The future, as every marketer knows, is in content. But that doesn’t just mean video, audio and all the impressive high tech stuff. It also means basic amenities like books. In many regions around the world there simply isn’t access to reading material. And at the most basic level, the abundance of mobile technology facilitates literacy, and improves people’s economic potential. “Our colleagues in a rich city like Sydney might find it strange,” says Lentell, “but in many countries [mobile] is the only way many people would be able to read a book.”
Lentell wanted to make it easy for people to access books and so developers of biNu built a reading app and populated it with books from Project Gutenberg. “When this received a good response we came across Worldreader, a not-for-profit based in Barcelona and San Francisco, which enables literacy through digital books. Its first focus had been getting the Kindle into schools into Africa. However, once they were on the ground they realised just how many people had phones and how many people would like to read via this method. We gave them our application and now half a million people are reading books on the Worldreader app on BiNu. That was a very satisfying outcome. But it is just the beginning.”
This March biNu signed a deal with Harlequin Publishers, to make over 8700 books, most notably Mills & Boon romance novels, available for purchase. “They came to us,” Lentell tells me. This seems an incredibly smart move as Mills & Boon has massive appeal in markets like India. Now the only thing left is to join the dots. If consumers in emerging markets could pay for stuff using this sophisticated retail network of mobile pre-payment hawkers perhaps you could make everyone happy?
“If all you have is the mobile phone and even if it is a small screen you’re as interested as being entertained as anyone else on the planet,” Lentell concludes, “this is just the beginning for these markets and the desire to consume is as strong as anything we might feel. And in a sense it presents an even more interesting market because the pent up demand is huge. The challenge is how to deliver content, education, knowledge through that one small screen.”
Source: Underground iTunes: Australian Start-Up Drives Apps Potential to Emerging Markets by Kathryn Cave, June 20th 2013