Posted: July 22nd, 2011
Morodo is pleased today to be able to support all Nokia S40 handsets with VoIP calling. From this day forward it is possible to use the MO-Call service and global network via the native Nokia Internet dialer to make free and low costs calls / SMS on the Morodo network from all S40 handsets.
We (Morodo) believe in the value Mobile VoIP can play in making mobile communications available to the next billion mobile customers. MO-Call is determined to make available its global network to enable cheap and low cost calls and SMS to all who want an alternative choice. The S40 is the World’s most popular handset and Morodo is pleased to welcome the S40 onto the Morodo network platform.
MO-Call enables low-cost international calling direct from a mobile phone, without the need to change mobile number, SIM or network. Should WiFi or wireless LAN not be available to the customer, the customers can still enjoy substantial savings over Mobile Network Operator International call tariffs by using the MO-Call “Home” or “World” services.
The work of Morodo in supporting the S40 represents a continued endorsement of VoIP as a mainstream mobile communication platform. “We are also seeing deployment of many additional WiFi hotspots around the world allowing free access from connected devices, to access Mobile VoIP (et al) services. This, together with a substantial growth forecast in WiFi enabled chipsets into connected devices and the insatiable appetite for speed, all point to a very favorable future for mobile VoIP. This all bears well for Morodo and add value to the already great value for money Nokia S40.
VoIP with Nokia S40
Posted: June 15th, 2011
Reporting on movements in user habits towards and favoring the Morodo model is always one of the more pleasant tasks of reporting in and around our ecosystem. It is surprising however to witness a move towards WiFi where the combatants with the greatest too loose, the Mobile Network Operators, are the force for change and towards customers seeking our WiFi as part of their daily data consumption pattern. This is certainly the case in the US today. Devicescape WiFi reports 64 percent of consumers surveyed hit hot spots at least once a day. Home Wi-Fi use can help reduce data usage, but for most smartphone owners who supplement their data plan with Wi-Fi, a full 89.8 percent use Wi-Fi both at home and on the road.
Customers are moving towards WiFi as MNO continue to pursue data capping as a means to concentrate revenue back in the MNO’s favour. The report describes 72.9 percent of respondents presuming they will switch carriers if faced with data capping and further a full 80 percent will likely adjust their downloading habits if data capping is introduced by their carrier.
There is no doubt that data demand around the mobile device is growing. Earlier this year, Cisco said it expected the average mobile user to consume 1,185 MB of data per month by 2015. That’s far more than the 250 MB that AT&T claimed was used by 65 percent of its customers when the carrier switched from unlimited to tiered mobile broadband plans.
The MNO’s have failed to see the world is now a more social and connected space. It is more social in the fact all human interaction is around your social network, whether articulated through membership or not. It is a more connected world than ever before as conceivably your most valued and useful possession is your mobile handset. The convergence of these two domains (mobile and Internet) is the genesis of Morodo greatest opportunity. The opportunity exists at its greatest inflection due to the ‘time to market’ a new aspirant would face wanting to support both the socialness of the internet with the connectivity of a ubiquitous handset.
The change in attitude and thinking and the realization the world is changing was articulated clearly in Nokia’s desire to partner with Morodo offering the clever feature phone platform (S40) the network support of Morodo. Nokia can now support VoIP calling globally over this feature phone with Morodo’s network support. Nokia is now a global network operator in its own right on this platform. This model supports no payment for spectrum licensing nor is the new entrant bound by geographical boundaries and expensive support and maintenance of last mile infrastructure.
Today, supporting over 800 WiFi enabled handset MO-Call can originate calls, disruptive of incumbent mobile network operator, to destinations all over the World. Last month this technology originated calls in over 150 countries around the world.
