Google CEO Larry Page announced that the company’s social network, Google+, is off to a strong start.

Google’s infant social network experienced a recent growth spurt.

Google+ has more than 90 million registered users, Google CEO Larry Page said during the company’s earnings presentation on Thursday. That more than doubles the 40 million that Google reported in October.

“We’re very excited about the growth we’ve had, and we’ve certainly seen a tremendous number of people added every day,” Page said. “That notion of identity is a deep part of what we’re doing.”

Google launched its social network last June. Since then, it has added toolbars and other buttons on its websites to aggressively promote the service. Google stirred up controversy last week when it began giving prominent placement to Google+ pages in results delivered by its search engine.

On average, Google engineers have introduced a new feature related to Google+ every day since its launch, Page said.

It took Facebook about four years to reach 90 million users, according to Facebook’s public statements. After starting as a students-only service, Facebook now has 800 million people checking their accounts at least once a month, about 10 times that of Google+.

Analysts say Google+ was built specifically to challenge Facebook’s growing dominance on the Web. Google and Facebook generally do not collaborate. Another rival social network, Twitter, complained that the recent changes to Google search favor Google+ and harm Twitter’s ranking on results pages.

“We provide a lot of third-party data in search, and we would love to have more,” Page said in response to an analyst’s question. “Generally, companies have been walling that data off.”

People who register for Google+ tend to be dedicated users of Google’s search engine, e-mail and documents services. More than 60% of them use Google products every day, and 80% visit a Google site at least once a week, Page said.

Page, who posted his comments on his Google+ page, did not say how often or what percentage of users specifically visit its social networking service. “Engagement on Plus is also growing tremendously,” Page said. A Google spokesman declined to comment.

Source : Myjoyonline

Customer spending on a website can be cut in half by a spelling mistake, says an online businessman

Charles Duncombe says an analysis of website figures shows a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half.

Mr Duncombe says when recruiting staff he has been “shocked at the poor quality of written English”.

Sales figures suggest misspellings put off consumers who could have concerns about a website’s credibility, he says.

The concerns were echoed by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), whose head of education and skills warned that too many employers were having to invest in remedial literacy lessons for their staff.

Written word

Mr Duncombe, who runs travel, mobile phones and clothing websites, says that poor spelling is a serious problem for the online economy.

“Often these cutting-edge companies depend upon old-fashioned skills,” says Mr Duncombe.

Charles Duncombe says poor spelling is costing the economy millions

And he says that the struggle to recruit enough staff who can spell means that this sector of the economy is not as efficient as it might be.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics published last month showed internet sales in the UK running at £527m per week.

“I know that industry bemoaning the education system is nothing new but it is becoming more and more of a problem with more companies going online.

“This is because when you sell or communicate on the internet, 99% of the time it is done by the written word.”

Mr Duncombe says that it is possible to identify the specific impact of a spelling mistake on sales.

He says he measured the revenue per visitor to the tightsplease.co.uk website and found that the revenue was twice as high after an error was corrected.

“If you project this across the whole of internet retail, then millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes,” says Mr Duncombe, director of the Just Say Please group.

Spelling is important to the credibility of a website, he says. When there are underlying concerns about fraud and safety, then getting the basics right is essential.

“You get about six seconds to capture the attention on a website.”

When recruiting school and university leavers, Mr Duncombe says too many applications have contained spelling mistakes or poor grammar.

“Some people even used text speak in their cover letter,” he says.

Even among those who appeared to be able to spell, he says that a written test, without access to a computer spellchecker, revealed further problems with spelling.

William Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, says that in some informal parts of the internet, such as Facebook, there is greater tolerance towards spelling and grammar.

“However, there are other aspects, such as a home page or commercial offering that are not among friends and which raise concerns over trust and credibility,” said Professor Dutton.

“In these instances, when a consumer might be wary of spam or phishing efforts, a misspelt word could be a killer issue.”

James Fothergill, the CBI’s head of education and skills, said: “Our recent research shows that 42% of employers are not satisfied with the basic reading and writing skills of school and college leavers and almost half have had to invest in remedial training to get their staff’s skills up to scratch.

“This situation is a real concern and the government must make the improvement of basic literacy and numeracy skills of all school and college leavers a top priority.”

