Finndle.com - Toward a Cyberspace White Pages
The lack of a comprehensive source for contact information represents a drag on commerce and a significant obstacle to communication. The burden of finding and managing contact information weighs against adoption of new communication offers. Finndle.com applies crowd sourcing to create a white pages for Cyberspace. The web app combines guestbook functionality with a mechanism for obtaining introductions and exchanging contacts. Finndle provides websites something like the networking function of a meeting sign-in sheet - an Online Digits Exchange.
Telephone white pages served as the social networking tool of choice before the Internet, but the utility of white pages declined as communication moved to mobile phones and the Internet. The web provides advertisers with options that go beyond traditional yellow pages, but telephone white pages remain the primary source of contact information for the communicating public. Finndle seeks to create a cyberspace white pages by making social networking a feature of websites rather than just a function of sites like Facebook and MySpace.
Traditional telephone directories were possible because telephone companies controlled telephone numbers and forced the publication of listings on an opt-out basis. The element of coercion disappears in the case of the web, so Finndle offers users control over their listing and privacy as an incentive to opt-in to a global directory. Finndle uses the fact a website's audience reflects the content. Finndle treats websites as the cyberspace equivalent of towns in the case of traditional directories.
The Finndle home page aggregates the resulting guestbooks under a search interface. As participation grows, guestbooks develop into local directories and collectively yield a white pages for cyberspace. Listings can include any form of communication or links pointing to profiles created via social networks. Finndle also provides a means for users to create a "SocialID" alias that points to their listing via the Finndle search interface or as a URL of the form www.finndle.com/socialid.
The SocialID reduces the burden of managing multiple communication devices and coordinates. It reduces the leverage service providers obtain from controlling telephone numbers and screen names. Distributing the Finndle SocialID avoids the need to share physical telephone numbers or actual email addresses that tend to change over time. Users can also create different listings and SocialID's for different contexts or even on an adhoc basis for "tonight's party".
Finndle gives websites operators a mechanism to engage and better understand the nature of their audience. The listings (i.e. guestbook signers) form a local directory of the most enthusiastic segment of a website's audience. There exist opportunities to create special offers to incent people to participate and take advantage of the feedback they can provide. Website operators can create subdirectories for various contexts (e.g. events or specific pages) and private invitation only directories. All resulting registrations and listings remain under the control of the host website.
Africa the Last Infotech Frontier
See pictures from trip to Ghana, Africa
hereA recent two week visit to Ghana, Africa offered scenes frozen in time from the moment of the country's independence in 1957 and even from the period before European powers arrived circa 1500. Most of the buildings and infrastructure date to the 1950's before seven military coups over thirty years made investment impossible. Open sewers remain the norm and modern paved roads the exception. The use of English as the official language traces to the colonial period, but an intricate system of village chiefs controlling local government and ownership of land traces to the period before the arrival of European powers. Yet, Ghana like a number of other countries in Africa generates among the highest mobile phone growth rates on Earth.
Ghanaian's have access to very nearly the same devices, features, and pricing as people in Europe or the USA a mere eight years after mobile phones first arrived. The timing coincides with the relative stability of Ghana after democratic elections in 1999. The success of mobile phone companies illustrates the opportunity a stable Africa presents for the larger infotech and communication industries. Vodafone acquired the state owned telco incumbent Ghana Telecom for $900mn in August 2008. The deal along with promised $500mn investments in fiber infrastructure represents a fresh start for Ghana. Government leaders understand keenly continued stability means investments in support of a jump to middle income and, eventually, first world status.
The government of Ghana has an explicit plan to move away from merely providing raw materials and toward a knowledge economy. Information, communication, and technology (ICT) projects already represent among the highest priorities for government and aid organizations, but there remains significant work to do in attracting attention to commercial sector opportunities. The 850 million people distributed across the 53 countries in Africa represent 11% of world population. The opportunity for economic growth remains tremendous with consumption of consumer goods, electricity usage, and per capita income a mere 5% of the levels in developed countries.
The 500 year track record of trade and conquest in Africa was shaped by the desire to extract the resources sought by more developed countries. Sustaining a knowledge economy requires precisely the opposite strategy where advantage depends on avoiding war and working to help move Africa toward full participation in the global economy. A successful transition to a knowledge economy can make Africa a sustainable economic engine for the entire planet. Ghana represents a greenfield opportunity relative to investments flowing toward China and India. The nature of Africa as a cash economy leaves the continent relatively untouched by the credit market turmoil in the developed world.
Africa deserves a fresh look, but investments still require a plan incorporating the realities of history. While the people of Ghana covet education as the key to upward mobility, this mobility frequently means the elite leave the country in search of opportunity. Any renaissance in Ghana needs to include convincing Ghanians to stay. There exist very few large employers in the country, so 75% of the population depends on self employment. Boot strapping Ghana's knowledge economy will need to start with external demand, but the country's potential as a gateway to Africa should create the demand for information technology in financial, health care, industrial, transportation, and government sectors.
Companies and entrepreneurs interested in participating in a renaissance of Africa also need to negotiate a number of risks and build first world amenities from scratch. Travel to Ghana includes a mandatory Yellow Fever vaccination and precautions regarding the risk of contracting Malaria. Relatively poor sanitation infrastructure means applying significant caution to avoid health problems arising from unsafe food and water. A Chinese company went so far as to import all the food, water, and workers necessary to complete the construction of a stadium in the country, but the main issue is controlling the conditions of food preparation. Inadequate capacity and unpaved roads make travel in and out of and between cities arduous. Outages make backup power a requirement for deployment of information processing and communication equipment.
