ICTworks by Inveneo

Back in May Microsoft launched a new mobile device that struck somewhere in between a feature phone and a Smartphone. Yesterday, barely a month after the Kin launch, Microsoft pulled the plug on Kin saying it was integrating it's Kin and Windows Mobile development teams.

Microsoft said Wednesday it has stopped work on the Kin to focus "exclusively" on Windows Phone 7, the company's new smartphone operating system that's scheduled to ship later this year. The Kin was built and promoted to attract a younger, social networking-oriented audience.

The official press release from Microsoft states:

"We have made the decision to focus exclusively on Windows Phone 7 and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned. Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones."

Apparently Verizon, the provider for Kin in it's short lived life had already cut the price of the phone by 50% on both models, making it fairly affordable for your typical mobile phone user in Africa and other developing nations where mobile phone use has sky rocketed over the years:

The Kin One, the lower-end model, dropped from $50 to $30, while the Kin Two, went from $100 to $50.

Now, this is just interesting (not referring to Microsoft's pulling out a product from the market a few weeks after launch) - but even more interestingly is the fact that Ken Banks, the guy who started off the award winning FrontlineSMS, a while ago wrote a blog titled "The “emerging market” handset trap" about the need for low priced, higher featured phones than the typical Nokia 1100-type phones that are typical of developing markets. Ken's rationale follows:

Low-cost phones have certainly achieved one thing – low cost – and in price terms they’ve done exactly what they said on the tin.

Over the past five years or so, prices have indeed steadily dropped, as we can see if we pick an early "emerging market handset" winner from 2005 (the Motorola C113), a ZTE phone widely available in East Africa in 2008, and today’s Vodafone 150.

The prices may have changed, but functionality has largely stagnated. You couldn’t browse the web on the Motorola in 2005, nor the ZTE in 2008, and today you’d have the same problem on the Vodafone 150. You can’t download applications onto any of them, either. They all have monochrome screens and look pretty-much-the-same despite having a five year gap between them. Very little has changed other than price, it would seem. Voice and SMS remain king at the bottom of the pyramid, or so it would seem.

The real trick is to reduce the price of these phones whilst at the same time increasing (or at very least maintaining) functionality, a combination which no manufacturer has yet managed to crack. Nokia’s announcement last week of their cheapest 3G-enabled phone for the Indian market shows prices are shifting downward for data enabled phones, but at $90 it’s still some way off what most would consider affordable for the remaining 1.5 billion people in the world without a phone.

From today’s announcement, a sub-$40 smart phone – which really would change the game – looks to be as far off as ever.

Well... here's Microsoft with a fairly highly featured phone at just the right price (below $40 and just above $40)...

Straddling the fence somewhere between a dedicated smartphone and high-spec feature phone..

And they are pulling the plug on a potentially game changing device in developing markets! This may be speculative... but why not offer it to developing regions such as Africa, applying to it the same business models and service models such as no contracts - buy the phone up front, prepay models, opened up to whichever mobile service provider the consumer prefers....???

This was first published as Microsoft Discontinues Kin Phone - Why Not Offer it to Developing Countries?

Do you have an idea on how to change lives with mobile phones? Is it also a good business opportunity? And can it work with Nokia phones? Then submit it to Nokia's Growth Economy Venture Challenge

Nokia is offering a $1 million (USD) venture capital investment (not a gift or grant) and support from Nokia to help turn the idea into reality. Your idea can be hardware, software, applications or a new service. As Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says:

"We've seen what the tech community can do when it focuses on problems that are also opportunities. We want to channel that energy toward improving lives in the deveoping world."

Just make sure that your submission has a clear mission statement and viable business model on how it will enhance the lives of people living on less than $5 per day.

Interested? Then apply today!

When Russel Southwood of Balancing Act, interviewed Ken Njoroge, CEO of Cellulant, on mobile phone music downloads, I was expecting a general overview of the musical tastes of Kenyans. How wrong was I!

In his telling interview, Ken Njoroge revealed that music downloads via mobile phones is a $4 million dollar Internet business opportunity:

Lipuka: a mobile music money maker

Q: So how many monthly music downloads are you dealing with?

A: It fluctuates depending on marketing activity but in a typical good month we get somewhere between 300,000-400,000. A successful artist might have 200,000-300,000 downloads over 3 months.

Q: What’s the cost of downloading a track?

