Over the last couple of weeks, my wife has been shopping for home and auto insurance. She used a temporary email address as she was concerned about subsequently receiving spam or unwanted email from insurance sales agents after she reached a decision. However, she had to provide a phone number to discuss and clarify quotes and so she provided her mobile phone number. She received numerous calls late in the evenings and she lamented at the lack of a second number availability on her existing mobile that would allow her to share this second number with the insurance sales agents.

Recently, I attended the One Young World Conference in London. Movius was one of the sponsors of this global event. The purpose for this conference was to bring together potential future leaders who are actively involved in their community to bring about a positive change. More than 1000 attendees from more than 100 countries were brought together to discuss global issues and eventually come to a vote on resolutions which would be passed on to world leaders.

The opening ceremony was kicked off by Desmond Tutu who touched on the media that focus on negative issues in this world rather than positive issues. The second and third day of the conference is when everyone engaged and raised their views on global issues. The format of the conference consisted of resolutions being presented to the delegates, discussions on them and a voting system in place to have everyone’s opinion on the resolutions counted.

The highlight for me during the second day was a speech made by Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Peace Laureate and economist who developed the internationally adopted concept of microcredit. During his speech, Mr. Yunus highlighted the importance of social business in the developing countries and mentioned that business can play and important role in the poverty stricken areas with an aim of not making profit but providing a source of sustainability to the communities that they operate in.

The last day highlight for me came from a debate on all the issues discussed especially social responsibility of multinational businesses which the youth of this world believe that these businesses should play an important role in the communities that they profit from. Overall, the two main focus points for me during the conference were the responsibility of businesses within our communities and the great impact that the media has on the development of our countries.

Main topics during the conference included Environment and Its Protection, Interfaith Dialogue, and the Role of Global Business. Results that voted on during the conference included:

1)  In the belief that climate change will seriously affect future generations, we call upon governments to take more dliberate, legislative action to help guarantee that appropriate carbon emissions reduction targets are both agreed and met by 2020.

2)  In the belief that ware must never be carried out in the name of religion, we call upon leaders and flowers of all faiths to unequivocally commit to deliver peace amongst nations, races and creeds.

3)  In the belief that multinational corporations have a fundamental responsibility to behave ethically, we call upon global businesses to define and act on their role in the fight against poverty.

4)  In the belief that freedom of speech is essential to a successful society, we call upon the media to use its influence and power to help protect truth and personal freedom.

5)  In the belief that all humans have the right to health care and nutrition, we call upon businesses governments and civil society to work together more effectively to prioritize spreading information about and providing access to good health care and nutrition.

6)  In the belief that upholding human rights should come before any political activity, we call upon our political leaders to make clear their stance on humanitarian issues before we consider our support for them.

Recently, I attended the One Young World Conference in London. Movius was one of the sponsors of this global event. The purpose for this conference was to bring together potential future leaders who are actively involved in their community to bring about a positive change. More than 1000 attendees from more than 100 countries were brought together to discuss global issues and eventually come to a vote on resolutions which would be passed on to world leaders.

For those that do not know, BBBEE stands for Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment. An important topic if you are trying to do business in South Africa.

What is this all about?

In a nutshell BBBEE was introduced during the mid 90's after the appointment of a democratic government in South Africa. It stems back to the release of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress coming into power. It is about the upliftment of PDI's (previously disadvantaged individuals).

The South African government launched a program based on a set of tenets designed to create opportunity for PDI's and foster entrepreneurship. A scoring system was introduced and companies are required to score at various levels, depending on turnover, to qualify for doing business with state entities and large South African companies. Companies that receive high scores get price advantages in state tender evaluations. In other words those contributing to uplift get favourable consideration.

BBBEE is taken very seriously in South Africa, to the extent that state and large companies will not do business with local companies that are not compliant and a companies own ratings are affected negatively if they do not award business to BBBEE complaint partners.

For Movius, we have achieved a level 2 AAA rating. This is a great achievement and very difficult to obtain especially since Movius South Africa is a subsidiary of Movius Interactive Corporation headquartered in the United States.

To do business with top South African operators such as MTN, Vodacom, Cell C, Telkom and Neotel, the BBBEE rating is now mandatory. The fact that Movius achieved such a high rating is significant! It opens doors to do business with any South African based operator and to be favoured in their procurement processes, because we are regarded as contributors giving back to the development of our great country.

