Story Board for monetized 'Tele Social Network'
If you look carefully, you would find that the Telecom Networks are best positioned to move into social networking space. While social network allows people with common interests to interact in a forum, the tele-social network is the next step when those interactions become real time.
So, what is a tele-social network? It is bringing the concepts of social networking to our handset.
Imaging this - VilaTel is a leading mobile telco in India. Every VilaTel customer obviously makes on-net and off-net calls to friends, family and colleagues. With all the creativity in the marketing departments of VilaTel, there would be umpteen offers for VilaTel scubscribers to have their friends and family on the same network to reduce costs and benefit from Closed-User-Groups. (CUG for instance is a primitive form of tele-social network. )
Suppose, VilaTel offers every subscriber the facility to maintain his/her phone book as part of their subscription accounts - via the VilaTel Portal, it suddenly has access to information about who - interacts with who within the network. This is possible through a CRM and a BI engine, which together reveal a heat map of each subscriber in relation to other on-net subscribers analyzing the bills (or realtime) on the time (and money) spent on calls with those subscribers.
Effectively, VilaTel generates heat pockets or 'subscribers' who are very 'active' on the network.
These 'active subscribers' can then be classified based on their preferences. These preferences can be managed via their accounts on the VilaTel portal - such as joining or leaving a community. This is like VilaTel owning an Orkut or a similar social networking site.
This classification, as done in traditional social networks, can then be merged with the real time nature of telecom.
Commercializing the concept is easy. Just offer an 'active' subscriber based on the heat map, some free content pertaining to his 'preferences' (... news about an alien planet - if I belong to the 'alien club' community for example!) - and it is bound to spread into the network of the 'active subscriber' - generating revenue.
Over and above that, users in communities with special privileges (paid subscriptions to communities) may be able to post to the community forum from the handset - and all priviledged users get the post as an SMS. Imagine what this may be able to do for sales persons who gather leads from the net!
All in all, telcos - are best positioned to buy a few social networking sites and/or start some of their own. With creative marketing and value added service of bringing the social network to the phone, it should surely find takers from within their subscription base.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Sunday, July 06, 2008
IT - The bulwark against economic downturns - an opportunity again.
A wise man once said, that in the middle of every difficulty, lies an opportunity - and there cannot be a better start to the analysis presented here - than this famous statement from the wise man.
The recent economic downturn exhibits once again that we haven't tamed the economic cycle yet. And it wouldn't be egregious to say, that we possibly wouldn't be able to tame this big cat for decades to come. Economic cycles exhibit the expansion and contraction of economic activity - which in turn is a complex function of parameters such as consumer spending, interest rates, inflation and a multitude of other parameters, along with the assumption that we humans are rational beings who act based on the information available to them. While we have been successful; partially though, in taming the economic cycles, the critical component of that success lies in making information available, for the rational beings to take judicious decisions. It is well known fact, that we have avoided severe downturns over the last decade - primarily due to improvements in Information Technology, which deliver the right information at the right place and time, to allow judicious decisions to be taken.
To give you a background, most of the recessions over the last fifty years have originated from the manufacturing sector. The reason is simple - Manufacturing industry has a value-chain, from the raw material producer to the end consumer. The raw material producer, supplies to the manufactures, who in turn supplies to the wholesaler and then the retailer, from where we customers buy products. At each stage in the chain, they have to keep some inventory of stock to cater to the variation in the demand. In early days, due to poor speed of information flow (about the inventory of the end retailer) the level of inventory maintained at each stage was relatively very high. Therefore, when a recession triggered in the - the retailer was the first to know about it - but it was very late in the cycle, that the raw material producer and the manufacturer learn't about it. This meant - huge overstock of finished goods and big-time lay-offs.
Over the past decade - with tremendous improvements in Information Technology - all members of the value-chain are able to keep a tab on the end consumption and therefore have managed to relatively reduce their inventory/stock. As a result, if the consumption goes down, they can immediately scale down production , and since they do not have huge overstock of finished goods - there are fewer layoffs.
While most of the industries have taken a huge leap in technological terms, it has allowed Fed's across the world - better quality of information and thus better decisions. Wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Information Technology has been our bulwark against severe recessions.
Having said that, we are in the middle of a severe downturn! Well, so now - how is that possible? In every recession, there is an industry which triggers the fall- not always, but mostly. In the days-gone-by it was the manufacturing industry. But with deployments of ERPs across the globe; good on them, they aren't the culprits this time on. From the articles world-over - there is significant analysis which proves that poor financial management in banking (read- bad credit checks) and housing led to this current downturn.
Is it not time, then, for better application of Information Technology in Housing and Banking?
Like the wise man said - in every difficulty lies an opportunity. And the wise man was Einstein.
The recent economic downturn exhibits once again that we haven't tamed the economic cycle yet. And it wouldn't be egregious to say, that we possibly wouldn't be able to tame this big cat for decades to come. Economic cycles exhibit the expansion and contraction of economic activity - which in turn is a complex function of parameters such as consumer spending, interest rates, inflation and a multitude of other parameters, along with the assumption that we humans are rational beings who act based on the information available to them. While we have been successful; partially though, in taming the economic cycles, the critical component of that success lies in making information available, for the rational beings to take judicious decisions. It is well known fact, that we have avoided severe downturns over the last decade - primarily due to improvements in Information Technology, which deliver the right information at the right place and time, to allow judicious decisions to be taken.
To give you a background, most of the recessions over the last fifty years have originated from the manufacturing sector. The reason is simple - Manufacturing industry has a value-chain, from the raw material producer to the end consumer. The raw material producer, supplies to the manufactures, who in turn supplies to the wholesaler and then the retailer, from where we customers buy products. At each stage in the chain, they have to keep some inventory of stock to cater to the variation in the demand. In early days, due to poor speed of information flow (about the inventory of the end retailer) the level of inventory maintained at each stage was relatively very high. Therefore, when a recession triggered in the - the retailer was the first to know about it - but it was very late in the cycle, that the raw material producer and the manufacturer learn't about it. This meant - huge overstock of finished goods and big-time lay-offs.
Over the past decade - with tremendous improvements in Information Technology - all members of the value-chain are able to keep a tab on the end consumption and therefore have managed to relatively reduce their inventory/stock. As a result, if the consumption goes down, they can immediately scale down production , and since they do not have huge overstock of finished goods - there are fewer layoffs.
While most of the industries have taken a huge leap in technological terms, it has allowed Fed's across the world - better quality of information and thus better decisions. Wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Information Technology has been our bulwark against severe recessions.
Having said that, we are in the middle of a severe downturn! Well, so now - how is that possible? In every recession, there is an industry which triggers the fall- not always, but mostly. In the days-gone-by it was the manufacturing industry. But with deployments of ERPs across the globe; good on them, they aren't the culprits this time on. From the articles world-over - there is significant analysis which proves that poor financial management in banking (read- bad credit checks) and housing led to this current downturn.
Is it not time, then, for better application of Information Technology in Housing and Banking?
Like the wise man said - in every difficulty lies an opportunity. And the wise man was Einstein.
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