Source: BBC

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Bing and Facebook are among the companies switching-on IPv6 versions of their websites for the one day trial.

The technology is gradually being introduced because the world is running out of older IPv4 addresses as more devices come online.

Companies and home users may need new networking equipment, however the transition is likely to take years.

World IPv6 day is partly a technical exercise by internet companies to see how the technology works, and partly an awareness-raising initiative.

For the small percentage of users already set up to access IPv6, they will be able to connect through the usual URLs – such as Google.com or Yahoo.com.

Behind the scenes, their browsers will be pointed to the new, much longer IP address.

New equipment

Groups involved in IPv6 day say that everyone will have to make the change eventually, but users should not worry at this stage if they are not switched over.

“This is not a year 2000 thing. Planes are not going to start falling out of the sky,” said Philip Sheldrake, a board member at non-profit group 6UK, which is helping to promote the system.

“The web will continue to work, but future growth would be stymied. It is just like when we used up the phone numbers in London.”

For users with an ordinary domestic internet connection, the changeover may involve upgrading their hardware.

“A lot of routers at the moment are already capable of supporting IPv6. What they need is a firmware update,” explained Richard Fletcher, chief operating officer at Plusnet, a UK internet service provider (ISP)

“ISPs should ship new routers or offer those updates. We are making sure all our fibre routers are ready for IPv6.”

Mr Fletcher said that the long term nature of the changeover meant that customers of most ISPs would receive compatible equipment through the natural cycle of upgrades.

The business end

Becoming IPv6 compatible is a slightly more complicated task for corporate internet users.

Bringing their systems up to standard will typically involve investing in and installing new networking systems.

As with home users, for many this will form part of the normal cycle of upgrading and replacing.

However, the lack of any firm deadline, combined with the hefty price tag, means that some are dragging their heels.

“Corporates are probably quite far behind,” said Sebastien Lahtinen from Thinkbroadband.com.

“They are trying to put off the expense and there are a lot of technologies that they can use to do that.”

However, Mr Lahtinen said that the leaders of those businesses should realise that this change was going to happen and that they needed to make the investment.

Even though IPv4 will continue working for at least the next decade, there is value in changing early according to Philip Sheldrake.

“You have to make the transition. It is better to do that sooner than later because it demonstrates that you are a modern, well organised company that is visible on the modern infrastructure of the internet.”

Source: BBC

Ghana ICT & Telecom Summit 2011 is designed to explore the critical business, service and technology strategies needed to ensure market competitiveness and exploit emerging opportunities for increased growth and profitability in Ghana ICT market.

Keynote presentations, dialogues and roundtable discussions will feature C-level executives from the major operators in Ghana including Ministry of Communication, National Communication Authority of Ghana, Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES), and Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC), as well as government and regulatory authorities, influential institutes and associations. Selected operators from overseas markets will share first-hand experiences and case studies relevant to Ghana’s broadband development aspirations.

Ghana ICT and Telecom Summit

He said Ghanaians were now known to be involving in social networking at the expense of productivity.

Prof Quaynor made the call at the first quarterly meeting of ISOC Ghana Chapter on the theme, “Social Networks Benefits and Challenges” in Accra on Friday.

He said there should be a national policy to regulate the participation of users of social networking sites.

“Users should be made to regulate the content messages they put on the sites,” he said.

He cautioned the users of those networking sites to be careful with information they posted on the walls, because it was in the public domain and so anything being put there should be acceptable to the public.

Prof Quaynor noted that there were numerous benefits that could be derived from social networking but that it would depend on the individual’s use.

He urged the youth to use the social tool to network for opportunities rather than mere friendship and communication.

“Parents should not leave their children to the mercy of the internet because the internet could be destructive and productive as well,” he added.

Mr Eric Akumiah, the former General Secretary of ISOC Ghana, in a presentation on the topic: “Emerging Issues: impact of Social Networks”, said Social networks were the fourth most popular online activity ahead of personal emails in the world.

He said apart from using it for communication purposes, the social networks were not having any positive impact on the users in the country at the moment.

He said these sites could be used effectively to develop so many aspects of the national life.

Mr Akumiah urged the users, especially the younger ones, to use face book particularly responsibly, since Twitter and Linkedin were not too common in the country.

