Too Much subscriber data - unable to drive key actionable insights?

I wrote this post for Openwave couple of weeks back, just posting here.

Marketers have an unquenchable thirst for data. They are always on the prowl for more and more sources of data with which to gain insights into consumer behavior. These insights are the spun gold of the marketing world, as they enable more precise targeting and higher ROI for the entire advertising ecosystem.

The better the marketing team, the better their ability to piece together valuable insights from whatever data is available. But even the best marketing gurus will benefit from more information about their target audience. The biggest challenge is accounting for the holes, or blind spots, that incomplete or unavailable data create. The constant battle to get closer to consumers requires a variety of tools and techniques like web analytics, behavioral targeting, multivariate testing, Nielsen/ComScore, CRM systems, and most important, a way to integrate all these systems.

A New Kind of Challenge
Mobile operators have the enviable problem of too much information about their customers. Operators sit on a goldmine of data like billing and location information, mobile transactions, online behavior and network conditions, but the sheer volume of data makes it incredibly unwieldy. A tier-one operator has millions of subscribers which yield billions of transactions per day – close to a Petabyte of data (that’s one million gigabytes). The problem is only getting more complex with the growing demand for data services -- subscriber data consumption is growing over 93% CAGR year over year.

A New Kind of Solution
Obviously, the right solution for today’s Big Data challenges must be able to process billions of transactions – or a Petabyte of data – on a daily basis at near real-time without a large investment of in hardware to processes this data. Key ways to solve these issues:

• Intelligent aggregation methods enable analyst, marketers to quickly generate multiple high-level insights.
• Pre-processing data into multiple streams to accommodate operational, internal marketers, advertisers, external marketers and content providers reporting and analysis needs.
• A flexible database architecture gives you the capability to integrate new and multiple feeds for a 360-degree view across multiple platforms.
• Smart sampling maintains granularity at a segment level and profile level, thus making the solution very economical.
• A flexible reporting environment allows ad hoc reporting, empowering marketers, operational teams, analysts and adversities to fill in the holes which arise from pre-defined reports without relying on IT resources.

Openwave® Analytics is a smarter approach to leveraging the incredible amount of data available to mobile operators. Besides drastically reducing the storage and processing costs of such large data sets, Openwave Analytics delivers all the capabilities marketing and operations teams need to manage and monetize their network.

Role Mobile Carriers could play on the Internet in near future

According to CISCO Visual Networking Index, Mobile Data is growing at 108% YOY from 2009to 2014 Worldwide. This doesn’t mean that mobile operators’ revenue is growing at same rate. According to ABI research mobile data revenue is growing at around 18% CARG in North America. With data usage growing so rapidly carrier’s biggest challenge is falling margins on the data network and are seeking ways to keep their maintain their margins.

Let’s fast-forward five years to 2015. The mobile Internet would become default channel to access the Internet. With my glasses I see two kinds of scenarios (there would a mix of these, just to make it simple, let’s consider these two cases)

(a) Carriers deliver only data

(b) Carriers play a major role in the Mobile internet eco-system.

Scenario (a),

Carriers have invested more into their network capabilities and believe that their business model is charging on data flowing on network and don’t want to get involved mediating their data traffic or have decided to sell their no PII data to some 3^rd party vendor, who sells this data to Ad-networks, publishers and enterprises.

Carriers will have a fast network and huge bandwidth. All the operators would also start dealing with high pricing pressure and/or struggling to maintain their high profit margins. Most of carriers now become like a Big Fat Pipe, just like Electric companies. People really don’t care who the provider of their electricity is, they do care about the fixtures, lights, and gadgets. Consumers wouldn’t really care who their wireless providers is, they would care about their phones, OS and Apps they are using. Everyone would start taking wireless internet connection as basic utility.

Now if operators want to move up the value chain to becomes more relevant to the internet, it becomes really hard for operators as they have been cut-off by their value chain for new from Apple, Google, Microsoft and others players.

Furthermore it would be hard for operators to even sell their data directly as they haven’t built their customer profiles and analytics capabilities, also they now don’t have direct relationships, technology integrations as their 3^rd party vendor have with Ad-Networks, Publishers and Enterprises and have continuously evolved their products over past five years.

Scenario (b)

Mobile operators have invested in their data assets to become more relevant to internet and have realized that their data they are sitting on is goldmine and are changing the internet for good. Major mobile operators built partnership, where they bring customers data together to give complete true insights on what’s happening on the internet without revealing PII information.

Operators truly have the ability to understand what you consume, what your likes, what your friends consume and can provide recommendation on Apps, Contents and Deals making your discovery easy on the internet. Furthermore, ad-networks, enterprises, and publishers are dipping into this no PII data assets to personalize ads, campaigns and deals to better server each profile & segment for higher ROI. With this Operator earns over the top revenues in multiple streams and playing a major role in evolutions of the internet.

Does this sound scary to all those privacy people out there? Oh yes. This would be just like big internet companies currently do; subscribers will have opt-out options, so that they don’t get any targeted information. But upside of these personalized and targeted ads, offers and content recommendation will make most of the subscriber to opt-in so that they don’t have spend time searching on internet as discovery is just becoming harder and harder.

Well for scenario (b) to happen, mobile carriers need to make transformation that they are just not pipe and they need to become a data driven company just like other web2.0 companies and to take advantage of the current situation. I personally want scenario b to play out so that power is distributed; it’s not just couple of big software and web2.0 companies control everything.

Future of Parking in Cities

I had written this paper while I was pursuing my MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006. I also received PASCAI Grant for this letter; here is the link - http://www.ini.cmu.edu/news/2005/01/omnipark.html

The paper is about solving day to day trouble of thousands and millions of people spend quite a lot of time to park their car. This paper focuses how to automate the processes of finding a parking spot, reserving the spot and have it automatically paid to the meters with help of wireless technology and sensors.

