1. 10 – 12 October 2011, Vienna, Reed Messe Wien
Media Port
Session: Mobile Publishing Business
Title: Making mobile click in Africa
Speaker: Steve Kromberg, NikaNOW / David Rabkin Project for
Experiential Journalism, Rhodes University, South Africa

4. Experiential learning platform
Community newspaper
Financially self-sufficient

5. Grocott's Mail reporters
circa 1900

14. “Freemium” business model
 Free for ordinary users
 Premium users (businesses etc) pay to advertise
 Advertising features:
• Specials
• Events
• Sticky banners
• Notifications
• Competitions

16. Advantages of using NikaNOW
 Community of practice
 Much cheaper than developing a new platform
 Automated content – low level of effort
 Very lightweight, non-resource intensive CMS
 Optimised for mobile
 Easy to customise for local area / city
 Intuitive admin front-end for customising content
 Social media integration

21. NikaNOW Community of Practice
 Basic set up and hosting on our servers
 Ongoing support (remote and on-site)
 Technical and business training
 Marketing strategy and templates
 Ongoing development
 Special features (eg. SMS notifications / short codes)
 Collaborative purchasing and selling of advertising
 Syndication of hyperlocal content
Basic fee and reasonable charges for services

22. Benefits of the Community of Practice
 Economies of scale
 Platform enhancements benefit all instances
 Shared development costs
 Shared training material costs
 Shared marketing material costs
 Geographical exclusivity
 Collective learning
 Collective negotiation of partnerships (eg zero-rated data)

23. Going it alone: technical obstacles
 Cost and complexity of setting up hosting for a mobisite
 Difficult to recreate the time based display mechanism
 Researching and choosing best CMS option
 Setting up SMS Gateway to integrate with CMS for sending/
receiving messages

24. Critical success factors (users)
 Internet-enabled phones
 Reasonably-priced mobile data
 Regularly-updated specials & other content
 Effective marketing through other channels
 Educated users (peer education)
 Traffic drivers (eg. social media)

25. Critical success factors (revenue)
 Enthusiastic, skilled ad sales force
 Big enough pool of advertisers
 Enough users
 Advertisers experience success
 Cross-media most effective

26. NikaNOW components
licenses in brackets
 CodeIgniter (CI Custom, similar to GPL)
 DataMapper (MIT)
 CIMobile (GPL)
 Twitter API Library (GPL v2)
 HTML DOM Parse (MIT)
 FooStack (MIT)
 jQuery & jQuery UI (MIT and GPL)
 jqGrid (MIT and GPL)
 Google Static Maps (Google Maps APIs Terms)

27. Requirements to customise code
 Ability to develop in PHP using CodeIgniter framework and MVC
architecture
 Understanding of JavaScript using frameworks like Jquery
 Understanding of SVN repositories and a Linux server environment

28. www.nikanow.com
stevek@grocotts.co.za