Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Lori Sylvia, EVP of Marketing at RedBend Software (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have any observation on language issues? There are several markets that are not English speaking. If you look at the Arab world, for example, they are mostly not English speaking. India, as another example, is vastly not an English-speaking market. There are maybe 50 million to 60 million English speakers, but beyond that there are another billion people who don’t speak English. Do you see opportunities for local language tablets, services or apps?

Lori Sylvia: Absolutely. Let me tell you how RedBend is helping emerging markets. As I mentioned, we have virtualization technology, and we have licenses this to a number of manufacturers of mobile devices. They are using this technology to be able to create a low-cost Android hand set. They do that by using our virtualization technology, putting Android on top of it, but running it on top of a low-cost chip set. When the consumer buys this device, they know they are getting an Android device. Maybe the performance is not going to be as great as my Samsung Galaxy SIII, but it is still a good user experience. The OEM is able to bring that device to market because of cost savings they could achieve using virtualization from RedBend.

Now you have a situation where tens of millions of consumers in China, India or Latin America are buying their first smartphones because RedBend was inside that device. Often these OEMs are not the big brands that you and I know, but there are dozens of local brands in India, China, Latin America or Russia, and many of them have very good market shares locally. They may not be number one, two or three, but they may be number four, five or six, and they have very loyal customer bases. They all want to provide localized services. We have a customer – Smart Communications – which is the number one operator in the Philippines. They wanted to use our software management capability because they wanted to be able to manage some of their branded applications independently from their operating system. One of the came from Jalebi, which is delivery of local takeout in the Philippines. Every time a Philippine consumer uses one of Smart Communications’ smartphones to make a takeout purchase, Smart Communications gets a percentage of the revenue. This is a revenue-generating application for them and of course for Jalebi. They wanted to be able to operate that separately. So there are lots of opportunities for localized services beyond just local languages.

SM: That was a very good use case. Do you have other examples from other international markets?

LS: Another one of our customers we announced recently is Vertu. They are the leader in luxury smartphones. They have since launched a line of luxury Android smartphones. Their phones typically go for around $10,000. Their phones don’t have an industrial design and a Swarovski [crystal]-studded case; it is about the service you get from them. They provide concierge services to their very high-end customers around the world. They are doing quite well in Arab countries and in other markets in Europe. They want to be able to manage the software over the air and always provide the best service to their customers. Their customers expect the best at that price point.

SM: What are some examples of the kinds of high-end services that this $10,000 price point offers?

If you just landed in NYC and you want tickets to the Mets, for example, their people behind the scenes are going to make that happen for you.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Lori Sylvia, EVP of Marketing at RedBend Software
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