Old battle, new players

So, the mobile phone companies are getting themselves enlisted in the Stock Market. Let’s see how well they do? If everything is set then we can expect GP & AKTEL offering their first IPO by June 2008. I wonder how the investors will react to their IPO. Will we notice some dramatic movements as we have experienced during the IPO offering by BRAC BANK LTD? Or will it just be like an ordinary company offering? Let’s wait and see.

If you call me, I will ad you as GP will pay me

“Caller tune Advertisement” is all about publishing advertisements as caller tunes on user’s mobile phones, so that the callers will listen to the advertisement until the user picks up the phone. In a nutshell, this idea is all about the mobile users trading their ringtone airtime for monetary benefits, which can be used to publish advertisement. This concept is all about publishing advertisement as a replacement for caller tunes or in-conjunction with caller tunes in user’s mobile phones. In return, users will get monetary benefits like free recharge coupons, discounts in bills, partial reimbursement of bills, free talk minutes, free value adds like free SMS, etc. These kinds of freebies will attract users to allow users to give up their ring tone airtime to place advertisement. Gaining publisher base will be a challenge. A good publisher base means a huge market potential. The success of this advertisement medium will be determined by the publisher base. This new business idea is patent-pending and its owner, TarryOnline is looking for interested investors.

Time to say adieu to welcome tunes of our mobile phone operators? How about applying your loyal customers to be launchpads of your product and service publicity? Next time when I get a call from people, I will make sure I pick up the phone late enough so that the caller listens to GrameenPhone's (in my case) 'exciting attractive offers' advert and then I will say a happy 'Hello' knowing that GP will give me free airtime worth the duration of the caller tune ad played with my phone number. I would love not to pay 30 Tk. per month as my welcome tunes fees, and I would love to get paid instead to allow GP to use MY caller tune/time. Sounds good?

Hey, mobile phone operators - listen up!

Mobile phone is a very important tool of our daily life. It is either like a friend or like a partner. But sometimes this friend just cracks our bones. Most of us use mobile phones for some good reasons while a few use the phones to bug around. They either disturb people by sending offensive SMSs/calls or giving missed call. Even some maniacs intentionally do such activities together to a target. It is really a painful situation. In this case, we can complain to the operators or the authorities. Nevertheless this process will take sometime; moreover it may not work out sometimes.

Whilst time is money as well as we people lead busy life, therefore we cannot wait up for reviewing the complaints by the mobile phone operators/authorities and hang up until they take necessary action. Now the question is who else can set us free from this situation? Of course mobile phone operators can save us from this problem. However to do so, they need some modification between their servers and software to add such service: “create ignore list”. The thing is that, this service will let the people create a blacklist. And after that the blacklisted number(s) can never be able to disturb that person any longer. Hey, mobile phone operators - listen up! We people are waiting for this service to come up in our hands.

Visualisation: Go with the flow

Visualisation: Data from mobile-phone networks can create maps that show how people are moving around

FROM THE ECONOMIST

PDF of article here (courtesy of MIT SENSEable City Labs)

WHERE is everybody? Being able to monitor the flow of people around a city in real time would provide invaluable information to urban planners, transport authorities, traffic engineers and even some businesses. Bus timetables could take account of hourly or daily variations; advertisers would be able to tell which billboards were most valuable. Such information can be collected via traffic helicopters, roadside cameras, police patrols, sensors embedded in roads, tracking units in vehicles, data from public-transport turnstiles and surveys. But the resulting picture is often inadequate, expensive—or both.

A new scheme devised by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) takes a different approach. Given that almost everyone in the developed world now carries a mobile phone, why not use the data from mobile-phone networks? Such networks have to keep track of where subscribers are, as they roam from cell to cell, in order to route calls and text messages. The MIT researchers have been testing the idea using anonymised data from two European operators, Telecom Italia and Mobilkom Austria, to analyse where mobile phones (and therefore people) are at any given moment.

The results take the form of luminous maps adorned with moving and colour-coded arrows, dots and patches of light that indicate the speed and population density of people in the city in question, with an accuracy down to a dozen or so metres. “You see how the city is pulsating,” says Carlo Ratti, who is leading the research as head of the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT.

The new approach has a number of advantages over other methods. Sensors embedded in streets can accurately count vehicles, for example, but cannot count passengers or detect pedestrians and cyclists. Sensors and cameras also fail to provide “origin-destination” (OD) statistics—jargon for information about where people are travelling to and from, and how long their journeys take. Such information is usually collated using surveys, which are very expensive to carry out. Using data from phone networks promises to be much cheaper. “It's pretty simple: you just need a digital map and you show the data,” says Hannes Ametsreiter, head of marketing at Mobilkom Austria, which is working with MIT to map the city of Graz. “This could be an opportunity for us.”

