Observations from the Mobile World Congress 2011 Part 1

Posted on February 26, 2011 by

Will Wireless Payments Help you Sleep at Night?

Fira de Barcelona Site of 2011 Mobile World Congress

Fira de Barcelona Site of 2011 Mobile World Congress

I was not alone, over 60,000 people attended this years mobile congress held at the Fira de Barcelona in Spain. With over 1300 exhibitors and 40+ keynotes, panels and awards held over four days, this was full immersion experience into the global world of mobility with all its players.

Walking through the gates of the Fira with its two towers, I felt a happy rush of excitement as I left the fair city of Barcelona behind and joined the global mobile ant colony.

A week after the congress, I am still processing the experience and coming to appreciate the implications for what the brave new world of mobility might offer to us the consumer. It has provided much food for thought. Rather than blog about technology, I want to provide some design thinking around what the technology means to us the consumer. So here goes.

Cordless Phone Charging

A very practical device at the  exhibition was a wireless charging pad. Made by Powermat, you put your cell phone on the pad and it gets charged. For a traveler who carried power cables for a camera, laptop and smartphone to the congress, along with electrical adaptors for European and UK standards, a wireless charging station seems like a great invention. But wait, there’s more….

Powermat went one step further with their product and business model. They included a technology called NFC enabling people to exchange power and information between their cellphones and the mat turning the Powermat into a reader.

Powermat Wireless Charger at MWC 2011

Powermat Wireless Chargerat MWC 2011

To use a wireless reader, consumers put their NFC enabled mobile phone (the initiator) 4cm or less away from the an NFC enabled reader (the target). Both devices are able to receive and transmit data at the same time. They can be used to send information, read information or to exchange information.

Likely scenarios for consumer usage of these readers include purchasing tickets for events, accessing a public transport system, boarding pass verification, accessing a hotel room, buying goods, sending money, or receiving information wirelessly about retail opportunities in your proximity.

Global Trend in Wireless Payments

NFC (near field communication) is an emerging technology gaining rapid global adoption. For example, 40% of the worlds mobile network operators back the technology because it holds the potential for creating new business opportunities. In Japan 60% of purchases are made by consumers using mobile NFC devices.

Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel have a joint venture, ISIS, which is a single platform on which NFC specifications can be used by their customers to make mobile payments in the US. Even the English can look forward to buying their MacDonald’s this way in the near future.

Smart phones including Googles Android, Apples iPhone and RIMs Blackberry will all have NFC capabilities shortly, allowing the consumer to use their phone similarly to a credit card.

New industries will emerge around this eco system. My example, using Powermat, is one of many stories illustrating how the integration between emerging technologies supported by network operators and device manufacturers integrated with cloud computing have the potential to deliver seamless mobile computing experiences for consumers.

Moving Toward a Networked Society

Hans Vestberg, CEO at Ericsson said it best “We are moving to a networked society where we impact peoples lives that are built on mobile coverage and broadband connectivity and the cloud. That together builds a society that brings benefit to all things that are connected.”

Footnote: As I left the conference at the end of a long day and walked back through the twin towers into a heaving throng of people waiting for taxis, buses and the subway, I encountered promoters and protestors. From Firefox its free coffee (thank you by the way). A Catalonian gentleman promotes the merits of Alo Vera; a woman hands out information on the risks of EMF’s (Electromagnetic Frequencies).

Her flyer reminds me that not so very long ago,  I used to measure the amount of electro smog in peoples home as part of my environmental design service. EMF’s are a real health concern particularly for the very young, sick and  frail. I would like to quietly raise a flag about EMF’s, particularly around new devices like the Powermat that are creating new design standards for transferring electrical power to devices.

The accumulation of electrical devices into the home and business environment is happening fast, in the US today people consume the same content from at least three different digital sources in a single day. May I make one suggestion, that you keep all your electrical devices turned off and outside the room where you sleep.  Do your body a favor and allow it to rest uninterrupted by electrical stimulation. You can rejoin the networked society next morning feeling better rested by doing this simple act of kindness for yourself.

