Sean Blagsvedt

I've been thinking about this space a fair amount with Freeman Murray @ http://jaaga.in and here are my initial thoughts

We will soon have the platforms – phones, cheap tablets and reasonable 3G data connections – to enable a potential revolution in the Indian educational system. Perhaps, but lots of folks said TVs in the classroom would make education significantly better and it never happened. That said, given the interactive, ubiquitous and personal nature of cheap tablets and touch phones, this surely has greater potential.

Elements required in the solution:
1. Cheap Data – right now one 500MB Bollywood movie downloaded over 3G costs Rs 500 - $10 – aka 5x more than seeing it in a theatre. And 10x more than what the bottom 50% of India pay for their entire monthly mobile phone bill. It is frankly appalling that the government taxes 3G licenses to the tune of $40bn and then asks for cheap bandwidth. We need innovative telco incentives and business models that the poor connect to connect via their normal mobile carrier connections.

2. Localized Content – Just because India will have a great mobile and tablet ecosystem, does not mean that English language literacy changed overnight. The Khan Academy is great if you a smart 17 year-old who speaks fluent English but few 10 year olds in rural villages are going to understand Mr Khan’s American accent. We need content that’s taught in local dialects by great local teachers on locally relevant subjects.

3. Community and Face-to-Face learning – Face it – watching a bunch of educational videos by yourself if not fun and most kids don’t learn in asocial environments. We need to take a page from the Digital Study Hall and DigitalGreen.org – use the technology to create occasions where local groups connect and learn together in real life motivate each other.

4. Student Recognition and Incentives – Kids will need incentives to watch and learn from educational content rather than watching Bollywood movies (which will always be just one app tap away). We need to create ways that students who do demonstrate skills acquisition and learning from digital platforms are recognized by their peers, the media and in their communities (just as toppers of the college entrance exams are today)

5. School and Teacher engagement – given that most learning is social, the most logical place to accelerate learning is in classroom. Again taking a lesson from Digital Green, teachers need to be encouraged to create best-of-breed digital lesson videos and interactive modules on tablets and compete to get those seen and distributed in their local communities. We need “Teacher Idol” replicated in 100 regions across the country and viewed on a 100 million tablets so that exceptional teachers across India get the recognition they deserve.

6. Educational Research and Government Support - The business models for how one makes money creating great educational content communities for the poor in India are yet clear, but they certainly have the potential for massive and scalable society benefit. Government and philanthropy need to provide research money to try out lots of ideas. Some may yield profitable business models but given that public education is a good in its owwn right, the focus must be on improving educational outcomes at scale, not necessarily making money immediately by selling to wealthier students.

This Wednesday saw the Nasscom Aadhaar Developer Track conference. Given this was the developer track where code was being distributed on CDs, I expected to see code demos of how a vendor could use their authorization API. Namely, I would expect to see a live code demo of something like:

1. Assume an Indian resident has registered with Aadhaar and has an UID (there were booths to register if one had proof of ID and residency but the process takes a couple weeks to get back to process the eye scan and other biometrics and send back an UID).
2. Assume you have an authentication key to call the Aadhaar as a client of authorization services.
3. Get yourself a piece of reference hardware – e.g. a well-known eye scanner or fingerprint reader with well tested drivers for Windows/Mac/Linux. (In open systems, it’s super convenient for developers to still have well tested reference hardware – just ask the Android folks).
4. Have the resident do a fingerprint or eye scan
5. Here’s how you the read the encrypted the biometric data from the reference device (i.e. the Aadhaar Biometric Capture Device interface) and prepare it to be sent to the Aadhaar webservice
6. Here’s the code you write to call the web service with the UID biometric data of the user
7. Here’s the Yes or No response you get back telling you whether the user is authenticated.

Honestly, this should be a very simple demo in code (and even simpler if I as an authorization client don’t need to provide any biometric data and just are making a request against using the OTP/one time SMS password API). I was frankly disappointed this was not demonstrated. With 10 million people already registered, there are lots of authentication scenarios that organizations could be building today if this were a well-documented process - e.g. Babajob could be showing our job seekers as UID verified – meaning they have submitted proof of address and identity - which we know will yield them higher salaries.