With markets becoming saturated and mobile operators' revenue-growth slowing—there are already 112 mobile devices for every 100 Austrians, for example—providing information about travel patterns could be a lucrative opportunity for telecoms firms. One potential customer is Seat, a firm based in Milan that provides real-time traffic maps that drivers keen to avoid traffic jams can call up on the internet before setting out. The company gathers information from roadside cameras, Italy's national toll-road operator, the police, and satellite-tracking systems installed in more than 220,000 vehicles across Italy. All this costs a lot of money and provides only a partial picture of the state of Italy's roads.

Paolo Cellini, the head of Seat's internet division, says using data from mobile-phone networks instead would dramatically improve the service. He estimates that within two years Seat will sell subscriptions to onboard navigation systems updated in real time with information on traffic levels and average speeds. After that, Seat will provide traffic forecasts produced by correlating past traffic patterns with variables including weather, the date and nearby events, says Mr Cellini. He expects to pay telecoms operators more than €30m ($40m) a year for access to their location data.

City-planning departments offer another important market, says Ricky Burdett, architecture adviser to the Mayor of London and the director of last year's Venice Architecture Biennale, at which MIT displayed a prototype real-time map of Rome (see picture). London is preparing for a projected additional 1m inhabitants in the next 15 years, and people-movement maps “will be invaluable” in planning housing and transport. Politicians will take to the technology because it can provide solid statistical backing for politically unpopular planning decisions.

Follow the people

It is not hard to think of other uses for the technology. Estate agents, for example, might be better able to appraise commercial property by determining how many pedestrians pass a given storefront. Advertisers would appreciate knowing how many eyeballs pass a hoarding and how those numbers vary between weekdays and weekends. And tourism authorities might change their promotional campaigns abroad after noting which nationalities (identified by their home networks) spend most time in town and which prefer to lie on the beach.

“People-movement maps could lead to improvements in transport planning, traffic-light placement, signage and road layout.”

Rome will probably be the first city with commercially available people-movement maps. When MIT presented its project, called Real Time Rome, to Telecom Italia last year, the top management at the Italian telecoms giant gave the scheme its backing. So did Rome's mayor, Walter Veltroni, and the city's transport authority, ATAC. Fulvio Vento, the director of ATAC, says the new system will allow him to scrap an expensive annual OD survey of 2,000 people, which costs more than €60 per respondent to carry out. Mr Vento says the maps will give his planners extraordinary and unprecedented power to shuffle the schedules of Rome's 2,100 buses as demand shifts throughout the day. It could also lead to improvements in traffic-light placement, signage and road layout. Roma Metropolitane, the city authority for Rome's expanding subway network, also says the maps will be a boon to planners.

Fans celebrate as Italy's victorious World Cup team arrives in Rome on July 10th, 2006. The areas with the highest population density are shown in green

Samarcanda, a taxi firm based in Rome, is providing free consulting services to the project in return for access to the data. The company's boss, Giovanni Coco, says his drivers still choose their routes based on habit and experience. “It's a disaster,” he says, “we need help.” Transport planning will provide a ready market, in short, but plenty of other potential uses for the technology are waiting to be discovered. People-movement maps would appear to have a colourful and pulsating future.

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Dhaka gridlock and traffic is the bane of my existence. The fly in my ointment. The cockroach in my Coke. The finger in my eye. The kick in my pants. The perfect metaphor for us as a people and as a nation (?). The rage-induced ulcer that is burgeoning in my stomach lining. Wait, the last one might not be a metaphor. Could this in any way be part of a future solution for us? It's not short-term, that's for sure, but since flyovers aren't working (that is when one is actually completed--they just expedite your travel time from one traffic jam to another) and city planners (or those who claim to be) and traffic cops are clearly clueless in the art of traffic management, would this help?

Modeling traffic flow would be a prerequisite if we ever decide to act intelligently about city planning and traffic. This kind of data could influence everything from traffic light timing/sequencing, location-based approval of commercial property licenses for businesses, etc. It could also enable all kinds of cool location-based services (which are actually already possible given the number of mobile phone towers around the city). How about simply creating an interactive digital map of Dhaka streets and overlaying a service a la Mapquest or Google Maps?