Here is the link to research paper in PDF format which talks how this problem can be solved using technology.

Palaces i want to go

Well i always wanted to share where all in the world i wanted to go. Its funny that i started using a Facebook App "Where i have been" and totally forgot about it. Suddenly today it poped-up in news feed and realized, long time back i had updated.

Just embedding the Map-

Multi-Channel Messaging is the Future of Email Marketing

I wrote this blog for Lyris sometime in Jan 2010, when i was contracting for them so just publishing here on my blog post here.

In marketing we talk endlessly about the best approach to reach prospects and how to convert them into customers. The email marketing industry has come a long way and we have become experts at optimizing email campaigns using advanced segmentation, trigger email, A/B and multivariate testing, and optimizing our email send time for maximum conversion.

However, email marketing is no longer just about sending emails. Marketers are thinking of creative approaches to engage their customers with email marketing by personalizing a lot more and integrating campaigns across multiple channels.

Over the past three months, I have been connecting with our customers to understand their current challenges, areas of focus for the near future, and how they think email marketing is evolving in their business.

Here are four key ways I have learned that marketers are hoping to use email marketing in the coming years.

1) Mobile friendly email marketing

With smartphone adoption sky rocketing, marketers want email service providers to automatically detect what kind of phone it is and render the email to meet the device specifications. Furthermore, marketers would love to dynamically localize email content based on the location of the phone. For example if Apple sends out an email marketing campaign for the latest Tablet, and you open that email on your iPhone, the email would show an offer related to your area and the address of the nearest Apple Store based on your current location, with a small map.

2) Video streaming in the email inbox

Social video sites are becoming more popular compared to TV among some generations for viewing their favorite shows on demand. With more than a billion video views on YouTube every day, now more than ever marketers want to reach their customers using video messaging. Marketers are looking for an email solution that can accommodate standard YouTube embedded code and video so that email recipients can view video streams as soon as they open their email. Let’s hope all the internet services providers catch up with this technology to render video streaming. Furthermore, marketers are wishing for video email to be friendly for major mobile email clients too.

3) Email that is social media inbox friendly

There are over 350 million Facebook users, 50M+ LinkedIn professionals,100M+ MySpace users, and millions of users on other social sites - and still astonishing social networking growth is occurring. Furthermore, consumers are spending more time on social networks than ever before, making it the perfect place for marketers to send personalized messages via the social site inbox. Marketers can’t wait to send targeted messages to all their Facebook fans right into their Facebook inboxes and watch those messages go viral.

4) Email integration with online optimization products

Email is no longer a single channel; rather it is multi-channel messaging over the Internet, so marketers are seeking dynamic content and targeting as well as multivariate testing of dynamic content across all the channels. Marketers are seeking tight integration with market leading online optimization products such as Omniture Test & Target, Google Web Optimizer and SiteSpect.

Wow that’s a dream come true for any marketer! I don’t foresee all of this happening in 2010, but with the evolution of mobile, social media and online optimization there’s no doubt that the email marketing industry will continue to evolve and grow well into the future.

Wish you a very Happy New Year from AppKettle Team!!

AppKettle wishes all our App users Very Happy and Prosperous New Year 2010!! and Thank you for your continual support, we really appreciate it!!

2009 was the year when AppKettle was born. On its first year AppKettle launched five applications on Android, three on Facebook and one on the iPhone. Darshana and I are pretty impressed with our outcome on first year. All credit goes to our Software Engineers (Arin, Gopal and Arun), Graphic Designer (Samtha) and Product coordinator (Nishant) who have been working really hard to get these application out. Thank you for all your support!!



Looking back at our first Application Shouldi - A polling app among friends, it had a pretty concept but with ok UI. As we built this App and launched, we learnt a lot what app users are looking for? what they like and started listening more closely. We got number of request from south American countries that they need this application in Spanish. So we built second app Deberia.


Deberia - Same polling app like shouldi in Spanish, catering to all Spanish speaking users. However, the adoption of the app was not as great we expected. So looking back what went wrong? Well status message, Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook was way users get their friends comment on the questions or anything. So lesson learnt was unique value to user, which they cant get from other places and it should be really really simple and easy.


Learning from our first two application we built our third application on Android "Indian Railway Schedule". There was no App which was catering to indian train commuters. Furthermore, India has thousands of railway stations and hundreds of trains, that it just made lot harder to build the mobile App. We took-up this challenge to build a mobile App, which will allow android users to "very quickly and easily find the status of train arrival and departure". We built the app on this key principle and published it on Android Market. We got a great reception on the adoption of the App and the App has 5 star rating. We have received tons of great reviews on the App.

Special thanks goes to Darshana for building this App!!


As Darshana and I love Bollywood movies, we were using quite a number of bollywood apps on our iPhone and Android to know what latest movies, gossip and news in the bollywood world. We realized that we had to use two or three apps to get information. We found this fustrating, so we decided to build a bollywood app "Access Bollywood".

The key thing we wanted the app to do
(1) Get all bollywood information from movies, to gossip all at one place.
(2) Should be fun and intuitive to read bollywood gossip.
(3) Should be very simple
(4) Should have pictures rather than text.

We built the App on the key principles and launched the App on iPhone AppStore, Android Market and Facebook on Thanksgiving. Just over a month since we launched the App, the App has been well received by the bollywood fans. We got ton of Feedback on what more Access Bollywood users want in their app. I really want to Thank you for your Feedback and i want to tell you that we are working on the request and in next coming months you would see your most requested features implemented.

It was very nice year for AppKettle and we are very thankful for your support.

So what's coming in 2010. A lot more new apps for user and also enhancements to existing apps.

We wish you all a very Happy New Year!!

Vishal

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