cyberlaxamana

by Richard Zhu (blog: http://richardzhu.org/) Think about the shopping list when you buy a new laptop: A new laptop: $500 (OS pre-installed) Anti-Virus: $40 (e.g. McAfee Total Protection 2011) Microsoft Office: $120 That is what happens in US, where average per capital income is about $40,000. What happens if this is in a developing country? Let’s pick up a hot one, China, where per capita income is 6.23% of US (Only $2,500 per year? Yes! That’s why your iPhone is made there!). Let’s see the impact such costs can have on these people’s income. (We know that the prices are the same): % of Annual Income US China Computer 1.3% 20.0% Anti-Virus 0.1% 1.6% Office 0.3% 4.8% Total 1.7% 26.4% Here we see that a new laptop is a big thing in China, like in many emerging markets. The relatively high price is giving incentive for them to seek alternative options. Here are things consumers could do to make the overall price less hefty: ...

by Aldi Haryopratomo In this post I’d like to use the lens to evaluate how would I have applied course concepts like lean start-up, product market fit, etc, in the developing world based on my experience setting up Ruma in Indonesia, which coincidentally has the second largest number of Facebook users in the world. Ruma’s goal is to create an app-store for low-end phones that sell useful applications like job search. (e.g., www.kerjalokal.com ).  Based on the precept that start-ups shouldn’t scale until the hypothesis has been validated, the natural move when I started Ruma would be to start hiring engineers and start developing the product and try to get users in the system. Unfortunately, this is more difficult to do in developing markets mobile phone industry for a couple of reasons. First, most users access the Internet via mobile phones and to get access to a lot of users we’d need to partner with a Telco operator. Naturally few telecommunications operators would be willing to...