I don’t think we’ll see many companies and organizations calling these APIs until this process gets damn simple and there are a set of training videos on .NET, Java, Perl, etc with simple instructions for developers: Buy this hardware device. Install this client software on your developer PC. Scan your finger. Call this web API.

In short:
1. Expose the location data (it’s already available anyway)
2. Expose the social graph
3. Provide open, uniform billing for non-phone SIMs
4. Expose the retail and digital payment system
5. Expose your verified profile data

In long:
In general, telco folks don’t think about their assets the way Google, Apple and Microsoft think about theirs. Namely, how do I leverage my assets and offer them to other businesses that bet their livelihoods wholly on top of the hard problems I’ve already solved. To name some examples, Apple solved the micro-billing, device compatibility, application-update and consumer trust problem for application developers with uniform rev-share billing APIs, a limited number of handsets, background updates and rating systems available from launch, respectively. No carrier has arguably solved any of these problems for their mobile developers. Instead in India, they have created a market for non-SMS VAS applications that primarily have little utility and frankly hover at 4% of revenue only with excessive promotion and tricky subscription billing schemes that users often accidently turn on and are difficult to turn off.

It’s not just an Indian problem though; by not focusing on providing platforms that enable developers to write interesting applications on top of them, telcos have essentially made the choice of carrier into a dump-pipe, commodity game – which network has the cheapest, most reliable voice and data service – rather than which network has the best apps?

But telcos have solved many of the hardest problems facing smaller businesses today and I’ll argue that enabling the telco as a platform is the key to unlocking their next wave of revenue for phone companies.

Some advice:

1. Expose the location data (it’s already available anyway)
Telcos have always known where your mobile is - how else would they be able to route a call to the right red and white eyesore (aka cell tower) on your way to work? Mobile location-based scenarios have been discussed for 15 years but it’s only in the last 2 years that these applications have seen any significant user adoption (e.g. google maps on smartphones, foursquare). What’s ironic is this generation of location-based apps entirely ignore (via GPS) or reverse engineer the telco’s location data by measuring the signal strength of nearby towers and then look up where the towers are in databases maintained by Google, Microsoft, Navtaq and others. In other words, if your phone has a data connection, any application on it can roughly determine where it is without the telco ever being the wiser. Thus, the location data that telcos always sought to charge app developers for is now free. Furthermore, other business models have developed around local apps that the telcos will never share in (imagine paying your phone $.50 per foursquare check-in).

But ultimately, these methods are work-arounds and limited. GPS and cell-tower triangulation does not tell an app developer anything about where all the phones are in a general neighborhood, what the car and traffic patterns are or how many people actually attended a given concert or movie– all things the telco actually knows in its data centers but only exposes when the bomb-squad comes knocking.
Thus, my free advice. Provide a set of free, secure, cloud-based, use-limited APIs that aggregate where all the phones are and APIs that streams a given user’s location (with their permission of course). If an app developer makes more than 100 million reads, you know they have a business model and then start negotiating how much you should be paid.

2. Expose the social graph
It amazes me that the telcos have always had the most interesting social network graph – the people I call – but it took a geeky twenty-something to turn that social graph data into a bazillion dollar business called Facebook and then enable “viral spread” to spawn other billion dollar businesses like Zynga. Clearly, the telcos missed the boat on this one.
But all is not lost for our friends with spectrum. Combined with location data and verified contact data (see below), the social graph created by our call patterns arguably still represents the most accurate representation of who is important to me. Obviously, app developers should be able to leverage this data as easily as they can call the FBAPI or Google’s opensocial.

