This month, France Telecom’s Lower Indian Ocean Network 2 “LION2″ fiber optic cable has been put in service, bringing the total number of cables in East Africa to four. In South Africa it is expecting West Africa Cable System to go live next month.

This huge growth in fiber optic cables connecting Africa means that bandwidth costs can go further down but there are many questions for internet service providers, regulators and policy makers on how to ensure the new connectivity/bandwidth can lead to development of online services, ecommerce and other services that rely on good internet connectivity like eLearning and eHealth .

For instance, lower bandwidth costs have allowed internet users to grow from 14 million to 17 million in Kenya in the last quarter of 2011. This has been propelled by mobile internet subscribers but cost is an underlying factor. The same applies to other parts of Africa, in Senegal the number of Internet subscribers grew phenomenally in 2011. There is currently more than twice the number of Internet subscribers than a year ago, this growth was driven by factors like new 3G licenses, the release of cheaper internet services and low cost smartphones.

One of the more notable results of the lower connectivity costs has been the growth of Internet Exchange Points, which allowed more ISPs to exchange content locally without going through international transit providers. The ccTLD registries have also been able to connect directly at the exchange points, improving accessibility to their TLDs.

In a recent study titled “Assessment of the impact of Internet Exchange Points – Empirical study of Kenya and Nigeria” conducted by Analysys Mason and commissioned by the Internet Society, it was revealed that uses of the Internet Exchange Point “KIXP” helped in increase service delivery for .ke which resulted in domain name registration growth.

Most of the African ccTLD has few thousands of domain name registrations and there are many other challenges facing African ccTLD uptake — like registration cost, restricted policies and lack of automation. But a good infrastructure, fair competition and increased Internet capacity means that more people can get online, buy domain names, set up websites and online business. Two of the Africa’s shining examples are Kenya ccTLD .ke with about 22,000 domains and South Africa .ZA is leading Africa’s name space with over 700,000 domains under .za.

dotAFRICA, Africa’s new gTLD project will also benefit from the growth of Africa’s infrastructure and internet users huge growth. Due to nature of Africa internet issues the project will contribute to the development of Africa’s Internet ecosystem through the establishment of dot Africa Foundation, more efforts directed to ccTLDs, registrars and Internet content services development in Africa.

Resources:
1. Africa’s current Sea Cables
2. ISOC’s Assessment of the impact of Internet Exchange Points – empirical study of Kenya and Nigeria
3. Senegal’s telecommunications regulator, ARTP, recently published an annual report for 2011.

This Article was also published in CircleID : http://www.circleid.com/posts/20120425_africa_infrastructure_growth_supporting_cctlds_and_new_gtld_growth/

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This post examines how an interactive Internet and new media tools can work for the developing world. It’s clear that the Internet can do much for a populations that may not have access to basics like education, employment and social services, let alone a computer.

I think new media can be used for noble goals like empowering people in the developing world, it’s on a crossroads where we are no longer about technology, about how we use the technology.

New Media offers so many compelling advantages compared to older technologies, that I foresee an extensive use of this new technology. In order to develop effective knowledge sharing applications for the agriculture sector for example, academic and research institutions, government agencies, NGOs, commercial organizations and users must collaborate since integration of data from multiple sources is necessary to provide meaningful information and content. Moreover, dissemination of this knowledge is crucial for successful deployment of these applications. The challenges for geographically dispersed organizations working in different fields, to jointly work together to address the requirements for such solutions are real, but could be resolved by leveraging the these new tools to facilitate a collaborative development of functionally richer applications.

New media and web 2.0 are creating tools which can enable a supportive platform for people expressing themselves, am talking about the mass public in the developing world whom don’t have access to latest technology, who don’t have the resources to spend a lot of time learning it.

I think that the real innovations that are going to happen in new media are going to be about bringing cutting edge, really broad-centered tools, that we have the fanciest trick that you can do in Photoshop, the most advanced video editing tool, and bring it down to a level that anybody can do it and do it within their means, within their resources they have. Those are going to bring about the real revolutions.

