Just read an article about per second billing being introduced by Globalcom in Benin. It didn’t make sense to me until I remembered how people in developing nations use their phones. Incoming calls, like Europe, are free on these mobile networks. If you don’t have a lot of pre-paid minutes, but your friend does, you “flash” or “beep” (also “bipage”) them. All you do is call them, wait for a ring or two, then hang up. Your friend sees a “missed call”, then calls you back. Charging by the second looks like a new way to increase revenue from this process. Corinne Ramey of MobileActive has written up a great overview on bipage.

I’ve been working on updating TAM, SAM, and SOM for the b-plan, and I couldn’t help think about tipping points. I read The Tipping Point earlier this year. OK, I just read the introduction, but it outlines a common sense idea; find the influencers in your target market, get them to use your product, everyone follows, profit! In practise, you always know the tipping point after the fact of when it’s obvious.

One tipping point I noticed is SMS usage by the over-40 crowd. Last summer, it was very small. I had a lot of trouble explaining to adults why using text messaging was better than an email list. This summer, a total change - everyone gets it because they’re all sending text messages.

The only thing I think that influenced it was the all-you-can-eat text plans that started to appear with the “Family Plans” last year. If you’ve got kids, adding texting is as easy of a decision as “do you want frys with that?” So the influencer in this case were the kids.

Padpaw’s biggest competitor are all the solutions people use today to manage their groups. One of the things we realized early on was that we can’t do it all. Sure we do messaging great, we can even do event manage good, but should we be the be-all-end-all solution for everything? Should we make our members abandon what they’re currently using and switch entirely to Padpaw’s solutions?

What we try to do at Padpaw is to work the existing solution. Example: If your group has long email conversations, use an email list. But if you want a quick way to send an email AND a text to the group, add you Padpaw group email address to the recipient list. Everyone gets a text message and can read more on the list or at the Padpaw web site.

We allow people to post photos, but Flickr does a great job too and it makes it easy to share them (say to grandma and grandpa who are outside of the group). We have a good basic calendar, but you might plan your events with Eventful. Fortunately, companies are making APIs for their services available so you can easily add them when necessary (including Padpaw’s Group SMS API ). Meetup has recently announced an API for their service. While it’s not complete, it does offer some interesting avenues for other companies to add features to their service which we’ll check out.

Our friends from MoCoNews had a post about cell phones and India:

And despite that, the piece of personal technology people buy as soon as they can afford any (maybe after a TV set for the household), is a cell phone. Why? Landline phones and broadband connections take long or are hard to get at all in India; text messaging is economical; and much of life is happening outdoors. [snip] … 300 million people in India have a cell phone. Since April 2008, there are more cell phone users in India than in the United States.

Like Japan, people in India use the space outside their homes as an extension of their homes.

Scott Heiferman, who runs Meetup wrote about the need for community organization in an era of “non-joiners”. Specifically, how do you get people out of their comfort zone and together with people that share a common idea, interest, or passion.

With all the hype surrounding social networks imaging a world of frictionless “getting together”, these relationships don’t stand up to the needs of real people meeting and working together face-to-face (or, in real time, meatspace, etc.). Real groups thrive when people feel they’re gaining more “benefit” than the time (which has an intrinsic value) they’re putting into it. Opportunity lies in reducing the overhead (time) needed to discover, organize, and manage these groups.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote a great summary on mobile web in Japan, but wonders if its applicable to the US. Japan is unique for a lot of reasons, but there’s one reason that tends to get over looked. It has to do with architecture, specifically living spaces.

In Japan, people typically have very small apartments or houses. An average area of a house in Japan is 860 sq. ft. where an average US house has 2,300 sq. ft.. People in Japan use the outside of their house; shops, restaurants, and cafes, as an extension of their living space. So, the time we Americans would spend inside, Japanese spent outside. The rise of a vibrant mobile web should be viewed as the rise in the web in general, just that it’s used on a different device. For all the web 2.0 rails cool kids, the model is the same, the view is different.

We’ve looked a lot at people using their cell phones and the pattern is the same; get phone, use phone, put phone away. Unlike when you’re home in front of your desktop; use desktop, see something, check it out, repeat, until you’ve burned 30 minutes of your day. Obviously, as I mentioned in a previous post the way people use their phones presents a big challenge to business models that rely on eyeballs, and feeding more stuff so your user sees more ads in the hope that they click on one.