References

Posted in Mobile World Congress, Trends in Mobile Computing | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

How Cell Phones Can Democratize Banking for the Underserved

Posted on February 15, 2011 by

The Vision Behind Obopay.com from Carol Realini Speaking at Women 2.0 Founder Labs

10 – 5 – 3 – 1  is Carol Realini’s Law for raising capital, a skill she has in spades. Carol is an entrepreneur who “eats nails for lunch”  starts companies and raises capital to fund them. After retiring she became intrigued by the work of an NGO group teaching peace to war torn parts of the world. This led her to Africa, Congo and Burundi where she witnessed that everything was broken except for cell phones that worked brilliantly.  If pre paid cell phone minutes could be converted to currency,  people could send or receive payments through their mobile phones.

This is Carols dream to use cell phones to make “payments” and democratize banking in the world. Her dream became a reality in 2002 with the start of  “Obopay”. Today Obopay operates in emerging markets around the world. Her dream is to narrow the gap between the haves and the underserved of the world by using cell phones to accomplish this. Here are the numbers she that informed her dream.

  • 6.6 billion – the number of people in the world
  • 5.billion – the number of cell phones in the world
  • 1.6 billion – the number of bank accounts
  • The undeserved

She predicts that by 2015 there will be nine hundred million people using mobile banking. Most will be in Africa, Asia, Latin American and India. What made Carol fearless about asking for funding was keeping the higher goal in mind and remembering the people who worked for her. Carols law is a best practice for raising financing goes like this:-

  • 10 refers to the number of venture capital meetings you should secure when making the ask.
  • 5 refers to the number of companies that will perform due diligence on the idea you pitched to them.
  • 3 is the number of term sheets describing the material terms and conditions of the proposed business agreement.
  • 1 is the number of money transfers into your bank account from investors.

With the funding raised, she built relationships with operators and phone carriers in the countries she wanted to deploy Obopay. In India this was Nokia running Nokia Money as the platform behind the transactions. Mobile handsets and carriers have massive distribution through local stores in towns and villages. This is traditionally where people come to top up minutes and buy their phones. Obopay trains the people who cell minutes to be banking agents and accept physical currency payments.

To work around the lack of electric the agents “banking” terminal is the mobile phone. To make a payment a client hands over cash to the agent and the agent texts the clients phone digitally uploading the cash to the device.  A virtual ATM in effect. They agent makes a small amount of money on each transaction that with high volumes, create an incentive to learn and honor the payment system.

Carol spoke about Obopay at Women 2.0 Founder Labs, she was the last star speaker in the program and left a great impression on what it really takes to be an entrepreneur.

  • You have to have confidence in your direction to stay the course.
  • You can’t be a pleaser to build a company.
  • You Don’t back down because people are rude or reject you and your ideas.
  • You have to be passionate about the idea.
  • You have to be unreasonably committed, knowledgeable and smart about your idea.

I am grateful to Carol and Women 2.0 for the opportunity to learn what it takes to be an entrepreneur and create a successful startup company. Two things stand out :  Yes, the vision really does have to be that big and yes, it really does have to meet the unmet needs of people.

As Women 2.0 wraps up and I head out to Barcelona for the World Mobile Congress I am excited to discover who in the mobile arena has the vision and who is meeting the unmet need.

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Trends in Mobile Computing | 1 Comment

Results from Customer Development and Learning to Pivot

Posted on February 1, 2011 by

Sally Grisedale Interviewing the Concierge at the Fairmont San Jose

Concierge Interview : The Fairmont Hotel, San Jose

Week 3 of Women 2.0 Founders Lab Mobile Edition

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about “Pivoting” for Women 2.0. Pivoting describes what entrepreneurs do when they get stuck.  It involves recognizing your business idea is failing and making a radical change.

In week three, our team objective was to interview 20 concierge at four star hotels in the Bay Area and get four to test our prototype on a free trial basis. Through customer development interviews, we hoped to validate our business idea for “GuidePad”.

