Adelaide, South Australia have followed in the footsteps of many other tech savvy cities and developed an internet enabled bus going by the name of, “i-commute bus”. The project has been sponsored by the South Australian government in partnership with Cisco systems, Adam internet, and real-time passenger information system “transSpot” of Israel. The bus will perform a myriad of functions for passengers including route timings, wifi, GPS, Bluetooth access to games and of course (censored) internet. The project has cost tax payers a staggering $500,000 AUD and has taken 18 months to develop.
Admittedly, my first thoughts of this very expensive Australian foray in the connected public transport arena were very negative. Half a million to put internet on a bus in a city that has a highly developed 3G network as well as multiple mobile broadband suppliers? Not to mention, the San Francisco version was a hybrid “Green” bus that balanced out the emissions generated from so much extra weight/technology. The word excessive comes to mind? On the positive, this opens the door for targeted location based advertising direct to consumers. Think- “Hungry? McDonalds at your next stop”. I assume this could be sold at a premium.
Connected busses are definitely a good thing and pave the way for all sorts of internet capable public services such as trains and trams but are coming a heavy price for the tax payer as well as the environment. Great opportunity for marketeers, though!
Source: News.com.au
Being a user of Apple iPhone since it was first released in Jun 2007, I was amazed at how the iPhone has transformed and shape mobile commerce industry within a short span of 3 years. The iPhone has transformed the smartphone market and also changed the way consumer access the internet via the Mobile platform.
Today, not only do we see the growth in the number of applications on the Apple App Store, other platform and handset providers (e.g. Android, Nokia, Palm Pre, Windows Mobile) are also starting their own version of App Store in order not to miss out on opportunities in the growing mobile commerce.
The travel industry is also starting to explore this trend in mobile commerce with a number of Online Travel Agencies (OTA) offering their iPhone application on the Apple App Store. I had the chance to install a number of them on my iPhone to try it out and am generally impress with the quality and maturity of the the application (WorldMate, Kayak, HotelPal, just to name a few). While many of these providers are US-centric, it is a matter of time before OTA in Asia start offering their own version of iPhone apps.
Just last week, Apple and China Unicom signed a 3 years deal to “officially” (in fact many consumers in China are already using the iPhone since 2007) introduce the iPhone to China. This is likely to further push the mobile commece in Asia to a new height, as it is predicted that approximately 20% of the iPhone sold globally will be from China – Apple is also likely to introduce the App Store in China to tap on the vast conumer market.
With the growing interest in mobile commerce, it is no wonder that PhoCusWright is organising webminars as well as conducting research on iPhone and mobile commerce (see the list of Webminiars and research below).
With the prolifereation of mobile commerce, it is definitely exciting to see what the next wave of mobile application would be like and how the mobile commerce infrastructure will change.
As most of you will be aware, Yahoo and Microsoft signed a much hyped partnership agreement at the end of July. The details of the deal, can be scrutinized here, but the most important component by far is the fact that Microsoft’s new engine, Bing, will be powering Yahoo Search.
In the US this creates a humble competitor to Google with a consolidated 28% share of Search… but in other markets, within Asia specifically, this partnership, if applicable, often presents a higher consolidated share than Google and puts a new Search Engine in number 1…. So I thought I’d highlight a couple of points on how this could impact the APAC market for SEM and SEO:
- From a Search Engine Marketing (SEM/PPC) perspective there are many countries, including most of the APAC market where Yahoo Search actually powers the Microsoft Search Engine. Advertisers and agencies currently use Yahoo Search Marketing (Panama version) to populate their ads on the SERPs.
This deal, will now reverse all that and require that Microsoft’s AdCenter be launched in all the markets in order for PPC ads to appear on Bing and Yahoo. This potentially means a long delay before we see the transfer of Search Engines in this region… I can’t see it happening in Australia for instance until late 2011.
- From an SEO perspective, today most companies only take the Google Algorithm into consideration when optimizing their pages and content. With Bing powering Yahoo, though, this creates enough of an opportunity for companies to start considering both. Bing has completely different algorithms and ranking techniques to Google and it’ll be interesting to see how companies prepare and deal with having to optimize for both engines. As AdAge reports, now that the Bing/Yahoo deal creates a new entity with 28% share, companies/agencies in the US are already considering the SEO implications…
Since in APAC the deal creates an entity with bigger market share than the one in the US, APAC based companies will have much more to gain from being prepared and start optimizing for this duopoly.