A: In Kenya it ranges from KS50-70 (US64-89 cents) and in Nigeria it’s about the same at around N100 a track (US66 cents).

Q: Who gets what out of that?

A: First, the Government takes 26% in taxes. After that, the operator generally takes 50-60% and we pay 10-12% to the artist in royalties. Prices across the countries we operate in are broadly similar.

Now let us do the math to see where the money is. First, 400,000 downloads at KS70 gives us 28,000,000 Kenya Shillings per month in gross revenue (or about $4 million USD annually).

Now with the calculation to the right, we get 2.5 million Kenya Shillings in net revenues each month. Not bad for an Internet business, eh?

Especially when you realize that Ken feels that he's only reached a tiny fraction of the 7 million buyers across Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana, Zambia, Botswana and Malawi where Cellulant operates.

In addition, Ken estimates that 20-30% of that total market have media capable handsets - today. As that percentage grows, so will revenue opportunities with multimedia savvy Internet consumers who see their mobile phone as a mainstream music distribution channel.

I can't wait to see what will happen when Ken & Cellulant take on the video download business at Wuse market. Movies will be a whole other business opportunity for him.... or for you!

When last did you visit a cyber cafe?

Eight years ago, my answer would have been “right now”. I would have been writing/reading this on a computer in a cyber cafe. Right now however, I am lying somewhere comfortable in my home, whilst punching the soft keys on my laptop.

A few years ago in Accra, one could count more than ten Internet cafes between Vodafone (then Ghana Telecom)’s Head Office around Kwame Nkrumah Circle and BusyInternet on Ring Road Central. There were: True Internet, WWWPlus Mega Cafe, Krofa Internet Cafe, Java Internet Cafe, and several others, whose names I do not remember at this time.

Sadly, most of them have closed shop. Whilst several reasons could be offered for the failure of these enterprises, one cannot overlook the solid impact of mobile phones and mobile internet technologies.

My facebook profile on a Nokia smartphone

Mobile Websites

A quick glance at the traffic metrics website Alexa.com reveals that the most visited websites in Ghana include: Facebook, Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Live.com, Wikipedia, MSN, GhanaWeb, BBC. Email used to be the most popular online activity in this part of the world but social networking websites seem to have taken the lead in recent times. News websites come third. Thus, the composition of the ten most popular websites is not much of a surprise.

What is more interesting is that ALL the most popular websites have mobile versions of their services. Typing facebook.com into a mobile web browser for example, automatically redirects one to a mobile version of the popular social networking website. The mobile websites are stripped-down versions but offer a lot of functionality, in a layout small enough to fit into tiny mobile phone screens. It is thus now common place to find people get busy with chatting, twittering, reading the news & more, from their mobile phones.

Smartphones

Smartphones are raising the stakes and pushing more possibilities into our hands, literally. They now have enough processing power to stream high-definition video and enough memory to download and store databases of music, photos and videos from the Internet. Some smartphones come with full QWERTY keyboards and thus making typing a pleasure. Emailing, blogging, chatting can now be done virtually anywhere.

Lower entry costs

Personal Computers are no longer the exclusive preserve of the rich and well-educated. 10 years ago, the pricing of an average laptop was about $2,000. Not any more. New, more powerful, full-featured laptops are available today for as low as $700. Their smaller cousins (netbooks) even come at lower prices; mwave.com currently prices an ASUS EPC900B-BLU01X Eee netbook PC at only $209.99

Used and probably refurbished PCs even drag the entry costs lower, for obvious reasons.

USB Modems

Those little devices have further democratised internet connectivity. Where mobile phones and smartphones are not enough, one could easily buy a USB Modem for as low as 60 Ghana Cedis (about $42) and connect it to a desktop, laptop or netbook for a full Internet experience. MTN Ghana is currently offering their USB modem at that price. Gone are the days when one needed to obtain a hard-to-comeby fixed phone line from the telecom monopoly or a fixed wireless antenna pointed at the Internet Service Provider’s radio mast, or a VSAT satellite dish + modem. None of these came cheap.

The more spectacular thing is that 3.5G USB modems offer real broadband speeds today.

