Online marketing – How to market your company: A talk by Badar Khushnood from Google Pakistan
Badar Khushnood is one of the leading Google evangelists in Pakistan. As Google’s official country responsibility he has taken the role of educating the majority of Pakistan’s software companies about Google. His recent talk about Online Marketing was recently held in Lahore for new customers looking to use Google tools to acquire new international customers. The talk helped experienced hands tweak their existing online strategies. I had the opportunity to attend Badar’s talk about how businesses in Pakistan need to start marketing themselves online from a Google perspective today.
It’s an interesting concept considering that many Pakistani companies need to explore markets outside of Pakistan considering where inflation and other economic factors have driven prices. People are looking for cost-effective goods and services producers at a very good price, and frankly speaking, we’re good at that. With a majority of the people attending from the technology world, it was a great place to network and meet with other professionals in the industry. Zafar Khan from Sofizar and Jehan Ara from P@SHA were major insights into how Google’s tools can help local businesses capture international customers.
Badar talked about some basic tools that all online marketers need to know inside out. As Google’s official representative in Pakistan, there was a Google-centric focus, but completely validated considering the amount of searches performed by web users using Google. What most users are unaware of is the potential market in Pakistan for Internet and mobile based marketing. Sharing some interesting stats from the presentation are that:
Pakistan is considered one of the most rapidly advancing countries in terms of broadband internet connectivity and mobile usage in the world. We rank at an impressive number 4 amongst the surveys conducted by international research firms.
The usage potential in the mobile domain is close to 226% year-on-year-growth. We are number 2 in this area amongst a number of fairly developed countries. We have around 90 million SIMs registered legally with the PTA.
So the potential is there for online marketing, so what’s going wrong? Badar talked about some interesting ideas that we’ve already implemented on our own website. Simple things like SEO, SEM and website optimization are given for tech companies. However for traditional product companies, it’s an important factor that can help drive more international customers to their websites.
Google’s Nexus One Released: Is it an iPhone killer?
Apple’s success with the iPhone has run for a long time, however, it seems like there’s a potential iPhone killer in town, namely the Google Nexus One. With Google employees almost immediately Tweeting about the release of the new phone, a hype has started building.
Recently I managed to get some one-on-one time the Nexus personally. Unfortunately, pictures were not allowed due to the impending release date of January 5, but the initial impressions were fantastic.
Feel
Starting with the overall feel of the phone, it just feels like a weighty and well-built phone. The Teflon coating on the back of the phone is absolutely fantastic. Smooth, sophisticated and polished – words that weren’t necessarily associated with the previous Android phones. The Nexus still maintains a link with its predecessors with its distinctive curves and buttons – remnants of the original G1. The smooth lines and slim profile helps portray the image of a durable yet oddly sophisticated and technical phone. Normally it’s hard to get all three areas correct but the Nexus just portrays this undue sense of nobility that’s hard to define. It’s got multiple personalities would probably be a better explanation – there’s the corporate image (utility grey, work productivity suites, etc), the sophistication (massive vibrant 3.7 inch screen, sleek lines) and the fun side (light, durable, easy to use aspect). Nonetheless, the most striking part of the phone has to be the screen.
Screen
The screen area is just impressive; it puts the iPhone’s screen to shame in comparison. The clarity and responsiveness is amazing, gentle finger movements are accurately recorded. The nice large screen definitely made the virtual keyboard easy to use. However, the vibrant 3.7 inch screen is absolutely stunning. The screen is clearer than the Droid’s and the 3GS which is great considering that in well-lit conditions most screens become very difficult to see. Rather difficult to use a screen without an OS, so how’d the user interface compare to the infallible iPhone?
All that is gold doesn’t necessarily have to glitter. Android has been touted as being one of the next big platforms that would knock iPhone of its throne. However, this doesn’t seem to be the situation for Android. The ultimate problem that the platform is currently facing is the number of versions of software on phones. With a whole slew of releases available for the Android platform, many apps are not necessarily backward or forward compatible with the operating system. Add to this the various vendors providing different phones with numerous variations of hardware components means that most developers have nightmares developing code for each individual phone rather than a universal app.
The problem inherently in this situation is that cross-platform independence regardless of hardware is an ideal utopia that developers want but can never get. Similar to the BlackBerry situation where porting apps from other platforms is a nightmare, it can happen but not without a significant fight.
