User Segments for VAS

We can divide the mobile VAS market into 6 segments:
1) CXO level users: These are Senior executives of an organization who hardly have time and of course high net-worth individuals.
2) Young Professionals: They are people like me, middle management of an organization.
3) Small and Medium enterprises or SOHO users: These are people who are small shop owners in our neighborhood, distributors, suppliers, etc.
4) People on field always: These are people like sales force, feet on street people, etc.
5) Young generation: People who are in college and will be soon be a part of the young professionals group. Age-group specially 18-25.
6) Family: Mostly dependent people like house wives and elderly people.

Of course, their buying behavior varies on weather the devices are company paid or self-paid, but at a broad level, the above six segment have the following need:
1) CXO level users: They basically need devices and application on their phone to reduce the decision making time. They need to be connected always. They are really not very tech-savvy and hence need applications as well as devices that are very simple to use.
2) Young Professionals: These people are highly tech-savy and are ready to spend on devices and application for the FEEL of it. They are mostly early adopters.
3) Small and Medium enterprises or SOHO users: When I see SOHOs in India, it is a very small segment that is very tech-savvy. However, a huge portion of these people are still technology challenged. They generally would demand "Value for money". Since are self-dependent individuals and will pay for themselves, they need low entry cost. The more less complicated and the more integrated the solution is, the more better for them.
4) People on field always: These are people who can stay connected to the organization only via mobile devices and applications. The applications for these people should be such that it help them improve productivity.
5) Young generation: These are people who are the most tech savvy and highly early adopters among the lot. They have great affinity for social networking and peer group communication.
6) Family: These are people who simply have basic communication needs and want to socialize only with friends and relatives.

While building VAS applications/solutions, one needs to know they carter to which user segment.

Tomorrow...VAS key challenges and hurdles

Mobile VAS services - Part 3

WAP Portals
With 3G, this delivery mode will see a completely new era. The entertainment sector can offer Video clips on WAP portals, Mobile games, Mobile themes and Mobile radio too. In the segment of Alerts and News, WAP portal as a delivery platform can offer Movies related information, Stocks portfolio manager, News tickers/alerts, etc. In the commerce segment, almost every service can be offered on WAP portal like ticket booking, Mobile Banking, etc. Wap portals can offer a variety of service in Social VAS like Mail, Mobile Greeting, Dating, Chatting, Blogging, Infotainment, User Generated Content, Advertising, etc. For Enterprise VAS, service could range from Location Based Services, Internet Mobile e-mail, Mobile calendars, Access to intranet and core business applications, Mobile VPN, etc.

Continues tomorrow...User Segments for VAS

Mobile VAS services - Part 2

IVRs as a delivery platform
In the field on Entertainment, IVR is used as the major delivery mode for "Music on demand". There was this famous article on "Who is your competitor" where they talk about the biggest player in music and surprisingly the answer to this is "Airtel". If I have to compare this as to where it fits in "Michael Porters 5 force", it is threat from substitute which is really difficult to determine. IVR has a big advantage of the fact that:
1) Gives a personal touch as voice is medium of communication and emotions can be expressed.
2) Can be conveniently used by rural/old people (people who resist change) and uneducated people.
IVR is a delivery platform which can make money (Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid).

Various other alerts and services like Astro, Vaastu, Personality tests, quiz, games are also delivered on IVRs. When it comes to the commerce stream, IVR is mainly used for mBanking, Ticketing, etc. Because of "CONNECT" via IVR, voice SMS is a increasingly used service for Social VAS. With IVR as a delivery platform for enterprise VAS, we have IVR based contact centers, Self help centers and Voice portals too.

Continued tomorrow ... Wap Portals

Mobile VAS services - Part 1

Most of the VAS services that you see today are only delivered on 3 major platforms:
1) SMS (most companies pioneer in this)
2) IVRs
3) WAP portals

With SMS as a delivery mode, there are wide offerings like Jokes, Ringtones, CRBTs, Wallpapers, Animations, Quiz, etc. Various Alert services like Cricket, News, Astro, Banking infomation alerts, Travel Alerts, etc are also offered. When it comes to commerce, sms is also used as a highly acceptable delivery mode like mobile banking, ticketing, etc. When it comes to Social VAS, it offers location based services, infotainment, search and near field advertising. Talk about take off of Enterprise VAS with SMS as a delivery mode: Pull services for m-Coupons, voting, information, etc. Push services for advertising, Location Based services, Enterprise IM and Group messaging are few examples.

