Indian Mobile Operators are going to spend over $20B for 3G Licenses – What can they do to recover these license fees?

Last week I went to India and the big news was India’s budget deficit is going to be reduced thanks to 3G auctions fetching in excess of Rs 670B with total likely to exceed Rs 1,000B (~ $20B) after WiMax auctions. In a country with an approximate ARPU (average revenue per user) of $4/month and 420M subscribers, how are operators going to pay for it.

Some Misconceptions on 3G

In reading various articles in Indian magazines, I was surprised at the misunderstanding amongst local pundits and the solutions proposed. The proposed solutions varied from offering 3G video conferencing, TV services (none of the video services make sense unless LTE type bandwidths are available and even then there is no proof of video conferencing making money for service providers anywhere in the world), location services (one doesn’t need 3G to have location services) and for operators to find a killer service. (operators are not known to find killer services)

Obvious Path though not Right

The obvious temptation for mobile operators will be to offer new data services and like the current VAS (value added services), keep a very large percentage of service revenue for themselves. I am afraid this will not work. Look at the examples of US and other western countries where data services  took off only after Apple made it easy for software developers to come up with new applications and keep 70% of the revenue generated.

Some Ideas

This is what I think Indian Operators should do to recover their investments and increase profitability. What do you think?

• Don’t deploy yesterday’s technology and instead take a leap to LTE technologies so that it can actually become a contender to replace DSL for broadband
• Become the best pipe and open the platform for hardware and software developers to innovate on
• Imagine new low cost smart phones, Netbooks, iPads, eReaders, laptops and other new devices all with built-in 3G technologies requiring monthly services
• Imagine new applications customized for Indian markets all requiring data connections where a developer has an incentive to innovate – a large market, good % revenue share with operators
• Imagine every student (India has lots of them and spends a lot on education) carrying a 3G enabled device all the time consuming data services everywhere

Conclusion

Just as mobile phone brought the first phone into majority of Indian homes, 3G has the potential to bring mobile broadband and hence Internet into every home provided mobile operators are not short sighted and provide the best data pipe and leave others to innovate to increase value of their data pipes and hence revenue and profitability.

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Finally some good news from MWC 2009 — Can we now build $100M Mobile VAS companies?

One of the significant news from MWC 2009 (mobile world congress) was the culmination of rumors with official announcements of app stores. Now we have a long list of Application Stores including:

• Apple is the innovator and king of this and called it Apple App Store
• Google called its app store as Android App Market
• Nokia extended its service brand Ovi to Ovi application store
• Microsoft may call its service SkyMarket and its own service as My Mobile for Windows Mobile phones
• RIMM called it Blackberry Application Store Front
• Samsung for its smartphones created Samsung App Store

Why is this significant for the Mobile VAS (mobile value added services) market?

Until now, Mobile markets have suffered from 3Ds:

• Distribution
• Discovery
• Dollars or whatever Currency you prefer

Theses announcements solve two of the problems -  that of Distribution and Dollars.

With smartphone sales estimated at over 60M units in 2008, it is clear that software developers only working on smartphone now have access to a large market. Should VAS developers even bother with lower-end phones? We will tackle this in a later blog.

How did we reach the 60M units number – based on many articles and estimates with the best one from Eric Zeman at Information Week.  Here is the breakdown which may cause many arguments and surprise many:

• Apple shipped 14M in 2008
• Microsoft shipped 20M in 2008 – yes more than Apple
• Nokia shipped 18M in 2008 with N and E-Series counted as smartphone
• RIMM shipped close to 14M in 2008 of Blackberry Curve and up

With an average price of $20 per application/application pack for the life of smartphone, there is room for many $100M software companies in the mobile VAS space with focus only on smartphone. No need to have large expensive sales forces calling on many mobile operators worldwide as distribution is now possible from the app stores which in most cases give 70% of the revenue to software developers rather than 20-50% which operators are giving to the software developers. So what does this mean for Mobile Operators – relegation to being a dumb pipe or? Of course, it is different for different geographies – we will tackle that in a later blog.

Now comes the third problem something that has plagued most application stores including that of facebook, myspace and hi5. Yes that is the problem of discovery and this is where virality, usefulness and marketing becomes ever more important. We will tackle this in the next blog.

