Agile In Everything Web And Mobile – AgileStorm

China Mobile rolled out its version of app store Mobile Market(mmarket) on Aug. 17th, 2009 and is allowing free downloads of apps till September 1st, 2009.   Well, it hasn’t been a pleasant launch.

On the surface, Mobile Market supports a wide range of cell phones like the up-and-coming OMS(Android)-based OPhones, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motoloa, LG, Lenovo, Dopod(HTC brand in China), and Dell(note: there’s no section for Android phones on Mobile Market).  Don’t get too excited.   Most of phones don’t really support Mobile Market’s phone clients.  So a user would need to download applications to computers first, then transfer them to phones via a data cable(way to easy to get apps pirated).  Only a small set of high-end smartphones( eg: Lenovo O1, Nokia N95, N97) can support Mobile Market client.   That means even though China Mobile has 495 million of mobile subscribers, only a very tiny set of them can actually use Mobile Market now.  For example, only 2 OPhones are being sold on the market: Philips V808(3980RMB), and Dopod A6188(4500RMB).  The much-anticipated Lenovo O1 should be launched in next month.  These phones are all fairly expensive though.  China Mobile will need to subsidize the phone purchase to stimulate interests and usages in Mobile Market(eg: buy the phone for 4000RMB, get 15000RMB credit for your bill)

Enough with the hardware side.  Let’s see how Mobile Market takes a lesson from Apple’s App Store.  Here are the differences and similarities:

• has only about 1000 apps for all phone models.  about 51 apps for OPhones.  So there’s really no comparison here.
• integrated billing with China Mobile.
• allows users to try out apps for a day.  If they don’t like it, they can uninstall without paying.
• right now, developers can charge a flat fee for applications.  In the future, developers can charge by monthly fee, or by usage fee( eg: 3RMB per 100 uses ).  Users can pick whichever method they like.
• no all-you-can-eat data plan.  However, China Mobile says there’s no data charge for using Mobile Market(including browsing apps & downloading apps using the phone client) for NOW.  Because this sounds too good to be true given China Mobile’s past behaviors, lots of skeptics out there are questioning how China Mobile can sustain such a model.
• both give 70% of revenue to developers and take the rest 30% home.
• both have an approval process for apps.  Reading to the Mobile Market developer forum and looking at apps waiting to be tested and approved, many apps have been sitting idle not being approved.
• one last very important point:  Mobile Market doesn’t have anti-piracy mechanism.  Once a user gets your app out of a phone, he can distribute and let others to use freely! So all the fancy dream of making money just goes out of window completely.  China Mobile better gets its act together.  Otherwise, no one will want to develop apps for Mobile Market. So many developers get on iPhone because they can or at least seem to be able to make money.  Apple makes it fairly hard to pirate iPhone apps.

If you are a developer outside of China and dream about tapping the huge subscriber base of China Mobile,  keep dreaming because you can’t do it without a local partner.  Mobile Market requires you to have a China issued ID or passport, or have a company presence in China.

China Mobile rushed out Mobile Market because it wants to get on offense first against China Unicom who’s going to distribute Eunuch(Wi-Fi less) iPhone in China in October.  But the early result of Mobile Market launch is not good at all because it’s not really ready for prime time.  There are not enough phones supporting Mobile Market, not enough apps, no safe ways for developers to protect their apps from being pirated.  There are not enough buzz around Mobile Market.  Many users have no ideas about it.   Supposely, Chinese mobile market is the biggest hope of Android and any handset makers that want to compete with iPhone.  But too many bad signs now.  A total mess.

