And it comes with instant monetization. =) Anyone will buy their awkward photos to avoid public 'humiliation.' And,if you don't want to buy your pictures, don't worry, loving relatives will do it for you.
Wired in.
Employing for the first time a direct-selling approach, telecom giant Smart Communications has unveiled a plan to invade the rural areas with a P500-phone package under its Talk ‘N Text brand.
In a press launch Thursday, Smart officials said the launch of the low-priced prepaid handset bundle, dubbed Talk ‘N Text Panalo Phone, signals a fresh drive to gain more ground in the lower D and E market.
The telecom operator said it is deploying a direct-to-consumer marketing strategy employed by consumer firms in selling their products. This means that the phone bundle won’t be available in malls or big retail stores – at least not yet – and will be sold only through distributors and roving sales teams.
The Talk ‘N Text Panalo Phone kit includes a new handset with a built-in Talk ‘N Text SIM, pre-loaded with free SMS. Specially-developed SMS bucket offers will also be available for as low as P5.
Smart officials discuss the Talk ‘N Text Panalo Phone in a press briefing on Thursday.
With the Panalo Phone’s price, the telco leader is banking on the bundled product to help put a cellphone in the hands of about 11 million or so Filipinos that still don’t have or can’t afford a cellphone.
“Offering quality services and making them affordable and accessible to what they now call ‘the base of the pyramid’ is built into Smart’s DNA. This is where and how we grew,” said Orlando B. Vea, chief wireless advisor and co-founder of Smart.
The mobile phone that comes with the package is provided by Cherry Mobile and ZTE.
Nice move from Smart.
If you want to reach every consumer on the planet, texting is the way to do that," said Daly, speaking Friday at MediaPost's Mobile Summit conference in Miami. To underscore his point, he noted that 2.3 trillion text messages were sent worldwide last year. And as one of the world's most pervasive consumer brands, Coca-Cola is always interested in reaching as wide an audience as possible.
Kawasaki's recommended structure for any entrepreneurial presentation is as follows:
1. Problem
2. Your solution
3. Business model
4. Underlying magic/technology
5. Marketing and sales
6. Competition
7. Team
8. Projections and milestones
9. Status and timeline
10. Summary and call to actionRegardless of a specific structure you choose for your presentation, your story needs to accomplish three goals: frame the issue, present the challenge, and explain how you will solve the problem.
Jesse Social Networks are for convincing your own, already acquired customers to share & build relationships w/ those that could become
Maybank Group led the ranking in Malaysia while Vietcombank took the lead in Vietnam and DBS secured the top spot in Singapore.
Indonesia (Bank Mandiri) and the Philippines (Bank of the Philippine Islands) also displayed similar trends, while in Hong Kong HSBC claimed the top spot in the market where the bank originated.
Global banking brands HSBC and Citigroup also secured positions within the top rankings.
Citigroup ranked as the #2 largest online banking destination in the Philippines and #3 in both Singapore and Indonesia.
Besides leading the Hong Kong market, HSBC also ranked as the third largest banking destination in the Philippines.
Online payment facility is interesting. How much more the mobile payment facility?
SMS HAS 4.2 BILLION USERSSo the huge number here is SMS obviously. Yes, 4.2 billion people are already active users of SMS text messaging. Don't listen to any of those fools who suggest SMS is going away. There is nothing in the digital world coming close to what SMS is today. Look at its size. SMS text messaging has more than twice the number of users as all users of the internet. Nearly four times more people send SMS text messages than have a PC of any kind. While email can also be accessed at internet cafes and at work - with 1.4 billion unique users of email worldwide, including residential consumer users and business/work email accounts - SMS is 3 times bigger than email already.
Do you think Facebook is 'important' and 'popular' - well, SMS is only ... seven ... yes seven (!) times bigger than Facebook. You like Twitter? SMS is 21 times bigger than Twitter! And is SMS 'slowing down'? No. The world's most widely used data application grew users by 17% in just one year! Did the traffic grow? You betcha! Try 24% in just one year! And what of SMS revenues you ask? Well, SMS hit revenue levels of 120 Billion dollars in 2010, which is a growth rate of 6% from the level in 2009. Do not for one moment think SMS will go away any time soon.
SMS is the only technology that reaches the pockets of 61% of the planet. SMS user base is literally bigger than the total number of radio receivers in use globally, three times as big as the number of television sets and almost four times as big as the total installed base of all personal computers in use (and not all of those are connected to the internet, mind you).
SMS delivers news and alerts - 1.2 billion people pay to receive news on their mobile phones - most do so via SMS text messaging. Note this number is more than all who pay for cable TV (ie who have access to 24 hour cable news services). The number who pay to receive news on their phones is nearly 3 times bigger than the total paid circulation of all daily newspapers worldwide. Yes.
And SMS does money! SMS has cannibalized coins and Estonia and Sweden are among the countries that are now decommissioning coins from some industries like parking, public transportation etc. In Kenya more than half of all banking accounts are SMS banking accounts, and 25% of the total Kenyan economy transits SMS based mobile payments. SMS does just about anything you could imagine from delivering answers to questions on AQA and ChaCha to reminding about medical appointments to teaching basic literacy skills.
WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE PHONE?Nokia told us in 2010 that the average person on the planet looks at the phone now 150 times per day. That means you and I will feel the compulsion to glance at our phone every six and a half minutes of every hour we are awake! Yes, its our clock and our alarm and our calendar and our map, but what do we do on it? Lets see.
The activity that gets the most use of the mobile 'phone' is voice calls - but that is nowhere near 100% anymore! Yes, only 88% of us will originate voice calls. For all regions now, including the USA, the primary use of a mobile phone for most users is.. SMS text messaging! 82% of all mobile phone users aleady send SMS text messges. And dont' worry, there is no math error. More people use voice calls - but for most users, they now prefer SMS as the most used function on the phone. A 2010 survey by Zokem of mobile phone users in the USA and Europe found that 29% of our time is spent on phone messaging, and only 23% on voice calls. The trend is global with national regulators and industry associations reporting on the preference of text messaging ahead of voice calls from the USA to UK to New Zealand - in India they are at the point where 34% of mobile phone users will not originate voice calls (Yankee Group 2007). Which gives us the big decliner - while essentially all mobile phone accounts include free voicemail, the use of voicemail is down to 67% of all mobile phone subscribers. They all are doing what for example the Finnish Prime Minister was saying earlier in the past decade - their voicemail says don't leave me voice mail, send me an SMS text message instead.
What else do we do? 71% of mobile phone subscribers will use the camera on the phone (note, only 77% of all phones in use are cameraphones!) 53% of us will listen to music on the phone (including use of ringtones and use of FM radio). Half of us have received advertising on the phone. 40% of us now send MMS picture messages. One third of us have used search on the phone and just over one in four, 26% have voted on TV shows via SMS. But of the hot story of the 'apps' - only 15% of the mobile phone subscribers have downloaded an app to the phone.
In our study, we found that the USWs tended to forget the payment dates for their microfinance loans and would skip their monthly medical checkups for sexually transmitted diseases. The USWs we interviewed were a unique population in that they were socially stigmatized and economically poor. However, mobile phone penetration among the USWs was 97%, which is an unusually high number for both: a developing nation population (the average wireless tele-density in India is 55.14% as of July, 2010 and women (who are 37% less likely to own a mobile phone in South Asia, as of February, 2010). Mobile phones are excellent tools for reminders and announcements since they form a pervasive infrastructure; are very effective at delivering short messages; and are portable. For the above-mentioned problem areas, we took into consideration the exceedingly high mobile penetration among USWs and narrowed down on designing a reminder and announcement system