The use of new media tools for Development will create participatory platforms and possibilities of a medium to which everyone can contribute. Below, we’ve taken a closer look at one example that highlight the possibilities of new media and Web 2.0 tools in a variety of human development contexts.

India : Babajobs.com

Development Issues Addressed

India’s informal employment sector comprises about 370 million workers, making up 92% of the country’s total workforce, according to the National Sample Survey from 1999-2000. The informal sector contributes about 60% of India’s national domestic product (NDP). Yet poverty remains an intractable problem among the demographic that serves as the base of this sector, even in India’s bustling urban centers, largely due to unemployment. Studies indicate that urban unemployment stems not from a lack of market demand for labor, but the lack of an efficient network to connect potential employers with job seekers.

Babajob.com, dubbed “Village LinkedIn” by its founder and CEO Sean Blagsvedt, is an innovative social networking tool that connects job seekers from India’s large informal sector to middle- and upper-class Indians looking to hire maids, cooks, drivers, security guards, construction workers, and other wage laborers. It is employment-oriented networking with a social conscience and a practical function.

Babajob was created to be an innovative private enterprise, designed to facilitate economic development and poverty reduction by addressing the inefficiency of the informal economy. This service is confined to Bangalore as of now, but it will be rolled out in other Indian cities once the model is better established.

Ire Weise, Babajob’s Managing Director, explained their basic model :
“Research has shown that one of the main causes of poverty is the loss of a job by a head of household, and the main way by which a poor person can escape poverty is through finding a job. Research also showed that most employers prefer to hire someone who is recommended by a friend.

Word of mouth is the usual way in which jobs are found in the informal sector. If I need a driver I might ask the watchman at my apartment if he knows anyone looking for work as a driver. The watchman’s brother may know someone looking for work as a driver, whom I interview and hire. I feel comfortable interviewing (and possibly hiring) the friend of my watchman’s brother because he is known to a ‘friend of a friend.’

The ‘word of mouth’ way of finding someone looking for work is closely related to how an Internet social network works. On the social network web site I can not only see my friends, but I can see the friends of my friends. Thus, if someone is looking for work on a social network I should be able to see if any of my friends, or their friends, know the job seeker.

In nutshell, we’ve created an Internet employment service built around a social network.”

The Innovation – Solving Access issue

India enjoys access to cutting-edge information technology, thanks in large part to a booming IT sector fueled by growing ranks of technology workers. But this technology has been accessible only to educated and relatively well-off Indians, while the poor lack the resources, literacy and skills to benefit from the Internet. Babajob addresses the poor’s lack of access to computers by setting up booths where job-seekers can come get help setting up their online profiles. Employees take photos of the applicant and help them fill out the resume that will be posted on the website.

This is a sample resume taken from the website:
Position: Cook (Part Time)
Employer: Mrs. Rani
Job Category: Cook
Time Period: Aug, 2003 to Oct, 2007
This person is looking for a job as a: Cook
This person is looking for a job and prefers to work: Fulltime
She has digitally scanned references; her purpose statement is terse:
“I have 4 years experience in cooking . I can cook all types of foods and I can work from morning 8am – 11pm.”

Weise explains:”The problem with using an Internet web site to find informal workers is that they don’t have access to a computer. We try to solve this by sharing the revenue we collect for an employee search fee (500 rupees after a 300 rupee rebate) with those people who make hiring possible through our business model. We pay 200 rupees to the person who has registered the job seeker, whom we call a “mentor.” We’ve contacted churches, NGO’s and Internet cafes to act as mentors and register job seekers whom they come in contact with in the course of their daily activities. We also pay 100 rupees to the people who connect the employer to the employee. In the example above, we would pay the watchman and his brother 100 rupees each for connecting me to the driver I hired, assuming all are in our database.”

Babajob is connected to a sister social networking site, Babalife, frequented by a wealthier, more educated demographic. Everyone who has a profile on Babalife is automatically listed on Babajob, so the employer side of the network is conveniently built in to Babajob. When the site first launched, Babajob built up its employee database by sending workers directly to job-seekers in the streets with fliers advertising its services. So far, as of December 2007, about 2000 job-seekers have signed up on Babajob.

