We are thrilled to announce that out of more than 400 entries from around the world, we are the first winner in BBVA's Open Talent competition! BBVA is a leading Spanish bank that operates extensively throughout Latin America, and with the financial and institutional support valued at €100,000 we will distribute our TiendaTek product to shopkeeper clients of BancaMia, one of the largest microfinance institutions in Colombia and partly owned by BBVA.
As part of this project we will develop mobile educational and marketing tools to help both shopkeepers and BancaMia improve their respective businesses as well as strengthen their relationship. We are honored by the award and look forward to a long and fruitful partnership with BBVA.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
Social Innovation and Smartphones
In this past weeks The Economist has written a couple of articles that I wanted to mention. In the first one, they discuss Obama's Social Innovation fund and similar efforts out of the UK. Both mostly focus on domestic issues and show the great progress being made in the field. It is fantastic that these approaches are reaching the Economist's wide audience, hopefully soon we'll read about international topics.
The second article covered the spread of smartphones in South East Asia, fostered by competition on mobile calls that have reduced the revenues per user. This is very good news for Frogtek, as it shows that the relatively poor are being chased by the big operators and handset manufacturers. In turn, that trend should bring down the prices of hardware and data plans.
What The Economist didn't discuss is what the poor will do with those smartphones. They'll obviously consume media and entertainment like everyone else. And they'll also communicate in a frenzy, now that everyone's on Facebook.
But will they also put the phones to productive uses, for instance to help their micro-businesses? We surely hope so!
The second article covered the spread of smartphones in South East Asia, fostered by competition on mobile calls that have reduced the revenues per user. This is very good news for Frogtek, as it shows that the relatively poor are being chased by the big operators and handset manufacturers. In turn, that trend should bring down the prices of hardware and data plans.
What The Economist didn't discuss is what the poor will do with those smartphones. They'll obviously consume media and entertainment like everyone else. And they'll also communicate in a frenzy, now that everyone's on Facebook.
But will they also put the phones to productive uses, for instance to help their micro-businesses? We surely hope so!
Combining Business Model Prototyping, Customer Development, and Social Entrepreneurship
Today I landed on a great post by Alexander Osterwalder regarding the combination of his methodology for business model prototyping with the approach we follow at Frogtek of Customer Development, as defined by Steve Blank. The two come together very nicely, one providing the visuals to think through and understand complex scenarios, the other the rigourous approach to learn the facts and iterate accordingly. You could say that the former is the Kanban to the latter Agile Development, using a software analogy.
But the beauty of the post didn't end there. It used as a case study the example of Peepoople, a social enterprise that brings a single-use toilet bag to the slums in Kenya. Here's an example of a potential business model (go here to understand the canvas):
I was delighted to see how these leading thinkers, who are shaping new business practices, support the nascent field of social entrepreneurship as applied to the BOP. Steve Blank also wrote about social entrepreneurship a while ago.
Please, keep these posts coming!!
But the beauty of the post didn't end there. It used as a case study the example of Peepoople, a social enterprise that brings a single-use toilet bag to the slums in Kenya. Here's an example of a potential business model (go here to understand the canvas):
I was delighted to see how these leading thinkers, who are shaping new business practices, support the nascent field of social entrepreneurship as applied to the BOP. Steve Blank also wrote about social entrepreneurship a while ago.
Please, keep these posts coming!!
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Web or Native app for the BOP
Mobileactive recently wrote a very well-researched blog post comparing the benefits and disadvantages of delivering content through a mobile website versus an application. As smartphones proliferate, content producers need to decide whether they want to cater to their audiences one way or another (or both) and the article makes a good case for mobile Web content.
However their analysis is not focused on emerging markets, where data connections tend to be slow and pricey. And more importantly, it also leaves outside the case of software tools that are designed to perform tasks interactively instead of distributing content. We believe that in these two cases native apps provide a much better alternative.
Through our work in Mexico and Colombia at the BOP, we have painfully learned how unreliable the mobile data connections can be, even in urban areas. That turns the mobile web into a distant aspiration, as mobile browsers today need a connection to render content. In contrast, a native app can be designed to store information to be uploaded when a connection becomes available. That added flexibility comes very handy with spotty networks. This approach also economizes on bandwidth, as graphics and the user interface can be found locally and only vital information is exchanged with the server.
And if what you are building is a productive tool and not a content consumption method, native apps win hands on. As mobileactive's article already notes, the more user engagement and features you need, the more a native app is the right choice. Accessing a local database and getting barcodes from a reader can only be done by a native app.
Finally, a typical BOP user doesn't have the luxury of a laptop to complement a smartphone for the more demanding tasks. If the smartphone is the only computing device available, the user will need the full-fledged experience that only native apps can offer.
So we believe that the mobile web will be less important to BOP users than mobile apps, given the conditions of data networks and the need for productive engagement.
In time technology will synthesize and eliminate this dichotomy: you can already insert mobile pages within a native app, as we are doing with our Tiendatek. This will allow the software designer to combine the best elements of each approach according to the particular goal at hand.