For more details on Movius' achievement read our press release.

For a long time, telecom operators have been regarded as a potential player in the SaaS (Software as a Service) model, a way of delivering applications by hosting them on a data center and making them accessible over IP networks. In 2006, Dr. Matthew Lucas posted an article Editorial: Software as a Service (SaaS) and the Telecoms  in which he lists his top 10 reasons why telecoms should care about SaaS. It's worth a read.
 

A point I would like to make is that this approach to distributing applications not only allows operators to leverage their network infrastructure and sales channels but also one of their major skills, to deliver services within a SLA.

According to a release from Gartner in November 2009, SaaS is regarded as a growing business. In the last few months some of the major European operators have made movements in this sector and we see how the existing portfolio of enterprise operator-run value added services increases with new this new approach. For instance, Deutsche Telekom is reinforcing their position and is set to take over SAP European software business based on news in September 2009.
 

The SaaS model is not only restricted to large enterprises. Last year, Telefónica entered into an agreement with NEC for a Software as a Service platform that will target small and mid sized companies.

Let’s see what happens in 2010 with SaaS. I expect that it will continue to gain momentum.

“Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users”

In this study, 54% of Internet users have some type of wireless access to the Internet (via cell phone, wifi, etc.). Of those, 25% use Twitter or some other service up from 14% in December of 2008.

“Owning and using a wireless Internet device make an Internet user significantly more likely to tweet.”

When asking wireless Internet users why they value their mobile connections, 50% say to stay in touch with other people. (I read this as status updates.) 

In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 Congress directed the FCC to come up with a plan and metrics for measuring this plan to get broadband accessible to all Americans. As a result, the FCC has published a request for comments here.

Excerpt: Driven by technology and market forces, this evolution of communications services to broadband creates many opportunities for our country, but it also has a significant impact on the circuit switched Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), a system that has provided, and continues to provide essential services to the country.

What does this mean for the end user? Hopefully this will open the doors to a whole slew of new application opportunities for developers. Take Google for example; the chromium OS that they are touting is 100% a browser. There is nothing else to it from an end user perspective. Why? I think the idea is to increase mobility and give you access to your data no matter where you are. All you need is connectivity. I read an paper a long time ago entitled "Rise of the Stupid Network" written by David Isenberg. It described a dumb pipe. Google is trying to reverse this by making dumb computers with a smart network. What better way to make use of blanket broadband for the population than to make the services live in the cloud?

Back to the future…

I started in the computer industry in the late ‘70’s. I didn’t work on mainframes, the norm in that era. I spent most of my waking hours on these new things called microcomputers. If you wrote software for a microcomputer, you were in absolute control. It was an era when could do anything you wanted or, more to the point, were capable of designing. True to the Wild West attitude of the time, before I graduated high school I owned a company which wrote, among other things, personal accounting software for Radio Shack’s TRS-80s. You had to pick your bets and choose which machine you wanted your software to run on. When machines such as IBM’s PC came along, we had to decide whether the device would take off and, if so, whether it would appeal to the demographics we were going after. In short, we spent our time porting our software so it would run on whatever was selling to our target market at any given time. In all cases you had to craft your application to get the most out of the device you were running on.

So why am I babbling about the past?

I was on a Wedbush Morgan roundtable panel recently where we discussed mobile applications.  

It reminded me again that diversity of background and experience is absolutely critical when you are trying to figure out where a given market or technology is going. Wedbush do a great job with their panels to make sure that the discussion can be open and that everybody from the chip manufacturers through the apps guys in a given space are represented. I am always awed by the caliber of the folks attending and the mutual respect people approach the discussion with.  

As a result of Wedbush’s approach, you get a coalescing of opinions from the app guys (like Movius) that things are going a certain way then out of the blue the CEO of a company who optimizes backhaul from the base station says “well, here is the problem if that happens”…and the discussion launches down the path of what impediments are which make that path impractical for another decade.  

It reminds me of GPRS. I spent a great deal of time, in what seems like a previous life, launching GPRS as quickly as possible. Five years later, I finally found an application, email of the RIM, which used the technology to add value to my life.   

So, in homage to the Wedbush, I would like to do a bit of a survey to see if we can start an educational debate. Let’s start a discussion. What do you think the next hot discontinuity will be in the mobile space? Please give a quick summary of your background and then make your prediction, elaborating on why you expect it to be so. I am really interested in what you have to say.