Oman: Internet Boost

Oxford Business Group

As 2009 draws to a close, Oman’s relatively underserved IT sector is preparing for the introduction of competition to the internet-service-provider (ISP) market, as QTel’s local subsidiary Nawras prepares to launch the Sultanate’s second fixed-line telecoms service.

Currently, internet service provision in the country remains the monopoly of Omantel, the predominantly state-owned national telecoms company. This is not for want of trying by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA), the national telecoms watchdog.

In 2007 it attempted to open the ISP market to competition by announcing the sale of licences to newcomers. However, perhaps as a result of the terms offered (which required potential new ISPs to lease infrastructure and bandwidth from the incumbent Omantel), no takers were found in the private sector.

As a result, a more ambitious approach towards introducing liberalisation and competition to the telecoms network was attempted. In April 2008 the auction of a second fixed-line telecoms licence was announced by the TRA, with the eventual winner, Nawras, announced in November of the same year.

Nawras has already proved extremely successful in Oman’s mobile telecoms market. A joint-venture between Qatar’s QTel, Danish operator TDC and a number of local investors, the company has captured around half the market share in Oman since launching services in 2005. Nawras has also served to shake up the market, often being the first operator to launch new services, and recently winning “superbrand” status in the Sultanate.

Having been awarded the contract for the second fixed-line telecoms network, Nawras will begin offering services in 2010. The company is building a backbone infrastructure of over 5000 km and will be providing fixed broadband coverage to more than 80% of the Omani population.

The government and regulator, not to mention the average consumer, will be hoping that Nawras’ entry to the fixed-line market will inject some dynamism to the ISP sector in particular.

While Oman’s internet penetration figures have picked up in recent years, they still lag in comparison with the wider Middle East. According to internetworldstats.com, a website which monitors penetration rates by country and region, Oman’s current internet penetration level places it near the bottom of the regional table, with only Yemen and Iraq posting lower figures.

There are currently an estimated 469,000 internet users in the Sultanate, representing penetration of 13.7%, compared with a regional average of 23.7%. Moreover, the majority of connections remain dial-up, with the government estimating a single subscription is shared between four or five people.

Some analysts and commentators have argued that there is an underlying antipathy towards the internet in parts of Omani society.

As Jawad Sultan, the director of Jawad Sultan Enterprises, a private eSolutions company, told OBG, “We still occasionally read articles in local newspapers and magazines about how the internet is a bad influence. This needs to change.”

However, it is possible to overstate such antipathy – other statistics seem to prove conversely that there is great potential for internet services in Oman, with a recent Arab Advisors report claiming 40% of Oman’s adult internet users spent a combined USD 236 m via e-commerce in 2008. When analysed on a per-user basis, this comes to nearly USD 1500 – an impressive figure.

Oman naturally presents some challenges to expanding internet penetration – not least its sheer size, and the relatively low density of its population outside of major urban centres. However, with GDP per-capita figures of just under USD 20,000 at purchasing power parity, it is clear that Oman’s current level of internet penetration is well below potential. The entry of a second fixed-line network should go some way towards remedying that – both increasing the number of subscribers and the quality of provision, thus opening Oman’s economy to an e-future.

Filed under: Articles , internetworldstats.com, Jawad Sultan Enterprises, Nawras, Oman, Omantel, Oxford Business Group, QTel, Telecommunications Regulatory Authority

How to be a good client

Branding Strategy Insider

The wisdom of David Ogilvy lives on in this reminder to client side marketers

How to be a good client:

01. Emancipate your agency from fear.

02. Select the right agency in the first place.

03. Brief your agency very thoroughly indeed.

04. Do not compete with your agency in the creative area.

05. Coddle the goose who lays the golden egg. (Provide enough time and resources to do the job well.)

06. Don’t strain your advertising through too many layers.

07. Make sure your agency makes a profit.

08. Don’t haggle with your agency.

09. Be candid and encourage candor.

10. Set high standards.

11. Test everything.

12. Hurry. (Profit is a function of time.)

13. Don’t waste time on problem babies (Back your successes and abandon your losses.)

14. Tolerate genius.

15. Don’t under spend. (The surest way to overspend on advertising is not to spend enough to do the job properly.)

Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy

Filed under: Articles, Intelligence , David Ogilvy

Building brands online: Marketers want triple-play from media

Interactive Advertising Bureau / Bain & Company

Al Haqq Society edit

The online advertising marketplace has changed dramatically in the past 12 months. Market growth slowed, and prices eroded as advertisers shifted to lower-cost inventory. And overall, there is the risk that online advertising may be viewed increasingly by advertisers as a “performance” medium opposed to a brand-building medium.

