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With the Meffys final, supported by Mozilla & BiP, just around the corner on December 1st (got your tickets yet?) we are taking a brief look at the finalists in the nine different categories.

Today we’re looking at the Innovation in Mobile First Markets category which aims to reward successful products, services, initiatives, technologies or business models in mobile-first markets. These are the companies bringing innovative services and products to emerging markets in a sustainable way, providing benefits to the local market using the power of mobile tech.

Bango for Direct Carrier Billing in India

In May 2016, Idea Cellular launched Direct Carrier Billing for Google Play through the Bango Payment Platform in India, allowing users to purchase content from the Google Play store and charge the cost to their phone bill for the first time. This meant that millions of Idea Cellular subscribers without credit or debit cards were suddenly able to purchase apps, books, music, games, software and in-app content from Google Play, and had access to the full range of Google Play content.

As the world’s second largest smartphone market, with Android devices having a 91% market share, and credit card penetration at less than 3%, the ability to pay for this kind of content easily and safely using just the phone itself is a hugely significant step for mobile users in India.

Visit Bango

Eskimi for Eskimi DSP Award

Eskimi mobile demand-side-platform  (DSP) is a mobile programmatic solution that allows advertisers to reach more of an advertisers target audience instead of just sites and apps.

Providing relevant advertising to end users can be challenging in developing markets as the necessary user data can be hard to come by. Add in the diversity of handset devices being used, and trying to reach a majority of the audience seems impossible.

Eskimi’s platform allows a mobile programmatic to reach 160M+ consumers on a monthly basis in all African markets and brands and agencies such as Unilever, Coca-Cola and Safaricom to name just a few have adopted the platform to achieve better reach and target specific audiences.

Visit Eskimi

Indus OS for Indus OS

Indus OS is the worlds first “Regional Operating System” designed for specific regional language users.

Indus is aiming to address the needs of emerging markets’ by providing its users with mobile solutions tailored to their regional languages. With patented regional keyboards, Word & Matra prediction, tech that translates text from English to preferred regional languages & vice-versa, while Indus Reader allows offline text-to-speech in 9 regional languages

The OS has been successfully launched in India & Bangladesh and currently has a user base of over 5 million, all using the OS across 45 different model of smartphone.

Visit Indus

MUV for Netshoes

Brazil is a big, emergent, connected and mobile country. Despite this, soaring mobile data costs have seriously impacted retailers – as was noticed by shoe giant Netshoes who observed that although visits to their ecommerce site via mobile had increased sharply, sales had not risen to match. The theory was that customers, many of whom rely on pre-paid mobile packages, were worried about their data charges and the possibility of running out of credit mid-purchase.

The solution? Establish the first e-commerce site with free navigation via its site and mobile app. With the help of network operator partnerships, Brazilians were now able to browse for free on the Netshoes Group mobile sites and Apps without consuming their data plan, providing an essential service for Netshoe’s customers and took an innovative step forward for mcommerce.

Visit Netshoes

Opera for Opera Max – Africa

Opera Max is a clever piece of data-management software that effectively shrinks mobile content on other apps via mobile and Wi-Fi, preserving user’s precious data – in some cases extending data plans by up to 50% for free.

The app uses advanced compression technology to help cost-conscious African users get the most out of the mobile internet. Whilst the price of smartphones is decreasing in Africa, data remains expensive, and the appetite for media heavy content is just as extensive as in western developed markets.

Opera Max is a free solution, allowing users to control their data more effectively, letting them block apps from using background or foreground data when not being used, set smart alerts for data usage and it can even cut down the data being used when streaming video content, without significant loss in quality. Very handy!

Visit Opera Max

Türk Telekom International for 4G Roaming Deployment

4G lets users enjoy mobile data up to 10 times faster than the previous 3G networks, meaning subscribers get faster mobile internet and super fast access to all their favourite, media heavy streaming services.

Türk Telekom’s 4G roaming initiative let its subscribers, across 81 different mobile operators enjoy continued LTE coverage, both for inbound and outbound roamers, meaning they could continue using their services as they move across networks without interruption.

The service provides cover across 48 countries and with another 70+ countries planned for the end of 2016, and is bringing an end to prohibitive data roaming costs and limitations.

Visit Türk Telekom

Join us at the Meffys finals – London Dec 1st

Meffys 2016 supported by Mozilla & BiP is part of MEF London Week (29th November – 1st December) which includes Messaging & SMS World and MEF’s European Consumer Trust Summit.

The winners will be announced at a networking reception and features an innovation showcase – your chance to meet the finalists as well as live on-stage interviews with the winners hosted by Shivvy Jervis.

Book your place now

MEF