The online community has also been made available through SMS. According to Weise, “there are 200 million SMS users in India, but only 2 million broadband connections.”

Weise thinks the Babalife and Babajob networks are more compelling than any comparable programs currently offered in India, and gives five reasons:

1) It uses local languages, starting with Tamil, Kannada, and Hindi.
2) Its blog can accept videos and pictures. A blog creator can control who can view his or her blog, and also see who has viewed it.
3) Every part of a user’s home page can be accessed via SMS. Via SMS a user can see any changes that friends make on their home pages, and stay in constant contact.
4) A user can control not only his or her personal information, he/she can also control who see each part of their home page.
5) The project has integrated an employment service into our SN, so users can find employees through the SN and also be compensated for helping their friends find jobs.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z5FAwtX5d4

Reference : http://www.columbia.edu/itc/sipa/nelson/newmediadev/Social%20Networking%20in%20India.html

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The United States recent elections and Barack Obama’s use of new media in his historical successfully US presidency campaign was a clear evident of the power of new media and social networks in communication and mobilizing citizens .

The benefits of new media and web 2.0 to governments:

Given the excitement and pace associated with government’s increasing use of new media and web 2.0, it can be difficult for public servants to identify the full range of benefits of these technologies. Too often public service organizations fail to develop compelling business cases and coherent strategies before investing in new media technologies.

Public service organizations in a variety of ways:

•    Improved efficiency:
Through enterprise – internal blogs, wikis, Collaborative Planning Applications, social networking platforms and mashups—organizations can increase productivity by sharing best practices across the enterprise and dramatically reduce the cost of collaboration. The Government of Canada’s GCPedia, for example, uses Enterprise wikis to connect employees and enable them to share learning. Moreover, by replacing traditional desktop strategies with software-as-a-service models and cloud-based desktop strategies, public service organizations can also reduce the cost of IT and the risks associated with implementing enterprise applications.

Intellipedia, which is essentially the intelligence community’s version of Wikipedia. It allows analysts and officials across the United States federal government to share information over the Web and plan operations.

About 35,000 federal employees contribute to Intellipedia, and there are some 4,800 edits made every day. It’s a good example of how to use collaboration technologies to let experts pool their knowledge, form virtual teams and make quick assessments.

•    More effective public services:
Web 2.0 enables government to solicit real-time customer feedback and develop enhanced customer insight, helping government deliver more responsive and personalized public services. For example, in Singapore, REACH, a citizen engagement agency, uses a range of social media to solicit citizen feedback on a range of services and issues.

•    More accessible public services:
Web 2.0 enables organizations to provide citizens with information about accessing public services as never before; not only through government sites but also through user-generated mashups and apps, social media and personalized feeds like those provided by the District of Columbia’s Digital Public Square Web 2.0 could also enable citizens to report problems to and request service from government more easily through social networking sites, widgets on non-government sites and mobile apps. Fixmystreet.co.uk and communityfix.co.uk are both nongovernmental web 2.0 sites that enable citizens to report problems to government more easily than ever before. One example of how Web 2.0 applications can provide services or serve as a stopgap until experts are available is  NHS Direct, where a Web 2.0 application acts as an interactive online health service. It provides citizens with some assurance about a particular health condition or alerts them to the urgency of finding care.

•    Greater citizen participation:
Through popular social networking sites and by developing their own web 2.0 e-participation tools public service organizations can engage citizens in a more productive discourse about what they expect from public services, how public services could be improved and – through educational applications – what they as individuals can do to improve their own or their communities’ quality of life. For example, local authorities across the UK are using online budget simulators to engage and educate the public and develop a better understanding of citizens’ public spending priorities.  Barnet Council, for example, offer a citizen portal with an application, designed to help citizens understand the tradeoffs necessary to budget for and administer public services.

Politicopia is another good example of how new media and Web 2.0 can enable more participatory and transparent policy-making. It’s essentially a virtual town hall meeting that was initially developed by Utah state representative Steve Urquhart. Politicopia runs on a wiki that lets users provide input into some 30 bills that are under discussion in the state legislature. Urquhart’s goals are to politically empower constituents, to encourage better dialogue in the legislature and to produce better ideas for the state.

