State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

This post is about the increasing importance of interactive marketing. Since we discuss telecom ads and marketing, there is relevance (anyway weekend is a good time for off topics posts). If you look at the marketing strategy in developing countries, it is clear that the low connectivity means that digital marketing is not very high. Most of the spending goes to TV and hoardings – the conventional media. Digital media is new and tricky as I posted on twitter today. Many telecom companies in Pakistan do not have a strategy for social media. However there has been a distinct change in the last 2 years and there is more attention being paid to the blogs, at least by the PR departments.

For the brand managers out there, the trend mentioned here should be very important. See the chart and excerpt from Forrester blog.

In this recession, marketers have learned that interactive marketing is more effective, and advertising less effective, per dollar spent. While budgets for online have decreased, they decreased less than other budgets. Six out of ten marketers we surveyed agreed with the statement “we will increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing.” Only 7% said “we have no plans to increase our marketing budget.”

Guest Post By Phil Cruver

This is a continuation from Collaborative Learning in Paksitan Part 1 which introduced the concept of collaborative learning using enhanced video technologies.

Educators can also provide students with links to their lectures and assignments to tag as a class project. With this technology they can tag “chapters” and “topics” within the media file with a descriptive text for each tag. Additionally, all tags can be exported and distributed as a blog.

Once students tag a portion of a video or locate a tagged section of a video that is relevant to what they wish to learn, they may want to share the link with others. They can embed this as a deep link on their website, blog, or even in an email message. When other students click on the deep link, they will be taken not to the beginning of the video but to that precise section within the video.

Rather than conducting a search for keywords or tags that describe an entire video, students can conduct deep searches for tags that describe specific sections within a video and then immediately jump to that precise portion of the video clip. This saves time and facilitates education because students don’t have to watch a five-minute video to find a five-second nugget of information they need to understand.

How do these deep technologies specifically enhance learning?

• They increase the granularity of indexed media, allowing specific parts of video lectures to be more easily remixed, linked, and reused.
• They engage students to co-create content via annotation of lectures.
• They make media as an instructional tool more efficient since reading or reviewing streaming video is more time consuming than print media.

Also, these deep technologies enhance the educational content. The more the commenting and annotating, the more valuable the learning asset becomes as the wisdom of numerous and diverse interested parties add layers of collective intelligence to the video. Furthermore, specific moments of time within these videos can be instantaneously identified and retrieved with the Learning 2.0 Platform search engine.

Consider the opportunity for enhancing the quality of education in Pakistan by harnessing thousands of video lectures produced by the top teachers throughout the country. This digital archive could be searched as indexed meta data by key words within the annotations. Not only would this video library compliment and extend traditional learning but it would also scale giving millions of students access to a quality education.

Hopefully, Learning 2.0 will be adopted in Pakistan as a complimentary component to the upcoming national curriculum, which would help foster a new culture of learning. It would be a positive step towards educating its students with the new literacy they will require for competing in the flat world global economy they inhabit.

Guest Post By Phil Cruver

The technological evolution of Web 2.0 tools has produced a global platform that empowers the collective wisdom and intelligence of the crowd. Powerful arrays of technologies are emerging as ecosystems for extending, enhancing and enabling learning in an accelerated mode.

Deemed Learning 2.0, these online collaborative, interactive, and just-in-time information delivery technologies are encroaching on mainstream education in developed economies. These new and innovative technologies are not intended as a replacement for traditional education, but rather as an extension for learning in deep and powerful ways.

Tagging, the practice of attaching a descriptive word or phrase to a piece of online content for the purpose of linking it to other related digital media, is a well-known web phenomenon. Students searching for those tags can retrieve that specific and relevant content; thus, facilitating just-in-time learning and creating new possibilities for creative expression.

The Learning 2.0 Platform for Teachers and Students in Pakistan has introduced a new technology that provides the capability to transcend the limitations of simple tagging for describing an entire chunk of rich media. This next generation of tagging and its derivative progeny – linking and searching – allows the creation of direct links to specific parts within a larger selection of media. By indexing metadata, which enables tagging specific sections, you get deeper data information with the descriptor “deep tagging”.

Consider the possibilities for just-in-time learning: educators record their multi-hour lectures with a simple webcam, tag and upload them to the Learning 2.0 Platform as small interactive chunks. Students can repeatedly review the relevant information without enduring the entire session. Deep tagging metadata allows them to jump instantly to that specific section within the video for the information they need to learn.

The above image illustrates how deep tagging enhances collaborative learning. Abdul Aziz Bhatti, Principal at the Federal Government Model School for Boys G-0/4 in Islamabad was videotaped giving a lecture about Chemistry. Students tag the video while watching and their tags are indexed and made available to all who subsequently watch the presentation. Students can also comment upon their peers’ tags and all comments are emailed to the teacher for response and interaction.