Want to learn more about the basis about China mobile market, check out our recent presentation.

admin Mobile Android, App Store, China, China Mobile, China Unicom, iPhone, mmarket, Mobile, Mobile Market, Nokia, OPhone

Here are the Slicehost’s advantages:

• Easy provisioning of new or existing slice(system).  Take a couple of minutes to create a new slice.  You can also resize slice’s memory easily(be warned though: the time it takes to get the resize done depends on how many people are ahead of you doing resizing and some other things).
• If you mess up the slice(eg: mess up the network setting so that you can no longer ssh in), you can use the web-based console to get in. When you really mess up your slice, you can drop into rescue mode to fix your slice image.
• You can get private IPs for your slices.  So every bit that transmits between your slices using private IPs is not counted against your bandwidth.
• All your slices’ bandwidth to the outside world is pooled together.
• Slicehost has a API that you can use other services like CloudKick to monitor your slices.
• Slicehost uses Xen-based virtualization which provides better isolation so my neighboor slices in the same physical machine can’t bring my slices down.
• Excellent documentation,  article and tutorial on getting things up and running.
• Active user community(forum, live chat).
• Quick responses on support tickets.  It usually takes less than 10 mins.  Or you can go directly to live chat to ask for an update.
• Last, the most important and useful feature that we can’t ABOSOLUTELY live without: one-click manual/scheduled backups(up to 3 backups per slice), restore a backup to any slice we own.  We have a peace of mind when we know that every slice is backed up on a daily basis.  Second:  When we do upgrades, we can rollback to a backup if the upgrade fails.  Third:  whenever we need a new slice, we can create one based on a backup.  so we don’t need to set up a new slice from scratch.  The backup feature is totally worth the extra charge.

As good as Slicehost is, here are some gotchas:

• Some people argue that Slicehost’s 64-bit systems use more memory than needed.  But I am not going to try another provider without the backup feature.
• As told by Slicehost support:  don’t do OS upgrade on your slices as it’s most likely to break, and Slicehost isn’t going to provide support the upgraded OS.  Your best route is create another slice with the latest OS you want, and load the data on it.  So when you pick a OS for your slice, you should get one with long term support(eg: for Ubuntu, pick the one with LTS).
• Slicehost doesn’t allow you to transfer IP address from one slice to another slice.

Slicehost has become a role model for every hosting provider.

admin IT Amazon Web Services, Backup, Hosting, Slicehost, Virtual Private Server, VPS

On Linkedin Answers, Tatjana Torkel asked the question “What is the Biggest challenge to implement a Business Idea?”.

My answer:

Most importantly, make sure your business idea actually solves a problem. If it doesn’t solve problems, no one is going to care about it no matter how good you think your idea is.

2nd. Good ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is everything. Find good partners. Build a good team. Stay focused.
At the end of the day, your success is all tied to the whole team, not your idea.

admin Entrepreneur Entrepreneur, Idea, Linkedin, Linkedin Answers, startup

Well, I guess the recession officially spelled the end of pure ad-supported business models (unless you already get lots of users, like myspace).

A business model like the following has been busted (especially if you want to raise VC funding):

• have a great idea
• build a nice demo, alpha version of your idea
• raise a ton of money
• get millions of users (after a couple of years)
• throw advertising around to attempt to make tons of money

However, there are tons of  business models out there.  Here are some of them:

• Freeminum – give away most of your service for free.   Charge for a few premium features.  Example: Craigslist(charge only for job posting), TaoBao(no listing/transaction fee, sellers can pay for additional services/promotion), iPhone apps, Flickr
  
• The “Woot” model with Guerrilla marketing- one kind of product  per day, limited supply.  Bag of craps. example: Woot
• “Pay what you think it’s worth” – let customers decide how much your service is worth.  Not many people/companies have been brave enough to embrace this business model.  It’s quite popular in open source software offering(you can call it “donation” as well).  Modrails currently offers Phusion Passenger Enterprise via this way.
• Open source software model: give software away for free. Charge for certification, support and service subscription
• “Pay as you go” utility model – charge customers by their usages.  They don’t need to pay when they don’t actually use your service.  Example:  Amazon Web Service
• Monthly Subscription – you charge a monthly fee for different level of services or supports.  Example: SalesForce, NetFlix
• Middle Man/Broker – You act as a middle man to facilitate a transaction between a supplier and a demand.  You take a percentage cut of a completed transaction.  Example: Google AdSenses, affiliate marketing in general
• Money printing machine – this is a dream for everyone.  eg: Google Adwords where advertisers pay for clicks/impressions/actions
• Learn from gaming industry where gamers have been willing to spend money – 29 business models for games

Other resources:

• In a battered economy, free goods and services online are more attractive than ever. So how can the suppliers make a business model out of nothing?  Wall Street Journal talks about the Economics of Giving It Away
• is the free ride for web startups is over?

