatively few like technology and those that do tend to be in Brazil, India and China, according to a survey.
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InfoWorld - The wide variety of operating systems on mobile phones is hindering the growth of cool mobile Internet applications, according to Arun Sarin, CEO of network operator Vodafone.
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From banking to education and even  organized crime, mobile phones are revolutionizing the lives of  ordinary Africans as foreign phone companies scramble for a  share of the world&#39;s fastest growing market.
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Rapid growth of the country's cell phone market has companies dreaming of a speed-dial to success. But the risks are high.