Entrepreneur - business angel in the Middle East

Some people have asked me if they need a domain name strategy, the answer is yes for this 4 reasons:

• Word of mouth is a strong source of traffic for websites but it’s also a source of
misspelling
• Every business becomes international, with this come the need to protect your
products names and brands in yours and future local markets
• Misstyping is a source of lost traffic
• To prevent cybersquatting (people that registers yours potential domain
names)

Domain names should be consider as an asset in a company but it’s to often undervalued by the management

Now, you know that the answer is yes, Where to start?

It’s quite simple

First thing, keep in mind that registering a domain cost only a dozen of dollars; so
don’t hesitate to cover all your needs.

Then, start to answer to each of the first 3 bullets point above. Remember that
generally, cybersquatters are more creative than us.

• What king of misspelling can be done with my brands and products? Commons are with or without “-“ for composed words, with or without silent vowel (try amazone.com) or an H in your name, etc…
• Try to forecast your international expansion and start to register all local domains you will need in the coming years (don’t forget to apply the misspelling check for each local market)
• With out being paranoiac, try to anticipate possible mistyping around your brands and register them (try amzzon.com or hervecuvilliez.com / hervecuvilier.com /hervecuvillier.com)

Once the list is done, select you registar and get your credit card ready.

Don’t forget to manage DNS on each domain.

Review it every year.

and one last tip, turn on the autorenew function, it will ease your life next year.

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Yesterday, It was my birthday. I don’t tell that for those who forgot but to thank Facebook. I never received so many happy birthday greetings.

Some were honests and recognized that they remembered because of facebook, others called proudly because this year, they remembered.

Special thanks to Remi, he left me a message to not wish me an happy birthday because it’s too easy now with facebook.

So thank you, facebook, for this little moment of social networking

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Most of startups are relying on online advertising with the very same principle: create a service, get a massive audience and try to monetize it.

Everything seems to be ok as long as online advertising is growing fast.
But the future of online adverising is elsewhere.

The online advertising 1.0 (today) is a copycat of the traditional advertising: Get me a massive audience, interupt what they are doing to expose my brand or at most click on my ads.
I’m talking about any kind of display advertising ( banners, over the page, etc..)

The online advertising 2.0 (what I’ve called Advertising on demand in a recent post) will be totally different by moving from a “look at my fantastic product” attitude to a “what can I do for you” one.
I mean by that propose to customers services they care about in your aera.
Nike made that move sometimes ago with product like Nike Ballers network, a facebook application where basketballers can: find a court, add your home court, find a game and schedule your own game and invite other players

Startups will have to review their copy if they want their share of the online advertising manna.

They will have to propose customizable version of their product in order to move their ad based business model to a b2b services businness model.
And from the success and the leadership will depend their revenues on the B2B side. Big brands don’t work will losers.

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A couple of months ago, I have created an account on Kiva.org. Kiva enables you to loan to small businesses in developing countries.

You can see my lender page here.

I’ve helped among others 2 projects, one Internet cafe (Loan Requested: $975.00) in Ayacucho, Peru and one bookstore (Loan Requested: $975.00) in Agoe, Togo.

Small Amount of money to be honest ($100 + $10 donation to Kiva). It was a trial to verify by myself if the social business concept is really effective.

The answer seems to be yes because i just received the first repayment from both projects.

It’s a great feeling to see these projects becoming a reality and more important repaying their debt to give others the opportunity to been also helped.

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I’m working on a project in the mobile area. I love this moment when you just keep thinking / discussing about it.

but here is the big question? what will make the difference ?

Of course, I start to have some experience but frankly it sometimes really hard to figure out what will make that vital difference.

Here is what I’ll try to always have in mind

Insights: my marketing background has taught me that a new service has to be based on a real need or solve something. We all are lazy, we don’t use something because it’s really smart or high end technology, but only because it’s fun or it helps. Never compromise on this.

KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid): as soon as, we have this good idea, our first temptation is to sophisticate it more and more, adding options, etc…
You should do the opposite by trying to squeeze everything that is not vital to serve your idea. that way, you will make a easy service/product to use. If I need to read the manual, you are done. To read more on this: an article of Jacob Nielsen on BBC.co.uk: Web users getting more ruthless.

User Experience: you can the best idea ever if the user experience is weak, you will fail.
that’s where the alpha and beta version is useful, getting feedback not only for the marketing trick.
A good way to illustrate this is the following: In the Internet and Mobile, the User Interface is like a windows between the consumer and your service. The clearer is your window the more you consumer is seeing your service.

Timing: I’m actually reading “the singularity is near” by Ray Kurzweil and I will quote him on this:

Most of the inventions fail not because the R&D department can get them to work but because the timing is wrong

Inventing is like surfing: you gave to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right time hope that helps.

Please, don’t hesitate to comment and share your finding

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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.

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Last week, I’ve broke my Iphone last week (see here)

But It was still working, so we decided to remove the glass to have access directly to Multi-touch pad. Despite what it seems on the video (see below), it’s still fully functionnal but not my fingers (it hurts !)

more on my flickr account

Here is the video

Why?

Because I can.

More surgery to come

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I was just getting back home last night after a very nice diner with some friends.

While everybody was saying goodbye, my Iphone escaped from my hand and fell full face on the ground.

Here is the result

You know what, It still fully functional

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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.

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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

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