While I was just writing this down, looks like he product portfolio is large enough for just SMS as delivery mode. This clearly identifies clear products required to be developed to get to leader for SMS VAS.

Tomorrow IVRs.....

Get to completion

Now a days, in my workplace, we are all (working hard, trust me) trying to meet deadlines and get the product out of the door! This does involve a lot of stress with meticulous planning and making sure we do not pass away important things. And I myself do realize the fact that there is no limit to writing code and there is always scope for improvement. And most of the time, when there is a great product idea, one cannot wait to see the idea become a reality. When I conduct the meeting every day, I always keep in mind the following:

1) Keep the scope as simple as possible and take "baby steps" - Don't try to everything at one go. The more you try to do, the more it gets complex because the time-lines do not change but scope does increase adding to hell lot complexity.

2) Perfection is the enemy of completion. Try to get the product the "good enough" state and not really THE perfect state.

3) My favorite 80-20 rule applies here too. Concentrate the most of 80% use cases and not 20%. Kill all the features that will be used by 20% of clients as they are really not mandatory for completion.

4) With the constant change in technology and high competition, one needs to make sure to get the product out fast in a good enough working form as simply as possible.

And, remember every product has a scope of improvement and also possible to add more and more and MANY MORE features :-).

Online social networks

Did you ever wonder why Social Networking was able to take off. Online social networking has almost changed the way people communicate, work(http://purwajain.blogspot.com/2010/01/power-of-social-media-for-business.html) and also PLAY! There was time somewhere in 1990's (when I started using PC's) where people were very reluctant to disclose their identity on the web and now almost all age groups are on some networking site. As rightly said by Charlene Li, "The social networks greatest achievements has been to bring humanity in place that was once cold and technological". It is also a awesome tool for mass communication. Like on facebook, I simply set my status and my friends and sometimes the world know about it. Moreover it has actually become a habit for me to update my status everyday. This just shows my ability to "Want to communicate" to all. These sites have also made people's personal relationships more visible. Even today, many companies when planning their product launches make sure that a part of their marketing budget is reserved for communication over social media.

Data Warehousing

Yesterday, I was discussing this with my colleague in office who was trying to break her head in a apt design of a warehouse and why is it not very scalable. Here is what I came up with:

Warehousing is nothing but just one component of business intelligence. The overall goal of BI is to provide information that is required to MANAGE a BUSINESS. This simply means that BI provides data that helps in decision making process and hence many a times also called as decision support system. As we all know, the 3 generic strategies to provide a competitive advantage is:
1) Cost leadership
2) Focus
3) Differentiation
BI should provide data which will help u to reduce cost, improve customer satisfaction and in turn increase profitability.

When you are designing the warehouse architecture, you need to remember that:
1) Change is constant - Business requirements will change
2) Take an incremental approach, do not over design!!!
3) Make sure your existing applications (OLTP as well as warehouse) continue to work
4) Need to allow more data and new type of data to be added
5) The BI view should be intuitive, obvious, visible and memorable
6) When people are thinking, they do not want their thinking process to be interrupted. Make sure you provide necessary drill downs at just one click.

Most of the OLTP systems are modeled as entity- relationship modeling. A warehouse follows dimensional modeling. Every business process is separated in form of a data mart. Make them denormalized and follow the hybrid approach. Need to explicitly well design the data acquisition process (ETL - we could use tools or write our own scripts for the same). Very important to remember in the ETL scripts is sequencing, transaction management (commits and rollbacks), performance and last but not the least Data cleansing. Data Acquisition and cleansing form 50-80% of the effort in a typical warehousing system. Always document the data marts! it is very important to see a consolidated view of a data mart. Enforcing some of a standard across the WH always helps in better undjavascript:void(0)erstandability. Make you document the standards too!. Design the metadata architecture in such a way that it allow sharing across various data models (OMG standards). Last but not the least, the WH must have "a single version of truth". You can use Datawarehousing Bus (conformed dimensions and facts). Most of the companies ignore this as Capacity Planning is a very critical part of the warehouse. Always be ahead in capacity planning to ensure smooth functioning and delivery.