•    Improved transparency and accountability:
Public service organizations can increase transparency and become more accountable to their constituents by developing platforms, like the NHS Choices website, that enable citizens to rate and comment on the quality of services; opening up government data banks to the public; and developing web-based tools, like recovery.gov and the IT Dashboard in the US, to report on spending and results.

We can’t expect radical change too fast. Governments are large, complex beasts subject to a number of constraints. In fact, the institutions of democratic government were deliberately designed to induce stability and prevent radical change. Implementing change is difficult and onerous when deep and resilient traditions combine to frustrate progress.

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The costs associated with the growing online economy are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long. Just think that in 1961, a single transistor cost $10; now Intel’s latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor – effectively too cheap to price). The traditional economics of scarcity just don’t apply to bandwidth, processing power, and hard-drive storage.

Yet this is just one engine behind the new Free, a reality that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. Anderson also points to the growth of the reputation economy; explains different models for unleashing the power of Free; and shows how to compete when your competitors are giving away what you’re trying to sell.

Freemuim, the Free services/products as business model is simple, its where you give a core product away for free and sell premium products; like the way Skype gives away free computer calls and sells voicemail, calls to
landlines and other products.

Personally am using many products which use the free “Freemuim” business model, Google is the most famous example, my pictures are stored in Flicker and my calls are done via Skype .

Skype is a good example of a sustainable free service, it’s a Vice over Internet Protocol “VoIP” service that provides audio and video calls over the internet. Since its first version in 2003 there have been over 1 Billion downloads of Skype free software. In the third quarter of 2008, the service had 16 billion of call minutes on Skype-to-Skype calls. During the same time, there were under 2.2 billion paid Skype-out minutes used. Or in other words, of the total 18.2 billion minutes, only 12% were paid for.

While there is a debate going on whether Skype was worth the 2.6 billion price tag paid for it, it remains a fact that it is highly profitable. In third quarter of 2008 the company declared a profit of $45 million.

The reason Skype can make so much money while only 12% are paying, is that the free product is so cheap for them to duplicate and distribute.

Flat World Knowledge is a  company which publishes college textbooks. Like other textbooks publishers they use recognized experts and complement this with reviews and editors. Where they differ from their competitors, is in their business model.

Instead of only selling extensive paper versions that change every two years, they release the books online for free download. Students and professors have access to quality textbooks at no cost. The publisher makes money from selling a range of other products.

While Flat World Knowledge is still a young company, this business model looks to be profitable for them

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu06K71JayE

In order to implement a successful freemium business model certain Characteristics is required:

Quality free product that people want :

The most important condition for creating a successful freemium model is that you have a great product that people want. It will be the engine that drives your freemium based business. If this free product does not have inherent value your freemium will not get off the ground.

So instead of giving away a sample track of the music, let people download the whole album. Instead of letting people take a look at your worksheets, let them have all your tools for free.

The free product can be duplicated digitally :

Only a small percentage of the free users will usually buy something. In order for this to make financial sense, the expense of distributing the free product should be very minimal. Digital duplication ensures virtually no cost for copying and distribution. If you want to distribute 1 million pieces of something, $1 as unit price is quite a substantial amount.

Large reach :

Freemium depends on generating attention with the free product; then to sell premium products or services to some of the free users. In most cases only a small % of the free users will buy something. This is no problem, as long as it is a small percentage of a large number.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuqK69E0ds8

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng

Below is a list to the popular social networking vessels categorized by media type.

1. Social Networking
   • FaceBook
   • Myspace
   • Linkedin
2. Social Bookmarking
   • Technorati
   • Propeller
   • Digg
   • Reddit
3. Media Sharing
   • Youtube
   • Flicker
   • Wikipedia
   • SlideShare
4. Blog Platforms
   • WordPress
   • Blogger

The three main Social Media Marketing arena’s include :

Social Media Networks: These include sites such as Facebook, Myspace and linkedin. These are online communities where friends can interact and share information with each other. The naturally viral nature of these online social networks can be used to your business ‘s profit.

