MobileMonday Boss Talks About Mobile in Asia

Hello from the SingTel iChallenge11 workshop here in Singapore. We have a pretty cool line up of talks, including one from the chief of MobileMonday (moMo) Global, Jari Tammisto. Catch my live notes below as he shares his thoughts about Mobile Monday, the mobile market, and telcos in Asia.

Jari Tammisto, image courtesy of SingTel

#15:28 Jari says hello and encourages everyone to join up for tonight’s MobileMonday in Singapore (I’ll be attending). He shows a cool video featuring how MobileMonday has grown across Asia, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China.

#15:32 “Today we’re in the wireless confusion,” says Jari. The future of mobile depends on ecosystems like Facebook, iOS, Android etc. But we’ll never know which platform will be the winner. How do we encourage people to use technology to build a business. For example, Nokia has laid off a hundred employees who have the tech knowledge to build sustainable companies. How we can help these people is one of MoMo’s core purposes.

#15:37 Jari shows some interesting mobile trends: Cheaper smartphones at $10 each and mobile advertising. He also shows an interesting article about an integration between social networking and mobile technology in Uganda and Kenya, in cooperation with MoMo. MoMo is also excited about mashing up mobile with other technologies to make lives better and also to tap onto more markets.

#15:42 [A little about mobile games from Finland.] Jari talks about Angry Birds by Rovio. “It takes a lot of hard work. Rovio builds over 50 games before achieving success.”

#15:49 Lawrence Cosh-Ishii, another key figure in MoMo takes over and talks about Docomo’s i-mode in Japan. Docomo, one of the largest telco in Japan, controls the phones and their features. Similar to Apple, Docomo has full control over what features it wants its phone to have. It is pretty much an app store to itself, profit sharing with developers in a 90/10 ratio, in favor of the developers.

#16:00 The telcos in Japan understand that they don’t have the agility. The same goes for most telcos in Asia. The telcos have built up the infrastructure and “milk” them by providing network services. The next step is to extend its services through consumer or even enterprise services. Mobile games, songs, are just some examples.

#16:08 “Recurring income is so much more important compared to just selling the app at $0.99 one off,” said Lawrence. [On a related note, we previously wrote about Kaito Royale, mobile game in Japan which attracts over 10 million gamers per month and generates over $12.5 million in monthly revenue. Kaito Royale runs specifically on features phone and any web browser.]

Lawrence says that we all love to SMS, tweet, play games, and listen to songs while on the go. One of the challenges is to pick and mashup these services to create a sustainable mobile product.

“Who cares if its a feature phone or a smartphone. It’s the content inside that counts,” said Lawrence.