Interesting developments where a product search page accessed by a mobile device can interact with the mobile device capabilities. This is taken from Texas Startup Blog.

Google’s product search features have been optimized for use on Android handsets and now Google has just revealed how Android might just be the killer phone operating system. Websites, like Google Product Search, can offer ‘intents’ that allow for interaction between websites and mobile applications.

If you go to Google Product Search on an Android phone you can click ‘Scan Barcode’ and the browser will call Android asking for ‘barcode’ intents like Barcode Scanner and ShopSavvy. Just click on the one you prefer and presto you have launched a barcode reader. Barcode Scanner sends you to the Google Product Search page.

Here is an interesting question: How does MSN, Live Search, Windows Live compare against the word Google? This confusion about branding was pointed out in a Wall Street Journal blog. For those of you who are starting out with their products or work as a brand / product manager for a company, this is a very important point. You want to make it easy for your users, not difficult. Verizon is another example. This company does not offer one number to reach its sales / service. There are many different toll free numbers — some are used for tracking promotions, others to differentiate between departments (TV vs Internet). To consumers, the reason does not matter. Its the brand which suffers. Can you cite similar examples from Pakistan telecom industry?

During regular “blind taste tests,” in which Microsoft asks randomly-selected consumers to score the quality of results from various Internet search engines, the quality of Microsoft’s search results have so improved that people can’t tell the difference between Microsoft and Google search results, says Mr. Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group. But when Microsoft slaps the Google brand name on the results from Microsoft’s own search engine during another portion of its tests, users invariably score them highest.

“Just by putting the name up, people think it’s more relevant,” he says.

Although improving its search technology has been a top priority, Mr. Mehdi concedes that another big problem for Microsoft has been a confusing jumble of brand names for its search efforts. The company’s search engine, available at Live.com, is called Live Search, though the brand is muddied by the plethora of other Microsoft Internet services such as Xbox Live and Windows Live. Mr. Mehdi says the company is looking for ways to “clarify” the brand for its search engine.

Even if it does that, Microsoft still faces the problem of the strong association in consumers’ minds between Google and Internet search. In theory, it’s far easier for a consumer to switch Internet search engines than it is for them to switch other forms of software. But Mr. Mehdi–a veteran of the Web browser wars of the late 90s in which Microsoft managed to overtake the pioneer in the category, Netscape Communications–says in reality it’s very hard to convince consumers to change their search behavior.

“Consumers are creatures of habit,” he says. “Habits are hard to break.”

Do all those tweets could be used to create something more interesting? when it comes to discovery,search and creating a following, there are some interesting angles that Twitter or its clones offer. Some are discussed in this article at Technology Review. I believe that we will see a shift towards more microblogging in public and semi-professional scenarios.

When Twitter was introduced in late 2006, asking users to post a 140-word answer to the question “What are you doing?,” many criticized the results as nothing more than a collection of trivial thoughts and inane ramblings. Fast-forward three years, and the number of Twitter users has grown to millions, while the content of the many posts–better known as “tweets”–has shifted from banal to informative.

Twitter users now cover breaking news, posting links to reports, blog posts, and images. Twitter’s search box also reveals what people think of the latest new gadget or movie, letting visitors eavesdrop on often spirited conversations and some insightful opinions.

Earlier this week, on The Charlie Rose Show, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, was asked directly whether Google might be interested in acquiring Twitter. He responded, somewhat coyly, that his company was “unlikely to buy anything right now.”

Nonetheless, as Twitter grows in size and substance, it’s becoming clear that it offers a unique feed of real-time conversation and sentiment. Danny Sullivan, editor of the blog Search Engine Land, compares this to the unique real-time feed of new video content offered by YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006, and says that Twitter could help improve real-time search. Notably, says Sullivan, this is something that Google isn’t particularly good at. Even by scouring news sites, Google simply can’t match the speed and relevancy of social sites like Digg and Twitter, he says.

Twitter’s ability to capture the latest fad is evident from its “trends” feature, which reveals the most talked about topics among Twitterers. At the time this article was written, Twitter users were discussing topics including National Napping Day, DST (daylight savings time), and the new movie Watchmen. A quick search also reveals that five people within the past half hour have posted tweets about last weekend’s Saturday Night Live skit called “The Rock Obama.” The most recent tweet includes a link to the video and was posted just three minutes ago.

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Google’s Zeitgeist was the site which had information about the search patterns, trends for Pakistan and other countries. I was always amused by the search terms and the variation of those over time. Now I hear that Zeitgeist is being replaced by other related products by Google, listed below.  It will be more interesting to see what people search from their phone and what search engines are used there. Yahoo and Google are likely to be the major search engines on mobile phones.