If four concierge were willing to exchange their time and skill to work with the device, this would prove our service had value. With value creation established, we would have a foundation to build a business model.

So off the team went, interview questions in hand to learn about the world of the concierge and how our device could be of service.

Our offer included a rentable smart phone with free national calling, Skype international calling, on call concierge help, turn by turn navigation, internet access and local listings, reviews, restaurants events and attractions.

How could concierge and their guests not want this amazing service?

Well they didn’t. And here are some of the reasons why.

The work of the Concierge has changed. Yes there are a few dedicated staff who work at large luxury destination hotels with 500+ rooms. We quickly learned that these people work on a commission basis and add high value personal touch services. Renting mobile devices was not on the list of “personal touch high value” services. Ouch!

This left the 90% of other “Concierge” who work the front desks of most hotels today. These people who are paid by the hour, are typically in their 20’s with a years employment history. They perform many tasks including checking people in and out, taking luggage to rooms, arranging transport, giving directions, suggesting places to eat or visit, giving change, running errands etc.

These people are very busy already, and did not have time to rent out a device. Additionally, there is no place to keep the devices, no one to keep inventory, track their upkeep and whereabouts. As one concierge said:

“When I give a customers a print out of how to get to an attraction or explain where a restaurant is, yes it can take time, but at least when I am done explaining, that is all I have to do, there is nothing more I have to worry about.

If I had to rent out a device I would have so much more work. I would have to take the customers credit details, get them to sign a contract, ensure the device gets back to the hotel and in the event it doesn’t track it down, keep inventory, get repairs and in necessary update a customer bill and resend it out”

So this business model wasn’t a hit with Concierge, but what about their customers?

Most hotel customers on the Peninsula are business travelers and bring their devices and their itineraries with them. They are self sufficient and don’t need of another device.

The cost of network roaming, which we hoped to solve, is not an issue for most business travelers who have this covered by their companies. They stay connected to the office because that is what the office wants. If they are paying for their own plans and do turn roaming off then they can use the hotel business center for free to collect their email.

For hotel guests who may want such a device, like the wife of a business man with time on her hands, the range of things to do at a suburban hotel is small and catered for by existing print material including the numerous pre printed guides held at the front desk and print magazines like “Discover Silicon Valley” a monthly events listing magazine.

So what have we accomplished in three weeks?

We built a team, put together a business proposal, put up a website, conducted a survey, built a prototype, interviewed customers and took it to our distribution partners. We discovered our business model to date has no value to concierge (dedicated and part time) at suburban hotels. Neither does it hold value to their guests if they are business travelers, are very old or in their teens and twenties.

It may be that there is a subset or niche market for this device among the middle aged international tourist staying at large destination hotels in destination resorts. This could be our next arena for customer development.

When I wrote about the term Pivot three weeks ago, I thought the term was bright and shiny. I envisioned that Pivoting would be a moment when you let go of an old idea and come up with something transformative.

Three weeks later I would like to amend that description to include the following. Pivoting means you messed up big time in your thinking and now you need to go back to the drawing board!

Posted in Entrepreneurship, The Lean Startup | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Customer Development for the Lean Startup

Posted on January 25, 2011 by

Notes from Alexander Osterwalder, Steve Blank, Cindy Alvarez and Hiten Shah Speaking at Women 2.0 Founders Lab

In week two of Women 2.0 Founder Labs, the stars of the startup business world kept appearing to shine on us. This week we heard from Alexander Osterwalder the author of “Business Model Creation”; Cindy Alvarez and Hiten Shah from KISS Metrics on marketing strategies for startups and Steve Blank author of Four Steps to the Epiphany, discussing what makes Silicon Valley scalable startups so different from traditional business models.

Business Model Creation

In a two hour Skype call from his home in Switzerland, Alexander Osterwalder generously shared the principles in his book “Business Model Creation” and gave us guidance on how to apply them to our emerging businesses.

Any business can be modeled from its 9 components on a “Canvas”. The process that is fast (about an hour), dynamic and inclusive. The  approach has become an international language to do business by and is a far cry from the lone MBA polishing his business plan in excel.