Morodo see any ISP, broadband provider and fixed line carrier as a good fit, with the support and success of WiFi, to become a mobile originator via a Morodo white label. Morodo will support all e-commerce comers with telephone 2.0 services and monetize via affiliation and loyalty incentives. Perhaps Morodo’s first success will be borne in America as the environment seems ready and almost demands new entrants like Morodo to come and fill the void left by the sleeping and slothy MNO’s. Morodo will soon be talking to LightSquared, the operator of a complete USA solution for 4G. Morodo is hopeful of joining their ecosystem to provide a range of services from voice, video calling, Instant messaging and video messaging services under the MO-Call brand but also, ready to enable others to provide service on a white label model.
The one thing from this report , whether WiFi or the new and coming 4G, is that Morodo is able and ready to support all e-commerce websites will telephone and communications and we are in small company.
Posted: December 8th, 2010
We hope that your preparations for the festive season are well underway. It seems as though one of our Christmas presents has arrived a little early. The analysts and pundits at Vision Mobile have entirely understood what a company like Morodo has to offer the Mobile Network Operators (MNO), this being opening the walled gardens to developers in order to innovate and revolutionize the way people interact and communicate.
A recent article by Avner Mor discusses how MNO are keeping Mobile Services within ‘walled garden’ and why MNO should adapt to the software and social era by opening up their walled gardens to developers.
‘Walled garden’ is used to describe a carrier or service providers control over applications, content and media on a platform. When carriers or service providers put up “walled gardens,” this restricts access to non-approved applications or content. Because of this, developers experience many restrictions and barriers when attempting to connect or integrate their application to a MNO.
As a result, the majority of developer innovation is slowed down and reduces the operator’s ability to be the centre of the innovation. With mobile operators facing market saturation, it might be time for MNO’s to re-evaluate the market and consider opening up their walled gardens to developers.
Avner Mor says “the missing piece is an infrastructure player that understands software innovation, developer programs and running telco-grade cloud infrastructure. A Facebook-like (software) player that can bring the Facebook out of the operator walled garden.”
Andrew Reid, CEO of Morodo says “MNO already hold an enormous amount of information about their users such as voice, messaging, location and preferences but this information is really underutilized. Through our MO-Call service, we already have every element of the Social Network tightly integrated with Telephony, Messaging and Presence. By opening up to developers, we will continue to re-define how people communicate.”
Morodo is already opening up APIs to developers giving them access to voice and messaging functions on the MO-Call network. By being the centre of innovation, Morodo will be a central player powering this great change in our society.
Posted: November 9th, 2010
On The Next Web, entrepreneur pages, Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten’s has asked and answered a question that must be on everyone’s mind. As he writes:
Is Facebook unstoppable? Of course not. Let’s imagine that in a month or so a new network arises… It really doesn’t matter who will start it. What matters is that it will be cooler than Facebook. You won’t find out about it until the three people around you who are cooler than you start inviting you. You will check it out, not understand the interface at first, but you will see that something cool is going on…
So you cautiously switch. After a week or two you find out that you are spending more and more time on the new thing. So you invite your friends. Heck, you connect to Facebook and G-mail and invite ALL your contacts. Within a month or two they all switch over too.
Returning to our tale, in a related rumour doing the rounds Facebook and Skype might partner to offer voice, video and messaging services to customers of the social network. This should not be a surprise to anyone and indeed it makes perfect business sense for both parties; Skype is not a social network, Facebook is not a Telco, together the sum may be greater than the parts. The battle for both will be, as Boris states, remaining relevant.
Notably, Skype this week also announced a co-operation agreement with Avaya, the call-centre company. Skype’s strategy is obvious! It wants to be a service provider to both Businesses and Consumers and to partner with as many companies as possible to promote Enterprise services.
Morodo is pursuing exactly the same strategy. In providing Universities and web companies with an Application Programming Interface (API), that accesses the MO-Call softswitch and value-added services, Morodo leverages one of its own core strengths: it’s Network. Where needed, we’re also offering client applications for desktop and mobile which are optimised for partner Social Network Services.
Social Networks are as fickle as fashion. We remember Friendster and Friends Reunited fondly, but where are they today? Who knows where Facebook will be in five years time? Bigger than Google?
Chances are that in the near future there will not be one dominating Social Network, there will be many. Each will cater for the specialised interests of its members. No matter what networks capture the intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and/or political consumer, Morodo can service all of them.
Image: Justin Sullivan / Getty
Posted: November 8th, 2010
On Wednesday last week, the world’s largest Social Network, Facebook, launched a series of new services for consumers and developers that place the company at the centre of the mobile world.
Introducing the new Location-Based Services (LBS) head of mobile at Facebook, Erick Tseng, stated that more than 200 million of the company’s customers now regularly use a mobile phone to access and update their personal pages. Now, as a key enhancement to Facebook’s Places LBS, customers in the USA can access special deals from a number of name brand high street stores, such as Gap, McDonald’s Starbucks and JC Penney.
With less fanfare but far more significance, Facebook also opened Search and Write functionality to the Places database to developers, allowing website builders and mobile application engineers to query and update a mutual customer’s personal records via an Application Programming Interface (API). What’s more, Facebook’s single-sign-in protocol has been migrated to mobile offering a great improvement in user experience.
The Morodo Team welcomes the news as a great step forward in opening the Facebook database to third party developers, we’ll be using it.
Mobile phones are social tools that are always with us, constantly in use as a communicator, contact book and calendar. With our mobiles we talk and text more than we game and surf, and it’s these core telephony services that will be at the centre of the new mobile social networks.
Morodo is opening APIs to developers allowing any website owner or application designer to access voice and messaging functions on the MO-Call network. The next wave of Social Networking Entrepreneurs won’t need to be VoIP experts to offer feature-rich VoIP services to their communities, nor will they need to understand the complexities of the mobile network infrastructure to provide advanced message and realtime status updates, they will just need a Morodo Developer account.
As Facebook have clearly stated, the future of Social is Mobile, and Morodo will be a central supplier powering this great change in our society.
Posted: October 8th, 2010
As we never tire of writing, times are tough for the traditional Mobile Network Operators. Earlier in the week we heard that Australian behemoth, Telstra, is to shed even more jobs over the next three years; coming on top of July’s cuts, the news that up to 15% of workers will be laid off, doubling the redundancy bill is part of the company’s Project Net, a A$1 billion plan to reduce costs and improve customer services.
Whilst Telstra’s profits shrink 10% year on year, many investors are wondering what has happened to the cash cow of old – given the dominant position in the market, why are they having such trouble competing?
Australian Business Spectator’s Alan Kohler speculates:
“Telstra has known for 15 years that the future of telecommunications lies in content, but it never really knew what to do about it…. And then Steve Jobs came along with iTunes and all the carriers went: “Oh, so that’s what content means!” Apple sold the devices with an operating system inside, and then added everything else: music, movies, books, applications, games, ringtones, you name it. Carriers were put in their place.”
To a great extent, this is true; Apple, the upstart manufacturer has indeed hacked its way into the mobile value chain and now sits comfortably between carrier and customer – on one device. Kohler wisely recognises that the power of Google’s Android Operating System lies in it’s widespread implementation on a range of mobile phones and states that this too represents a threat to all incumbent Mobile Network Operators.
Again, we agree, but it’s also our place to say that all Apple and Google have done is speed up a process that was well underway as soon as the first smartphone with a Software Development Kit hit the streets. We’re duty bound to say we told you so, but we’re pleased that the US catalysts came along to help.
Enlightened Operators in Europe are trying to compete, but is it too little too late? News has leaked that a forthcoming Android LG phone from German carrier, T-Mobile, will carry a cheap WiFi calling app that directs calls to the company’s own network. On-net calls might be free but we doubt whether International calling plans will enjoy great price cuts, not whilst they remain a premium source of revenue.
It’s increasingly common for these previously “too-big-to-fail” incumbents to lose market share to innovative providers, such as Morodo. Driven by a greater understanding of the customer need for simple services, cheap charges and plain pricing, ground-breaking mobile apps like MO-Call are writing the rules of a whole new game.
Posted: September 25th, 2010
When you read any article on mobiles and the downloadable apps that now go ‘hand in hand’ with them you would be forgiven for thinking that there are two distinct classes of handset. First class is occupied by the ‘Smartphone’ family. This families famous members include iPhone and the new Android mobiles. These are the handsets that occupy time with the paparazzi showing off their ‘wears and tears.’
Then there are the others … or Java feature phones. These handset are not as intuitive as there more expensive brothers, require a little more user input but do the job nonetheless and come at a price tag affordable my most of the developing world.
Bringing this all back to MO-Call, Morodo now supports over 2,025 of the World’s most popular handsets. The majority of these are Java Featurephones giving access to the group who arguably benefit the most from engaging with a Morodo type business to an alternative Mobile Network Operator and saving up to 90% on their international calls and SMS.
User habits for app downloads are different between the developing and developed World also. Research from Research Firm Canalys calculates that over half of the Chinese people that they have surveyed download and use mobile apps, that’s more than twice the level of downloads seen in Europe.
Even more interesting is the finding that app downloads are far from just a smartphone phenomenon in China. In fact, the market is being driven as much by Java games and apps on feature phones. Surprisingly, the most popular app category in terms of downloads in China is Books, with 68% of app downloaders saying that they read e-books on their phones. For 16-25 year-olds, that figure rises to 76%.
For Mobile Industry pundits in the West, most shocking of all were the statistics revealed for Social Network Services (SNS), as Canalys state:
The high uptake of social networking applications in Europe did not feature as prominently in China; however, survey results showed that two thirds of social networking users in China were willing to pay for access to their favourite social networking sites. More than half of these respondents were open to paying at least RMB10 (US$1.47) each month for the privilege.
Whereas in Europe and America, consumers use free SNS, such as Facebook and Bebo, China’s service providers, led by Tencent’s QQ, frequently charge customers gateway access and make huge revenues from the sale of virtual goods associated with online gaming. And whilst you might think that the average Chinese net-surfer is tapping away on the most modern of smartphones, prepare to be corrected on that point too. The vast majority of consumers are using less powerful Java featurephones to read, play, chat and learn. Services are built as Java applets or rich web applications, something that the Morodo team in Beijing has been doing for years.
We suppose this all goes to show that you MUST support the mobile handsets your target customer base uses and as far as Featurephones are concerned MO-Call has got the World Wide Globe covered.
Posted: September 25th, 2010
Judging from his speech at last week’s Nokia World event Vodafone CEO, Vittorio Colao has a few demands of developers, mobile manufacturers and the general public. As reported in Mobile Europe, Colao believes the world has turned on its head, and where once he only had to worry about the network, now he has a whole new ‘ecosystem’ on his hands. Mobile Europe makes the point that most Mobile Network Operators are in the same boat.
Educating the ecosystem in the how Vodafone sees the new order, Colao made the following three points clear:
1. Someone needs to pay for the network. Bracing the backbone for the onslaught of increased consumer data is expensive and Vodafone would like to remain profitable, so expect to see tiered data pricing very soon. App developers bear this one in mind when you’re creating new products and services.
2. Real competition and choice in mobile phones means a diverse range of devices that meet the needs of rich and poor alike. Naturally, Colao wants budget smartphones for the emerging economies, but he also requires affordable top-end devices for the mature markets. Email, Social Networking, Videos, Games and Maps supported by smartphones will all drive data usage and create revenue.
3. Search, recommendation and carrier billing (supporting contactless payment) are all Colao wants to see from developers. The way we read it, between the lines, Vodafone have had enough of disruption, they need development on their terms.
At this point, one would consider oneself well lectured in the mobile ‘ecosystem’ as Vodafone see it, but the kicker is yet to come: Colao went on to say he had enough of the vertically integrated Mobile Operating Systems, in his view we need a truly open environment for mobile application development and that can only be provided by the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC).
Translating that into layman’s terms, Colao is fed up that Apple and Google destroyed Vodafone’s commercial relationship with customers that want to buy applications and consume (and pay for) content. Everyone should get with the program and join the cosy club of Mobile Network Operator developers, the WAC. To be fair, Colao stated very clearly that he understands that with more stakeholders in the value-chain, everyone needs a fair share of the revenue.
Forgive us if we have been a little scathing in our reportage, but as the Operators have had the upper hand for so very long, some twenty years, why should anyone give them back the keys to their beloved Walled Gardens now? The Gatekeeper days are done with, dead and buried. What good will come of that? Not much good, believe you me.
As reported in Fierce Wireless earlier this week:
France Telecom-Orange CEO Stephane Richard has invited the heads of the three competing operators to meet Oct. 8 to explore the creation of their own common OS–the report states the talks are motivated by a belief that iOS and Android are “Trojan horses” enabling Apple and Google to establish their own relationships with consumers, effectively minimizing the carrier’s role in the mobile services value chain.
The four Operators referred to are Orange, Deutsch Telecom, Telefonica and Vodafone. Obviously, less important stakeholders in the value-chain are not invited to this meeting, no, not even Nokia.
It’s clear to us that in the Ivory Towers of the Operators, the only significant changes being made to the ‘ecosystem’ are those driven by fear of lost market share, fear of lost customer ownership and fear of becoming the bit-pipe for a new generation of connected consumers.
Viva la revolucion! Viva MO-Call!
Posted: September 19th, 2010
New Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop, chose to make his first public appearance for his new employer at this week’s Nokia World event in London. His first public act? To handover a USD 1 million prize to a team of developers and paraphrase his former supervisor, Steve Ballmer, in stating that the most important part of the Nokia ecosystem is: Developers, Developers, Developers.
Elsewhere at Nokia World SVP of Design, Marko Ahtisaari, made it clear that Nokia have high hopes for their new Operating System Meego when he said:
“In order to cut through in the media environment, I think you need to do Operating System (OS) level innovation….in order for it to cut through and people to say, whoa, why didn’t somebody else think about that and that’s kind of what Nokia should do, it will be easier to cut through, from the media point of view, with MeeGo.”
We bet he’s got his eyes set on the all-important US market when he talks about cutting through the media environment.
We’ve been playing with Meego for some months now and are generally pleased with the performance of the OS but more work is needed to compete with the kind of ease-of-use consumer expectation that the iPhone has created. And ease-of-use, simplicity in app design, does not just stop there at the OS. There’s also what the Developer creates.
Last week, User Interface (UI) Guru Aral Balkan attracted some flak for making the case that User Experience, not bundles of Features, differentiates applications and devices. As we’ve made it something of a virtue to keep the MO-Call apps light, friendly and easy to use, we tend to agree with him.
Features should be useful and compliment the core strengths of your offer. There are too many ‘kitchen-sink’ apps these days that try to cram in every social network, messaging service and scheduling tool in the mistaken belief that more features mean better sales. Usually, this results in a process-hogging app that dominates the device and battery (and not in a good way).
The virtue of Morodo is that, wherever possible, the User Experience is not changed. Just use your mobile as you normally would, MO-Call is clever enough to do the money-saving work for you. As Balkan states, sometimes the best UI is no UI..
Posted: September 19th, 2010
Wired forecasting the Death of the Phone Call has caused a few ripples around the Internet. The crux of Clive’s argument is that:
“This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed.”
Here at Morodo we’d agree that the traditional phone call is indeed badly designed – expensive too. We’ve made a whole business around the need to change the way that phone calls are made by re-engineering calls made from your mobile and your desktop.
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) with VoIP MO-Call provides Presence: you can see who is online; and Status: you can see the availability of your Contacts to take a call.
If your friend or colleague is online, you can call them for free if they have a MO-Call account. If they’re offline, send them an SMS. And for Generations Y and Z, we’ve added Facebook, Yahoo, MSN and ICQ Messaging and Presence right into the MO-Call User Interface.
These are just a few of the simple ways in which Morodo is improving communication for the better. The Phone Call may be struggling to find a future, the MO-Call is alive and well.
