Entrepreneur - business angel in the Middle East

First of all, thank you for your support in this project. All your feedbacks and help offers showed that we are doing the right move.

More and more people are bored by facebook. I’m not sure that a new design will change that, no?

Facebook has released its new home. Should we rename facebook to twitbook. at least, they will give twitter some credits

with 514m$ raised, Facebook is so innovative. they are able to copy twitter but change twitter light blue into a Facebook dark blue. Waouh

I hated the new HP of facebook, too crowded too messy, and u kinda lose ur way in there

I agree with the FB fact,i’m one of those who are getting bored, their new look? dont even care plus they are copying twitter

now facebook wanna be like twitter. clearly twitter is market leader and facebook is trying to catch up.

facebook has clearly accepted that twitter is the future and they have to just follow the direction of twitter

I’ve certaiinly stopped using facebook as frequently as I did. Suspect you are right - new design won’t bring me back.

Twitter success is because of the real time intimate conversation (include support of this through apps and desktop widgets) and the age of next generation reporting as a cause of this. This is why Facebook copied Twitter.

YouTube is real success, it’s worldwide used but since the beginning they are struggling at one thing: be able to monetize this huge audience. Everybody look at it like a unreachable gold mine.

They tried all good (not so apparently) old recipes. Ads in our videos, very badly welcomed. Brand Channels, nobody is giving a sh.. except for some major brands like Nike.

But today the spark might have come from Nintendo and their experience WII campaign.

Take a moment to enjoy it: http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii

If you can’t take 2 mins to enjoy it here is the story:
they have reproduce youtube video page in flash, and synchronize it with the video playing in. When Marion jumps to hardly for example, the page starts to break. Whose who didn’t find out, you can play with the broken pieces.

Brilliant, they deserve the buzz going around.

Who’s next ?

I was in Amman, monday/tuesday to meet people working in the industry and to better understand the digital middle east market.

I met Samer, he is trying to organize the first bloggers conference in the Middle East.

The idea is to get together all the middle east and foreign bloggers in a place for a couple of days and share through round table, conferences and open discussion.

so if you are a blogger, please register on iblogimedia.com, if you have any input regarding the conference, please contact Samer: samer(at)jazarah.net, if you want to be a sponsor and help your industry to grow, you are more than welcome.

I watched on techcrunch a couple of weeks ago the future of search by Google. It impressives me, not only because they will team up human rating with pagerank but also because it will create new sources of traffic creation for all of us (your name is visible on each comment & rating made). Google was already taken something around 75% of our attention, it will become with this 99%.

It made me realize that Microsoft will never catchup on web search. They are too far behind, even buying Yahoo won’t solve the problem.

Having said that, Mr Balmer should look at emerging countries and learn from their “jump to the next generation” attitude.

When you start traveling there, you realize they’ve chosen not to catch up but to invest into the next generation infrastructure and it’s a winning strategy: Estonia (called  E-stonia), Macedonia (wimax covered), Africa (mobile applications stronger than web ones), UAE (150% mobile penetration rate)…

That’s why should focus on the next big thing: Mobile.

Mobile is the big thread for Google (my previous post on this here).

Why? because with mobile will come new usage patterns. Today, everything start with google but tomorrow nobody knows what will be the entry point on mobile internet.  Google already working on it with Android and their strong presence in the iphone.

Of course, it’s easy to say not easy to do, but with Microsoft cash-flow, it should be doable.
My humble opinion

I just noticed this morning a local (middle east) ad on my facebook. I started chasing for some more. And here is my findings: Telecom, Banks, Online Service

I heard too many time that blogs and social networking are for kids not for real business, it’s good to see that’s things start to change.

So it might seems nothing but having some middle east advertisers considering facebook in their media plan is a great “moving in the right direction” sign for this region.

Note: Facebook is social network #1 in the middle east, 2nd is myspace

I spend a lot of time talking, thinking about the evolution of advertising. I even get pay for that.

for a lot of peoples, Nike or Apple are the champions. In a way, it’s true. They have great products, they are really strong in innovation and their communication is really best in class.