Whatever business model you come up, you really need to provide values to users and work on stuff that matters.

admin Entrepreneur Advertising, Business model, Entrepreneur

Notes and thoughts from Startup-U SFO: Do It Yourself PR & Social Media for your Startup with Brian Solis, FutureWorks and CoFounder, Social Media Club on April 9th, 2009:

Brian first showed the conversation Prism, a very nice breakdown of what communities/networks/sites to engage with depending on your needs:

Traditional PR is all about getting publicity.  But now days, it’s not about publicity.  It’s about getting people to use(especially for startups.  Case in points:  even when your site gets techcrunched, you can get a spike in traffic.  But you may not get sustainable traffic or attract users to really use your site).

A couple of rules:

• become an expert on your product service and industry
• find conversations, observe, analysis
• find key influencers
• become a resource for influencers
• record and analysis

Do:

• answer questions not related to your client or company
• be proactive
• converse and comment
• Understand you are not the only story in town

How to reach non-early adopters(the world can function without Twitter or Facebook):

• understand where the community is
• Find out where they are in the conversation

Create a launch Plan

• build in a cushion, prepare for any kind of disaster
• bloggers get hammered with lots of PR pitch.  No two bloggers or journalists are created equal  Don’t just hammer them with copy-n-paste emails.  Connect with their interests in your message
• Make sure your site speaks clearly about messages, problems, solutions before launching Otherwise, people start complaining about it very early
• hold launch date

A company needs to have an incredible spokesperson. And your company blog is more powerful than you may think

Answer customer service emails and calls – FreshBook makes everyone do it to feel pain of users( I really love this approach)

My Take:  Traditional PR is dying.  Conversational marketing is on the rise.  Relate to people, understand them, be resourceful.

admin Marketing Conversational marketing, Marketing, Public relations, SVASE

When Android and iPhone came out, hundreds(if not thousands) of entrepreneurs must be thinking of of building a location-aware mobile shopping application:

• shop in store, use the phone camera to take a picture of of a product’s barcode, get back real-time pricing info
• type in the product you want, have the application search for the products close by your location, and then directly go to the store and buy

This all sounds very cool.  But where can you get real-time product pricing and inventory information?  You don’t want to mislead users to a store that doesn’t have the product in stock or has the incorrect price
Good luck in asking all the big retailers to give you real-time pricing and inventory info.  If you don’t have a significant amount of users, they don’t care (unless you won some developer contests like ShopSavvy).   But if you don’t get this kind of info, you won’t be able to attract users.   A typical chicken and egg problem.

Well, I went to the landing your first customer SVASE event and learned from Scott Dunlop from NearbyNow how he successfully solved the chicken and egg problem of attracting users and retailers back in the days(even before all the GPS-enabled phones came out).

Scott talked about how his wife loves to shop at mall and how he hated spending hours at mall.   He wanted to build an application that helps mall shoppers to quickly locate the products they want.  The way he did the user research was just plain simple but effective:  buy some pizza, give them out for free in mall during lunch time in exchange of people telling him what they want in their mall shopping experience and their pain points.

Thinking all along of how to get the real-time pricing and inventory info, one day he found the mall operator sign, he realized that retailers in mall have strong relationship with mall operators.  And there are only few mall operators in the US.

