Sunday, 23 November 2008

Future of Mobile 08: Reaching the whole world

Doug Richard — Trutap

Doug gave a very good talk on how we should change our thinking about the upcoming mobile markets in developing countries. “It’s not just farmers sharing crop prices.”

Tom Hume has written a good summary of Doug’s talk, with extra perspectives coming from his company’s involvement in the development of Trutap.

My notes are a little shorter as I was helping Simon Maddox with some regular expressions…

  • 500m - 1 billion people in aspiring middle classes around the world
  • Comparing LA to Mumbai:
    • Mumbai user wants to do all the social networking stuff that LA user does on his PC
      • Wants to have friends, know friends & meet girls :-)
    • If he visits an Internet cafe, he has to pay 10-100 times as much for data as on his phone, and he will have someone looking over his shoulder
    • Mumbai user’s primary device is the phone
    • Phone is not extension of your web life, it is your only internet access device
  • Social networks on a PC are a temporary phenomenon
    • They should have started on the phone
  • Launching new Trutap today
    • support all of the world’s IM transports (about 16)
    • live feed
    • support full profiles
      • In Japan, dating sites never split from social networking
      • Trutap v2 adds detailed profiles and profile search to put the dating back in

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