Back to those cyber cafes. The rapid closure of cyber cafes is not limited to Ghana. 234Next.com, a leading Nigerian news source, today published a report titled: Cyber cafes are vanishing:

"In those days, around 2000 and 2001, I used to go to cyber cafe, pay money to check my yahoo email. You know the feeling that time was powerful. I was the only one who could browse amongst my friends then. We will go to a cyber cafe and crowd around one system, five of us, and then the systems were always very slow, so if we hear that one cyber cafe somewhere was fast we will go there," said Solomon Edema, a computer engineer. "Now, all of us browse with our phones. I also used my laptop. I have not gone to a cyber cafe for over a year now," Mr. Edema, adds.

Nowadays, the proliferation of computers and 3G mobile phones, including the famous China phones, has resulted in cheaper prices. As a result more people can afford internet-enabled phones. Similarly, the competition in the telecom industry has also led the telecom firms out-doing one another in offering cheap modems and internet access. Traders at Computer Village, Ikeja, now offer software that enable free internet access on laptops and mobile phones.

It is clear that mobile phones, are pushing cyber cafes out, the same way public phone booths and “communication centres” have become endangered species. What waits to be seen is how long the few cyber cafes that remain would last. Would they close shop or evolve their business model? Time would tell.

I want to believe one of the things that captured your attention is the "bribe" in the title of this article. You have heard about the Halliburton scandal and many other high-level bribery scandals in the country including the recent NITEL sales. Truly it’s possible that the Nigerian government bribed opera, let’s look at how…

Nigerian mobile phone market

In year 2001, the Nigerian government opened the mobile market for private investment, taking the sole business off state-owned NITEL. Econet got the license, MTN followed suite and Glo also did get license and started business.

The business was so lucrative that MTN made profit it normally makes in 3 years in South Africa in just 1 year of business in Nigeria. The Nigerian telecom market is a multibillion dollars industry and is amongst the world faster growing and largest telecom market, so why wont there be bribery? Well consider the following too...

Mobile telecom growth in the country has been massively growing at a whopping rate from 266,461 in 2001 lines to 74,511,614 in January 2010. This is a massive growth compare to what the mobile lines in the country used to be in the early 2000s. Teledensity currently stands at 54%, this shows that there is room for growth as millions are yet to own a phone.

Mobile Internet in Nigeria

Looking at the cost of owning a PC and subscribing to the internet in Nigeria, it is a luxury most people cannot afford. Going mobile, with less than $50 you can get an internet enabled phone, get connect edand eureka! You are live on the internet.

The telecoms service providers have various internet plans which you can either browse through your phone or connect to your PC;

The Mobile Internet Market

I laid my hand on the Opera state of the mobile web for December 2009, the results was a good pointer to the mobile browsing pattern of Nigerians.

The above image shows the top sites and model of phones used by Nigerians. In the top button points; 524.5% in page view is phenomenon, also number of users browsing with Opera mini more than triple (315.3%) compared to 2008.

Most users want to keep up with their friends, check their email, read news and search for information. Sport and free SMS are not left out also (goal.com and mjoy.com)

Facebook is the biggest beneficiary of the opera mini craze on Nigerian mobile internet sphere.

Looking from the business side of it, no Nigerian website among the most visited sites, creating a massive market for a site that can provide interesting local content for the emerging market.

But why bribe Opera?

Really if you say Opera was bribed, you may not be far from the truth depending on the side of the coin you are looking at. The government opened the mobile market, the flood came in and the surge never stopped; if that is the incentive for the opera usage fine!

One thing that may not be clear to people outside Nigeria is the growing trends of free browsing on mobile phone across most networks. There is a loophole in the configuration security provided by the telecom operators. The method is facilitated by adjusting the settings in the opera mini and there you go… no billing just browse on!

The operators in most cases disabled opera mini use on their network, while people some have argued against this measure, urging the operators to tighten their security as opera mini provides one of the best user experience on mobile; giving fast downloads with its compression technology and reducing cost of browsing on mobile phone.

Going forward...

The growing trends show a massive market in the mobile internet market in Nigeria. I believe if the prices are lower a bit it could spur more usage and ultimately make more money for the Telco’s.

On the other hand, mobile is the future and definitely will be where internet will get to most Africans (because of exorbitant cost of PC acquisition and subscription). The current unified rate of 15kobo/1 KB among the operators is still very high and low emphasizes is still be paid to enlighten people about data plans they can take advantage of instead of 15k/KB. The operators apparently are still enjoying the bumper of voice revenue!

So to our question above, did Nigerian Government bribe Opera? If providing open market for competition to thrive means bribe, then the answer is yes but if market forces and people’s desire to consume online content is the drive for Opera adoption then the answer is no!