Social Bookmarking: Social Bookmarking sites are a bit like your “favorites list” on your web browser. But, instead of keeping this list on your computer for just you to see, it is stored on a website where your list can be “tagged” with your specific keywords and crawled by the search engines

Social Media Sharing : includes sites such as YouTube, Flicker, slideshare and Google Video. Users upload video’s or photo slide shows. These applications can bring a flood of new website traffic to business/products sites and improve inbound links to product’s content.

How Social Network Marketing can grow your business marketing profits?

Social Media Marketing creates opportunities to:

• Adds a human element to your business or product
• Engage with customers directly but informally while hanging out online
• It is fun and simple to do once you know how
• Get traffic to your website and promote your products
• Create buzz around your website, product or service or brand
• Creates loyalty and trust

One of the most important the value for marketing on social networking sites may be simply the ability to reach niche groups via advertising. Most of these sites have targeted text advertising with fees in reach of small businesses. For example LinkedIn’s fees can be as low as $5 for 1,000 impressions and allow users to set a budget. Advertisers can choose two of seven criteria to target, including geography, industry, seniority, and company size.

Marshall McLub quote “New media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusions, but new languages with new unique powers of expression”, is true using new media for marketing requires new innovation, creativity in the interaction with the new media crowd, adding value to its users instead of treating new media specially social networks as a direct advertising platform.

Social networks sites are evolving in nature, they change from day to day thanks to the contributions of it’s members – this is why they are so successful. As the platform evolves constantly, so should the approach to using it as marketing vessels.

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The senders of those coupons and promotional mail letters or emails ( now days we receive Advertisements emails on a daily bases)  knew nothing about me other than where I live or my email address, my immediate reaction to these mail coupons is throwing them to recycling basket, and deleting the emails even without reading them .

Personalized certainly has its advantages, for example Customers online shopping can create profiles that include their buying and shipping information, so that they need not bother to reenter that information each time they purchase from the site. Once they’ve registered and surfed, the site can direct them to areas they seem to prefer, bypassing others that appear to spur no interest.

Google is the first of the major search engines to introduce personalized results on a massive scale. Weighing a number of factors including but not limited to user history, bookmarks, community behaviour and site click-through rate and stickiness, Google is providing results that are specific to what they believe you are searching for. Currently this service is only available to those who are logged into their Google account.

Google, knows me well, because it monitor my search and scan if not reads all my e-mail, as a regular user of its Gmail service. On Gmail, there’s a thin strip of text ads that run on top of the list of messages and above opened e-mails. I notice those ads frequently, because they are placed contextually based on the content of the e-mails in my Gmail inbox. I don’t try to look at them; they just catch my eye when they’re relevant to me. I’m surprised at the number of those Gmail text ads that I’ve clicked on through the years.

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO … said gathering more personal data was a key way for   Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organize the world’s information.Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.”, “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’”

Amazon.com has been the early adopter of personalization technology to recommend products to shoppers on its site, based upon their previous purchases. Amazon makes extensive use of Collaborative Filtering in its personalization technology.

Personalization as it was originally conceived was simply meant to be a way of altering information we give online to match our individual interests. Companies that stored personally identifiable information, or PII, such as names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, and even Social Security numbers, began to sell or share that information with other companies, allowing those third parties access to customers who had not requested their services. Spam emails began to proliferate, but even that seemed minor compared to the more troubling vision of credit card numbers being abused, either within a company or by hackers.

Not surprisingly, we are all were bombarded with spam emails or in extreme cases credit card bills with unauthorized charges, its very concerning as this has lead to invasion of our privacy. Even if we authorized the originating company to use our information, most of us they hadn’t been informed — and in many cases, they don’t how that information would be used.

Personally, I think individually we have a responsibility to ensure our privacy online but providing limited personal information, read an review privacy policies. There is pressure from us the customers “Crowd pressure” against companies to balance personalization with privacy and be clear about the privacy policies on their sites.