Business aside, I think that people are starting push away from the screen (PC and TV) and get out in the city or town and experience things “out”. It’s up to companies like Padpaw to make going out more useful and fun.

We remove our ads from the desktop and mobi site (if you still see them on the blog, its because we haven’t gotten to that yet). As I’ve written before, web advertising doesn’t fit the way our members are using Padpaw. A well managed group will use the web site, but most of the information transferred will be through mobile messaging (SMS, some email).

Getting ads that made sense to our members was a chore. With Google, you need to do a lot of unnatural acts to get password protected information (remember, privacy is extremely important)exposed to ad engine to get a relevant ad. And even then, the level of relevance wasn’t acceptable. The “meet how singles” ads for the boys baseball team were a real eye opener for the parents. Not cool - This isn’t a surprise as click-thru advertising isn’t living up to the hype. Adriana Lukas at Media Influencer has written a bunch on this topic.

Our members know that the service, while free, costs something at the backend. In addition, they want to know about services in the areas they’re meeting. Longer term, we need a bid-ask system that members could find near-realtime status on services. I could have used this last week when I was in the Berkshires. A bunch of people I was with needed to find someplace with a late night menu (many places close down at 10:00 on weekdays). Mobile search doesn’t cut it because the information is too static and doesn’t reveal itself to questions like mine. Project VRM talks about some of these ideas.

Most of the Internet start-up cool kids measure their business by looking at the average CPM of ads they sell on sites. While the ads are sold on “impressions”, they’re performance aren’t impressive. In a recent Techcrunch post Erick Schonfeld describes an ad-network that serves Facebook applications selling ads for a CPM of less than 25-cents. Google has reported disappointing results from their ad revenue from MySpace. Despite all the kids updating their profiles, they seem to be ignoring the ads.

Advertising Age has recently published their 100 Leading National Advertisers report, and I suggest everyone reading this to download the charts before they take it down. What’s eye opening is the 1) the staggering amount of money top brands spend on advertising, and 2) that Internet only comprises 7% of that amount. Brands, on average, still spend more on radio than on web ads.

The most revealing statistics are in a chart called “Revenue Per Ad Dollar Spent for the 100 Leaders” (you’ll have to go to the previous link to get to it). Restaurants, which are interesting to Padpaw members, get $22 of revenue for every $1 spent on advertising. In fairness, there’s a lot more behind a statistic, but it puts the focus on CPM into sharp relief.

It’s no secret that businesses like Padpaw have to pay for every SMS message we send to our members, who also pay through their text plans. If you had really amazing “reach”, you might be able to make a cash-flow positive business at 2-cents per message, but that still translates to a $20 CPM. For the VP signing off on a campaign, she’ll won’t be thinking about how many people will “see” the ad, but how $20 in text message advertising is going to turn into $500 or more of revenue.

For mobile start-ups, including Padpaw, this is BIG challenge which is compounded by how people use their phones to send and receive information (text, mobile web, etc.). More on that in another post.

Recently I’ve been asked explain the difference between Padpaw and Twitter

I like Twitter. I think its fun to post a semi-lucid comment from time to time. But Twitter is about the individual; what are you doing? Where are you going? etc.. Knowing your “status” might be helpful when organizing a group, but it presents a lot of issues with your privacy.

What if you want to update everyone regarding your kid’s soccer team, does everyone in the world need to know that? Most of the parents we work with feel that information should stay within the group. It’s no one else’s business.

Padpaw is private by default. We give organizers control to grant and block access, and give members the ability to expose as much information about themselves as they want. If a member wishes to be anonymous, they can and still participate in the group.

Recently, I’ve been reminded about the appropriateness of texting someone in the evening or early morning. Unlike email, SMS is more synchronous communication due to the fact that people tend to leave their phones on and respond to the ringer when it goes off. Texting someone late at night is almost like calling them while they’re in bed - not cool. If you need to alert your group, try to keep it in “9-to-9″ (9:00 am to 9:00 pm) unless its really urgent. Your group will thank you