But Google is the real champion as a brand and as a media.

1) Google Brand reaches the Top 20 (source: Interbrand Best global brands 2007) in less than 10 years without buying any media. For that, they have created the first business case of every advertiser dream.
How did they do that ? one key word: Innovation
Strong buzz around products: Gmail, they offered 1Go storage capacity by invitation only when others offered only 25mb then 250mb in reaction. Bottom line
Open Culture: Google maps, every website can use them for free, a real service and Google gets its logo on every page
Entertainment: how hasn’t play hours with google earth. Bottom line for them, you have called all your friends about it and spent hours with a Google logo in front of your eyes.

2) Google is the center of the advertising world
Having a website google search compliant is now mandatory,
they have redefine the advertising model by introducing remuneration based on performance, first online but TV is next to come (read here).
With Adsense, Google have provide a lot of startups their first stream of incomes. In a way, Google is also the most active business angel

To me, Google will be the spark that divide she advertising market into two worlds.

The “performance model” one where you will pay only for results based on its ultra dominant system Adwords. I’m not talking only for advertising but for all kinds of media, especially TV because of TIVOs systems and Catch up TVs.

It will the largest share of the market in term of revenues, but not in term of profit for the industry except for google of course.
This world will be good for generating sales, driving traffic but not to create brand or create your reputation. This last point introduce the second world in the advertising industry : the advertising on demand world.

Born with the Internet, the on demand advertising (ODA) can be define by one rule: if you have to buy ad spaces to promote it it’s not ODA.
ODA is and will be more and more about creating Branded Entertainment, Application or online services that people want to see, use even pay for it.
Need examples other than Google Earth? M&M’s e-commerce, Burger King Video games, etc..
Isn’t one of the best form of advertising to have people downloading your product, playing with it or spread the world about it?

ODA market will be small in term of market share by definition (remember no media buying) but will be the most profitable segment for agencies

Everything between those 2 worlds will disappear especially the good old $1 millions 30s TV commercial, but it seems that the industry is stunk in the old good “pay per view” model even Yahoo, so Google will have for years a bright blue sky in front of them.

I hope I will be wrong about that (no competition in front of google) but I doubt.

With a price ratio 1:20 comparing to PCs and a vaste majority of the population living with few dollars a day, it’s a no brainer to understand why mobile penetration is 10 times bigger in emerging countries.

For that reason, we will see mobile innovations coming from those countries in years to come.
Want signs of this?
South Africa is about to release a voting system through mobile for local, regional and even national election.
Bangladesh mobile operator Grameen Phone has gave information access (information is key for a farmer, for example. It’s helping him to know to where and when to sell his production instead of relying on local resellers) to poor people through 16 millions lines.
M-banking is the future of banking in Midle East & Africa (Etisalat has released last month a mobile wallet)

I see more and more mobile innovations coming from Africa (see dreamoval), middle east and of course India & china.

Kill cliches about tech innovation always coming from developed countries and remember

from the necessity come the creativity

If you know any others innovations there, please continue the discussion by leaving comments

Ad:tech was taking place in paris the 7&8 april 2008 and I was a great event, lot of people, great speakers.
I was really blunt about the first edition in 2007 but this year was a real success.
I’ve animated a round table about Online identity and online reputation with Charles Nouyrit ( CEO and founder of MyID.is), Alain Bensoussan (Lawyer), Xavier Moisant (Blogger) and Stephane Billiet (CEO Hill and Knowlton).
I was a bit worried about the schedule: 10:30 am Monday morning but not on purpose because the Grand Auditorium was full.

I’ve also attended a really great conference around the internet of things (I’ve spoken previously about that here) with 2 great panelists : Bernard Benhamou (French Prime Ministers Office, Misson Forcast & Internet Governance) & Rafi Haladjan (CEO of Violet).

So once again, Congratulation Genevieve.

Cashstore has released a version on cashstore in spanish : cashstore.es. The team has received a warn welcome from the market with dozen of press articles and more than 84 000 results inside google.com (to have the updated number click here).

I hope it will be in Spain the same success as it is in france.