Warid has recently announced 2 location based services: friend finder and place finder (i.e. local search). These are pay-per-use services (Rs.3+tax). Using SMS or MMS. you can find the location of another warid cell phone customer or do a local search for a point of interest such as bank. Service is limited to major cities.
This is an interesting first step towards location based services (LBS) for the telecom industry. In US and EU, navigation and related data services are growing rapidly and account for a major portion of network operator’s revenue. The rules and privacy norms are quite different in developed countries and sharing of real-time location is subject to a lot of scrutiny. Warid is simply relying on per-request permission to work around the privacy concern. However I do not find this a good approach — it can be quite annoying to get such messages left and right.
In the US, LBS is a hot area with lots of startup acitivty. Companies such as brightkite, loopt and whrrl have received tons of VC money to develop all kinds of fancy mobile and web-based applications. Recent inclusion of GPS in 3G iPhone has created even more buzz!
Warid has taken a different and relatively simple approach where the application is based on back and forth sms or multimedia message (MMS). The SMS solution is pretty much the same which Google offers in the US and which works extremely well for quick searches. The MMS option is for the map display - limited to a few major cities. Since there is no mention of GPS requirement, Warid must be using triangulation algorithms to find the approximate location. See my previous post on Google maps and how it works.
Although there are many limitations of Warid’s LBS this still matters because this is the first attempt for location based service. I can assure you that this is just the start and we will soon plenty of other implementations around the buddy finder concept and LBS in general. There are so many creative ways to use this service, especially when combined with a personalized website and higher resolution maps.
As reported in Daily Times and blogged about at Karachi Metblogs. Regardless of the fairness of this rule, I think it is absurd to assume that such rules can be realistically implemented. There will be a task force which monitors all the SMS traffic and figures out who is “manipulating” the market, yeah right! This is more of a PR tactic. Lets see when the first offender gets nabbed.
Manipulation of the stock exchange market through short messaging services (SMS) from mobile phones will be treated as a cyber crime, the federal government decided on Sunday, July 20, 2008.
The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) will deal with creating disinformation about the stock markets through SMS. The government has also directed the agency to take immediate notice of such cases in future.
The decision to bring the practice under the agency’s supervision comes in the backdrop of a major stock market decline last week, which saw small investors, the most affected by the slide, demonstrating violently outside the major exchanges at Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore.
The recent sharp fall was attributed to a range of factors. Most immediate was the decision of the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan to remove a 1% daily limit on how far share prices could decline, bringing it back up to 5%.
I can’t believe that I am doing another post on McDonald but this is an interesting marketing tactic. It is about mobile coupons in action at McDonald’s SMS Lounge in Germany.
What do 99% of all people have in common? They love to get something for free! With the SMS Lounge, McDonald’s invited customers to save money with their mobile phone. One text message was enough to register at your favourite restaurant for the service. In the following months, people received a mobile voucher directly from the restaurant onto their phone every two weeks. The coupons – embedded in a QR code - could be redeemed by scanning them at the restaurant. Food delivery at it’s best!
Dashwire 2.0 is out and offers a full suite of mobile phone and web sync features. I tested it with a friend of mine who has windows mobile phone tested their service today and we found it interesting and useful but not without issues and limitations. As I have written in the past, with all the gadgets at work and home, getting your life in sync is a major problem. There are a bunch of solutions out there (Zyb, Shozu etc) but not a clear winner - yet. Apple obviously saw this gap and is offering a subscription service - MobileMe which should be a big hit.
Features, availability and reliability - all play important role in driving usage and adoption. Network and data plan availability is of course importnat too. See a description from Dashwire site and this review from Engadget. Also check out their blog, especially the post on connected services.
Your phone content — contacts, text messages, calls, photos, videos, Internet favorites, speed dials, ringtone, and wallpaper — is seamlessly uploaded from your phone and safely stored online in your Dashwire account.
With Dashwire, you can…
Send and receive text messages from your computer without picking up your phone
Automatically upload photos and videos captured on the go to easily organize and share with your friends
Add an address book contact on your computer and have it instantly appear on your phone
Easily set Internet favorites, ringtones, wallpapers, and speed dials – in seconds from your computer
On the way to work today I heard a report from NPR about email overload. I wanted to share the story with all and ask you:
do you consider your email volume to be excessive?
do you use any special tools (other than filters) to manage email?