• Google Insights: http://www.google.com/insights/search/
• Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends
• Google Trends for Websites: http://trends.google.com/websites

Here is the last set of queries published by Google Zeitgeist, in summer of 2008. By now these terms must have been replaced with more current topics but still some of these are quite amusing, even hilarious. The one thing that has not changed: Katrina Kaif remains on the list of most popular searches in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Top Google Queries in Pakistan In June 2008

1. free chat
2. wedding rings
3. pretty girls
4. HBO
5. Maria Kanellis
6. Bank Alhabib
7. swimming pool
8. Pakistani
9. 123 greetings
10. earthquake
11. Samsung Pakistan
12. human anatomy
13. Urdu
14. Mozila Firefox
15. deer

Here’s another post by Tee Emm on this topic. Thanks to Badar Khusnood for sharing updated information.

A number of competing services are available for providing information and answers to questions on a mobile phone (Telenor Ask in Pakistan, Google’s sms and voice, Microsoft TellMe). ChaCha enters this crowded market with a free, human powered offering. I wonder if the premium service from Telenor Ask is a hit with users in Pakistan?

ChaCha is avaialble in US via SMS (242242) and Voice (800-2chacha). An excerpt from Mossberg’s review:

The service works by routing your questions to one of 10,000 hired “guides” — students, stay-at-home parents, retirees and others — who look up the questions on the Web and reply. They get paid 20 cents per answer.

Naturally, these guides vary as to their speed and accuracy. If you don’t like the answers they give you, or you want related information, you can call back or reply to the text message with a follow-up question. For instance, after learning which pitcher had won for Boston, I asked who lost the game for New York. I was quickly informed it was Phil Hughes.

Overall, I liked ChaCha. In most cases, I received fast, accurate, useful answers. But it has two weaknesses. One is that the low-paid, part-time guides can provide inconsistent service. When I asked for the best Mexican restaurant in D.C., for example, ChaCha came up with a choice that few locals would cite.

The other is that, unlike many other cellphone information services, ChaCha doesn’t automatically know your location. So, unless you include a location in your query, it’s clueless about questions such as “Where’s the nearest drugstore?”

As mentioned a while ago on TelecomPk, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) had started investigation and corrective measures to combat fraudulent and fake SIMs with cooperation of mobile companies and NADRA. This month PTA has release some numbers about their efforts.

PTA issued detailed operating procedures for mobile operators to ensure sale of new SIMs with proper documentation and had asked for verification of old records through NADRA. Cellular mobile companies have completed verification of approximately 85% data of their subscribers through NADRA.

More from the PTA press release:

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Here’s one more company claiming to fix the yet unsolved problem of speech recognition on mobile phones. I’d like to see their speech-to-text solution in action or hear from someone who has tried it out. Read the complete article about Vlingo’s voice-recognition interface at Tech Review site. The key differentiators are a) that it uses Hierarchical Language Models and Adaptation techniques and b) you can train this software easily by fixing the text it gives you. And by the way, this article is available in audio as well (registration required). Here are some excerpts:

Vlingo, a startup in Cambridge, MA, is coming to market with a ­simple user interface that provides speech recognition across mobile-phone applications. “We are not developing the core speech-recognition engine,” says cofounder Michael ­Phillips, a former MIT research scientist and founder of SpeechWorks, which developed call-center speech interfaces. “We don’t need to do that again.” Instead, Vlingo takes speech, turns it into text, and provides a simple way to correct errors using the phone’s navigation keys, helping the system “learn.” The user’s spoken words travel over a mobile Internet connection for analysis on Vlingo’s server, sparing the phone the heavy computational work; the transcription appears less than two seconds later.

“Small platforms need speech, and search is a powerful way to find information,” says James Glass, head of the spoken-language systems group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “The combination of the two is very powerful,” he says, adding that Vlingo is working at that frontier.

Mazin Gilbert, executive director of natural­-language processing at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, NJ, says others, including AT&T, are also developing speech interfaces for mobile phones; he thinks one problem will be “providing the right user experience in a cost-­effective, scalable way.”

As I reported earlier, Google gives cellphone users a mini version of its search engine which can be used via sms and speech. Now Google wants to become a gateway for finding and paying for mobile media content. It is also trying to come up with a service to broker ads for other mobile web sites, competing with Yahoo and start-ups in the lucrative mobile advertising space.

According to Yankee Group, global sales of music, video, ring-tones and other content reached $27.4 billion last year, and they are expected to grow to $59.3 billion by 2011. With the new system by Google, users would search for a piece of content – such as a popular ring-tone — and get back a list of providers as well as links enabling them to easily purchase the material. Google can charge companies for high placement in the search results, much the way it offers “sponsored links” on computer Web searches.

WSJ reports on this:

Google has been working for months with content providers — including large entertainment companies and smaller mobile-media aggregators — to index their material and make it available via mobile search. But the project has been marred by a series of technical delays, people familiar with the matter say, illustrating that there’s a learning curve as Internet giants adjust to the peculiarities of the mobile world. It isn’t clear how soon Google plans to launch the service.

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