He also advocated for content policy to be introduced to regulate some of the activities of the users.

Giving the example of Brazil, Mr Akumiah said authorities in that country had to use legislation and regulatory framework to check the activities of users as well as site providers.

Participants at the meeting expressed views on the privacy of users and also how some of the users abused the sites for unprofitable gains.

GNA

Safaricom’s CEO Bob Collymore on network quality, customer care, LTE and local content

A price war in Kenya has seen mobile calling rates drop from KS8 to KS3 a minute and then down to KS1 per minute from Airtel, although it later described this low rate as a promotional offer rather than a new tariff. The man in the hot seat is Safaricom’s new CEO Bob Collymore as the company currently has the lion’s share of the market:

”We have 77% of the market by subscriber numbers. Our ARPU is higher than anyone else’s. But 77% market share is not sustainable. We do have “significant market power” but we feel that’s because everyone else was very incompetent. There was no consistent management at the number two operator. We’re OK with losing market share (faced with unrealistically low rates) and focusing on Nairobi and high-income communities. The people in remote districts are receiving calls (more than making them). If rates decline, why should I continue to do that?”

Collymore would like to see the Government establish a floor price below which rates could not be reduced, something he says has been done in DRC and Sri Lanka:”The alternative is to tax it (calls at low rates) but a tax doesn’t address other issues (like the need to invest). Faced with these challenges, Collymore says it would be necessary to adopt a different business model, with a focus on managed services:”We wouldn’t employ graduates in call centres. Currently we try and avoid outsourcing.” This is a clear message to Government along with his warning about potential loss of shareholder value.

With both the price war and other issues, Collymore has worked the media extensively, seeking to make “full disclosure” so that they don’t become things that come back to haunt him further down the track. He is a much more emollient personality than his predecessor and must know that he has some significant mountains to climb.

On Safaricom’s notoriously congested network:”In my interactions with customers, it’s clear that the quality of the network is a concern to a lot of customers. People tell you things if you’re listening.We have increased our traffic by a lot. Our traffic in week 50 of 2010 was 100% higher than the same week in 2009”.

And on the data side of the network?:”We are not as vulnerable as on the voice side. It’s not bad and there are not as many complaints about pricing and coverage. My 3,000 followers on Twitter would tell me if there were.”

On Safaricom’s less than responsive customer care:”Access to call centres could have been controlled better. Typically, we have 500,000 call attempts per day but only a capacity for 100,000 calls so you’ve only got a 1 in 5 chance of getting through. However, that’s down from a peak of 800,000 a day.”

Much of this demand is generated by Safaricom either not explaining things well enough to customers or tariffs being too complicated. So Collymore has simplified the voice tariff structure reducing it to post-paid and paid (with on-net and off-net) down from 20 more different tariffs:”There were too many tariffs. It’s confusing across the industry. We need to tell customers the truth.”

Despite the price war pressures, Safaricom is still acting as one of the main innovators in the Kenyan market. Household Internet and Triple Play?:”It’s on the radar. It’s inevitable we’ll have to do it as it’s what the customers want.” LTE?:”Our tests are fine but it’s 12-18 months away as the devices are not yet available. But we’ll be ready to go and first in.”

M-Pesa?:” We have 14 million customers and 2.5 million transactions a day worth KS1.3 billion a day. There’s more competition in the space but we keep adding new, exclusive functionalities. It needs to be a lot more ubiquitous.” So will Safaricom interconnect M-Pesa with other M-Money services?:”It’s not going to happen.” But you sense from the twinkle in his eye that he knows it will.

Building a national fibre network is one area it won’t be going into:”It’s too late to do it. We should have done it five years ago. It’s currently not very reliable. There were disruptive fibre cuts when we announced our half year results and the timing of these cuts was suspicious. We’ve built solid, interdependent relationships with KPLC, Telkom Kenya and JTL and are getting competitive pricing.”

So will retail Internet prices continue to come down?:”Yes, they will continue to come down. The more people using it, the cheaper it will be.” So what’s the total potential market?:”I’d like to see every Kenyan child connected to the information highway. It needs to be used to drive social development and I have the passion to drive that.”