Alexanders advice included: Do not to fall in love with your first business model. Stay open to exploring many different alternatives by using the Canvas to model alternatives, for example, trying a revenue stream that is free or one that is paid. Prototyping a business this way enables you to explore alternative possibilities before committing to a good strong competitive model that can be tested.

By focusing on “all” the parts of the business equation, not just the product, entrepreneurs become systematic in the way they build a company, reducing the risks whilst increasing the understanding by testing they underlying hypothesize through customer development.

Is there an app for that? Yes a business model generation from Alexander and his team is coming soon to iPhone.

Lean Marketing for Startups

We heard from KISS Metrics’ Cindy Alvarez and Hiten Shah who know a thing or two about driving traffic to new products. Their advice included:  At the early startup stage you are not marketing a service, you are trying to illicit what people need and mirror it back to them. You have a hypothesis so you want to convince prospective clients into talking to you. The approach is to find out, by asking open ended questions, what is the thing that is causing them pain and then decide what you want to do with it.

The duo were full of generous, practical and immediately useable insights. This was user research done in a  refreshingly fast, abundant way. Next week we take this learning and hit the streets with our interviews, surveys and new marketing materials.

What makes the Startup World in Silicon Valley so unique?

Steve Blank is author of Four Steps to the Epiphany, on building early stage companies. The book is at the center of his curriculum for teaching entrepreneurship to both undergraduate and graduate students at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University and the Columbia University/Berkeley Joint Executive MBA program.

Silicon Valleys, with its combination of young hills, rich soil and flowing bay, brilliantly supports one industry : technology ventures and right behind it, venture capital, or as it used to be called “Adventure Capital”.  Steve suggests that a startup company from Silicon Valley is not like a startup company anywhere else. Why is this?

Firstly, the people plan to go huge from day one. Second, the company is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model and third, a scalable startup it is not a small version of an established company. Established conventions for hiring, product development, sales and marketing simply don’t map from an established company to a startup, they are different.

For example, a business plan is good when you are doing the next generation of a product at an established company. A business plan is no help if you don’t know what the first year of sales will be or who the customer is yet. Until Steve read Alexanders’ book, he had not seen another way to track and test a business hypothesis in real time.

The work of Steve, Alexander, Cindy, Hyten, Women 2.0., Y Combinator and Eric Ries, to name just a few, are growing that stack of new knowledge on how to systematically build a scalable start up company. Steve predicts that in 20 years we will be having E schools along with B schools. Through this community, a foundation for learning for the future is taking shape. This can only be good for how we all learn to build viable sustainable businesses from the ground up in the future.

Truly it is a privilege to be a participant in the extraordinary learning process provided by Women 2.0. I am grateful to them and to those brave entrepreneurs who have gone before us to show us the way.

Posted in Entrepreneurship, The Lean Startup | 1 Comment

Report on Week 2 of Women 2.0 Founders Lab

Posted on January 23, 2011 by

In week one at Women 2.0 Founders Lab the focus was on setting up our lean start up companies. Teams were formed and business ideas were hotly debated. My team had on a strong direction when I came on board and it took me a couple of days to get fully behind what was being proposed, and I am glad I did.  Our business is to support international travelers with a mobile extension of concierge services.

Within a week we had summarized our hypothesis and built a straw man business model reviewed by our super mentors Mike Rowehl, Jenny Fielding, and Jay Jamison. Feedback was diverse, for example, could this all be done on a SIM card? What are the associated costs of being in the rental market? What concrete problems were we solving? Who is the early adopter? It was fascinating to see how our message was received.

In week two we were encouraged to discover what the product had to provide to win the trust of consumers. We had access to a travel industry expert who graciously shared with us insights into the world of the concierge.

A casual coffee in Union Square led to a long and informationally rich conversation with a seasoned international traveler. From these two inputs we began to hypothesize about customer development and rapidly grew our knowledge base about customers by posting an online survey accessible through our website www.guidepad.com.