3. Provide open, uniform billing for non-phone SIMs
We’ve reached the stage where it makes sense for lots of devices to have wireless data connections e.g. Kindles, iPads, cars, my keys, my dog’s collar or any object of value (so I can track and find them). It makes less sense that consumers have to pay a monthly data subscription plan each of these devices, especially if the amount of data they use is small and their utility is narrow. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way that a small developer or device maker can simply buy a small set of SIMs – say for a $7 a piece – that are authorized to send or receive 1GB of data and have a lifetime of 5 years. As a small developer, I should not have to negotiate a deal with someone inside a telco’s biz dev team (as Amazon has with the Kindle), to build a few thousand devices with a wide-area data connection. Give the developer community simple, ease-to-use data pricing for devices that can be applied to any SIM, and you’ll see that wirelessly connected devices will explode on a per capita basis.

4. Expose the retail and digital payment system
I like to point out that the American Internet is the cheapest place to buy anything on earth. There are lots of reasons for this but one of biggest contributors is ubiquitous digital payment instruments – credit cards, paypal, etc – along with cheap shipping and low tariffs across states. In India though, if I make a physical or digital good, I can only really sell it broadly if I have the ability to collect cash from my customers. This is hugely annoying to a digital company such as Babajob.com or Cleartrip, given that less than 3% of India has a credit card. Flipkart is arguably solving this problem beautifully by sending a dude on a bike to my house to collect my cash payment when they deliver a $3/Rs 150 book, but really – does every online company want to re-create its own nation-wide cash collection network of guys on motorbikes?
Now, the telcos arguably have the best network of cash collectors in the country – literally 2 million tiny shop owners make their livelihoods earning Re1($.02) on Rs 50 ($1) mobile recharges. Of course, it’s difficult to organize but there’s no reason they could not turn 50,000 of those guys into the 7-11s of Japan - where products get delivered to a nearby corner store and consumers walk down and pay a fee to pick up the product. Especially for digital products like services or tickets, it’s easy to imagine a simple system where any consumer can give their recharge shop Rs 300/$6 for a product (with a known unique number) and the telco takes 5-7% of the transaction (which is what most Indian credit card processors charge). Just as early mail order companies drove their customers to use MasterCard and Visa and ebay drove users to paypal, 100,000s of businesses would drive their customers to particular telco recharge stations if they could leverage them to collect cash at reasonable rates (rather than the 80% rates that VAS companies live with today).

5. Expose your verified profile data
The next five years in India will see a hugely important rise in verified user data. Very soon, in order to get a SIM, you’ll not only have to give proof of your address and a government ID (as you need to provide today), but also a biometric UID-mandated finger-print and eye scan. This data collection will be mandated by the government (because it’s really handy in tracking down terrorists) but the data is incredibly useful for anything that requires trust among people. This includes job profiles (where I’m absolutely positive we at Babajob.com can help job seekers earn more from employers if the employers know they are verified individuals with known addresses) but also enables a host of other vitally important trust-based services like credit-agencies, loans to individuals (rather than self-help groups), etc. There are few initiatives that could transform the economic potential of India as greatly as better trust and verification systems. If the telcos can state their users are verified, UID citizens, capable of signing contracts (where default suddenly gets much harder), it massively increases the value of their customer database for almost any business.

The first Indian telco that creates a scalable, simple, near-free verification and profile data reuse API is the telco that gets to be the backbone behind conceivably billions of transactions per day in the next decade.

That’s it for now. I hope the telcos are listening; they are among the most important enabling institutions in our societies and its high-time they started acting like it.

Sean Blagsvedt
CEO, Babajob.com

I had a nice chat with a delegation from Tajikistan (population: 7mil) this morning who represent the advisors to the President and Parliament on mobile and Internet policy.

They liked babajob but the meeting got me thinking about what policies I'd put in place if I were in their shoes.

1. Encourage mobile digital payment systems. Google - and all free internet services - only exists because ad publishers pay for clicks. Publishers only pay for clicks because a reasonable portion of those clicks turn into actual sales on their website. Those website sales only happen because people can buy things online with their credit cards. It's the reason that Google only made $20m in 2008 in India (even though it had the #1, #2 and #4 sites) - we have only ~20m credit cards (and very few people use them). You don't build digital payment systems because you want to make Visa rich - we do it so that an entire ecosystem of new services can arise.