However their analysis is not focused on emerging markets, where data connections tend to be slow and pricey. And more importantly, it also leaves outside the case of software tools that are designed to perform tasks interactively instead of distributing content. We believe that in these two cases native apps provide a much better alternative.
Through our work in Mexico and Colombia at the BOP, we have painfully learned how unreliable the mobile data connections can be, even in urban areas. That turns the mobile web into a distant aspiration, as mobile browsers today need a connection to render content. In contrast, a native app can be designed to store information to be uploaded when a connection becomes available. That added flexibility comes very handy with spotty networks. This approach also economizes on bandwidth, as graphics and the user interface can be found locally and only vital information is exchanged with the server.
And if what you are building is a productive tool and not a content consumption method, native apps win hands on. As mobileactive's article already notes, the more user engagement and features you need, the more a native app is the right choice. Accessing a local database and getting barcodes from a reader can only be done by a native app.
Finally, a typical BOP user doesn't have the luxury of a laptop to complement a smartphone for the more demanding tasks. If the smartphone is the only computing device available, the user will need the full-fledged experience that only native apps can offer.
So we believe that the mobile web will be less important to BOP users than mobile apps, given the conditions of data networks and the need for productive engagement.
In time technology will synthesize and eliminate this dichotomy: you can already insert mobile pages within a native app, as we are doing with our Tiendatek. This will allow the software designer to combine the best elements of each approach according to the particular goal at hand.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Lowering the capital requirements for a tech start-up
Yesterday I read a very interesting post by Fred Wilson, a prominent VC specialized in web and mobile start-ups (his fund has invested in stars like Twitter, Zynga of Farmville's fame and Foursquare, to name a few). Although he was focused on seed funds, to me the most relevant point he makes is that technology companies require less and less capital to get started and to prove their merit:
This is a welcome change, as successful entrepreneurial teams get to keep more equity and the investors run less risk. It also tilts the balance of power towards the founders and away from investors (see the Foursquare example in Fred's post).
The main reasons for this great shift is the increased availability of open and often free platforms to build web and mobile products. For instance, at Frogtek we are using Android (free and open-source!) to build our mobile point of sale, and we are using Google App Engine (free under a generous threshold of activity) for our web components, including hosting and servers somewhere in the Cloud. All this means we get to experiment and build a functioning product without any technology investments beyond Mac computers and some affordable workflow tools.
It is great that this structural change is lowering the entry bar for rich world start-ups selling to rich world consumers. But it could have an even happier impact on tech start-ups that cater to the poor such as ourselves. Not only the experimentation phase is cheaper and faster, also the operational costs are lowered, which is great news when you're serving low-income consumers.
Finally, this shift is also making the first steps easier for start-ups located in emerging economies, as all these platforms are available anywhere on the planet (mostly). With the parallel and fast diffusion of mobile phones in those markets, the future is bright for those who want to build local solutions to local problems using the best technology the world has to offer. We'll definitely be paying attention!
The main reasons for this great shift is the increased availability of open and often free platforms to build web and mobile products. For instance, at Frogtek we are using Android (free and open-source!) to build our mobile point of sale, and we are using Google App Engine (free under a generous threshold of activity) for our web components, including hosting and servers somewhere in the Cloud. All this means we get to experiment and build a functioning product without any technology investments beyond Mac computers and some affordable workflow tools.
It is great that this structural change is lowering the entry bar for rich world start-ups selling to rich world consumers. But it could have an even happier impact on tech start-ups that cater to the poor such as ourselves. Not only the experimentation phase is cheaper and faster, also the operational costs are lowered, which is great news when you're serving low-income consumers.
Finally, this shift is also making the first steps easier for start-ups located in emerging economies, as all these platforms are available anywhere on the planet (mostly). With the parallel and fast diffusion of mobile phones in those markets, the future is bright for those who want to build local solutions to local problems using the best technology the world has to offer. We'll definitely be paying attention!
Friday, July 9, 2010
Developing frogtek.org
Today the tech team has started a blog to tell the story of building a high-tech product for low-income customers. It'll be quite techie and in Spanish, focused on Agile techniques, quality assurance, kanban boards, test-driven development and so forth.
Hopefully they will inspire other top software engineers to tackle the many problems at the Base of the Pyramid that can be solved or at least alleviated with smartphones and Internet applications. They sure have inspired me with their first post!
Monday, June 28, 2010
A beautiful overview of our dear Tiendatek
For a while we have had different demos of our product Tiendatek in youtube. But Kristel, our fantastic graphic designer and multimedia queen, has put together a phenomenal overview video designed to greet the shopkeepers that buy our product.
We are now working on a set of tutorial videos that explain how to conduct the key operations on the phone like making a sale or a purchase, register an expense and see the financial reports. The goal is to have a simple and self-explaining product that brings with it all the training needed to operate it.
The shopkeepers will then buy the product, open the box, watch the videos and get started without any further human interaction. We're still a while away from that but getting closer!
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