On a side note and as a simple example, one of my personal favorite LBS utilities on my cell phone is Geominder which allows me to set alarm reminders based on location after I "teach" it some of my key locations. For example, I could set an alarm for "Don't forget to buy bread next time I pass by an Agora". For other examples, see Meetro (location aware instant messenger and social network for your cell), Smarter Agent (location sensitive real estate searches), Loc-Aid (track the location of friends, loved ones, colleagues, find a date, etc.), Loopt (location based social networking), and Socialight (discover great places/reviews as you walk around).

Anyway. Get back to work you lot.

BF

Most fertile soil, most lucrative mobile market

Yet another report from bdnews24

Bangladesh has been elevated to ninth position among the top 10 mobile phone markets in the Asia-Pacific region during first quarter of 2007. A recent study of UK’s market analysis company The Mobile World revealed the news, but the industry calls it "too little to celebrate." Three months ago, in the fourth quarter of 2006, Bangladesh was in the 10th position. But it overtook Taiwan after adding nearly three million subscribers during the first three months of 2007. "The primary reasons for this growth are existing low penetration of telephony and the availability of very affordable mobile services in the country," Grameenphone chief executive Erik Aas told bdnews24.com, speaking about the report. Nokia Bangladesh head Prem Chand echoed Erik. "Increased competition through entry of new mobile operator and lower tariffs leading to affordability have fuelled this growth." He believes the devices with additional features and services beyond "voice only" and increased focus by manufacturers, such as Nokia, in the market are also the catalysts. But the country’s mobile phone operator’s forum – ATOB – is not that impressed. "Mobile markets of Bangladesh and Pakistan are quite identical (how?) but the regulatory environment is poles apart," ATOB president Khalid Hasan told bdnews24.com Tuesday. He said the crucial difference has elevated Pakistan to fifth position while Bangladesh is in number nine. "Pakistan’s regulatory independence is enviable and we can do a lot better in Bangladesh," Khalid said, urging immediate reforms to the telecoms law.

Bangladesh had 24.1 million mobile users until March followed by Vietnam’s 22.3 million users at the same time. Bangladesh and Vietnam have pushed Taiwan off the Top 10 list, the study said. It also considers Bangladesh or Vietnam being a potential threat to the eighth-ranking South Korea (41.1 million) in terms of net quarterly addition of mobile clientele. There have been some significant changes to the top 10 largest markets in Asia Pacific by customer numbers between the fourth quarter of 2006 and first quarter of 2007, the report observed. The top six places remained unchanged, with China (463 million) and India (158 million) unchallenged in first and second places. Japan (96.7 million) is still well ahead of Indonesia (69.4 million) to be safe in the third place at least for another year. Pakistan remains fifth, finishing the first quarter of 2007 with 55.6 million customers and pulling further away from the Philippines (45.6 million) which is sixth. The first changes to the order in the quarter are in seventh and eighth places. During the quarter, Thailand (43.4 million), which was in eighth place at the end of 2006, added 3.2 million new mobile connections, more than two million ahead of South Korea (41.1 million). It has taken over South Korea’s seventh place in March.

From my limited knowledge, what I understand is Bangladesh's small size, plain landscape and the highest population density per square kilometre makes its the BEST country in the world for mobile phone companies. Because of Bangladesh's unique demographics, the outreach of a single base station/tower is able to serve more number of users, which means companies can and are supposed to cut down costs remarkably. BTRC and the mobile operators will continue pointing fingers at each other but the fact remains that our mobile telephony market is as fertile as the soil of the land. If we need to let farmers do 'contract farming' on our fertile land, we need to make sure when they reap the harvest, they give us more share of the crops and not take back the lions share to their origins.

Close up tomakei khujche Bangladesh!

The world is on the lookout for a 'famous' Bangladeshi female business official. The number of daily searches in Google and other blogs who mention her name that led users to Bangladesh Corporate Blogs never seem to decline. Some of the keywords even asked for her 'gallery', 'album', 'pics' and other keywords not worthy of mention here. Some are also discussing raunchy speculations on how her employers, sensing trouble ahead, conducted a successful 'hoodiny act' and moved her 'behind the curtains', some even guessed that she might be out of the country too.