Disclosure is commonly done in the form of a privacy policy posted at the e-business site, However, there are new software services aimed at promoting online privacy by offering intelligent, managed disclosure methods, including the ability to make a privacy policy interactive through a new technology standard called P3P.” P3P, or Platform for Privacy Preferences, is technology designed to simplify the user’s process of understanding a site’s privacy policy. P3P would collect the user’s privacy preferences and screen through a privacy policy, flagging any discrepancies between the user’s preferences and the site’s stated actions.

The next important consideration is participation management. Using a combination of opt-in and opt-out will allow customers control over the personalization experience, and keeping the customer informed of that control is important as well.

Until these privacy issues are minimized, I will continue to enjoy the benefits of personalization communication but be a cautious about my online privacy.. a win-win situation .

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The concept was popularized by in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com and Netflix as examples of businesses applying a niche business strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities. Anderson elaborated the Long Tail concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More

The basic premise behind “the long tail” is that, in certain industries, the ability to marginalize manufacturing, distribution and storage/warehousing costs makes it possible to generate significant revenue by selling small volumes of many products. Collectively, sales of these less-popular products can rival the sales for the handful of popular products that typically sell in high quantity. This phenomenon is depicted in the graphic below, with the red area representing the “popular” products and the yellow area representing the long tail, so named because it stretches almost infinitely to the right.

Anderson provides many examples of products and industries that follow this distribution, but the music industry is perhaps the easiest to understand through this lens. Historically, the music industry has been “hit-centric,” with most of its money made by selling large quantities of songs and albums from a handful of artists, and largely ignoring everyone else. This hit-centric approach has shaped everything from which acts to sign, to which format a radio station should follow, to which titles make it into stores. As evidence of this phenomenon, according to Anderson the average Wal-Mart carries 4,500 unique CD titles, representing less than one half of one percent of all titles available. Among the main reasons for this are the high costs associated with shelf space, and the need to rapidly turn over inventory.

In contrast, Apple’s iTunes – because all of the songs are digital and require no physical storage space or distribution channels – can offer a near-infinite selection of titles, thus capitalizing on a segment of the market that was heretofore ignored or deemed too expensive to pursue. Apple is thus capitalizing on the long tail whereas its brick-and-mortar competitors cannot. Similar shifts are happening in other media as well, including movies, books, and television

I believe that the long tail theory provide explanations to how new technologies specifically the internet has changed the business dynamics and enabled small companies or individuals to produce and distribute their products electronically to a mass customer base quickly and effectively. The new Market winners include small wineries, authors (Amazon), ebay merchants, Apple App. store developers,..etc.

The 21st century products are moving towards being digitally free products, Google’s has more than 300 products, almost all of them are free and these are monetized by advertising. One aspect of this is familiar to the traditional media model of radio, TV and newspapers (somewhat free).

The beauty of Free and paid is customization and features. You know what you want, you understand the value, and you want to pay for it. Marketing/advertising is not needed to seduce a customer into buying the product sells itself by letting people use it.

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The mobile landscape is at a tipping point right now, switching from a very old approach to an edgy new one. The difference between newer smart phones vs. feature (or non-smart) phones, or even older smartphones, is dramatic. Consumer behavior is transitioning from mostly using the phone for voice and text communication to using it as a secondary or even primary computing device. For this subset of wireless subscribers, their pocket-size Smartphone ( e.g IPhone, Android, ..etc) or mobile device ( e.g Apple IPad ) is used for browsing the web, watching videos, reading e-mails, listening to personalized radio stations, downloading eBooks and even filing taxes.

Worldwide mobile phone Mobile subscribers will surpass 5 billion in 2010 (that’s over 70 percent of the world population) and growing rapidly, led by China and India. Half a billion people accessed mobile Internet worldwide in 2009. Usage will double within five years as mobile overtakes the PC as the most popular way to get on the Web. By 2011, over 85 percent of new handsets will be able to access the mobile Web.

That’s where mobile marketing comes in. Mobile marketing enables companies in many sectors such as travel and retail to show targeted ads or send promotional messages and vouchers via and SMS and MMS for example, which is a direct targeted approach to connecting with limitless clients.

