Along the foot steps of facebook and silicon valley

Facebook's IPO is the current talk of the town. It even set its own price for its shares which most analyst think is undervalued never the less Mark Zuckerberg will pocket a cool 1 B$ and his shares will be worth more than 17.6B$. A very good pay off after a few years. There's no questions how great Facebook has become can even afford to snub bankers putting Silicon Valley over Manhattan.

Looking at this achievement and how it comes about is not to look within Facebook itself but in a grander scale, Silicon Valley the playground of large tech companies, exciting start-ups and most importantly industry collaboration. So why are successful tech companies in Silicon Valley? Being part of a cluster initiative in Sweden, Mobile Heights we try to emulate the success of Silicon Valley. However there is something in Silicon Valley not present in the Oresund's region, a trait, a very simple one... Inclusivity. The culture of ensuring everyone is included and involved, until Sweden and Denmark acquires this trait it will never emulate Silicon Valley, and I stand by that word.

In Sweden, Denmark and the rest of Western Europe, it's never about inclusivity, rather its about exclusivity. This is ingrained in the culture and very difficult to change. To emulate Silicon Valley inclusivity must start from the onset, from the schools, from the home so the next generation will have this trait as they embark on the journey to future of financial success.

Let's take my daughter as an example, who grew up in a typical Western European environment who had her birthday months ago but will have her birthday party together with her current best friend in the coming weeks. They were listing who should they invite and all I heard was why they should not invite her friends she used to play with and their mothers actually encourage them not to since its a lot of work to have more children in a party. Recently she complained she was not invited on another friend's birthday party. If you have not picked up what I wanted to say, here it is. From childhood, Western European children are encouraged to be exclusive and not inclusive. This carries on all the way to business where it is never inclusive, that's why Silicon Valley will stand on its pedestal for a considerable period of time.

I believe that if we want to change that and be inclusive it must start from the most basic institution, the home and family. We must practice what we preach and have our children embrace being inclusive... only then can we truly claim we have set the real foundations towards emulating Silicon Valley's success.

Are you paying for too much mobile data usage?

While reading news on the web, I noticed that CNN published an article regarding additional cost mobile users get when using too much data. The CNN Article can be found here. What surprised me was that AT&T  only has overage (when too much serviced is used) for data usage. This is surprising especially that AT&T have been using Carrier IQ in almost all if not all of its customer devices. I would assume that having an embedded CEM device agent makes this alerts easy to implement, not only that its very easy to implement (at least in the Customer IQ platform) but at least subscribers can have their own alerts.

Further to that subscription or usage charges should be visible to to every mobile subscribers either post-paid or pre-paid. At least with pre-paid subscribers they won't incur the cost. On my Telenor subscription I get notification only while roaming, it would be good to have the same find of overage notifications while I am not roaming at least it helps me control my phone bill amounts.

Thinking about it it should be easy enough to write an application that notifies mobile users when their potential cost of either roaming, data usage or simply phone calls are exceeding a particular limit. Now I wonder if INQUSO have that kind of policy control....

What your mobile operator and service provider do not want you to know?

A few days ago CNN published an article on its technology section about what mobile operators and cellular service providers do not want their customers to know. It centers on an application from carrier compare showing a comparison of various service providers/operators. The application is crowd-sourced and cost $1.99, a big amount of money for such an app compared to some really good mobile games costing less than a dollar. The CNN article on comparing networks can be found here.

Being curious and having little knowledge about such applications, I can't seem to understand that the hoopla is all about and why CNN put such worthless coverage on its news feed. Come to think of it similar applications have been available since 2009 and they are far better showing coverage and performance of competing mobile networks; better yet they are free. Well of course carrier compare is free if you don't mind the advertisements.

As a mobile user will you pay 2 of your precious dollars to know how the operator you did not subscribe to performs on a specific area? I am not so sure, but as one of my American colleagues explained to me in America, people will pay for such app. Now that got me thinking why don't we push our Customer Experience Management app in America for subscriber to pay a dollar :-) but then it will contradict on what we believe in that such application should be free of charge to the user and free from advertisements... Maybe one day I will bite the bullet and will do so, but that is not today.

On another point how will operators and service providers react, will they push more of Carrier IQ applications hidden to the user to know that their subscribers are checking out the competition? I believe in 2 things... (1)subscriber has the right to know (2)subscriber has the right to the best service possible. Having said that the network operator or service provider must provide the level of service they guarantee their customers will have, and at the same time keep their subscribers informed. This can be achieved with  CEM applications that are native to a smart phone, has opt-in and opt-out capabilities and has value to the user such as customer self care or information about the services they are receiving.