Is Safaricom in the content business and why are the income splits so disadvantageous to developers?:”I’ve followed the debates on KICTANET where we’re accused of profiteering. We’re charging 70%. Why does the developer think he needs an immediate profit? We’re not about to change our business model.

“We want to develop local content and have put time and effort into it with local music where effectively we run a record label. We have an exclusive deal with artists but we will develop them. We will do other forms of content but we knew music was important to Bharti and thought it was the right thing to do. It’s small in revenue terms and we’re not doing it to make tons of cash, it’s about creating sustainability. Musicians have to make a living” So what about the rumours that Safaricom will open an app store?:”We’re not going to do it just yet but we will do it. Kenya is technology hungry.”
To see an interview on our Web TV channel covering these and other topics, click here:

Phillipe Luxcey, CEO of Orange Uganda on its 3G roll-out, LTE and Mobile TV

As Uganda’s latest challenge Orange Uganda has its work cut out. In terms of public profile, its outdoor advertising seems to be everywhere in Kampala but it has yet to win the “hearts and minds” of voice customers. Like Safaricom in Kenya, it is seeking to get to grips with a price war, this time initiated by Warid’s new owners, Essar.

Phillipe Luxcey cannot believe the price war will bring any good:”It’s crazy, really crazy. There are offers like getting free calls for 24 hours when you load UGS1000 of airtime. Offnet calls are down to UGS3.00 a second and the interconnect rate is UGS131 a minute. Add to that, the fact that you pay 30% taxes to the Government on revenues. We don’t have enough margin to cover our network costs. All off-net calls are losing money. Warid started it but Airtel followed.

“However, despite the low prices, their market share is not shifting very much. Operators are too confident they will kill the others (their competitors) and also claim that it will increase traffic.”

So how many subscribers does Orange currently have?:”After three months in the market we have 600,000 subscribers but it’s going up slowly. But we only count living subscribers.”

Orange has had more success with its data side:”We were the first to launch HSDPA and UPA and did so successfully from day one. We have the widest 3G coverage with 230 3G base stations. We currently have 50,000 subscribers but again this is still growing and we have the best quality, fastest network. We see more and more 3G phones in the market and lot of these are from the grey market. You can now get touch screen smartphones for around US$100 or less. We are also planning to do WiMAX but not on a large scale. We offer a version of the Orange Livebox product called Flybox which works with 3G.”

Most Internet use is Facebook, BitTorrent, Yahoo and You Tube. Google has created a local caching server but all is not well in the short-term:”We used to be connected to the Google Global Cache and that used to be fast but now it’s a nightmare. We’re organizing a meeting with Google to say we’re not happy. Customers are complaining and utl (the former incumbent) doesn’t know how to manage the cache server.”

So will Orange be introducing LTE in Uganda?:”We have some trial networks in Europe but we think this year it’s too early but will study the case next year. We have to stabilize the equipment.” Mobile TV?:”We will share a platform with Kenya to deliver it using 3G. It needs either time or event pricing with special rates to do different things to be successful.” Orange Money?:”We don’t have it yet but it will launch shortly. The future of mobile money is inter-operability.”

Source: Balancingact-Africa

The ITU says the current bad situation of network congestion which subscribers are experiencing, will continue and eventually get worse.

According to the ITU, smartphones such as Iphone, Android, Galaxy Tab among others, which are set to rise from the current global estimate of 500 million handsets in use, to almost two billion by 2015, are consuming an average of five times data capacity more than users of ordinary mobile phones and hence the need for governments to show enough commitment to the growth of mobile broadband.

“Governments need to take urgent action now to support mobile broadband growth by avoiding network bottlenecks”, says Dr Hamadoun Touré, Secretary-General of the International Telecommunications Union in a press release dated February 11, 2011.

According to Dr Touré, this will accelerate fibre roll-out and greater spectrum availability.

According to the ITU, even though mobile operators have invested billions of dollars to upgrade and improve the capacity and performance of their networks, some mobile phone users are still frustrated by the chronic problems of network unavailability.

The ITU boss said countries need to have a National Broadband Plan which will promote enough and extra spectrum to support the growing number of data-intensive applications.

“Robust National Broadband Plans that promote extra spectrum and the faster roll-out of the fibre networks which are essential to mobile backhaul are vital to support the growing number of data-intensive applications,” he said.

An ITU analysis shows that only 98 countries have National Broadband Plans in place but this number is set to increase in the coming years.

In 2010, ITU inaugurated a Commission known as the Broadband Commission for Digital Development to highlight the need for governments worldwide to promote broadband as a key development tool and push broadband network roll-out more proactively.

The Commission, which is co-chaired by President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Carlos Slim Helú, Honorary Lifetime Chairman of Grupo Carso recommended in its report which was delivered to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York September 2010, that world leaders should focus on building a ‘virtuous broadband development dynamic’, and urged governments not to limit market entry, not to tax broadband and related services too heavily, and to ensure ample availability of spectrum to support mobile broadband growth.

Mobile phones are particularly significant and popular in developing countries, where land lines and traditional communications infrastructure can be unreliable or non-existent.

In Ghana for instance about 75% of the country’s 23 million population are mobile phone subscribers, the national regulator, the National Communication Authority (NCA) has said.

According to statistics from the NCA, the total number of mobile phone subscribers in Ghana is over 17.4 million at December end 2010. It puts the figure specifically at 17, 436, 949 subscribers which is an increase of 2.2% from the November figure of 17,062,917. And the 2.2% increase in subscriber rates in the month of December is the highest increase in the entire year 2010.

And Ghanaian subscribers are familiar with network congestion issues.

By Emmanuel K. Dogbevi & Ekow Quandzie

Facebook wants users to connect with website developers as well as friends

Facebook appears to have U-turned on plans to allow external websites to see users’ addresses and mobile phone numbers.

Security experts pointed out that such a system would be ripe for exploitation from rogue app developers.

The feature has been put on “temporary hold”, the social networking firm said in its developers blog.

It said it needed to find a more robust way to make sure users know what information they are handing over.

“Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data. We agree, and are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so,” the firm said.

The updates would be launched “in the next few weeks”, it added and the feature will be suspended in the meanwhile.
Bad guys

Facebook’s volte-face is likely to be a case of ‘once bitten, twice shy’.

Last year, wide-ranging changes to privacy settings resulted in a loud chorus of disapproval from both users and privacy experts, including the Canadian privacy commissioner, Jenny Stoddart.

The firm was forced to radically simply privacy settings. Ms Stoddart said at the time that the social network had “vastly improved” the sharing of personal information with third-party developers.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has made no secret of his desire to open up the relationship between the network’s 500 million members and the wider internet.

Having access to mobile phone numbers and physical addresses could have real benefits for users, the firm said in its blog.

“You could, for example, easily share your address and mobile phone with a shopping site to streamline the checkout process, or sign up for the up-to-the-minute alerts on special deals directly to your mobile phone.”

But Graham Cluley, a senior analyst at security firm Sophos, said it would also be very easy for rogue developers to jump on the bandwagon.

“You can imagine, for instance, that bad guys could set up a rogue app that collects mobile phone numbers and then uses that information for the purposes of SMS spamming or sells on the data to cold-calling companies,” he said.
Not required

Facebook has introduced a dashboard which allows users to decide what level of access to grant various apps they sign up for.

It also said that users would have to grant permission to any apps or sites that had wanted to access people’s home address or phone number.

But many people still click ‘accept’ far too quickly, said Mr Cluley.

“Facebook does alert users to the fact that this information will be shared with others, warning prompts and other pop-ups are so frequent that they are often ignored,” he said.

“The best solution would be to permit users to provide this data, via a dropdown or checkbox, when they choose to add an application, but it should not be required,” he added.

Source: BBC

In almost every country connected to an international fibre connection in Africa in 2010, the speed of the connection increased and prices fell. Our own personal experiences from travelling extensively across the continent confirm what we know from the data that comes to us from other sources. Ookla’s latest Net Index statistics which shows which ISPs in South Africa give the best broadband speeds gives the clearest sense of this shift. According to the results from 184,442 Speedtest.net tests between 14 November 2010 and 13 December 2010, Cell C is the best service provider with an average download speed of 4.62 Mbps. Web Africa is second with 2.81 Mbps and Telkom third with 2.54 Mbps. Mybroadband.co.za has published a table with the top ISPs. To access it click here 2-4 mbps download speeds? Who would have believed that five years ago?

