EXICON

Mobile will tranform our business

If you have any doubts take 5 minutes to watch this Morgan Stanley video

Some Facebook Numbers….

I just read an interesting interview with Vice President of Engineering at Facebook Mike Schroepfer on Venturebeat and with Sheryl Sandberg, COO on Techcrunch

- 300M active users a month
Pretty large population….

- People spend 8 billion minutes online on Facebook every day.
Hence Facebook next to Youtube/Google being the top 2 destinations on the Internet

- There are 2 billion photos uploaded each month and 20 billion total.
Consumers want to share Images and Videos to stimulate conversation and interaction

- There are 15,000 other partners accessing Facebook data through its Connect service.
Identity is proving an important element. Facebook connect is now available for mobile sites too.

- Yesterday, the company serviced over 5 billion API calls. Facebook Platform is growing at a much faster rate than the web site.
The impact of Facebook opening their API’s in 2007 is still underestimated. Twitter for that matter too. This changed the economics of the web and is the “dawn of the application economy” to quote Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga

- Facebook now has over a million developers working on its platform
The importance of building the developer ecosystem only encourages a platform, be it Twitter, Itunes, Android etc.

- 250 applications now have a least a million users each.
confirms the point above. But it’s important to provide developers transparency , tools and API’s and support with visibility and opportunities to make monetize

- Facebook’s multi-feed system that can calculate 50 million operations per second pulling data and updates from hundreds or thousands of friends and condense them into the 45 most interesting updates in between zero and 20 milliseconds.
Check out this site just to find out the infrastructure they have in place to support this….http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/20921/

- The company has 1.2 million users for every engineer

Real Time Web. It’s not hype, it’s not the next new Internet craze, it’s real, it’s here and you’re probaby using it already.

The buzzword you hear a lot in the software and internet industry is Real-time…. everything needs to be real-time, from real-time conferences to real-time servers to real-time search engines etc etc…

The real-time web is often described as the latest iteration, the new Web 2.0 or the next evolution of the internet largely due to the adoption of internet across PC’s, mobile and net books.

To get a better understanding of real time web we just need to step back and put things into perspective. New or Non users of Facebook/Twitter or other social media site commonly dismiss status updates like, “About to have a coffee” “Going to see a movie.” “Getting ready for my 3K swim”. However when someone says he’s going to see a movie in the office pantry this is not seen as trivial or a waste of time. They separate the real-time experience of conversation from the indexed, archived Internet.

And that’s exactly it. The value of the real-time web is valuable only in the moment it’s being experienced. The real-time web compliments your existing traditional internet experience. We are already using the internet in 2 different ways but the lines are “blurred”.

Twitter, Friendfeed, Posterous, Blogs, Facebook etc all provide real-time information, and there is a steady trickle of information throughout the day. It’s like you are really there in the office pantry, at the conference or in the middle of the riot. We’re already familiar with such analogies: Live video of a mid-day car chase, the evening news’ coverage, YouTube’s recent ranking of what’s hot at the moment;

http://pro.gigaom.com/members/edgubbins/profile put’s it real nice: Real-Time feeds our intrinsic need for simultaneously shared experiences, adding a feeling of connectedness to the entertainment value — a feeling that diminishes over time.

Add to this the power of mobile and the location information it offers to real-time. In a mobile world, location is often linked to the present moment. There are ever-increasing numbers of applications tapping into the API’s of mobile networks enabling the creation of useful real-time applications eg Locatrix .

Already today there are location aware mobile applications available for finding ATM’s, Mcdonalds, Pacific Coffee’s, now when adding real-time you’ll be able to know where the next nearest available taxi is, when that bus is coming around the corner etc etc.

This is creating an increased amount of volume Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. A company like Locatrix acts as the gateway and Layar provides the client application and interface. The mobile coupled with this type of interaction will increase the amount of location data about mobile user preferences and habits which in turn provides a significant source of immensely rich data for understanding consumer behaviors. Macrosense translates that data and anticipates customer needs in order to deliver accurate recommendation, personalization and discovery – better than ever before – without retaining customers’ original location data.

Real time will bring tradeoffs though…basically think gossip. The real-time web will follow trends instantaneously which can lead the way to news and information but at the same time can spread confusion and misinformation.

But it’s entertainment. Check out the most popular blogs, magazine, programs on TV…..

Read more: http://pro.gigaom.com/2009/09/the-real-time-web-isnt-the-new-internet/#ixzz0SfqxoQMs

Internet Banking 2.0 Style

3 days ago Intuit announced their acquisition of mint for USD 170M. If you haven’t used Mint yet, it’s a brilliant service supporting consumers based on spending habits and methods with alternatives on how to make that dollar stretch further. Making it easy to use was a critical element to their success http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/10/23/mint-vs-quicken-patzer-points-importance-ui

Last year we met with a number of consumer and retail banks on the shift on the internet and offered some options on how this might effect their online customer propositions. Below is an extract from those presentations.

We sort of stopped pitching this after the financial crisis broke out in full swing, but with this acquisition it sort of makes me want to bring it out again and see if we can find some takers :).

Wouldn’t it be great to get such interaction with your online bank? We manage multiple accounts and internet banking whilst brilliant in terms of service, ease of use etc, still has a long way to go. Banks have just really “overlayed” their legacy processes and systems onto the web, rather than looking at it with a fresh pair of eyes on how to adopt the processes and systems to support customer service goals, especially when it comes to servicing small and medium businesses.

Mobile Operator Network API or “extensible Application Famework

Mobile operators are constantly asking if they should charge for exposing network level API’s. In a discussion just yesterday there was a strong sentiment for “YES” if they add real value…..I had to go back and remind them of a couple of things.
Does Facebook charge for accessing their API’s? Does Twitter? Does Java on the handset? Does Apple charge to access the Accelorometer api on the hanset? NO.
And by the way what is real value add? Don’t the developers application add real value to the network? Mobile Operators primary focus should be not to be disenfranchised in the value chain. API’s at the telecom operator has the strong potential to increase ARPU’s up to 36%

Currently there are some 15M software developers in the world. Of these there are a number of opportunities for them to developer their applications
1 Embedded
2. Enterprise
3. mobile
4. web

If you then look at mobile developers only, competition for these developer is extremely fierce…. handset manufacturers (nokia, sonyericsson, motorola, huawei, samsung, apple etc) software vendors (java, android, adobe, microsoft, LIMO, etc), application stores (handango, getjar, etc) and operators (betavine, orange, sprint, at&t, etc) all looking to win the hearts and minds of developers.
Developers go where the money is and charging them is only going to turn them away.
The VC market funding developers focussed on network centric applications is pretty dry at the moment due to lengthy sales cycles and tight exit windows.

There are a number of alternative means of monetizing the network assets and the operators have a lot of strong asset. We have worked with a number of operators on revenue approaches adding value to their franchise whilst contributing to the bottom line.