The IAB and Bain & Company launched the market-making research project Building Brands Online: An Interactive Advertising Action Plan. The research combined a survey of over 700 leading marketer decision makers or influencers with in-depth interviews with senior executives from leading companies throughout the interactive advertising ecosystem.

The study creates a road map for interactive publishers, pointing out changes in both value proposition and go-to-market strategy in order to win more brand advertising spend and grow the interactive advertising market as a whole.


Key findings:

• Online ad formats and creative have not evolved to meet marketers’ needs.

• Media companies lack category expertise and engage too late in the planning process.

• Marketers want integrated campaigns instead of platform-specific media programs.

• Marketers see value in digital and believe it could be effective at all stages funnel but current online media industry practices inhibit greater investment spend.

• Marketers express needs for differentiated services and believe that media companies and agencies have to meet those needs for online to grow.

“Unmet marketer needs create a major opportunity for media companies to collaborate directly with marketers,” said John Frelinghuysen, a partner in Bain & Company’s media practice and lead author of the study. “But few media companies currently have the capability to fill the gaps in online sales and service.”


The path forward for media companies consists of six steps based on the needs expressed by marketers:

01. Create segmented offerings to meet the separate needs of advertisers who are focused on building brands and those who are looking for direct response.

02. Make brand-focused marketers a priority by building a sales force of category experts who respond directly to those marketers’ specific needs.

03. Develop a full range of solutions with more engaging options and formats, including social networks, video and other rich media.

04. Offer deeper service and support customized to vertical industries, to help advertisers plan, create and measure the brand impact of online ads.

05. Optimise the ways that ad inventories are sold, with a range of approaches from full-service to self-service to partnership with ad networks and resellers.

06. Enhance organisational effectiveness by setting the right priorities, clarifying internal roles and accountability and investing in sales staff skills and incentives.

“Ultimately, marketers are looking for media companies to offer a true triple-play service model from direct response to awareness to high impact brand engagement,” said Frelinghuysen. “This model is the key to staving off continued price erosion of online inventory.”


Building Brands Online: An Interactive Advertising Action Plan (Summary)
Download (713 Kb .pdf)

Filed under: Articles, Intelligence, Internet , Bain & Company, Building brands online, Interactive Advertising Bureau

Deep brand engagement creates customers

Razorfish / eMarketer

From awareness to consideration, purchase and recommendation

The power of online brand interaction is not to be denied: A solid majority of connected consumers have had their opinion of a brand swayed, either positively or negatively, by an online experience.

More than 97% said that experience influenced whether they purchased a product or service from that brand.

Razorfish’s “2009 FEED” survey polled US broadband users who had visited a community site, consumed or created digital media, and spent at least USD 150 online in the past six months.

These connected consumers were also connected to brands. About one-quarter had produced content to participate in a contest held by a brand, and close to the same amount had followed a brand on Twitter. Two-fifths had friended a brand on Facebook or MySpace.

Brand followship and friendship

The main reason to follow or friend a brand was to get exclusive deals or offers, followed by general fandom—because the user was a current customer, or because of interesting or entertaining content.

An impressive 64% of connected consumers told Razorfish they had made their first purchase from a brand because of a digital experience—be it a Website, microsite, mobile coupon or e-mail.

And friending, following and content creation spurred upticks across the marketing funnel—from raising awareness to consideration, purchase and recommendations to friends.


“Digital experiences not only build a brand, they can also make or break it. For those brand marketers still neglecting (or underestimating) digital, it’s as if they’ve shown up to a cocktail party in sweatpants,” according to the report. “Invariably, consumers will choose to converse with a savvier—and hopefully more stylish—partner.”

Razorfish FEED Digital Brand Experience Report 2009
Download (2.8 Mb .pdf)

Filed under: Articles, Intelligence, Internet , eMarketer, Razorfish

Internet shakeup looms with multilingual addresses

Zawya / AFP

By Jun Kwanwoo – Edit by Al Haqq Society

The internet is about to get more accessible for millions worldwide with the imminent approval of a new multilingual address system that uses Asian and Arabic scripts, a global regulator said.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said it would declare an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses.

“This is the biggest change technically to the internet since it was invented 40 years ago,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board in charge of reviewing the change, told a press conference.

When the change comes into force, it will be possible to use characters from other languages – such as Chinese, Arabic, Korean and Japanese – for a full internet address, instead of just part of the address as now.

ICANN president Rod Beckstrom said the change – designed to serve the growing number of non-English-speaking Internet users – would come into effect in the middle of 2010. ICANN aims to start receiving applications next month.