In my case I have multiple email accounts (work, web-based, ISP, blog, others). With hundreds of emails coming each day it is a challenge to sift out the useful and relevant messages from trivia, promotions and spam. At work, I find the back and forth short messages to be most annoying, esp when there is a large distribution list in CC. For personal emails, the forwarded chain letters, powerpoint slide shows and hoaxes are a nuisance - and many times they come from your family and friends. On the other hand its a pain when a useful mail ends up in spam.
IM and presence indicators (such as those in outlook or yahoo) are useful to cut down on some email load. SMS is another option but its cost could be a factor in some places. Blackberry comes to the rescue but it is not a common tool. A co-worker uses outlook client with yahoo filters as a catch-all. Main reason — yahoo spam filters works so well. Here’s a new development from Yahoo:
Yahoo, one of the biggest providers of Web-based mail, is trying to rethink its e-mail as a social network, according to John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail. The idea is that since most of us e-mail only a handful of people regularly, e-mail systems should display those messages at the top of the inbox.
Most recently the so-called social networks are adding to the junk mail because people who you have never even heard want to be your friend. One person I know refuses to sign up for LinkedIn because he is afraid that people will get offended if he refuses their connection request!
The NPR story has an interesting anecdote about how “auto-fill” created a multi-million dollar problem for a fortune 100 company. I have myself been in the situation where outlook auto-filled the wrong email (yahoo instead of work) and I got in trouble later.
I believe that the good old phone call is still a great way to get things done. May be as a follow-up to that email you just sent or as a heads up that an important message is on its way soon!
Here’s an interesting marketing trend inspired by mobile phone culture. Building on the popularity of Text messaging advertisers are using the texting acronyms (omg, bff, g2g etc) in their ads. I’m sure phone companies are enjoying this attention — after all data has become one of their major revenue producers. I have also noticed this in magazines. However all this new vocabulary may leave parents confused and that is not exactly what the advertisers want. This goes back to the generation gap post I did a while ago. A recent Wall Street Journal article notes this trend emphasizes that it is important to explain the shorthand, otherwise the ad will miss a large number of its audience!
Young adults 18 to 24 years old spend about 32 minutes a day texting, according to the Yankee Group, a research company. The texting phenomenon has given rise to acronyms like “paw” (parents are watching), “lol” (laughing out loud), “g2g” (got to go) and “ooc” (out of control).
Some of the ads that use the shorthand have drawn a big audience. Cingular’s spot has attracted more than 1 million views on YouTube thus far. The ad, for an unlimited texting plan offered by the carrier, featured a mom questioning her daughter, Bethann, about all the texting she was doing. Bethann’s response: “o-m-g, i-n-b-d.” (Translation: “Oh my gosh, it’s no big deal.”) She explains to her mom that she is texting her “bff Jill.” The ad has spawned numerous imitations on YouTube.
Frito-Lay, McDonald’s, AT&T and others have tried to demonstrate their street cred to the teenage set by using text-messaging abbreviations in their commercials. An Internet video ad for McDonald’s in Korea shows two men warming up their vocal cords to sing the McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it” jingle. At the end of the video, a voice-over chimes in: “Are you ready?” The screen reads: “r u ready?”
Activists in Pakistan are leveraging technology to organize and support their campaign against the martial law in Pakistan. Using the tools of mobile phones, SMS, Wikis, social networking and blogging, the activists have stepped up to fill the gap left behind by the absence of news and TV channels. I reported about the rising trend of mobile activism in the world in July and I asked a question that if this is something we will see in Pakistan in the short term. The recent turn of events has made mobile activism a sucessful reality in Pakistan. See other posts about mobile activism in Pakistan here and here.
Due to the low number of Internet users and the very limited broadband in Pakistan, blogs and other Internet based tools are not within the reach of the masses. Text messaging on the other hand has been very popular and with the 70 million plus mobile subscribers, this is a medium which is widely spread in Pakistan. Bloggers report that Saturday 3rd November saw the highest ever number of SMS sent with an average of 10 text messages being sent across the networks per subscriber.
Relying on Text Messages Indeed, for ordinary Pakistanis, the cell-phone text message has proved a saving grace, one not yet withdrawn by Musharraf. Internet penetration in Pakistan is low, but Pakistan is one of the world’s fastest-growing cell-phone markets, with user numbers growing 73% this past year. The country of 160 million currently has 67 million cellular subscribers, and, according to Pakistan watchers, in the past week many Pakistanis have been sending and receiving at least 10 text messages a day from relatives overseas who watch the international news on Pakistan and feed the information back home. A conservative estimate of 500 million text messages a day is a bonanza for cell-phone operators.
Along with writing on blogs and posting on wikis, bloggers are also making use of sms to report updates and send alerts. The blog by Teeth Maestro is using SMS2Blog technology as explained here:
We have enabled LIVE SMS-2-BLOG services allowing citizen reporters in Pakistan to directly update this blog by sending this blog, readers shall now be given live updates from the field as it happens. Join this blog’s Twitter Channel at: twitter.com/teeth
See this report from News which talks about Aurat Foundation’s plans to setup a sms based system for activism:
However, keeping in mind the fact that a majority of the population does not have access to the internet, members at a meeting held at the Aurat Foundation’s office decided to circulate their message of protest through text messages and work towards the restoration of human rights, the judicial system and the removal of the media blackout amongst other issues.
On the other hand, hundreds of people have also been registering their protests at pakvoices.net, gopetition.com and facebook.com
All of this is promising - it shows the resolve of the people and their determination to share information and make the best use of available tools.
 This picture is just another reminder before October ends that we still need to remember and support the victims of Earthquake. Here’s one easy way to do that.
Mobilink offers SMS marketing as one of the business services. The page on the MobilinkWorld site boasts of the 20+ million subscriber base. This service allows up to 1o million messages to be sent. So if one has the funds and wants to reach tens of millions of mobilink customers, its that easy. And the 10 million limit does not seem to be an absolute one, I am certain there are ways around that if the price is right.
What about subscriber rights? Can the subscribers opt-out? In the terms and conditions its mentioned that “Subscribers will be given the option to opt out of receiving broadcast messages“.
This is a typical case of the provider keeping the control and limiting choices for subscribers. I am not singling out Mobilink but using it as an example. It sounds to me that only after the subscribers start getting these messages they are given the option of taking some action to stop future messages. What action is needed for customers to avoid getting these messages? Where is the policy defined?
Here’s an application demo on a topic about which you will hear a lot in the coming days: Group and Integrated Messaging. Found out about SwarmTeams at InBabble where there’s an interview with the founder. This looks promising and is something which I could really use. What is your take?
A bit of background which may be interesting to you: Swarmteams has been developed in response to research into biological teams and groups (aka “bioteams”) such as micro-organisms, ants, bees and dolphins. The principles include:
Stop Controlling - Communicate information not orders
Team Intelligence - Mobilise everyone to look for group threats and opportunities
Permission Granted - Achieve accountability through transparency not permission
Always-On - Provide 24×7 instant “in-situ” message hotlines for all team members
Symbiosis - Treat external partners as fully trusted team members
Cluster - Nurture the team’s internal and external networks and connections
There are a lot of new voice services around these days. Some promise international calls with no extra charge than using your mobile minutes, others take your voice calls and convert them to text. Financial Times recently did a good review of the various services to bridge the gap between voice communications, text messaging and mobile web. In Pakistan we have a few similar services such as voice 2 text. Some (edited) excerpts from the FT article are presented below:
JAXTR Jaxtr, which is free, is designed to link your fixed or mobile phone to the web, so you can hear from callers worldwide while keeping your number private. You need to sign up for a free Jaxtr account.
To call your friends with Jaxtr, you click on their Jaxtr link using a PC and enter your phone number. Jaxtr connects the call by dialling their number and calling you back on the number you entered. If they do not have an account, you can invite them to sign up.
Calling Jaxtr numbers is free from any long distance or international toll charges if Jaxtr supports local numbers in your area - currently it has numbers in the major metropolitan areas of 51 countries (including Pakistan). Each account comes with unlimited voice and text messages, and the service allows you to forward up to 100 minutes of incoming calls to your phone a month, depending on your country and the kind of phone.
GRANDCENTRAL Although its application is not limited to mobile phones, GrandCentral, a start-up recently acquired by Google, is worth taking a look at though the service is currently only available as a beta or trial service by invitation.
GrandCentral lets users consolidate all their phone numbers, including home, office and mobile numbers, into one new number provided by the service. New voicemail messages on any of the old lines are forwarded to your GrandCentral number and kept as audio files and consolidated into a single online mailbox.
As communication technologies improve and number of mobile phone subscribers grow in Pakistan, unwanted telemarketing and sales calls and text messages are fast becoming a concern. We have talked about the lack of identity protection measures and almost no regard about one’s personal information in Pakistan before. The recent PTA warning about unwanted and fraudulent SMS was also discussed here. Other bloggers have also written about the marketers who invade people’s privacy and waste time.
Many developed countries have taken steps such as “Do Not Call” databases which prohibits telemarketers to call those people who are on the Do Not Call list. Facing pressure from public, India’s telecom regulator has set up a Do Not Call system to fight against unsolicited telemarketers (See this article for details). It will be interesting to see if it can make a difference there. Usually such Do Not Call systems require significant effort to regulate and punish the offenders, which can make it difficult to work in Pakistan.
Another related problem is that South Asia is the home to a large number of outbound call centers. Many of these unsolicited calls in US or Euorpe originate from abroad … often the accent of the callers provides a hint about the location of the caller. I have personally received unwanted calls and text messages from South Asia, and that too at odd hours.
With mobile advertising on its way, this situation will get a lot worse - so brace yourself and take precautionary measures to safeguard your information. First awareness is the key: Pakistani bloggers need to continue to spread the word. Next, take charge of your information. Ask banks, phone companies and other financial institutions about their data privacy policies and demand that they should not sell your data or else you will take your business elsewhere. It MAY work!
The recent issue of FLARE has a good article about the pain of spam sms and unsolicited calls. Excerpts:
With 63 million subscribers currently and growing rapidly every month, telephony in Pakistan is witnessing an unimaginable boom but carries one terrible downside “Unsolicited calls”. Banks are the biggest offenders. Car loans, home loans, personal loans, even loans to pay off other loans, and an unending list of unsolicited calls subscribers receive daily. More terribly, the tele-sales persons have complete personal and private information about subscribers, including name, business and personal contact details, the bank where you have maintained your account, your company name and even balance of your account and the transactions you have made recently.
“Once your cellular number is exposed to tele-marketers, you will find that there are more calls you get each day, furthermore. A notable increase in the ratio of marketing calls will be seen once you have posted a positive response to any package. This gives a clear feeling that these telemarketing companies share their data with-in their departments or even with other telemarketing companies likely to be based on barter system” said Ali Hassan, Senior Professor at a local university. Banks also arrange data from other sources as well; hotels, restaurants, online communities, directories and yellow pages are the big sources.
Warid has recently announced 2 location based services: friend finder and place finder (i.e. local search). These are pay-per-use services (Rs.3+tax). Using SMS or MMS. you can find the location of another warid cell phone customer or do a local search for a point of interest such as bank. Service is limited to major cities.
Warid has taken a different and relatively simple approach where the application is based on back and forth sms or multimedia message (MMS). The SMS solution is pretty much the same which Google offers in the US and which works extremely well for quick searches. The MMS option is for the map display - limited to a few major cities. Since there is no mention of GPS requirement, Warid must be using triangulation algorithms to find the approximate location. See my previous post on Google maps and how it works.
Although its application is not limited to mobile phones, GrandCentral, a start-up recently acquired by Google, is worth taking a look at though the service is currently only available as a beta or trial service by invitation.
Many developed countries have taken steps such as “
With mobile advertising on its way, this situation will get a lot worse - so brace yourself and take precautionary measures to safeguard your information. First awareness is the key: Pakistani 
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