MobileMonday founders bring world markets to Singapore start ups
Posted on: July 26, 2009 – Filed under: Oslo
Singaporean start ups were provided a wide and colourful view into the world’s mobile markets by MobileMonday founders in Suntec City on Saturday, June 20.
The powerful Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (iDA) used the opportunity provided by the CommunicAsia Summit and invited MobileMonday founders from Finland, India, Japan, Norway, Denmark, Indonesia, Vietnam, South-Africa and Australia to talk about their respective mobile markets.
The MobileMonday team had earlier in the week given two star seminars as a part of the CommunicAsia Summit on Mobile Marketing and Advertising and on Mobile TV and Entertainment.
"It was great to see the intensity and enthusiasm in Saturday workshop. Many participants were especially interested in Africa, the hottest developing region of out industry," commented Jari Tammisto, CEO, Mobile Monday Oy.
Tammisto had a long discussion with iDA officer Christopher Chen about a possibility of setting up MobileMonday Asia-Africa support center in Singapore.
“We are in an absurd situation where the Finnish innovation strategy emphasizes the ever more international nature of innovation communities and centers and where companies lean ever more on open communities, yet MobileMonday can find no public financial support in Finland. We need to have resources to support our network reaching almost 50 countries, Tammisto says.
“Singapore’s iDa, Malyasian Multimedia Development Agency (MDec) and respective organizations of other countries have shown interest in hosting our support center. For time being, we have decided to keep the MobileMonday international coordination in Finland, as the local companies give us strong positive feedback.”
Africa lacks money, not innovation
In the workshop Teemu Kiijarvi, the founder of MobileMonday South Africa and the regional director of MobileTools International Ltd, told the audience that Africans lack money, not innovativeness.
“There is no need for Europeans or Asians to teach Africans how things need to be done. In many senses Africans are leading in mobile development. Since there is only mobile channel, African people and companies put it into wide use. Mobile banking is used more in Africa, than anywhere else,” Kiijarvi said.
He also pointed out that Mixit mobile chat/IM service has huge following among the youth since it is much cheaper than SMS messaging.
A Singaporean entrepreneur was enthusiastic about Andy Zain’s presentation on Indonesian mobile markets. He said he gained new and richer vision into neighbouring market insights, even if his company had already done some business in Indonesia.
Michelle Chan, CEO, Clearhub, a provider of email, wap-content and classified advertising, said that the presentations helped to gel some of her ideas on the next steps toward international enlargement.
Infoline’s Subramanian Veeramani thought he found new channels to sell his speech based search service technology. Infoline’s technology works over any phone connection. The search results are prioritized in a same ways as Google ranks its results or advertisements. The earning model is based on the compensation from companies that benefit from the search results.