Gauravonomics Blog

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The real opportunity in the mobile services business is at the two extremes.

At the top end of the market, mobile phone are really compact, but really powerful, location-aware, always-on computing devices. This model presumes ubiquitous and unlimited data access (including wi-fi access), and a Java-enabled smart phone with GPS and a sophisticated mobile browser. Japan and South Korea have already established the proof of concept for this model and iPhone and other smart phones are creating a mainstream market for it. Most of the oomph and much of the money in the mobile services business is at this end of the market, but the number of users is still small (less than 300 million worldwide).

At the lower end of the market, mobile phones are the only communications device people have access to. The mobile phones themselves sell for as little as $20 and usage is primarily driven by voice and text messaging. This end of the mobile services business has little oomph but there is some serious money to be made here, because of the sheer size of the user base (almost 3.5 billion worldwide).

Later in the evening, I’ll be going for a book reading session of ‘Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics’ by Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox at Busboys and Poets.

Surprisingly, neither the Netroots Rising website, nor the book’s Amazon page offers a blurb! So, here’s the blurb from the Busboys and Poets events listings –

The 2006 elections will be remembered as the year when the center of power in American politics shifted from traditional “top-down” central broadcasters to new “bottom-up” decentralized activists in the blogosphere and netroots. The authors give firsthand accounts of the burgeoning power of the netroots to determine the outcome of political contests, most notably as when the national balance of power was tipped by Jim Webb’s “rag-tag army” of bloggers and netroots activists who provoked and exposed the gaffe that proved fatal to George Allen’s senatorial bid.

It seems to me that the prominent use of social media tools in election campaigns has introduced social media to a set of Americans who wouldn’t have been interested in it otherwise. As a result, there’s suddenly a lot of interest in the use of social media to engage (young) citizens in civic issues. Books like Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age and ‘Netroots Rising’ are an indicator of this interest.

According to the recent Mobile Media Marketplace report from the Nielson Company (via Ashish Sinha), gaming and entertainment are the most popular categories amongst mobile internet users in BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) whereas email, weather, news, and search are the top categories for both American and European mobile Internet users.

Jeff Herrmann, vice president of mobile media at Nielsen, suggests that –

In the U.S. and Europe, broad access to media and entertainment has been available for decades through a large fixed distribution infrastructure, and more recently in specialized devices like iPods, to meet consumer’s entertainment needs. Users in the growing Brazil, Russia, India, and China markets haven’t had the benefit of broad-based content distribution thereby limiting their exposure, and are filling the service gap by embracing mobile’s transition into a personal entertainment platform.

Mobile internet penetration in BRIC countries continues to lag US/ EU (10% to 16%). Still, Russia at 11.2% and China at 6.8% are far ahead of Brazil at 2.6% and India at 1.8%.

It’s interesting to note that India is the only country where neither search or news figure in the top 5 usages of mobile web. It’s equally interesting to note that China is the only country where e-mail doesn’t figure in the top five mobile web usage list.