techdigest

Mobile money (or simply m-Money as it is commonly referred to) is getting lot of attention lately. Businessline today published an article on mobile money. As the article mentioned, Japan already has three providers successfully executing this concept.

There are two different ideas that people are talking about:

• Link the phone with some credit card account and then use double authentication to pay money to the vendor. The actual money gets deducted through your credit card/bank account. The simplest form of this is provided by Citibank India for mobile recharge. You have to register your cell phone on the Citibank website. It generates some random key and sends it to your cell phone. You enter that key on the cell phone and it generates one PIN. Now you can send SMS “RC CITI <PIN> <AMOUNT>” to Citibank and voila, your phone is recharged! Other examples: NGPay , Paymate is trying mobile money and there is one more company that I can not recall right now. Will update it later.
• This is mostly a Japanese concept. Have RFID in the phone. You go to an ATM, place the phone on some contact pad, access your bank account and transfer money from your bank account to your phone. Now you just touch the phone to the vendor’s contact pad and the money is transferred. Japan is using this to buy subway tickets and some grocery shopping kinda activities. It will certainly have the problems if the phone gets lost. But similar problems are with credit card and it can be mitigated the same way.

All of these approaches sound great but will have lot of complexity and integration needed. For micro transactions (upto say Rs. 500), there should be a simpler system. The system that I can actually use to pay the auto driver, to the samosa shop and perhaps to a beggar at the temple Lots of Indians use prepaid mobile accounts. There is a system in place where I can recharge someone else’s phone from my account. Why can’t this simple system be extended for mobile money for smaller transactions? To buy my metro ticket, to buy milk etc ? There can certainly be some basic authentication built into it as well like sending the PIN with the SMS (similar to Citibank mobile recharge) to authenticate the transaction. The mobile providers need to make minimal changes and it will really help everyone. If micro-finance can be such a revolution and success, this simple model will probably help everyone in micro transactions.

Update: Very similar idea is being tried in China: Mobile Money in Rural China

I will just add that, for such a system, since customer sends SMS with the payee number, amount and PIN, there needs to be one more app on the cell phone that will delete the PIN from the “sent message”. This will ensure that PIN is not exposed to the user who steals the cellphone. There should also be one more dynamic-one-time-use PIN to enhance security. It can be the same as HSBC provides for online transactions. This system will work very well in India!

A new website has come out of stealth mode: mginger.com. It offers a feature that many have been thinking about.. get paid for the advertisements on your cellphone. The website mentions the following points -

• Earn money for reading ads on your mobile
• Get SMS ads of only those products that you want to buy
• Get ads at your convenience
• Save money through discount coupons and offers
• Earn much more money by inviting family and friends

I would like to see how long this model goes and how does and how it translates into revenues for the advertisers. I am sure that very soon, the users will figure out the categories to make much more money and add those advertisement categories even if they do not want to buy those items! Perhaps one more wrong solution to fix the wrong problem?

Update:
When you sign-up, the email verification mail goes to the spam folder if you are using gmail. No no.. I have not signed up.. this is just my gut feeling

Update 2: Thanks to Himanshu for bringing my attention to mGinger terms. Here are the important ones -

• You MUST provide correct/true information about your profile. mGinger has the right to verify the information you provide. If this information changes you must immediately update your profile by logging in to mGinger.com
• You MUST read the advertisements sent to you.

Now you might think, how would they make sure that I do “read” every advertisement? Here comes the biggie -

• mGinger will send verification messages called “Activity Verification SMS” (referred to as AVS in this document) from time to time to check if you are reading the advertisements sent to you. You MUST respond to these AVSs with the appropriate message content which is specified in the verification message. If you don’t, mGinger reserves the right to downgrade your membership by lowering your payouts and eventually terminate your membership.

This is total crap to me. To make 20 paisa, I not only need to get some bugging SMS, I need to reply messages with products/services that I have no interest in buying! In my humble opinion, for any advertisement model to succeed, it needs to be unobtrusive to the end user. This model will be a failure for the advertisers who will not be able to realize their investment in this scheme. If it succeeds, I will learn few things about people that I dont know. Till then, I will hold on to my opinion of “Good intent, bad implementation” for mGinger!

After making waves in USA, I always thought a service like Twitter will be hugely popular in India. To the uninitiated, twitter is a service where you can register and create your channel. Now you can send a messge from your cell phone or IM or web to that channel. Your friends can subscribe to the channel and will get the updates from you.

India already has a vast and growing population of mobile users. SMS are a way of life for all mobile users. And the market is ripe for a service like twitter. While I was thinking about such a service in India, I read few blogs around the same..
On radioblogs

There seems to be a company ActivMobs (No idea why they have a URL “inactiv.com”), that is doing some similar stuff in Karnataka! I will be interested to know who sucks up the cost of outgoing SMS!

Here is an article on economic times. Neeraj roy has an interesting comment in the article :

But managing director and CEO, Neeraj Roy says that such rich VAS’s would never survive in the current eco-system where telcos have walled the gardens, where content providers like him, play. Once these walls have been pulled down, only then he says can such VASs proliferate.

Update: Some one is trying to clone Twitter for Japan: http://www.getacoder.com/projects/clone_social_network_site_48876.html

Kinan from Tectactic.com has created an interesting mash-up/beta website to write resumes. Thingsicando.com comes with a different perspective to introduce yourself. It enables the user to express himself in a better way. More liberty and more power to communicate skills and strengths. You add a skill or “thing” as per the site’s terminology and you can also specify tags with it. Other users can rate you on those specified “things”. You can search users with required “things” or with the tags. It is definitely unique and interesting idea. Perhaps the user experience needs to be changed a bit. A major overhauling of the website is on the anvil. I will definitely give it a shot!

