Press Room
>An Android phone selling out in Kenya
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Safaricom, of well-deserved mPesa fame, has started promoting Android aggressively in Kenya. They teamed up with Huawei to distribute their Ideos phone, which is an entry level Android phone selling for $100 bundled with 600MBs (we’re jealous here in Mexico, both phones and data plans are more expensive…)
Apparently the phones are selling out as the demand has outstripped expectations. 2000 Ideos are being sold per day, with 50,000 sold so far. Kenya has thus become a hot market for smartphones, in some ways surpassing South Africa.
Let’s hope other mobile operators decide to tap this market and turn the smartphone into a mass consumer device!
>The History of Accounting
>Accounting gets a bad rep for being dry and boring. Fair enough. But if you dig into its purpose and history, you can find a fascinating story. With the proviso that I am no historian, I wanted to offer a glimpse at how many innovations have been spurred by the need to account properly.
Let’s start at the very beginning. Human populations have always traded with their neighbors but when they settled down in growing villages, their trade routes lengthened and the amount of goods exchanged grew. The solution was to craft pottery jars that could hold and preserve the goods while on transit. But when you had 100 jars, how did you know what each of them contained? Traders had to invent writing to account for their wares. Believe it or not, accountants were the ones that invented writing systems (poets were still memorizing their verses).
Of course, numbers and other mathematical constructs had a direct application to ac-counting from the very beginning. Trigonometry can be handy while calculating how much grain a given plot will yield. Algebra apparently received a powerful impetus from the complexity of the Arabic inheritance laws. Even the hindi-arabic numerals came to Europe through accountants: Fibonacci wrote the Liber Abaci in 1202 to show how bookkeeping would be enhanced with the new numbers, advocating for their introduction.
Double-entry accounting took a bit longer. While already in use by Venetian traders in the 1200s, we had to wait until 1494 for Luca Pacioli to write the first formal treatise on bookkeeping and thus formalize double-entry accounting as we know it today.
To keep this post short, let’s fast-forward to the computer age. Initially, programmable computers were huge and designed for the military and big universities. But guess what, the first company to take the invention private was J. Lyons, a British catering company that built the LEO I to manage payroll and inventory.
As the price of computers dropped, there was a quick evolution and all the major corporations purchased mainframes to help their bookkeepers. SAP, Oracle and other huge companies are still innovating in this industry. Later, with software like Intuit’s Quickbooks, even small businesses and individuals with a PC could get the benefits of someone dumber but faster doing their numbers.
Today, accounting is fully democratized among the businesses in the rich world. However, that’s not true with the informal businesses in the developing world: the micro-entrepreneurs. Lacking computer applications, the best of them struggle with paper-based methods that are less powerful than Luca Pacioli’s. That stymies their progress as it makes their operation harder to manage and less likely to get financed.
Luckily, all micro-entrepreneurs already have a computer in their hands: the cell phone. As soon as their interfaces improve and their power grows, their phones will turn smart and will be put to work as accounting tools.
Our belief at Frogtek is that it will take another computer paradigm shift through a combination of mobile phones and cloud servers for these informal businesses to adopt accounting . That is the reason we are building Tiendatek on Android and with a connection to the cloud. Hopefully millions and millions of micro-entrepreneurs will become our happy users in the next few years!
>Shifting Computing Paradigms
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Ben Horowitz is one of the smartest tech bloggers and investors around. He posted today about his views on whether we are currently experiencing a second Internet bubble or not. For the record, he believes we are not and provides very sharp points backed with financials. The main ones are that building software today is much much cheaper than in the past and that there is now a 2bn market to distribute software over the internet.
He then goes on to explain his understanding of the current technological shift:
One thing he does not mention is that the shift to cloud/mobile will soon grow the software consumer market by another 2bn or so by adding all those BOP mobile users as they upgrade to smartphones. This will bring huge developmental benefits as those “new companies that solve important problems” increasingly focus on the BOP.
Back in the mainframe paradigm that Ben discusses, the beneficiaries of technological innovation were the government, the military and the large corporations and universities. As the industry moved to client/server, rich-world consumers started reaping the benefits of venture investment and start-up innovation. Today we are at a point where most activity focuses on them and corporations play catch-up with their employees.
It then follows that the shift to cloud/mobile will re-focus innovation towards BOP consumers. Not only they are legion and will be connected to the digital marketplaces. They’ll also produce the innovations themselves, given the astounding drop in capital needs to build software and the imperative to understand the end-user.
Now, that’d be gargantuan for sure. We can’t wait to see it happen.
>The actual people using our software
>Our management team got together for a week in Bogotá. We had a number of strategic topics to discuss and we spent two full days visiting some of the 70 shopkeepers that are using our product there. We wanted to know how they’re liking our current version. And we took the opportunity to do some usability testing of our web portal with their performance reports. You can see a few pictures in the slideshow below.
The first store we visited was Damaris’. She was profiled in our video for the Mobile World Congress competition and was very happy we had won the award. She was positively beaming when we showed her a news clip from a Spanish tv channel where she appears.
But more importantly, she and her husband Diego explained to us why they like Tiendatek so much. Before they started using it, they would track all sales in their notepad and then spend 3 hours in the evening updating an Excel spreadsheet with their inventory! That shows their discipline and we’re happy they can save so much time with our product.
Tiendatek has also helped them secure a micro-loan and guide its deployment. As a result, the shop has grown significantly and the reports on the phone have helped them understand which products to keep and which ones to let go.
Damaris and Diego are two exceptional people that are using our product to its fullest advantage. It was very moving for us to realize how Tiendatek can help them translate their hard work into an opportunity to move ahead in life. Now we have to go out and find more shopkeepers like them!