Opera Mini- Friend or Foe?

The Opera Mini browser has done more for the mobile internet than all the operators and device makers put together. With its awesome full web to mobile screen crunching technology, superior data compressing and rich experience, it has made the web accessible to everyone with a GPRS enabled handset no matter how feature rich the handsets are. And people love it- the billion page views that it serves month on month is a testament to its growing popularity. It’s surprising that the device makers, apart from Apple, have not been able to develop a worthy competitor to the Opera mini.

However, what peeves me is that content companies and carries have not been able to harness the potential of the Mini. The Carriers on their part have been silent spectators to the runaway success of the mini. Sure, they’re happy that it’s made a lot of people adopt the mobile internet and thus boost data volumes and internet plans. Again, this is another step that will lead to the operator becoming a dumb pipe in the long run.

More worrying is that content and media companies too have not realized that millions of subscribers have been consuming their content and services through the mini without any substantial benefit to these web media companies. You would say, hey, they are getting massive page views? Wrong! With the Opera Mini all the page views are meaningless since Opera Mini fetches all content through a proxy server that reformats web pages into a format more suitable for small screens thorough the Opera Servers based in the US or Norway. Thus, all the page views are just non-identifiable and not serve the basic purpose of any intelligible data that is traditionally known through normal web browsers which can be used for advertising.

Also, the monetisable services that are available in a wap/app format through the carrier decks are bypassed since users the Free to use internet services through the Mini instead! For e.g.- a well known matrimonial web services company in India runs its wap and sms services through carriers on a micro-payment revenue model. However, the same services are available to the user through the Opera Mini for Free!! Now why would anyone pay for the WAP/SMS services now?! Ditto for sport scores, infoservices etc..! Some smart internet content and services companies have thankfully taken this into account and are now identifying the browser type and serving only Mobile internet sites on the Mini like the popular Men’s Mag- Nuts or Loaded in the UK. Nuts mag offered the full web services on the Mini earlier but by the sheer traffic that it got through the Mini lead them into serving mobile users with the mobile internet portal only. Now users can download content from Nuts mag at a price- no more free web services and revenue leakages! Well done, Nuts.

This is a fine example of how web media companies and carriers can truly monetize the mobile internet through the Opera Mini. Sure, I might face some flak saying that it’s detrimental to the growth of the mobile internet etc but with the current economic climate and digital advertising hard to come by, some tough decisions need to be taken for the web companies and carriers to survive lest they get into the mess that the newspapers in the US have gotten themselves into.

Now everyone can Game...

It doesn’t take a Mckinsey/KPMG report to tell you that Gaming is exploding...

Every household has a kid/youngster whose wishlist is a gaming console for his or her birthday/diwali/[insert any random occasion where gifts are exchanged]. Heck, I know of many who have a number of Gaming devices- a Ps2, a psp and of course the mobile phone.

Yes, you read right- I called the mobile phone a gaming device...

For years, people have been dreaming of the day when gaming is accessible to all and we can all be happily twiddling our thumbs away killing monsters in distant lands or racing our fantasy cars on the winding roads of Monaco. Dream no more, the mobile phone has made that possible.

A few years ago, the mobile gaming experience was quite inferior- a poor man’s gaming console, due to the handset capabilities and inexperience on the part of mobile gaming developers on how to utilize the restricted environment to offer quality gaming experience. However, that has changed and how!

All the latest handsets support gaming experiences to rival the Nintendo DS and even the PSP! Mobile device makers have, to their credit, pushed the limits of hardware capabilities and game developers have exploited this fully. The Apple Iphone has to some extent shown the other device makers of how a mobile phone can be a great gaming console. Sure, Nokia had a great device called the NGage with some really good titles but the device had a love it or hate it ‘sidetalking’ feature and a bad game discovery process. The iphone with its superlative hardware and a great app store coupled with great low prices and top of the line titles has really infused new energy to the once-flaccid mobile gaming market. Gaming for the iphone is very profitable business line- evident by the number of games available in the app store- Games lead all iPhone categories with 6,276 titles, or 23.1 percent of total App Store applications.

Unfortunately, most carriers are still mostly grappling in the dark when it comes to Mobile Gaming. It all starts with the Carrier’s deck- most carrier decks are cluttered with too many inferior games selling at mostly inflated prices. Gaming for many in India begins with the Mobile phone (since consoles and high end PCs are still out of reach for the average Indian) and the first few experiences that they have with it will determine on whether they would purchase more games from the carrier or stick to their embedded ‘Snake’ Game for the rest of their lives (Read the Video Game Crash of 1983 for more). It is imperative that Carriers get quality titles that are reasonably or at least creatively priced with pricing options like Try N Buy, Micro-payments etc to get people to get their first taste of gaming. A large opportunity stands before the carriers in the country- they can quickly get an entire generation hooked onto mobile gaming and lead this initiative or watch the device makers, with their fantastic app stores, to snatch them away.

This is one real-world game that has a lot at stake for the mobile operators.

VASJobs.com

For any industry to truly succeed it will need exceptional people to drive it…Mobile Data Services or VAS (Value Added Services), as it is called in India, is no different.
This industry needs a different set of skills and talent which is presently quite short in supply. This is because very few head hunters truly understand the role of the VAS Professional. Thankfully a new job services portal- VASjobs.com might help fill that gap and make available the right kind of jobs to the right people- it has tons of jobs posted already!