From a smaller developer viewpoint, Android is a difficult platform to work on. The amount of resources and time needed to code for a single application is significant for a small business; the need to re-code for various hardware and software versions is not conducive to building a customer base. Not only do variations in hardware and software affect the overall compatibility of the app, it reflects poorly on the build quality of the app. As a result, customers are naturally wary of the platform when they experience poor app quality and interaction. Developers are then compelled to write quick-and-dirty patches to resolve problems, which is inherently dangerous and shoddy programming.
Go, probably the shortest name for any language conceived by developers, excluding C of course. Go is an effort by Google to introduce a new programming language to help developers utilize the new technology that is fueling a boom in the computer software industry.
The primary purpose of Google of launching this new language was to deal with the following issues:
•Computers are enormously quicker but software development is not faster.
•Dependency management is a big part of software development today but the “header files” of languages in the C tradition are antithetical to clean dependency analysis—and fast compilation.
•There is a growing rebellion against cumbersome type systems like those of Java and C++, pushing people towards dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript.
•Some fundamental concepts such as garbage collection and parallel computation are not well supported by popular systems languages.
•The emergence of multicore computers has generated worry and confusion. (Source)
The very first point caught the attention of many people. Currently 64-bit systems are incapable of dealing with the 32-bit designed software applications. Resultantly, there’s a need to create software that fully accesses the hardware to its full potential. The recent slow down in software development has been linked to the inability of current programming languages to deal with hardware that is being pushed in new machines. Go does support x86 architecture for processors while maintaining legacies for older processors. However, the focus of the language is to change the landscape for programming languages and improve object orientated programming for programmers.
Palm WebOS Development Conference in December 2009
Working overtime to push their smartphone OS into the open market, Palm has decided to organize a conference in December 2009 in an effort to lure developers to its platform and begin developing apps to market on their Open Catalog e-commerce program. A key development of this conference will ultimately be how Palm decides to charge developers and provide a business structure acceptable to all parties concerned. Palm has stated that,
“(It) will offer developers choices for getting their applications to market, as well as a transparency into the process that will help them promote and grow their businesses.” – eWeek
Previously the apps offered at the store were free, however, realizing that the iPhone OS along with Android and RIM’s BlackBerry OS were quickly gaining ground over webOS; Palm decided to increase its marketing and get support for webOS. Currently, Palm’s store had apps for free in their app store, which was a reason for some of the excellent home-brew apps that were available to customers. Secondly, Palm’s strategic decision seems to be changing; currently the webOS was only available on the Pre and the Pixi. Unfortunately the problem with luring developers now is that the profitability factor of the Pre is compromised.
Already Apple has created a competitive situation where it has successfully captured a number of developers. By allowing developers to keep 70% of the profit margin by taking a 30% royalty along with a $99 developer fee, Apple has created a very strong incentive for developers to move to their platform – (Source). Since the success of the app along with the overall marketing push of the app is from the developer side, most of the work is done by the developer and by letting developers retain profits; they market their app themselves. Currently, Nokia, RIM, Symbian, Qualcomm all charge heavily for developers to access their OSs’ and SDKs’; in comparison to the structure offered by Apple, they are rather draconian in nature.
Apple’s commitment to quality is reflected via the total control they exercise over the submission and review of apps. Not only do they maintain a standard for apps, but similar to any licensing authority, they have the ability to screen out potentially malicious developers who could exploit the iPhone SDK and OS. In retrospect, this is probably why there have been very few security breaches on the iPhone while other developers have used financial clout to screen developers. Although in the long run, it will become difficult to screen what could be potentially millions of apps, it will at least ensure that apps available for download are safe.
Coming back to Palm, they are in a key situation where they can clearly see how draconian approaches will result in poor support for webOS or could help lure developers away from a fairly crowded market into a lucrative business venture. This is dependent on two things:
1.Palm creating a development program that provides a similar incentive to Apple’s program while streamlining the overall development process,
2.Marketing the Pre more aggressively and ensuring that consumers start to realize the full potential of the phone.
Although the Pre is exclusive to Sprint’s network, recently Verizon and Google have teamed up to launch Android compatible phones on Verizon’s network. The Pre has some serious competition now in terms of AT&T’s and iPhone alliance along with the Google-Verizon collaboration. It seems like that the Palm team is at a crossroads, a careful long-term strategic decision here can definitely change the path of the Pre and Palm’s profitability or it could doom the Pre to the depths of obscurity.
What do you think? Will Palm emulate Apple’s current market structure or will it follow the routes of RIM, Symbian and Nokia? Leave your thoughts and comments below.