The result of our first survey was not particularly helpful since we had not captured any demographic information about the people taking the survey. After an excellent presentation from Cindy Alvarez and Heten Shah from Kiss Metrics on customer interview techniques, see my post on Women 2.0 for more details, we wrote open ended interview questions for both concierges and international travelers. Our new goal is to understand distributor and customer pain points and use the  information from the interviews to inform our product development plan.

At our second review we presented a working prototype on a mobile device and a revised business model. Our super mentors Mike Rowehl, Jenny Fielding, and Jay Jamison and guest mentors Steve Blank and Vivek Wadhwa were full of ideas and feedback.

We were encouraged to look for the largest comparable companies and learn accurately the size of the market. We were told to put up numbers about who we might address and serve. We have to determine how we are going to illicit these customers and what the value of acquiring them would be in years 1, 2 and 3 -  and do this by next week of course!

The process of asking before you build makes so much sense, I am thrilled this is way we are being invited to develop our businesses. Any reservations I had about getting behind a project that felt ungrounded two weeks ago, quickly evaporated when we put the first prototype in the hands of customers. Now the real conversation of how we can be of service to the market can begin. The ability to have a conversation around pain points for customers with real problems and figuring out how we might solve them is very exciting, creative and intoxicating.

Come back next week and learn how we got on developing the next step of our business together.

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Report on Week 1 at Women 2.0 Founder Labs, Mobile Edition

Posted on January 16, 2011 by

Last Saturday I joined Shaherose Charania, CEO of Women 2.0 and her team at the offices of Heruko in San Francisco to take part in a life changing experience called “Founders Lab Mobile Edition”.
Founders Lab, is available for both men and women who wish to build a high growth mobile venture from the ground up. Participants are screened for their expertise in three fields, engineering, design and business development.

This years group of 18 broke into five teams working five days a week, for five weeks to produce 5 viable mobile products. All this work gets done outside of normal office hours, permitting participants to keep their day jobs. The first week was brilliantly structured allowing the group to settle in, get to know one another and learn in context about the mobile eco system. We heard from many luminaries from the mobile start up world.

Lars Kamp, from Accenture, whom I could listen to forever, made it clear that part of our mission was to find a sustainable business model. He explained that if it costs 100k to ask an agency to build a mobile application and you get $1 per unit revenue, to break even you have to sell 100,000 applications. Mobile applications alone are not a business model because the loyalty and retention falls within 180 days. Lars advice was  to find a way to get money outside of just user sign up. So here was our challenge how to engage and retain users?

The answer to user retention came from another mentor Jessica Livingston She suggested that you start with a problem that people can’t live without and be prepared to see it change. The popular photo sharing site Flickr, for example, started out as a massive online multi player game with photos as a small feature. Users responded to the small photo feature and Flickr was born. By listening to users and their feedback, they will give you what you need to shape the service.
Eric Ries also encouraged us to look to our users. He spoke about the process of learning to Pivot and measure the product for its value to customers. Read my blog post at Women 2.0 for the full article.
Once the advisers had left for the day, there we were, 18 strangers with little more than butcher block paper, a few pens and a passion to build the dream of making it work. Shaherose set us short get to know interviews and idea generation exercises so we had an opportunity to listen, learn and interact with everyone in the group.
Within four days, five teams had formed and product ideas were being discussed. I had seen so many people I wanted to work with, I was not forward about asking, I just trusted the process of synergy. My intention was to learn from others current in the mobile industry and support them with my experience as a user experience design expert.

When I received an email from an engineer with over 30 apps to his credit and a senior director in product management from a mobile browsing company asking me to join their team, I shed a tear of gratitude into my Cappuccino at Cafe Barrone. Aware my former bosses boss, ex CTO at Yahoo! and now head of his own start up, was holding court only tables away, a strange feeling came over me, maybe, just maybe, the dream of doing a start up in the valley could be part of my reality.