Through his well-connected friends(Scott has a good track record in building successful companies), he pitched to the mall operators to build a mall directory mobile application that a user can easily use to navigate the mall and locate products they are looking for.  Every retailer wants to be on that directory because no retailer wants only its competitors to be seen by customers.  They are also willing to provide real-time data to drive customers into their stores.  Therefore, mall operators are the catalysis to help NearbyNow acquiring retailers as customers.

Users can use NearbyNow to search for product pricing and availability within their area, reserve the products(store associates will be notified and get the products ready), and go to stores to try them out.

NearbyNow works particular well with products that users want to try out in person(clothes, shoes, jewelry) and that are very hot selling and with limited stocks(wii)

The real nice thing about NearbyNow is it bridges online and offline shopping(online->mobile->location) as it can drive and track online leads that turn to offline leads and sales.

Its business model:

• cost per customer driven to a store
• sponsored listing of products from retailers in the mall where the user is currently at

Since NearbyNow gets the real-time data which no one else has(eg: shopping.com), it’s another gold-mine that it can easily monetize(eg: build a API for accessing the info.  Tons of mobile applications would love to access).  In fact, thefind partners with NearbyNow to offer product reservation in local stores.

After reading the NearbyNow story, have you be inspired to find any catalysis to solve your chicken and egg problem?

admin Entrepreneur, Mobile Business model, Customer Acquisition, Local Shopping, Location Aware, NearbyNow, Shopping

Notes and thoughts from Startup-U SV: Landing your First Customers with CEO’s Scott Dunlap, Mike Maciag (Electric Cloud) & Dan Steere on Jan 27th, 2009:

• Customers often tell you a thing or two that you don’t know( customers are smarter than you think)
• It’s a brutal reality that people/companies are only willing to pay for must-have products
• Products that help people cut off cost, expense, operation cost and optimize on resources will excel
• Everyone should be a product manager.  Everyone should be in a customer call every month to understand customer’s pain-points and problems( this is so true, but few companies are doing it.  Many startups are very engineering-driven that there is a big disconnect between engineers and customers)
• Scott from NearbyNow shared how he solved the problems of getting the first retail customers on board with his location-aware shopping system( his lesson deserves a separate blog post from me).

Enterprise Sale

• For enterprise products, don’t give free pilot(or trial).   You force customers to consider pricing in the conversation.   It will also force higher-level management people to look at the product when it involves money transaction
• If you do give out free trial(100% discount), don’t tell any one
• Publicize the ROI if it’s met.  Case study is important
• Always ask people how it’s going(eg: proper account management, don’t just let it run on auto-pilot)
• Your first few customers may force you to change your business if you customize too much for their needs
• You should try to find out what initiative your customer is having.  Then try to attach your service to their initiative.

This was one great panel discussion.

admin Entrepreneur Customer Acquisition, Customer Management, Product management

Notes and thoughts from SVASE Digital Media Startups – Expectations and How to Achieve Them in the Current Market meeting on Feb 19th, 2009:

The majority of the discussion is on surviving the downturn(recession).

General thoughts:

• Be scrappy
• do more with less
• Save money, cut cost
• be data-driven
• the bar for VC series A is very high
• VCs will still bet on very viral products.  But you need to keep the burn rate down

Good points by Andrew Chen:

• Vcs tell you what’s hot, but they already invest tons of money into this space.
• Don’t build your business around corporate partnership – you can’t predict
• Execution always beats ideas.  Great team + mediocre ideas > mediocre team + great ideas
• No need to worry about cutting edges
• 6-9 months bootstrapping(then raise angel, then raise VC if you can or you need it)

It was a great discussion.

mo

admin Entrepreneur Entrepreneur, startup, survival, VC Funding

Notes and thoughts from the SDForum Mobile SIG in Feb 2009:

Skyfire

Skyfire is a mobile browser that can deal with rich content(eg: flash, AJAX) and work like what you’d expect from a desktop browser.   Whatever you request in a Skyfire browser, it goes to a Skyfire server which runs your request in a real Firefox browser, and the server sends back the interactive image to skyfire browser for rendering.