R. Paul Singh

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Lessons from a Mobile User Generate Content (UGC) Portal

I usually don’t write about PixSense’s products and customers. Recently, however, I was questioned at great length about our experiences by many of our potential customers after they read our announcement of exceeding one million unique visits in less than a month after launch. Considering it to be a well worth milestone achieved, I decided to share it on a public forum and get comments from others on their experiences and thoughts on UGC portals.

Most of us are familiar or avid users of UGC portals. However, as of late, they seem to have become specialized in terms of media sites (Flickr, Photobucket and Snapfish, YouTube) and social networking sites (FaceBook, Friendster and MySpace). Maybe, it’s due to the fact that there are specialized devices for each; digital cameras for photographs, camcorders for videos, and PCs for maintaining contact information and uploading and viewing the media. One of our customers/partners launched a mobile UGC portal in China and wasn’t sure as to what areas to focus on initially. Looking at how broadband UGC sites have developed over time, it’s natural for us to speculate whether our mobile UGC portal will become a photo site, video site or a social networking site?

When you look at today’s mobile phones, a 5MP camera is becoming commonplace (At this point, I would add that I do feel empathetic for all of us in the U.S., where a 2MP camera is still the standard camera phone offered by our mobile operators) and so our logical speculation was that we would become a mobile photo destination. But wait, taking a YouTube style video is possible from most new moderately priced camera phones too! So, why wouldn’t our mobile portal be a destination for videos? Lastly, consider social networking sites: At a very basic level, it’s a combination of an address book, e-mail and the users’ media. Every mobile phone has a very potent address book. That, coupled with the users’ mobile media and text messaging capabilities indicates that social networking should dominate the mobile environment.

So, what have been the results so far? In less than four weeks, over 12,000+ media pieces were made public, and probably the same numbers were kept private. About 60% of the public media comprises of user generated videos, while the rest is comprised of photos. Interestingly, videos started out slow, but now seem to be dominating photo uploads. Like other media sites, there are lot more viewers than creators, the ratio being 100:1. Interestingly, users are viewing the content not just from their web browsers, but also from mobile devices, using WAP connections. Moreover, users are sharing media with their friends, with some sharing it from mobile to mobile, but most through their existing social networking sites.

Summing it up, here is a quick overview of some of our findings on mobile user generated content sites and how they differ from broadband user generated content sites:

Mobile camera phones are an integrated device. As they come equipped with capabilities for both video and photo capturing, mobile UGC sites will be able to host and manage both, and hence, stand out (i.e. these sites will have no difference and will host both videos AND pictures).
There is a higher percentage of content creators in the mobile UGC world than in the broadband UGC world. Why? Maybe it’s because it is easier to create, upload and publish content from a mobile device using the right software (like our partner, Paiker, has experienced).

Most people want to post their content to more than one social networking site directly from their device, which, in this case, was a mobile camera phone. Would users shift away from their existing social networking sites to start using mobile social networking sites? The statistics don’t support this; users still want to use their preferred social networking site. A mobile UGC portal, thus, needs to be able to integrate with already preferred social networking sites. Offering familiar media-posting destinations coupled with an ease of mobile media management, makes for the ultimate mobile UGC experience.

What are your experiences? Similar or Different?

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With the Arrival of 3G Networks, What More Can Mobile Operators Do?

Over the course of time, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with mobile operators who have either invested millions or are about to invest millions of dollars in the development of 3G networks. Amidst the discussions with them a question still looms in my mind: What can our 3G network subscribers do now, and where/how can we make more money from our subscribers? In the quest for the answer, I started researching, using Google.com – using keywords such as “3G applications”— and, to my dismay, found the first 100 search results disappointing. That’s why I decided to write this piece myself; hoping it will answer many of the questions that continually arise. For example: What can we do with 3G now besides selling a 3G enabled Apple iPhone?

Let’s take a closer look at the following questions:
- Is 3G everywhere?
- What is 3G anyway?
- What are the most commonly mentioned applications of 3G?
- Which 3G applications can Mobile Operators deploy today?

Is 3G Everywhere?

There has been a lot of talk about 3G investments in Europe and the US which inevitably resulted in a near ubiquitous 3G adoption. As I was researching for this article, I stumbled across the fact that China Unicom announced that it plans to spend $14.5B on a 3G network infrastructure (http://www.theregister.co.uk/). According to articles by my friend, Om Malik, on Gigaom.com, India appears to be prepping for 3G wireless broadband, with the government all set to start selling 3G licenses. In Asia, SingTel lead the way as the first to deploy 3G in 2005. According to Cellular-news.com , the CDMA Development Group (CDG) announced that, as of Q1 2008, Indonesia had more than 16.3 million CDMA2000/3G subscribers – putting them in the lead in Southeast Asia for 3G CDMA subscriber growth. So, the bottom line is that 3G is a solid presence in most of the developed world and will be available in all emerging countries within the next couple of years.