Six competing mobile phone companies make communication an important exception to the list of infrastructure deficits. Broadband penetration remains less than 2%, but competing fiber builds connecting the country's cell towers promise cheap and ubiquitous wireless broadband. Enterprising Ghanians already talk about the country's potential to become Africa's "Silicon Valley". The parallels between Ghana and California look rather substantial in terms of population size, natural resources, and coastal location. The direct economic comparisons may only fit with California in the mid 1800's, but the rapid spread of mobile phone technologies suggest it will not take 150 years for Ghana to catch up.
Calling Circles
FWD outlined instructions for creating
Calling Circles on the FWDWiki. A Calling Circle offers the telecom equivalent of social networking friend lists. It is a directory of friends accessible via FWD. The elimination of usage based communication charges associated with services like FWD gives communication with friends a different character. The wait continues for cool new communication applications, but Free World Dialup members already enjoy global termination of calls as with any Internet application. The technical setup obstacles remain significant, but any FWD member can talk with any other FWD member anywhere in the world for as long as they want for no cost beyond the
$30 membership fee. This opens up the possibility for a different type of communication experience even as the process of dialing numbers and dependence on a familiar looking telephones remains unchanged.
Return on Infrastructure Investment
There remains a large gap in perception regarding the value of communication infrastructure investment versus transportation infrastructure. Everyone gets the tremedous RoI achieved by public sector infrastructure projects associated with highways and airports, but communication infrastructure gets left to private entities intent on leveraging scarcity to preserve prices. The telco business model is anti-investment. The policy debates always revolve around this issue of investment where telco's argue they need some policy result in order to have incentive to invest. They win the policy result and subsequently fail to invest. Capital investment as a function of revenues remains very low. Most of the telcos invest less than they report in depreciation. The US government subsidizes billions worth of noise suppression barrier walls around highways across the country and zero in communcation infrastructure. It's not clear how to recreate the conditions that led to the interstate highway system initiated during the Eisenhower administration, but until the US obtains an equivalent conviction regarding connectivity the country will fall further and further behind in the global economy.
ICED
The mnemonic ICED stands for
independent developers, connectivity, emerging markets, and devices. It serves as a filter to help in navigating toward the areas generating the most opportunities. More and more companies are deciding that they can't afford to employ the number of developers necessary to maintain the pace of innovation. Plan B calls for creating open platforms that attract interest from
independent developers. The trend likely originated from the terrific productivity and innovation generated by the open source movement. The opportunity for independent developers will grow as will the competition for their attention. Google, Apple, and
Nokia compete for the attention of
independent developers regarding their mobile platforms. AOL created dev.aol.com and opened up all their products as the means to traffic growing innovations.
Connectivity represents the primary bottleneck/driver for
infocom innovation in the same way processing power drives the
infotech industry. All the inputs necessary for cool new products improve in price performance at a rapid clip except for connectivity.
Emerging markets and the 3 billion people without access to communication represent a far more interesting market that trying to sell someone in the developed world a second mobile phone.
Devices connected to the Internet represent an entirely greenfield opportunity. The easy of use obstacles preventing the SIP
VoIP device from growing mainstream will get solved.
Paid versus Free
Free World Dialup's journey from free to paid membership created a lot of criticism along with plenty of snarky comments about changing the name. Time will tell whether the move represents a stroke of genius or blunder. The fact few people see the stroke of genius part makes the experiment all the more interesting. All Internet startups need to navigate the paid versus free decision. The following lists a few of the categories where paid represents the right answer. In any case, the knee jerk assumption everything on the Internet needs to be free deserves some scrutiny.
1. Services that require reliability are usually paid: The issue here is enabling something more valuable than the price of the service. Lawyers do not jump on every cheap long distance offer. People continueto hold onto wireline phone service to preserve reliable access to E911.
2. Services that require accuracy are usually paid: LSSI sells 6mo old data at 10% of the cost of accurate up to date data.
3. Proprietary services are usually paid: The proprietary database services like Choicepoint charge on a per lookup basis to provide background on individuals. Choicepoint acquired 50 companies over five years to corner the market on these proprietary databases.
4. Customer acquisition costs are paid: The entire advertising industry exists as a mechanism for customer acquisition. ROI calculations make paying for customer acquisition an easy decision.
5. Monitoring services are usually paid: Nobody monitors home alarms for free. People can opt-out of monitoring, but peace of mind with cost.
6. Services requiring customer service are usually paid: Customer service is simply too expensive to provide for free.
7. Services requiring continuous improvement are usually paid: Free service offers tend to be relatively static given the lack of incentive/ability to invest.
8. Non-optional services are usually paid: Finding an ISP to connect your computer to the Internet is not optional. The free ISP's did not survive.
FWD paid membership makes sense in the context of just about all of these dimensions.
Infocom Ecosystem
FWD seeks to participate in a communication ecosystem entirely distinct from the one associated with traditional vertically integrated telecom. Infocom ecosystem companies specialize at a particular layer of the value chain (e.g. horizontal integration.) Communication solutions arise from a value chain that includes chip mfrs, device mfrs, software platform providers, application providers, and service providers. The chip and device mfrs determine the media types available for communication. Platform and application providers determine the particular form of communication. Service providers provide enabling services (things end users cannot do for themselves.) Service providers dominate the traditional telecom landscape, but service providers in infocom offer enabling services around the edges (e.g. SIP registration). End users contribute the content in both cases, but the options available to end users in infocom go well beyond those in telecom. The telecom ecosystem offers one pricing model, one level of reliability, one level of voice quality, etc etc. The offers of one telephone company are indistinguishable from the offers of others and do not change over time. The underlying elements associated with infocom communications improve in a manner analogous to Moore's Law in infotech. The net result should allow the infocom ecosystem to develop in an entirely different direction than telecom.