Ruby on Rails is the biggest thing since sliced bread! Ok ok, I am dramatically exaggerating it. Nevertheless, it is really GREAT! I myself have worked on java, struts, spring, turbine and many more frameworks but none can match the prowess, simplicity and speed of rails! I sometimes still lean towards perl when it comes to scripting languages but the combination of ruby and rails is just amazing.

There are lot of plugins and some great logical extensions to ruby on rails. Hobo is the new candidate. From hobocentral -

Hobo is an Open Source extension to Ruby on Rails that helps you build full-blown web applications incredibly quickly and easily. Available as a Gem or Rails plugin, Hobo provides a simple, clean and elegant development framework, which allows for rapid prototyping or production of the most sophisticated web applications.

Main Features:

• Rapid implementation of dynamic Ajax interfaces in your application with no extra programming.
• Switchable themes. Customise and tweak your application structure and layout to meet any design goals.
• Powerful mark-up language, DRYML, combines rapid development with ultimate design flexibility. The end of the cookie cutter blues!

I havent tried it but I am all excited to give it a shot! I will post my feedback after initial trials.

With the success of youtube, myspace, facebook, del.icio.us, flickr and many more; every one wants to replicate these websites and make money! So many clones of myspace and facebook are being created, same is true for flickr, youtube and other. But there are some web 2.0 websites that are really innovating and introducing very unique and differentiated offerings. This post is dedicated to such companies.

• Odesk.com: Odesk has introduced an amazing platforms for freelancers and vendors to tap internet potential for mutually beneficial transactions. It is trying to position itself as a platform for on-demand global workforce. The idea is very itneresting. Its a marketplace for remote work.
• Zopa.com
  I really give it to zopa. I am not sure if they are making money or not, but it is a unique idea and perhaps disruptive too! They have created a platform where individuals can lend-borrow money with better deals than banks.

I am sure there are many more! I know few unique music creation websites but I am not covering them here. Post your comments if you know more of such unique interesting web2.0 companies.

PC World magazine has ranked the major technological inventions of the past few decades that have changed the way we live and work. Which is your favorite?

1. Netscape Navigator (1994)
2. Apple II (1977)
3. TiVo HDR110 (1999)
4. Napster (1999)
5. Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS (1983)
6. Apple iPod (2001)
7. Hayes Smartmodem (1981)
8. Motorola StarTAC (1996)
9. WordPerfect 5.1 (1989)
10. Tetris (1985)

Half of the list consists of products that have virtually died: Netscape, Napster, Lotus, WordPerfect, Motorola StarTAC. Microsoft killed Lotus, Netscape and WordPerfect. I do not feel sorry for them however. It is creative destruction. What it probably conveys is that that just the innovation is not enough. It needs to be constantly improved or it will make way for better products to take over. Hotmail, Motorola StarTAC, Friendster are all examples where they introduced a game changing product but eventually died because of lack of innovation or constant drive for improvement. There is no such thing as “first mover advantage” in technology unless you are constantly innovating and exceeding customer and market expectations!

List of top 10 web 2.0 companies has been published. I was very happy to see a non-profit company wikipedia to make the top 10 list. Will there be more individuals and groups who would try to replicate the success of wikipedia? Here is the list:

1. MySpace

2. YouTube

3. Facebook

4. Wikipedia

5. Bebo

6. Digg

7. Flickr

8. Netvibes

9. Del.icio.us

10. Meebo

This is the tool that I always wanted to build. In fact, just a month back, I started to work on it! And here comes Tabber.org. Depends on how you look at it, It stole my idea or validated my idea Whatever it may be, it was a pressing need. I think it really connects the user in a different dimension. It is not all what I wanted it to be but it is very close.

The digg for tabber describes it as -

With Tabber you can import your contacts from a number of sources (gmail, digg, myspace, yahoo, aim etc) and tie them to additional social sites such as blogs, del.icio.us and photo galleries. You can then view their recent activity on these sites in aggregate or individually.

It has a crisp UI, well designed interfaces. What I find most appealing is the functionality. My friends can be updated with all my online activities and information! Pretty neat huh..

Lots of companies, VCs and investors are betting big on mobile phone web users. With the increasing smart phones and iPhones, the bet is getting bigger and bigger. I have my own apprehensions around it. How many people really surf web over their blackberries, N73s or jazzy samsung smart phones? I do not know many who do that. I never do it. The reasons are many. Few of them are:

Small Screen: The screen is way too small and the web content is not designed with this screen in mind. All the CSS or mobile pages look like a patch up. Unless the whole content is designed keeping in mind the mobile users, it is never going to be a good user experience.
Speed: With all the new jargons and buzzwords(CDMA, 3G, 4G, EDGE, EVDO), the speed on mobile devices is still pathetic. Try to surf few content heavy websites and you will know what I am talking about.
Input Components: We do not only read news on internet, we check stock quotes, write email, post comments, search vendors, see maps, process information and all of this is not a very pleasant experience. QWERT keyboards on smart phones did help to a certain extent but the touch technology needs to improve as well. iPhone with its multi-touch technology might improve things a bit.
Fully functional websites: Content providers expose rather restricted features and capabilities on mobile websites. Content creators need to invest more time innovating on how to make a website fully functional for mobile users.

Unless all of these things are addressed in the mobile devices, the convergence is going to be a distant dream. With the mobile phone users growing 4-5 times faster than PC users, it becomes even more important to address all these concerns.