What is 3G anyway?

According to Wikipedia, 3G is the third generation of mobile phone standards and technology, superseding 2G, and preceding 4G. 3G is based on the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) family of standards, under the International Mobile Telecommunications program, IMT-2000. It includes HSPA data transmission capabilities which can deliver speeds of up to 14.4Mbit/s on the downlink and 5.8Mbit/s on the uplink. It is based on CDMA technology, which is dominated by Qualcomm.

Let me now try a simpler way to explain 3G. Remember those days when we used dial-up modems to access the Internet (or maybe you are too young to remember). Believe it or not, many people in the world still rely on dial-up connections to reach the Internet or use their 2/2.5G mobile data connections. 2G is to dial-up connections what 3G is to broadband Internet, with the mobility added to the mix. In the simplest terms, 3G means faster internet access from anywhere, anytime and anyplace. Therefore the first obvious place for 3G to compete is with Wi-Fi on various laptops – nothing new here but just a different technology competing for the corporate dollars for wide area network (WAN) access on the move.

What are the most commonly mentioned applications of 3G?

For the purpose of this article, I want to focus on 3G applications built for mobile phones only – and not standard computer applications. In researching through many sites including www.3g.co.uk/, http://www.3gnewsroom.com/ , http://www.umtsworld.com/ , here is a list of the most common application categories for 3G applications:

- Mobile Internet access
- Digital TV Broadcasting
- Mobile Commerce
- Location Based Services
- Interactive Gaming
- User Generated Content (UGC) Management

Certainly, mobile Internet access becomes a reality with higher speeds just like many applications came to light with the broadband access on the PCs. Therefore it was no surprise that the 3G iPhone dominated any and all searches of 3G applications on the web since its web experience far superseded that of any other phone. The next three applications are neither a direct result nor an obvious outcome of the 3G infrastructure and so they can’t be readily deployed without other major investments in the infrastructure.

Which 3G applications can mobile operators deploy today?

There is a lot that has been written about mobile Internet access and interactive gaming. So, instead, I will focus on UGC management applications – another application type that can be deployed today and doesn’t seem to get enough attention from the media (though many analysts including Juniper Research have done some excellent research on the potential of this market). Many of you are wondering what this UGC market is – and as soon as I start naming the businesses that fall under this category, every one of you will agree that you are an avid consumer of this market and contribute significantly in terms of content, advertisement eyeballs, and other various forms of purchase. Yes, I’m talking about the first wave of the UGC marketplace in the form of media sites including Flickr, PhotoBucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly and YouTube. Then the wave of social networking sites came crashing in, including FaceBook, Friendster, Hi5 and MySpace, just to name a few.

Now that you realize the potential of the UGC market, think of the pain and complexity users experience when posting their content, with a mish-mash of USB/FireWire cables connecting a device to their PC, while ensuring a broadband connection is secured, and then having to manually input the location of their media (if needed). In contrast, let’s look at the 3G phone: a continuous broadband connection, 2+ mega-pixel photo/video camera equipped, your contacts (friends and family) always at your fingertips, AND, with many phones, even location tagging is enabled through GPS or cell tower identification. Hopefully you now see the potential – as a 3G mobile operator – a new ability to initiate, cater to, and develop existing and new mobile user-generated content communities. The categories of applications are both similar to, yet different from, what has been enabled through broadband Internet on PCs. The various applications can be thought of as catering to three functions mobile subscribers want to do with their media:

- Preservation / archiving of users’ media including contacts, pictures, videos, ringtones, SMS and music
- Sharing of users’ media both on a one-to-one basis as well as one-to-many basis giving rise to many new services including mobile greeting cards and video SMS, to name a few
- Publishing users’ media on social networking sites or public forums or creating a social networking site itself

In my next blog entry, I will address more details on some of these applications, as well as address some of the issues and challenges that plague this market, and how mobile operators can begin to deploy and monetize mobile UGC services.

R. Paul Singh
CEO, PixSense, Inc.

Note: If you have any stories/examples of the Mobile Operator experience in deploying mobile UGC applications, please email to us at marketing@pixsense.com

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