Out With A Bang

Like the rest of modern humanity, I’ve long walked in the shadow of Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Our paths almost crossed in Vegas one-time as a combination of MyLocalWriter and Addiply made it to the final round of the 2008 Knight News Challenge only to be pipped at the post by Sir Tim and Martin Moore with their ‘kite-mark’ thinking.

‘Pipped’, as in by a country mile. For me, it remains a killer application as we all seek to prove our worth and our value out there in Web-land.

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2008/05/23/sir-tim-i-take-it-all-back-with-the-glorious-benefit-of-hindsight-you-have-an-absolute-killer-of-an-application-on-your-hands/

Whether our paths do ever cross again remains a wholly moot point; Sir Tim is clearly – and rightly – a man in huge demand.

But having read this the other day, it would be nice to drop at least one memo into the great man’s in-tray…

http://www.webfoundation.org/2010/03/vodafone-donates-1-million-in-support-of-web-foundation-initiatives/

Because if the World Wide Web Foundation and their new best pals at Vodafone are on a quest to discover web-based tools and applications that can help empower the next generation of African entrepreneurs, then I think we might be able to help…

Ever since Matthew Buckland of www.24.com called on the World Association of Newspapers to find an ad model that delivered a 90% return to publishers… http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2009/03/27/it-would-appear-that-matthew-buckland-has-a-plan-for-the-world-association-of-newspapers-the-same-plan-that-linda-clive-and-the-people-of-darwen-are-working-on/ …cracking that African nut has always interested me.

Addiply, of course, does just that – delivers a 90% revenue return to publishers. Be they www.24.com or potentially, say, a farmers’ co-operative website in Ghana. That, maybe, ad-network wise, we had something vaguely akin to a wind-up, clockwork radio.

I only say Ghana because that was the last time I spotted Sir Tim; wandering around a maize plantation in Ghana in the company of a mobile-stroke-web minded farmer and @aleksk of ‘Virtual Revolution’ fame.

But – and here we’re into scribbling on the back of fag packet territory again – if, say, that Ghanaian farmers co-operative website looked to try and cover its monthly hosting costs by dropping a Google AdSense/Double-Click device into its back-end, I’d be amazed if they weren’t presented with ads for Ghanaian hotels and safaris.

Neither of which would do much for their click-through returns.

Equally, there might be a Ghanaian seed merchant who might be looking to market his wares on a local, digital platform. Could he oust that same Ghanaian five-star safari lodge ad from said co-op site?

Maybe I do those marvellous, intuitive people beneath Mountain View a disservice; if so, I humbly apologise. But if Phil and Co can’t get www.thelichfieldblog.co.uk to deliver much more than ‘B&B in Lichfield’ ads, then I’m not sure either our farmers co-op site or his potential seed merchant advertiser in Ghana would fare much better.

Deploy something that was simple, three-click and offered a 90% revenue return and the seed merchant would get an opportunity to market his wares to an appropriate audience; the farmers co-operative website would get the chance to cover their hosting costs… the chance to make them a ‘not-for-loss’ proposition.

Could they not do that with the AdSense/Double-Click proposition? Maybe. But there was a very interesting line hidden away in Steve Outing’s recent piece on the value/virtues of Kachingle…

http://steveouting.com/2010/03/15/my-blog-earned-65-08-via-crowd-funding/

That: ‘Looking at my Google AdSense earnings from this blog, for comparison, I note that the monthly figure is usually in the low one-figures…’

Could a Ghanaian farmer get the same piece of kit to beat US media commentator S Outing and his ‘low one-figure’ return?

OK. Clearly one of the barriers to entry will be the PayPal take-up across Africa; or the lack of it. Not everyone has a credit card. Or, indeed, a bank account.

And for Addiply to offer a tool that enables said Ghanaian farmers co-op to offer a 5 Ghanaian Cedi/week ad space to, say, a Ghanaian seed merchant, ideally that same transaction would be fully automated.

That, however, might be coming; cue this…. http://www.techmasai.com/2010/03/is-paypal-coming-to-south-africa-they-are-according-to-techcentral/

More intriguingly still, however, is this baby… http://www.mobile-financial.com/node/4447/Vodafone-to-launch-its-mobile-money-transfer-service-M-PESA-in-South-Africa

A mobile phone payment system delivered via… Vodafone. Now bolt that onto an Addiply back-end. Oooh… that’s interesting…

Of course, Addiply is an open ad network. Which means – with the addition of our new richer media suite – we can offer the chance for ‘national’ brands to drill their Flash-supported banners, buttons, skys, MPUs etc down into highly-targetted areas… in a very cost-effective manner.

Brands like, Oxfam. AIDS awareness campaigns…

We can drill ‘mesaaging’ into famine hit areas via an MPU slot; we can drop agricultural educational videos into said Ghanaian farmers co-op website… enhancing their seasonal yields whilst at the same time rewarding said website for their digital publishing efforts… turning them from, potentially, a ‘not-for-loss’ proposition into one that offers a small profit.

Which can make the world of difference.

I’ve never been to Africa. Always strikes me, however, that it is a continent teeming with budding entrepreneurs; all they ever want is the right tools to do certain jobs.

Simple, robust tools that they can tweak and twidde with along the way. Discover what works for them. On the streets.

Give them the right tool for the job, you then just sit back and let them get on with it. Empower them to build a better future for themselves, themselves.

That’s all they ever ask. And I think – albeit on the back of a fag-packet - we can deliver.

Albeit, perhaps with a little help from Sir Tim and his friends…