Indian Mobile Advertisement Player - Shooting Blindly

The Smartphone adoption and subsequent flood of startup's with mobility centric focus changed the dynamics of Advertisement market place. Few years back all brand were focusing on print or TV media whereas in current environment mobile advertisement segment is attracting investment as well as attention from the startup focusing on Mobile Application reaching out to Advertisement Network to acquire additional userbase to justify the investment they received from the investor as well as asking for further investment by showing growing Daily Active User's.

The double digit growth in Smartphone also prompted Ad Networks to enhance their platform to ensure that they deliver the number what Mobile Application providers are asking for. Most of the Ad Network made the fortune in the last 4 years and many new player jumped in to milk out easy revenue stream. The rush by the Application developer flushed in with funding helped the ecosystem grow faster than Industry but completely missed the attached innovation required to serve the end consumer as per their need as well as to acquire quality user with higher retention percentage. 

The Mobile Advertisement sector innovated unique mechanism to incentivize end consumer to get the download wherein tried to reduce the Cost of user acquisition for Application provider. Most of the incent wall offer recharge on he data and voice side but they don't tell end user that at the end they need to pay for  the data. In that scenario, end mobile user is paying more than what they are getting as return from these incent wall. On a contrary, The incent wall offer application listing to end consumer without knowing anything about it. I am writing the above as I have done extensive research on the pain point of end consumer what is being enforced onto end consumer. If one ask Mobile Advertisement company about it then they say that end user can block this by choosing disable advertisement which is generally placed in Non Incent wall.

The Indian Mobile Advertisement companies as well as Application Developer must move to next level of innovation by offering options to end consumer only post knowing end consumer.

Draft Telecom Security Policy – First Potential Salvo From Regulators To Control Misuse Of User Contextual Pattern

The Indian regulatory bodies in a correlated effort came out with draft telecom security policy fulfilling the requirements and expectation of home ministry to lawful agencies. The proposed policy would put the onus of user information protection to Telecom ecosystem players.

In my recent blogs, I have been raising the concern of used mechanism of diverting user contextual information by the companies to take the undue advantage of user preference. There are “N” number of Applications offered by domestic and international companies by taking the consent of user under Terms and Conditions which none of the applications user read.

Even after repeated attempt by Indian regulators, many companies managed way around to keep on retrieving user information which intern affected end user. I am also sure that many of the users must be receiving redirect attack. On personal basis, I received many and charged premium tariff for the same. The first query pops up from the same that how come such traffic pass through claimed secured network.

Post the higher adoption of Applications and Off Net hosted service offering through cloud started violating many Indian regulations. Interestingly many companies offering through that said model don’t even get bothered to look into regulatory and always focuses on legal compliances.

The proposed regulation implementation is going to create the same havoc the way MVAS regulation created in India. When I look into the current scenario of in and out security breach, I believe that its utmost important for regulator to enforce all. The current and expected trend of m-commerce and m-payment adoption, it is important for all to make sure that device based malware or phishing to network centric vulnerability donot happen otherwise it may cripple the whole ecosystem. It is also clear that many security breaches are not being reported to lawful agencies whereas lawful agencies are not being able to tap in the user initiated information due to lack of infrastructure compliance by the service and other ecosystem players. The proposed one is going to be boom for some companies and bust for many. Many top notch Applications offered by International companies may see their business opportunity dry down in no minute if the draft gets converted into policy.