“It will take some period of time to process the applications and then introduce the successful applications,” Beckstrom told the news conference.

“Of the 1.6 billion internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based,” Beckstrom said.

“So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the internet continues to spread.”

He said internet addresses would no longer use limited “Generic Top-Level Domains” such as .com or .org, and instead use more flexible “Internationalised Domain Names” such as .post or .bank.

Thrush said that under the new system, all web addresses ending .bank would only be available to “authorised” banks.

“Consumer confidence can be greatly enhanced,” he said.

ICANN, formed in 1998 by the US government, was recently given more autonomy after Washington relaxed its control over how the internet is run.

Filed under: Articles , ICANN

Gartner: One in five households worldwide will have a broadband connection by end of 2009

Gartner

Despite the global economic downturn, the number of household broadband connections continues to grow robustly, and one in five households worldwide will have a fixed broadband connection in the home by the end of 2009, according to Gartner, Inc.

A total of 422 million households will have a fixed broadband connection in the home in 2009, up from 382 million households in 2008, and the market will steadily grow with nearly 580 million households having a fixed broadband connection by 2013.

“Consumers may be watching their household expenditure, but dropping their broadband connections is not on the top of their agendas as a way to reduce outgoings,” said Amanda Sabia, principal research analyst at Gartner. “Multiple motivations are conspiring to keep broadband growth strong, such as PCs being more affordable, migration from dial-up, affordably priced broadband subscriptions, aging populations requiring broadband connectivity, and even as a result of an economic boost from country-specific economic and broadband-specific stimulus plans.”

At the end of 2008, approximately 21 countries had broadband connections in at least 50 percent of homes. In many countries, the rates are much higher; the highest penetration being in South Korea at 86 percent and the lowest being Indonesia at less than 1 percent.

Although many mature markets will see a slowing down of broadband rates as connectivity reaches saturation, many emerging markets are still in the early stages of broadband deployment and will see rapid growth in adoption rates. Gartner predicts that over the next five years, the emerging markets (China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Latin American countries, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa) will collectively provide twice as many new consumer broadband connections as mature markets: 135 million vs. 62 million connections, respectively.

Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) will account for 92 million (68 percent) of the increased 135 million household broadband connections in the emerging markets, meaning that BRIC accounts for almost half (47 percent) of the total global increase in connections. China takes first place in contributing the greatest number (62 million, or 46 percent) of the 135 million new broadband connections in emerging markets.

Twenty seven million U.S. households will make up a large share of new broadband connections in mature markets between 2008 and 2013, with Japan accounting for almost 10 million, Germany with 5 million and the U.K. with slightly over 3 million connections.

However, despite the significant growth in connections in emerging markets, Gartner analysts said that households in emerging markets will continue to outnumber those in mature markets by 4-to-1. Consequently, it is unlikely that broadband household penetration in the emerging markets will catch up with mature markets within the next 10 years, and Gartner estimates that the digital divide will remain in the 50 to 54 percent range for the foreseeable future.

Gartner estimates that the worldwide consumer fixed voice, Internet and broadband services market was worth USD 372 billion in 2008 and that broadband access services supplied 27 percent of that total. Broadband services will continue to be the growth engine in revenue, offsetting declining voice revenue and supplying almost 40 percent of the USD 347 billion total revenue in 2013.

“Broadband services represent the core of all fixed-line household communications services; hence, communications providers will be able to continue their reliance on broadband subscription revenue to offset revenue loss from other services in their portfolio offerings,” Ms. Sabia said. “Equipment manufacturers (modems, routers and PCs) and providers of carrier infrastructure will benefit by having more connections to supply equipment and services to. Government, medical and educational institutions alike will have alternative access to their customers via the household broadband connection.”

This research refers to broadband as fixed broadband modalities, such as DSL, cable modem, FTTH/FTTP/Ethernet, and other high-speed technologies (mostly static fixed-line replacement technology for the main broadband access into the home, such as multichannel multipoint distribution service [MMDS], LANDesk Management Suite [LDMS], WiMAX, satellite and power lines).

Filed under: Articles, Internet , Gartner

Interest free banking in Sweden: JAK Bank

Article:
Yes Magazine – Supporting you in building a just and sustainable world
Saving Together
Interest is among the most pernicious causes of concentration of wealth and devaluation of the future.

In Wikipedia:
JAK Members Bank

Site:
JAK Members Bank


Thanks for the link goes to N.H., jazak Allah khayr.

Filed under: Articles , JAK Bank

10 common mistakes that startup and small companies make

FastCompany / By David Lavenda

Young companies have small margins for error. Mistakes made early on can sink a company before its gets off the ground.