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4 Steps to Building a Better Product

Posted on November 18, 2010 by

In her lecture at the Watermark Forum in June 2010, Sara Beckman presented a model of the product development process built on design thinking and innovation. She began with an overview of the learning theory behind product design best practices, then went on to describe in detail, the 4 steps to building a better product. The talk provided a good insight into the teaching curriculum she offers students in her product design class at the Haas School of Business Management at UC Berkeley.

As a designer of global consumer software, web and mobile products for fortune 500 companies for 15 years, I was thrilled to discover what the next generation of business leaders are being taught as a foundation for how to approach product design. The credence now given to design thinking and innovation in the product development process is a terrific step in the right direction for business and consumers alike.

The 4 steps an organization needs to know to build a better products include:

  1. Develop empathy through out your organization for customers and users.
  2. Focus on the most important problems and ladder up the hierarchy by asking why
  3. Motivate change innovation with compelling sticky stories
  4. Learn through rapid prototyping of alternative solutions.

Develop empathy through out your organization for customers and users.

Identify the audience and design for the extreme then test your solution on the mean. For example, the potato peeler the Oxo Goodgrip, was designed for a person with arthritic hands to use. Arthritis sufferers make up a small percentage of Oxo’s customer base however, the design innovation also met unexpressed needs of the larger audience. This design is a market leader.

Empathy is also needed for the stake holders in an organization on whom you are pushing your innovation.  For example, product innovation without proper institutional support from user feedback, business planning and engineering implementation is destined to fail, at least this was my experience leading design innovation projects at Yahoo!.

Design innovation can succeed when you have command and control leadership like Steve Jobs at Apple or you have open innovation born out of love. Without this arrangement it is hard to avoid the corporate run around and business incentive to focus only on short term financial wins.

Focus on the most important problems and ladder up the hierarchy by asking why

Sara spoke to the need to focus on the most important problems and ladder up and down the hierarchy of needs and keep asking “why?”. Working with individual clients and companies over the years I have found this to be true. What a client tells you is a problem often masks a deeper issue that needs addressing before any attempt at resolution can be found. Diagnosis is critical to establish the true problem to be solved. Where the pain shows up, may not be where the pain originates so you have to keep asking questions. More explicit or stated needs that can be found through interviews with customers and social media

Motivate Change with Customer Stories

Sara recommends enforcing and motivating change with compelling stories discovered from customer observation. There are two types of story. One you tell internally to unite the team in pushing ahead with a new idea and stories you tell the market to help sell your new product. For example, Kimberly Clarke customer insight stories helped reframe their perspective on diapers away from “waste management technology” to clothes designed to help parents potty train children. This research inspired story then became the public story behind a new product of “Pullup” diapers with the famous tag line “I am a big kid now”

Learn through rapid prototyping of alternative solutions

In the five years I worked in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer, all I did was prototype new product concepts for testing, feedback and industry promotion. The type of prototype ranged from simple card sorting exercises to understand the order someone would complete a task, video to communicate interaction ideas, and interactive prototypes people could interact with and tell us if what happened on matched their expectations.

Sara mentioned that getting her students this year to test their ideas was proving difficult. She feels this generation is so used to looking stuff up online, that interacting with people and sharing their ideas face to face is not desirable.

The reality is, if your audience can’t try out your ideas before you go to market, you are missing out on one of the most creative moments of the design innovation process.

When you make the time to observe, listen, analyze your work being used by the people you are designing it for, you experience profound insights which help transform your OK ideas into great ones.

This is when the stories are made, this is when the penny drops, and this is when you and your team find the heart connection, what martial arts experts call “hitting the Tai Chi”. Finding that perfect right point that when you attain it, all the other variables, problems, glitches and hiccups fall away and you have your perfect right solution.

Conclusion

The four step approach to product development is a brilliant shift in direction for the future of product design. By focussing on extreme needs of customers and testing on the wider audience, we get to solutions that solve the heart of the problem. This is not the era when companies compete on features. To capture hearts and minds, modern business has to  deliver on meeting the unmet needs of consumers. Customers will always reward business for delivering on that.

 

 

Posted in Product Design Process | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments