SAD 1 ASSIGNMENT

SAD 1 Assignment

SAD 1 Assignment

Introduction

“Europe” is in this document confined to signifying the existing EU member states (EU15). These member states are, indeed, different in many ways, but with respect to mobile developments there is, in the present situation, a high degree of similarity. In general, the telecom market in Europe is organized as separate interconnected national markets with respect to network operation. The same does not apply to equipment manufacturing, where the intention of the European Community of creating a truly European internal market has succeeded to a large extent. Where formerly, before liberalization, there was a much higher degree of symbiosis between national network operators and national equipment manufacturers, there is on the European market today just a handful of larger European-based international companies, first and foremost Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens and Alcatel. The fact that the network operation market is organized as national markets, however, does not mean that there are no international network operators. License holders in the different countries are to a large extent owned by companies with ownership interests in a number of countries. The most striking example is Vodafone with ownership interests in 12 of the existing EU member states; but there are other companies such as Orange, T-Mobile and TIM, which have interests in different European countries. An interesting and noticeable fact is also that, in spite of operators with operations in different countries, there are practically no trans-European service offerings. Operators tend to treat their customers not as European customers but as national customers paying excessive charges when traveling to foreign countries.

A use case description

M2U's approach of rolling out their technology gradually throughout the world showed great success when conquering western markets and seemed to work OK for africa aswell. No other search engine had it's user interface translated to Zulu, Afrikaans and Xhosa years before they opened an office in South Africa or any other African country and still today there's no competition.

Back in the very early M2U years using voluntary user contributions with their M2U in your Language service and is constantly adding new languages. But there seemed to be weak spots where M2U was not able to roll out it's infrastructure on a global level in other fields, because they involve too much professional local knowledge and infrastructure and this is where I was delighted to see some real progress in the last months:

M2U Mapmaker allows people to edit and contribute to maps in countries where no professional map making company has gone before. The (infrastructural and marketing) power that honorable open source map projects like openstreetmap did not have meets usability and the result is great map data for all countries in Africa.

Today there was now the big news (via TC): M2U launches SMS based services for the ugandan internet community. Some of these services like M2U Trader (think of Craigslist/gumtree/kijiji simplified and via SMS only) are build exclusively for M2U Africa and I'm sure we'll see them rolled out and succeed in many african markets ...