No matter what you think about twerking singer Miley Cyrus, she did make a very good point about emoticons. (Those little smiley faces needed an ethnicity update, she suggested in a Tweet.) Her message was forwarded to Apple, which said it was working with the Unicode Consortium to create the standards for racially diverse faces.
The news was a worrying jolt for Alpesh Patel, whose African company mi-Group had been working on black emoticons since 2012. He instantly called a team brainstorming session, finalised a broad range of expressive icons featuring a character called Oju, and launched them globally.
His rewards were headlines declaring that this tiny African company had beaten Apple to the draw, plus 15 300 downloads in the first few days, 70 percent of them from the US.
The Oju innovation is typical of how Patel and his company work. It's innovation by degree, rather than wham-bam revolution. "Innovation for me isn't about technology only. It's taking traditional business models and flipping the script," he says. "I'm not going to fool myself that I have to develop a new technology that can be commercialised. Innovation is taking the traditional model of phones, cards and smileys and flipping it."
Patel's first business venture years ago set him on that path of identifying a gap and jumping in. The first gap was a gaping chasm, really, when the cellphone industry was just emerging and handsets were not widely available anywhere. Patel, who had studied Asian economics, saw that the Chinese market was untapped and began buying Motorola handsets and delivering them to a Chinese buyer in Hong Kong. "Nobody had realised China was about to boom and I was there unpacking them at the port and the Chinese customs officials went absolutely nuts for them," he says. "I was making £1 000 on each phone. I was a millionaire very quickly."
A sophisticated market
It sounds crazy that a lone operator could fill a gap that the major players hadn't spotted, but Patel says: "Sometimes the big guys are too big to spot opportunities like that."
Motorola, where he became the director of sales for the Middle East and Africa, failed to spot that Africa was a huge handset market for the future, he says. "Motorola was so fixated on the revenues in South Africa that it didn't see that the big revenues were going to come from the rest of Africa. It was annoying to me that the company wasn't reinvesting into Africa."
He decided that Africa could be handled more effectively by an African company, and took on the challenge of creating the first local handset. The result was the mi-Fone, which now comes in a range of models from the Fab Lite at $59 to the Fablet at $299. Some have QHD IPS colour display screens for easy reading in bright sunlight.
So far, they've sold more than two million units and the goal is to sell 50 million in the next five years, cornering ten percent of the expected market. The company is active in 15 markets, with its main centres being Angola, Kenya, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The phones are also sold online.
A big challenge will be to launch in South Africa in a few weeks' time. Mi-Group has stayed out of South Africa so far because the market is more affluent and thoroughly sewn up by the network operators. Now with six years of experience and a broad range of handsets, it's ready to address this sophisticated market, Patel says.
Lack of funding
Mi-Group will also be promoting Oju icons here and pushing its third product, the mi-Card, a debit card that has won the support of Visa. The mi-Card can be downloaded to any phone, making its potential market far bigger than its handset market.
Customers without a bank account can top up the debit card at a mi-Group retail outlet and use it to make purchases over their phones.
Customers without a bank account can top up the debit card at a mi-Group retail outlet and use it to make purchases over their phones. "You have to give people a tool to access information and a tool with which to make payments and then you have made them more productive," Patel says.
Together, the handsets, the payment system and Oju can touch people's lives and take something from Africa to a global audience, Patel believes.
Other ideas are fermenting in his head, but the group is already hampered by a lack of funding, leaving it too cash-strapped to employ more people. There are no venture capitalists behind the business, and many more naysayers than supporters.
"We have innovations coming out of our ears. There's more stuff we want to do but we don't want to come out with it in a haphazard way, so unless we come up with more capital and bigger teams, the ideas will have to stay in the cupboard," he says.
First published in the June 2014 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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