All this curiosity about this particular person, her whereabouts, links to other corporates in recent headlines etc. make me wonder, 'why do we bother?'. One thing is for certain that as more and more women would be inducted in our corporates, male counterparts will have to readjust how they perceive their female colleagues, their capacities, their expertise etc. It seems as if if a female colleague, executive happens to be externally attractive too, it fuels, to some extent, typical male fantasies. I don't intend to embark on a debate over women's rights and gender disputes. Office spouses, office fantasies and 'all other non-official' male-female activities etc. are normal and are bound to happen everywhere in the world, in any workplace. I just think that we should be prepared for this upcoming trend in Bangladeshi companies. As there might be many more good looking female colleagues, bosses and sub-ordinates. We might need to work with them, order them and on top of all, might have to 'follow orders from them'. So two proposals in the end, for those who want to embrace happily female workforce into their midst---lets put their expertise primary, their external beauty, personal lives secondary. For those who still can't get over the sex appeal, make a website like Dhaka hotties, propose a few more names, so that we can have a competition at hand and give that 'person in question' some rest from repetitive woman-hunt done in Google.

MPDD in Banks and Telecom

More and more MPDD (Market Place Decision Difficulty) is set to occur as telecom companies are throwing newer offers with slashed prices, discounts almost every week. Newspapers are also filled up almost every day with news of branch openings across the country of various commercial banks. Southeast Bank opens 34th branch at Kakrail today, Bank Asia opens 27th branch at Mohakhali today and I am sure more to follow in coming days. The website of Bangladesh Bank provides the list of weblinks to commercial banks of the country but I still have not come across any website which gives a comparative view of our banks. Could we have a website which would show and compare banks in terms of their number of branches, ATMs, interest rates for deposits and on top of it all, there could be a comparison chart of various loan products offered by different banks. This way, consumers could easily compare different products in the market and could take more informed decisions regarding their banking needs. Same goes for telecoms as well. Frankly speaking, I have no clue about the minute details about all the prepaid and postpaid packages, their pulse rates, FnF, free talk times and all that jazz. I get confused and I wish I could see some sort of tabular comparison of the offers made by telecom companies. Just a thought from a regular user who uses mobile phones and goes to bank.

CityCell cheats state out of Tk 360 crore a year

Mobile phone operator CityCell is making about Tk 360 crore a year illegally, regulatory officials were quoted as saying Wednesday by bdnews24.com.

A 12-hour raid on the company headquarters in the capital Wednesday produced evidence for the BTRC officials to claim CityCell, majority-owned by former foreign minister M Morshed Khan, was making nearly Tk 1 crore a day from illegal VoIP connections.

RAB officer Major Shamsuzzoha showed to bdnews24.com copies of bills against numbers 01190005010 and 01190005100 and said: "We have found 50 such dummy numbers. More one crore taka has been billed against these numbers every day. That brings the monthly figure to Tk 30 crore and annually Tk 360 crore."

"This means the government has been deprived of Tk 330 crore a year by CityCell," said Anamika Bhakta, a member of the six-strong BTRC committee to fight illegal VoIP business.
She said BTRC will sue CityCell under telecommunication laws.

The raid on the CityCell headquarters on the 13th floor of Pacific Tower began at 11am and ran well into midnight.

Warid struggles to get GP, Banglalink interconnection

Warid telecom is struggling to get interconnection deals signed with GrameenPhone (GP) and Banglalink following lower call charges offered by the UAE-based company to its clients.

Telecom sources said the two companies want Warid to raise the charges to the levels they charge, or remain isolated. Instead of, however, denying the interconnection facility upfront, they are resorting to the old tactics of buying time to force Warid to come to their terms.

This is not unexpected from companies like GP and Citicell, who have more or less the same trackrecord of exploiting people taking advantage of the dishonesty of the politicians. But this is quite an unfortunate gesture, particularly from a company like Banglalink, which contributed to bring about a major change in the country's cellphone market.

One of the GP officials while being quizzed by media people at a press conference in Dhaka arrogantly said this is a sellers' market, not a buyers' market. Banglalink's arrival led it to be a buyers' market, where consumers dictate the terms. But it seems Banglalink is now complacent with the share of the market it holds now and joined hands with GP to deny people the right to get a competitive mobile phone market.

We already found campaigns by certain newspapers against Warid and there are reasons to believe that these were orchestrated by the big players in the market. Because these newspapers were mysteriously silent about the cheating of people by one company which sold mobile connection plus set for Tk 150,000 and another company which sold its connection with BTTB interconnection for as much as Tk 40,000.

The BTRC should play a more pro-active role to ensure fair play in the cellphone market.

CitiCell theke palabe kothay?

In my humble personal opinion, CitiCell's 'palabe kothay' is a complete advertising disaster. It took me a long time to understand the promotion billboards across the city. Finally when I got to see the TVCs and radio promos, I got to understand what the advertisement is trying to convey. Well, though CitiCell tried to do something different from GrameenPhone, BanglaLink or Warid, in terms of stepping away from the much hyped 'patriotism' angle, they could have done a better job in ad content and delivery.