Almost as interestingly, Main One has been running a test site offering free, high capacity bandwidth in the Palms Shopping Mall in Lagos’ Lekki district which is operational until 9 January. According to a blog by Olunyi Ajao who went to try it:” I was more excited with the potential speed, than it being a freebie. You see, Main One is a submarine cable system that carries gigabytes of data from Europe to West Africa and so, I expected their connectivity (without going through MTN or another ISPs that use them) to be an extreme experience. In plain English, Main One is an ISP’s ISP. So, I went to the mall with very high expectations”.

“The speed met my expectations. I commenced downloading all the stuff I had always differed…. I was able to download content at a steady speed of 2 MB/s (with two other downloads in progress) on Main One’s wi-fi but the maximum (unsteady) speed I can get downloading via MTN’s 3.5G service is about 0.48 MB/s”.

“Just to be triple sure, I initiated a video call to a friend in Malaysia via Skype. Though we could not talk much due to the noise around me, he confirmed the video was very smooth. Youtube videos (including HD versions) streamed smoothly for me today”.

His main irritation?:”My Blackberry and (later) my Nokia 5800 XM could not detect MainOne’s wi-fi signal. Consequently, I could not experience the broadband on my smartphones. I was initially able to download some a podcast on the 5800 XM but that started failing after I upgraded the Operating System on the smartphone.The connection went off every hour or there about, and I had to always reconnect via my browser. I reckon this was their lame method of enforcing their “2 hour limit”.

Nevertheless, he concluded “the speed was worth the trouble”. And his not too startling conclusion?:”The ISPs necessarily need to invest in better last mile technologies or improve their existing networks so consumers can enjoy the real broadband that is possible via MainOne. I know of Mobitel‘s 4G and Swift‘s WiMax but both have limited coverage”. For the full blog click here

So now the moment has arrived for broadband Internet in Africa, all operators need to get focused on selling it to individual consumers. For if they don’t, there will be an awful lot of unsold international bandwidth on their balance sheets for years to come.

Currently, there are three broad types of operators who are in this market: firstly, Africa’s traditional independent ISPs who have lived largely on corporate subscribers and a small number of wealthy individual; the mobile operators who have come in and expanded the market with mobile Internet; and alternative insurgent challengers like Wananchi with its Zuku brand. The African consumer broadband market is still just being born so no-one has yet got a full grip on the market. Consumers are fickle and go where price and bandwidth seem most advantageous.

In the interests of creating a strong and vibrant African broadband consumer market, here are our seven tips on making this market work:

1. Be honest and straightforward

When it’s not price wars (which are easy to understand), Africa’s operators seem to offer a baffling array of different tactical marketing offers. Using the techniques pioneered in selling voice, mobile operators offer their customers short-term, tactical financial advantage. The result? Customers game the system about as thoroughly as consumers anywhere in the world. If it’s cheaper at 3pm in the morning, they’ll be awake and using it. Privately, most operators will admit that this is no way to change their market share but seem obsessed by the monthly percentage changes tactical marketing brings.

Operators have also sought to “slice-and-dice” the sale of their bandwidth capacity in so many different ways that it’s hard to know what you’re buying. How many Internet consumers know what a 4 Mb download capacity means? How do you know what you’re getting during a hour’s worth of Internet? What does unlimited subject to a “fair use” clause actually mean? Cyber-café and WiFi hot-spot operators continue to dilute bandwidth even though a great deal more is available at cheaper prices: old habits die hard. Take your profit while you can seems to be the unspoken mantra.

The operator that is consistently honest and straightforward has every chance of winning this game. If you say to your customers, you have two choices, price and bandwidth speed: which do you want? For those budget customers, set a much higher provisioning (2 mbps as a minimum) but clearly indicate that this speed may be considerably less during busy periods. For those who need higher speeds, charge more and give them a demonstrably better service (perhaps 8 mbps as a minimum). Set up bandwidth speed comparison tests internally first and then allow your customers to use them. Use the information gathered to drive out bottlenecks at the national and local level.

For the alternative insurgent challenger, there’s the perfect opportunity to arrive as “Honest John” amongst those who seem to speak less than straightforwardly. The challenger can be clear about what it’s offering and that it’s seeking to get all of its customers the best deal possible.

2. Service – Making things work

The mass broadband market in Africa needs to work on a “plug-and-play” basis. The household consumer needs to be able to open the box, plug in a limited number of cables and then follow the on-screen prompts to get things working. Household broadband needs to be cheap, well-supported and reliable equipment so that CPE costs are kept as low as possible.

When things do go wrong, companies need to have service back-up that can deal quickly and efficiently with complaints. Companies need to analyse where breakdowns and other complaints occur and figure out ways of dealing with them as quickly as possible. They need to encourage user forums where customers can compare notes and find ways of overcoming some of the issues themselves.

Two contradictory things are in play: firstly, in order to deliver the best broadband service at the cheapest price, it has to “get-up-and-go” at the cheapest possibly cost; secondly, consumers will become more demanding as speeds and performance increase. On the second, the absence of bandwidth suddenly seems like a “life-and-death” issue, not some minor irritation to be taken with the usual African patience when almost anything doesn’t work. So how to resolve these contradictory pressures? Educate users to pay for service contracts. At the bottom end, the amount charged will be very small but at the top end it will be much larger and contain time-based response clauses. Within this framework, be absolutely rigorous about providing friendly and response service.

3. Branding, character and use

When they took off, African mobile operators were selling aspiration. If you had a phone, you were somebody. Back then, it was all new but now there’s not an African city that doesn’t have billboards showing desirable young models smirking their way through conversations on mobile phones. With the introduction of mobile Internet, these same aspirational images have been simply transferred over. Can you tell the difference between the images used? OK, so the colours and the name are different but what else?

Africa’s broadband Internet brands desperately need some “character”, something that will mark them out and make their customers smile and remember them. They need to be able to convey a different version of the aspiration message. There won’t be necessarily the same level of Internet users so the aspiration message has to be more finely honed.

All the soft, aspirational branding constructs have to translate into “uses”. 99% of potential African broadband customers will not care about the technical attributes of the service, only what it can do for them. The young professional will want to put his social life together on Facebook. The parent will want to know that he or she can get education materials that will help their children in school. Grandmas will want to know how to access family photos on Flikr and use Skype to talk to their children. The taxi driver will want access to maps showing street locations, and so on. Too little broadband marketing translates into both selling these uses and identifying new uses to sell.

4. Encouraging maximum use by offering maximum capacity

The African operator that thinks it’s really smart starts by offering a broadband service at the highest price it can get away with and then slowly cascades the price down to a much level. The problem with this approach is that it fails to grasp that the overall market objective must be to create the largest possible “critical mass” of Internet users as quickly as possible.

Unlike voice, where everyone wants to have access, selling broadband Internet is a much harder sell. It relies on getting the mass of current users (the young, educated) to persuade others (the old, educated; staff like child-minders and drivers) to use it as a primary means of communication.

The strongest way to promote the largest “critical mass” is not by dealing it out in “penny packets” but by offering the maximum available capacity at prices that will encourage young and old to do the kind of things on the Internet that people do the world over: things like social media (Facebook, Facebook and Facebook), Twitter and You Tube are giving some idea of where things can go. If there were 1.7 million Nigerian Facebook users in August 2010, imagine how many more there will be in a year’s time.

5. Expanding the potential market

SMS is really just e-mail in budget clothes, the only difference is the character count and the ease of tee-ing up the browser. SMS-to-e-mail workarounds from companies like ForgetMeNot Africa show the potential for transition to full e-mail. And those that currently use SMS with some facility are all potentially on an upward escalator to a wider range of Internet services.

If you imagine the current handset market as a pyramid, the broad base of the pyramid is made up of extremely basic handsets with very little functionality. At the top of the pyramid is a tiny sharp point representing smartphones and the next band down is feature-rich phones. In most markets, these will be barely 5% of the overall market.

To expand the potential market, you need to expand the number of devices that can handle interesting Internet applications. You need to be offering ever-cheaper smartphones with the prize going to the first to offer one for US$50. You need to offer even cheaper feature-rich phones (with a i-Phone-style interface from someone like Snaptu) to the less well-off at below this price point. In this way, the existing basic phones in the market will shrink and the number of customers with Internet access will increase.

6. Building the device pyramid

The mobile is Africa’s tech device of choice and the one that reaches the maximum number of customers. But building an African broadband market requires operators to understand another pyramid.

This second pyramid is about all the tech devices an African broadband consumer might own. The broad base of this pyramid is composed of feature-rich phones, followed further up by smart-phones. Then there are net-books, followed by tablets (like iPad) and at the top of the pyramid lap-tops and PCs.

The challenge with this device ownership pyramid is the same as for the handset pyramid. Mobile phones that can access the Internet are a great thing but they have their limitations. Therefore how do you get all those people who might have access to a PC at work and/or have a feature rich phone to get some sort of wider PC usability? (The main barrier to greater use is size and use of keyboard functions but there are other issues.) Somewhere around the netbook/tablet area is a device that long-term may cost between US$75-100 that will broaden this part of the pyramid and give PC-like abilities to a much wider number of broadband users.

For the ambition must be to create a world in which there is the ability to do things using broadband almost wherever you are: the bar, the home, the hotel and the school.

7. Spreading everyday usage

The lesson of the success of Facebook is obvious in hindsight. The average African professional organizing his or her social life on a Friday afternoon is the “human equivalent of Facebook”. So the insight is really a very obvious one for operators. They need to introduce apps and services that drive everyday use. These might come from elsewhere but in time there will be local variants. In places like India and Brazil, the local variants stamped out their own ground by not being in English. Watch for local variants and see whether they can be marketed successfully to create new, local social media.

Think about the insights from something like M-Pesa, again so clear in hindsight but not when they were struggling to gain traction. It took something that was a major barrier (carrying and pay most things in cash) and challenged engrained habits. So look at other potential areas. What about finding your way round Africa’s cities? How many times have I witnessed the giving of directions that are of the “go past the third flower seller on the right” variety? Of course, there’s Google but how many people will use it? So somewhere between the “human Google” (phoning a friend or fellow taxi driver) and Google sits a much simpler app to help people find where they’re going.

Operators need to keep coming up with ways to weave the Internet into everyday use so that it becomes as natural as….well, picking up your mobile to make a call.

Source: balancingact-africa

Ed Vaizey: wants to discuss changing the way pornography enters private homes.

Internet service providers are to be asked by the government to tighten up on website pornography to try to combat the early sexualisation of children.

Ministers believe broadband providers should consider automatically blocking sex sites, with individuals being required to opt in to receive them, rather than opt out and use the available computer parental controls.

Ed Vaizey, the communications minister, is to meet internet providers, including BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk, “in the near future” to discuss changing the way pornography enters private homes, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills confirmed. The move is designed to protect children from being exposed to pornography on the net.

“This is a very serious matter. I think it is very important that it’s the ISPs that some up with solutions to protect children,” Vaizey told the Sunday Times.

“I’m hoping they will get their acts together so that we don’t have to legislate, but we are keeping an eye on the situation and we will have a new communications bill in the next couple of years.”

The action follows the success of moves by most British internet providers to prevent people inadvertently viewing child pornography websites.

Now ministers want to see adult pornography controlled with similar technology, with sites blocked unless people specifically request access to them. Internet providers had said implementing the scheme would be technically difficult and cost too much. However, some now seem willing to implement the scheme voluntarily.

Andrew Heaney, TalkTalk’s executive director of strategy and regulation, told the newspaper: “Our objective was not to do what the politicians want us but to do what is right for our customers. If other companies aren’t going to do it of their own volition, then maybe they should be leant on.”

Virgin Media said that it had already implemented the technology on its mobile service, but said that parents can control what their children see at home and online. A BT spokesman said they had a “clean feed” system to stop access to illegal sites.

In a parliamentary debate last month, Claire Perry, a Conservative MP who has campaigned for tighter controls, said that 60% of nine- to 19-year-olds had found porn online, while only 15% of computer-literate parents knew how to use filters to block access to certain sites.

The MP said six companies – BT, Virgin, Talk Talk, BSkyB, Orange and 02 – streamed the internet to 90% of homes in the UK. Perry called on the government to put pressure on those companies to install default measures to stop children accessing pornography online.

Source: The Guardian