No 1. question came to my mind was that Skyfire is a middleman knowing all of my browsing data.  so how can I trust them with every piece of my browsing data?  Should I just throw my privacy down the drain?  They said all the data is encrypted in memory.  Well, it still sounds too risky as one disgruntled employee may choose to access to lots of data(how about credit card numbers, social security numbers?).

Skyfire clearly solves a big problem of people wanting to get rich content on their mobile phone.  I think one of their business models is to license the browser to carriers and let them customize it(eg: default the homepage, default search engine choice).

Zannel

Zannel is a location-aware “social network enabler with built in applications and outreach with viral consumer campaigns, LBS, iPhone applications and a dynamic Inauguration Channel that provided a front seat to Washington’s Historic Day”

Zannel provides instant syndication of your content from your mobile phone so that you can enjoy instant gratification of knowing your content and your moment being delivered to your friends and followers.

Examples:

• share photos/videos of an event instantly with your friends on Facebook, Youtube and Flickr.
• Real Estate agents share photos of new houses on market with his clients.
• Bands/artists share backstage footage with fans.

It’s like the Twitter model where you syndicate content with your followers!  No wonder they are called “the multimedia Twitter“. Zannel is smart not make user generated content locked down on their site.  It acts as a distribution tool.

Zannel also works with mobile phone carriers.  It has the ability to censor on media and can set content filtering per carrier per region.

Their business model is to partner with carriers, and monetize instant media network by selling targeted advertising opportunities, sponsored lifecasts, and other premium opportunities to reach the 16-34 years old who are addicted to Zannel and its snack size media updates.

I can also see power users like bands and artists are willing to shell out some money for a pro account to market and share rich media with their fans(followers), and manage the fan relationship.

admin Mobile Mobile phone, SkyFire, Syndication, Twitter, User-generated content, Zannel

While some people are still debating how soon mobile as an advertising platform can take off, the recent research around consumer mobile usage has told all of us in business that mobile is here to stay and is the next new and effective sales channel!

• Daily Mobile News Consumption Doubles in Past Year

“The number of people using their mobile device daily to access online news and information more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2009 and now stands at 22.4 million, according to comScore.

Among the total audience of 63.2 million people who accessed news and information on their mobile devices in January 2009, more than a third (35%) did so daily.

comScore also reports that the fastest growing activities for mobile web use are accessing news and information, social networking and blogging, stock trading and accessing financial information and seeking movie information. Notably, social networking and blogging are “growing at a torrid pace,” said Mark Donovan, SVP, mobile, comScore.” (See original post from MarketingChart)

• US Overtakes UK in Mobile Browsing, Spending

“The US now has 29% of the world’s mobile web browsing traffic, and has knocked the UK out of the #1 spot on the list of countries with the most mobile web use, according to February data released by Bango.

Bango also said that this growth in traffic is being matched by a corresponding growth in users paying for content on the mobile web, in part because of publicity behind the Apple iPhone, as well as increasingly improving payment experiences that encourage more people to buy mobile content.

“With 245 million subscribers, it was only a matter of time before the US became the number 1 country in the world for mobile web browsing,” said Anil Malhotra, SVP of marketing at Bango. “When it comes to payments though, the US is accelerating faster than any other country and now accounts for 57% of payments worldwide.”

The statistics also show that while some countries such as India and Indonesia have a good appetite for browsing on their mobiles, it doesn’t always convert into purchases. In fact, only five countries in the Top 10 browsing chart are also in the Top 10 payments chart – USA, UK, Portugal, South Africa and Spain.

No matter how high the browsing rate, it is only converted into a high purchase rate where people have a good disposable income and can pay for content on their phone bills, Bango said.  In regions such as India, South Africa, Indonesia and Egypt the driver for mobile browsing is a lack of fixed-line broadband and PCs for accessing the internet which means that the mobile device is the only way people can get onto the internet.” (see original post from MarketingChart)

admin Mobile channel, ComScore, Mobile, Mobile web, United States