Importantly, companies such as Facebook announced that they see the future as being mobile. “There are more than 150 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.” – Facebook official statistics (August, 2010), astonishingly it has acquired 50 million of those users since Feb of this year.

Many industry statistics Cleary indicates that mobile will be the future of media marketing:

First, SMS is still king of mobile messaging: According to Portio Research (February 2010)

- SMS is used by four billion consumers worldwide.
- In 2009 worldwide SMS traffic topped five trillion messages, and that figure is set to exceed 10 trillion in 2013.
- MMS, mobile email and mobile Instant Messaging “IM” are all growing strongly. The driver for MMS is the number of camera phones, for mobile email is the business market and while IM is popular with the youth market.
- The global mobile messaging business is worth over US$150 billion, and will hit US$233 billion by 2014.

Second, Mobile Internet usage growth

In the U.S. today, nearly 50 million mobile subscribers access the Web via their devices on a monthly basis. In the U.S., the mobile Internet audience grew 74% between February 2007 and February 2009 .

Internationally, the U.S. is one of the leading markets for mobile Internet penetration, with more than 18% of subscribers accessing mobile Web .

Third,  Expenditure on mobile advertising and marketing worldwide:

Strategy Analytics (March 2010) estimates that global expenditure on mobile advertising (defined as placing an advert within a variety of mobile media formats including mobile Internet, games and applications, mobile video, mobile TV, streaming music, text and media alerts) at US$3.6 billion in 2009, growing to US$38 billion in 2015.

ABI Research (May 2009) estimates that global expenditure on mobile marketing and advertising in 2009 was $7.5 billion, with forecast years for $11.5 billion in 2010, $16.3 billion in 2011 and $21.2 billion in 2012.

Juniper Research (August 2009) predicts that total advertising expenditure on mobile was expected to rise from just over US$1.4bn in 2009 to US$6 billion n in 2014. Of this, ad spend on mobile Internet was estimated to be US$500 million in 2009.
The report also pointed out that:
- Where fixed Internet access is limited, mobile is the dominant means of accessing the Internet: in India, mobile accounted for nearly 90 percent of all Internet users in 2008.
- Visitor numbers to popular mobile Internet sites makes strong case for advertising and sponsorship options.
- Brands can build up much more detailed profiles of user responses compared to online and plan follow-up campaigns accordingly.

References: The Nielsen Company, Global Online Media Landscape report April 2009 and www.mobithinking.com

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Today’s online customers—as both producers and consumers of their own content and services—ferociously guard their online experiences. As markets morph into Web 2.0 consumers gain much greater freedom to pursue their own interests, customers are doing things that marketing managers don’t necessarily want—or expect—them to do. For example, they can easily connect with one another, often using multimedia sites such as YouTube and Flickr, so they themselves can satisfy their need for information about products. Furthermore, consumers may trust information obtained in this way much more than they do information from companies.

Companies are no longer in control of their message because people can talk back to the company via social networks, blogs, video, chat etc.. Companies started to pay attention to web 2.0 and new media tools like blogs and social networking sites and started use them as a medium to communicate with their customers and the public. This keeps the companies informed and responsive by monitoring what is said out there about them and how they could be more active in the community as well as shape the product to fit the niche market better.

Web 2.0 and new media tools enables companies to :

• directly communicate with and receive feedback from consumers
• assess consumers requirements and priorities
• provide direct, engaged customer service
• build direct brand-to-user relationships
• do all this efficiently, maximizing ROI

Given the shifting media, consumer and technology landscapes, traditional practices are costly and non-agile mechanisms for creating and sustaining this company-consumer engagement. Companies will have to be innovative in using new media’s to create a new company-consumer relationship.

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New Media is changing the way you live, discover how by following my future blog posts on the topic, which are dedicated to my Manchester Business School MBA, New Media Marketing Module post.

New Media Marketing “NMM” is an interesting module which will explore many aspects of marketing for new media specially the internet and web 2.0 and how to integrate web 2.0 in the corporate agenda .

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