It’d be great to get feedback from any companies that have already started looking at the Bing SEO implications…
Read here and here for articles in Techcrunch on the contribution of immigrants into the US and how they are powerful innovation and employment generators, especially in the tech sector. There is a powerful case, xenophobia aside, that such immigrants are extremely important building blocks of the innovation engine that drives silicon valley.
From businessweek:
Although they represent just 12% of the U.S. population, they have started 52% of Silicon Valley’s tech companies and contributed to more than 25% of U.S. global patents. They make up 24% of science and engineering workers with bachelor’s degrees and 47% of those with PhDs.
Businessweek also mentions a survey, which tracked 1203 Indian and Chinese immigrants who had gone back home, that 30% of them had permanent US residency or were US citizens. A large proportion of respondents mentioned “better quality of life” even at lower dollar income level.
Such a population demographic would be in the top socio-educational 1% of the pyramid. In India, the IITs produce the best and the brightest and the most subsidised graduates. Up until recently, a large percentage of these graduates ended up in the US. I wonder if the donor governments in the brain drain game are doing anything to accelerate the reverse brain drain?
Incentives could include:
1. Tax rebates/holidays for individuals or for firms being set up by them
2. Software parks or Export promotion zones earmarked for such individuals
3. Funding tenures for those returning to academia after leaving tenured posts in the US
The sleeping giants have woken up – we need to poke them in the right directions.
On the back of a report by British Insurance firm Legal & General, ‘The Digital Criminal’… News.com.au had an interesting article last week about how Social Network users are likely to face higher Insurance Premiums on their homes. Why? Because of security risks posed by their open-ness on Social Networks.
Sounds a little crazy doesn’t it? but if I was an insurance firm, I’d probably be worried as well… about my clients telling everyone on FaceBook and Twitter (and any other Social Networks they are on), about their daily movements. Users are probably most exposed when it comes to posting the when, where and how long they’re traveling for…status updates.
It’s not just your friends that you should worry about, but it’s also burglars trawling through the sites to glean as much personal information as possible… with the intention of robbing their homes.
According to News.com.au it seems Australians are OK for now, and shouldn’t expect hikes in their home insurance… but how long before this happens in Australia or any other Asia Pacific country for that matter?
On the back of a report by British Insurance firm Legal & General, ‘The Digital Criminal’… News.com.au had an interesting article last week about how Social Network users are
likely to face higher Insurance Premiums on their homes. Why? Because of security risks posed by their open-ness on Social Networks.
Sounds a little crazy doesn’t it? but if I was an insurance firm, I’d probably be just as worried… about my clients telling everyone on FaceBook and Twitter (or more Asia focused ones like
Mixi,
CYWorld or QQ’s
QZone), about their daily movements. Users are probably most exposed when it comes to posting the when, where and how long they’re traveling for… status updates.
It’s not just the closely connected friends that users should worry about, but it’s also burglars trawling through the sites to glean as much personal information as possible… with the intention of robbing their homes.
According to News.com.au it seems Australians are OK for now, and shouldn’t expect hikes in their home insurance… but how long before this happens in Australia or any other Asia Pacific country for that matter?
Earlier this week I read a very interesting article about China Unicom being given an exclusive deal to develop the mobile communications infrastructure of the Hubei province, China. Something about a project this ambitious seemed a bit strange for a company whose net profit decreased by 45.28% year-on-year in the first six months of 2009.
The deal stipulated China Unicom spend no less than CNY 15 billion on the project over the next five years, with extra effort to be put towards the development of the 3G network. The local government has even pledged its support and will provide all the assistance needed to help complete the development. The big pay off? A very timely three year exclusive deal for China Unicom to carry the Apple iPhone in China, of course.
For some time there has been speculation whether or not the the carrier would land the iPhone, but today it was made official. The details are very limited at the moment with more to be unveiled in due course. For China Unicom it means a huge leap forward in a market dominated by China Mobile, for Apple this represents a huge opportunity for capital gain and a billion new potential customers to engage.
With the advancement of 3G infrastructure and the iPhone on the way, Apple and China Unicom look like a formidable team, one to watch in the coming months.
McDonalds have built different websites for different ethnicities. On the surface this idea seems somewhat logical; most brands have different sites for different regions/countries to varying degrees of success, so what makes this different? For one, the sites can be considered somewhat racially insensitive, featuring sections such as “Kimchee Mouse” for Korean sayings on http://www.myinspirasian.com and various stock photos of African Americans on http://www.365black.com that feel very impersonal.
I am interested to hear how others feel after visiting the sites. Personally I am left wondering: Why?
The Indian internet industry is growing faster than the regional average, albeit helped by a lower base to start with. There are a lot of success stories in the ecommerce space, but the leader of pack is an unlikely contender. It is the Indian railways - set up in 1853 and with all the trappings of a large government owned enterprise, it was off the block with a rail ticket booking website in 2003. This website now books over 200,000 tickets a day (out of a total of over 860,000 tickets daily) making it the largest e-commerce website in India, generating around $80mn of revenues every month. In India, it is ranked the number 1 website by visitor volumes as well in the travel space and rank 21 overall.
Indian railways made its API available last year to select licensed OTAs which has led to a lot of activity in this space. Leading online travel players were off the block quickly with Thomas Cook, Makemytrip and Cleartrip launching their train booking platforms based on the API last year. OTAs earn only a booking fee and a chance to cross-sell their products to the rail ticket buyers. These developments will increase the penetration of the internet even further.The customers benefits from some usability and feature based innovation. At the end of the day, the rail booking system seems like a win-win for all involved.
The Wall Street Journal has a story about AliBaba.com (undeniably, China’s biggest B2B online retailer…) shifting their classified listings site Koubei.com away from Yahoo China. According to the article AliBaba is going to be moving Koubei onto it’s Retail website TaoBao.com.
What does this say about Yahoo China’s ability to attracting relevant converting visitors?… is this just another step towards Yahoo’s global image as an Entertainment portal? Does this also mean that AliBaba will sell some of it’s shares in Yahoo and no longer be the controlling shareholder?
The Australian public have been told the Freeview service represents a major leap forward in free to air digital television in Australia, but do the specifications of Freeview compliance limit the functionality of co-branded products, essentially making them unusable? If the PVR support forums are anything to go by, the answer is an emphatic yes. The Topfield TRF-7150 forum, for example, was taken down a few weeks after its release- possibly due to some “constructive criticism”. With consumers moving towards online television solutions such as Boxee, Youtube, IPTV and Hulu to name a few, can Freeview really afford to be so picky?
The major drawbacks of the service include:
- No user-defined “Time skip” function
- Maximum 6X fast-forward
- No support for commercial skip
To be honest, not all of these functions are terribly important to the success of the units. It seems to be the way the Australian PVR manufacturers rushed the units to market that have put consumers off. From my own experience as a PVR owner, the existing firmware was used from previous models with all non compliant features removed. This is further highlighted in the user manual- the functions are still listed (global pre/post recording buffer settings, user defined skip times etc.,) but the entire menu on the system is missing. I can’t say this gives a sense of added value to the overall design.
Drawbacks aside, there are some positives. The free EPG, although not perfect, is a suitable alternative to paid services (IceTV) but still lacks the ability to series link, (Automatically record a tv series each time it airs). Freeview appear to have also relaxed some of their original specifications: With firmware upgrades, compatible units can now export recorded television to a portable USB drive. This seems to have come as a response to consumer feedback and shows that the service is still evolving.
With better internet service on the horizon for continental Australia we can only expect improved Internet TV services to come with it. Looking at figures coming out of North America, the PVR technology may be already on its way out, “70% of 18 to 34 year olds have watched TV on the web. Only 33% have viewed a show on DVR/TiVo”-http://socialnomics.net/. As we look to the future, it seems internet TV will continue to claim market share from the more restricted traditional model. Will the Freeview service change and adapt to the needs of consumers that can easily fulfil their entertainment needs online? I would like to think so, but I wont be holding my breath.