Herve Cuviliez: Entrepreneur - business angel in the Middle East

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 spent a year travelling in the middle east (Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Jordan, Lebanon,…) and I even moved recently to lebanon. I’ve met a lot of people in the industry there.

And I was impressed by the market evolution in a year.

• Internet penetration is booming (21,3% penetration with 32% in Kuwait or 38,4% in the UAE) more on Internet world stats.
• Mobile penetration and usage is even more impressive (150% in the UAE), see my previous post on this: Mobile innovation, start looking at emerging countries.

On the startup side, things start to be organized and new projects are released every week. here is some good sources of information:

• Arabcrunch.com is dedicated to profiling and reviewing Arab originated startups.
• Startuparabia.com is talking about Arab startups and entrepreneurs
• The twitter of PV Tribal DDB is giving daily news about internet and mobile markets in the region.

On the funding side, things are still a bit messy but one good initiative need to be be named. It’s the ABAN (Arab Business Angels Network) and they organize a meeting every quarter with for 4-6 selected startups + some guests.

My opinion? VC’s should start considering this market with a population of 200 millions people, a strong growth, and a huge appetite for new technologies.

Without disclosing any secret, guess where my next project will take place.

I had a discussion a couple of days ago with some internet marketers. I was really disappointed by their attitude regarding the mobile.

Of course, all of them will tell you that mobile is the future but in fact, they complain about the poor creativity capabilities in comparison with internet, you heard some “we are not there yet”, “mobile need few more years to be ready”,”there is no data usages”, etc…

Does that ring you a bell? the old media marketers 10 years ago when there were talking about internet.

If you recognize yourself in this, please wake up.

Mobile Age is NOW

To realize that, you need to look east (Japan, Korea, Singapore and an European exception Finland with Nokia) not as usual to USA (my opinion of USA telecom industry here), Iphone missed “rendez-vous” with Europe is another example.

+8* is a good information source for that

Then, you will realize why Google is so active with the android platform.

In a near future, their main competitor will surely be Nokia with their 40% market share (more than 300 millions handsets per year) and their Symbian platform.

I quote Tim O’Reilly in a recent post:

a platform beats an application every time.

the platform beats the application, the mobile will beat the Internet.
Who will be the next champion ? Do the maths.

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

Is it possible that a technological advanced country as a so poor mobile network (talking about AT&T).
I bought a prepaid card 2 days ago and I still pissed off.
You pay when you receive phone calls even when you receive texts (a shame everybody know that it cost them nothing). It remembers me the early 90’s in Europe.
Definitevly, USA is #1 on the web (watch out china, guys) but for mobile you should definitely look East.

I will spend 4 days (3-6 march 2008) in San Diego for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2008.

An amazing program is waiting for me: Mobile, Data vizualitation, Gaming, robotics, etc… with worldclass speakers.

4 days of mind opening, cool I just want through the attendees list I’m the only french. is that normal ? ok it’s far but 14 hours in plane is not so much regarding the program.

Hope next year, there will be more.

next post about the Tim O’Reilly keynote.