2. Similarly, policy makers should be encouraging mobile banking systems far more quickly than they do today. These are two of the most heavily regulated industries in the world but they really should merge. If you've visited the Philippines or Kenya anytime in the last 5 years, you'll see the amazing power that being able to super-easily move money on phones has enabled. It's really only because of regulatory hurdles that these systems have not been copied elsewhere.

3. This is more specific to India but governments must issue unique identifiers to their citizens (e.g. UID, social security numbers, etc) in order for credit systems to properly function - be they MFIs that get duped because one woman belongs to 2 loan groups or credit agencies that do not exist India because they can't correlate their user records. Yes their are privacy concerns in UID but read Jared Diamond or Robert Wright - the societies that have thrived over time are those with strong trust, land title and contract systems. In a modern society those systems are entirely based on knowing the difference between two people with the same name, something that's made possible if you give everyone a unique unumber.

4. Encourage efficient markets and communication for all citizens- even the very poor. This is somewhat a plug for babajob but the poor do face the most inefficient markets in the world and that often fundamentally limits the choices (How are you supposed to look for a better paying job if you are a live-in maid in the country? Well, we are trying to solve that problem). Furthermore, super-cheap cell phone plans improve the quality of life and allow for much better real-time coordination of activity. For example, the real reason that rural fisherman with phones make money is not just that they know which market has the best price - it's that they can call other fisherman who tell them where the fish are today. Similar, if a delivery helper in Mumbai has a phone, it's easy to imagine that the number of deliveries he can make radically increases because he does not have to wait around (he can just call ahead).

4a. There are 2 primary ways that governments can ensure that phone calls are cheap:

1. Keep the regulated rate that carriers charge each other for connecting between networks as low as possible. This is the reason that India has some of the lowest rates in the world (and the US's are so high). Of course this rate is guaranteed profit floor for the carriers and they'll resist it mighty, but this is way to make the market bigger and efficient.

2. Don't overcharge for 3G bandwidth. I honestly find the 3G auctions ridiculous. Rather than taxing the potential innovations of 3G AFTER we've found the killer applications and a market has been proven, governments are taxing the carriers before BEFORE any significant money has been made. This effectively makes cheap 3G systems impossible (because the carriers had to pay billions for the spectrum). It's really the exact opposite of the policy you'd want to encourage innovation. Instead, just levy a tax on the services when they are consumed.

My favorite line from the story: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13friedman.htm
"If the geopolitical, economic, and technological shifts of the 1990s didn’t do it; if the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 didn’t do it; if the current economic crisis didn’t do it; perhaps this oil spill will be the catalyst for me, as a citizen, to wean myself off of my petroleum-based lifestyle."

It sadly all does remind me of Jared Diamond's great but tough to read book Collapse, which details how a dozen or so of the world's greatest civilizations collapsed (with really horrible consequences like war, genocide and cannibalism), most often because they did not manage their natural resources well enough.

It's nice to MSFT delivering something great again - though I gotta say you have to be a geek to wade through this video.

Add this to my www.babajob.com Page

This article is a good one too and mostly on the ball in its conclusions
http://gizmodo.com/5473947/microsoft-into-the-light-the-unofficial-windows-phone-7-strategy?skyline=true&s=i

In essence, he argues that once the American health-care bill is passed and insurance companies cannot deny pre-existing conditions, those same insurance companies will see it as in their interest to reduce sugar consumption (because it leads to Type 2 diabetics and costs them $400,000 over the life of a patient). Thus, they will act as an counter-balance to the food lobby that prevents things like taxing soda (which amazingly now accounts for 12% of the total caloric intake of American adolescents).

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/opinion/10pollan.html

stopped and gave another water -via SMS

for me in India all week! -via SMS

India's seeks to flaunt the law (thus most do it) while the West's seeks to change it (thus only the powerful can do it) -via SMS