Below is a list of 10 common mistakes made by young, small companies. In the list below, I use the generic term “product” to refer to either a product or a service.

01. Drinking your own Kool-Aid.
Overestimating the Enthusiasm for Your Product/Service – thinking your product is more special than your customers perceive.

02. Not validating market demand.
Thinking that your product is a “winner” before making sure you get a solid base of people who agree.

03. Starting to work with customers too late.
Only engaging with customers when the product is ready for sale.

04. Underestimating the difficulty in penetrating the market.
Not expending enough effort to reach customers and to get them to try the product.

05. Overestimating the product’s uniqueness.
Related to “drinking your own Kool-Aid” this refers to not taking competition into account, where competition can be another product or service, or whatever customers are using today.

06. Underestimating the effort needed to build the product.
Promising to get to market before you can actually finish the product.

07. Hiring the wrong kind of people.
Hiring “big-company types” who are used to having a support staff to help them do their work.

08. Not focusing.
Being tempted by side projects and spreading yourself too thin to focus on developing your company’s main value proposition.

09. Not pricing correctly.
Under or over-pricing the product may inhibit adoption.

10. Not having a long-term vision that scales.
Having a “one-trick pony” that does not lead to future sales.

In the entrepreneurial spirit of “under-promise and over-deliver,” here are two more mistakes young companies make:

11. Never finishing the product.
The “never time to do it right, but there is always time to do it over” syndrome. Constantly redo-ing the product but never finishing it.

12. Not offering employees enough fun.
Sadly, a common quality of many startups.

Disclaimer: As the veteran of six startup companies (two that were successfully sold), these are mistakes I have seen time and again.

Filed under: Articles, Muslim startup , Fast Company

Investors turned off by poor GCC corporate websites

Arabian Business

GCC companies are losing out on international investment due to the poor performance of their websites, a new study has found.

The report, which analysed the performance of 85 publicly listed Gulf firms, warns that the region’s corporate websites rank significantly lower than their peers in Europe and elsewhere in terms of providing essential information.

The report, by Hallvarsson & Hallvarsson (H&H), found that while European corporate websites scored an average of 50.3 points, those of their Gulf counterparts scored just 18.5. “This indicates that the level of website performance differs substantially, with some companies performing poorly,” said the report.


“A corporate website, rich with information in English, is now one of the most single most important ways to attract international investors,” said Staffan Lindgren, executive partner of H&H.

“Many GCC companies are failing to use their corporate websites as their principle communication channel to the same degree as companies in other international markets,” he added.

“In order to communicate effectively to the key audiences in the capital markets, they need to adapt to international norms and standards of corporate communication.”

The findings are based on H&H Webranking GCC Survey, which ranked the region’s websites based on an annual survey of business journalists, analysts and investors who identified what information and functionality they valued most from listed companies’ corporate websites.


Hallvarsson & Hallvarsson: Press Release
Hallvarsson & Hallvarsson: GCC Webranking

Filed under: Articles, Intelligence, Research , GCC, Hallvarsson & Hallvarsson

American Muslim Consumer Conference

Muxlim Advisory

By Rafi-uddin Shikoh (Dinar Standard), Al Haqq Society edit

Perhaps the American Muslim market had been hard to reach (given its fragmentation and diversity), perhaps the right media channels weren’t available, perhaps the post-9/11 environment made it difficult for main-stream marketers to pursue it. Much of this however is changing – in an environment of economic crisis, the growing potential of American Muslim consumers is getting harder to ignore; a variety of media channels to access this market are maturing; and the post 9/11 environment of mass-media negative perceptions of Muslims is fading.

An upcoming conference, American Muslim Consumer Conference (AMCC), October 31st, 2009 in New Brunswick, NJ, USA is set to present this changing environment and the new market opportunity. This event is bound to provide marketers with another convincing look at this market.

The event has a great lineup of speakers of marketers, analysts, and experienced Muslim market entrepreneurs who will cover American Muslim markets scope, trends and opportunities, and ways to effectively reach them.

In an economic environment where any new idea or opportunity is worth evaluating, this market is bound to provide invaluable opportunities for both main-stream marketers and niche Halal market entrepreneurs. It’s the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ for US marketers, one which they will increasingly run into. The question is: who are the few who will creatively and effectively ride it?

Related in Al Haqq Society blog:

The life and times of the modern Muslims

Muslim consumers in the media

The untapped American Muslim consumer market

Filed under: Articles , American Muslim Consumer Conference, Dinar Standard, Muxlim