Entrepreneur – business angel in the Middle East

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.

1) Our culture: Coming from an engineer culture, France has always been strong at building infrastructures, don’t we have one best automotive highway or high speed train networks even airlines. It’s a no surprise that’s we have a fair good broadband network. As a consumer, you pay only 30 euros for a 20mb connection plus free calls plus 60 TV channels. Everything perfect but only 53% households have access to it.

But this time it’s not about infrastructure but about services and content
Didier Lombard (France telecom CEO) said

Contents are the oxygen for our networks

That’s my point because our culture, we don’t give enough value to intangible assets. We have very few online champions, really to few to catch the growth which goes to the US (around 80% of online media spending in france)

2) Our lake of investments: if you take a look at the The Global Information Technology Report 2008 ranking just released by the World Economic Forum, you won’t see big evolutions in the past 3 years, France (2006: #22, 2007: #23, 2008: #21), UK (2006: #10, 2007: #9, 2008: #12), US (2006: #1, 2007: #7, 2008: #4), Germany(2006: #17, 2007: #16, 2008: #16), India (2006: #40, 2007: #44, 2008: #50), China (2006: #50, 2007: #59, 2008: #57).

Knowing that a networked economy is directly linked to innovation and competitiveness, we will have to invest heavily to catch up with the 10 or even just for not been catch up.

Regarding point 1) and our 2,000 billions euros debt, It will need political courage and vision to make the necessary investments.

3) Talents migration: Due to point 1&2 and/or to our tax system, we face a huge talents migration and where we are still questioning ourself about it , others developed countries are already working on it (see Bill gates congress intervention here). In the past 6 months, every entrepreneur, I have met was considering incorporate outside of france. Fortunately, we have local initiatives (see my post on digiport) but it won’t be sufficient.

Conclusion: This is in this context that was appointed Mr Besson as Digital Economy Secretary of State. He will present his catch up plan for the french digital economy in a couple of months after a series of meetings with french digital economy leaders.
It will have to be ambitious, heavily founded and engaging if he wants to have the market makers behind him.
I wish him good luck, If this time nothing happens, I will also move east.

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.