Celedu

Cellular+Education

Spreading literacy and education in the

developing world

Team: Rafael de Cardenas, Claire Cunningham, Hank Huang,

Gyorgy Paris, Swami Sekar, Alex Shih 

February 26, 2009.

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What Is Celedu?

• Celedu aims to help the next billion people at the

bottom of the pyramid to increase their living standards
by helping educate them, first in India
• Celedu provides a mobile platform for literacy and
language education
– Initial solution: a game interface to distribute
ReadingWise/DevAlt language-learning content
• The platform is flexible and adaptable for
implementation in other language programs worldwide 
• Celedu is going to deploy its service to rural villages in
the developing world
– Utilizing a community-learning model
• Partnering in India with ReadingWise/ Development
Alternatives
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Our Product

• Through our market research we identified the following key

insights:
– In India the mobile penetration in rural areas is still low, but mobile is
the key media platform there (no PC, no TV)
– People like to come together, learn and play together
– A group of people will “watch” and pass around one mobile for the
exercise

• Our service must evolve as mobile penetration increases

throughout India and as users’ mobile knowledge and usage
Phase 1.
habits change Phase 3.
•One phone – one Phase 2.
•Various phones – various
application •Many phones types –
applications
•Learn to read and write one or two
•Learning with
•The learning experience applications
organizer/teacher or users
would be “disguised” as a •High end and
can do self-learning
game medium level phones
•Downloadable from
•High-end phone (large •Learning with
Mobile Operators
screen) community organizer
•A community organizer is
needed to act as conduit
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and teach people in a small
village
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How Does It Work?

• Celedu is focusing on community learning at start:

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Market – Mobiles in India
Mobile Operators’ share:
• Mobile is the key communication
channel in India
• Penetration is at 28% level – 318
million users
– Growing fast: it took 10 years to
reach the first 100 M users, and
took 3 years to reach the next 200
M users
• Other telecom service penetration
levels: User growth forecast:
– Fixed line: ~ 50 M
– Internet: ~ 10 M
• Mobile broadband usage is low (~
5 M), data access is minimal
• Lowest prices, highest usage in the
world
– Voice is the killer app yet
• Est. number of users in 2012: 750
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Market Opportunity
Mobiles in India
• Current users are from
metro areas, penetration in
rural areas is much lower:
~ 20%
• As voice is very cheap
Mobile Network Operators
are making two big bets to
grow revenues and
profitability for the long
term
– Targeting rural areas to
grow penetration and
increase number of users
– Grab market share now
– Launching data networks
and Value Added Services
with high profitability
potential
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Literacy
• Over 800 million illiterate
people worldwide
• 60% of which comes from
India and China
• Literacy in India is at 61%
level  there are over 400
million illiterate people
It’s in the Mobile
Operators’ best interest to
increase literacy among
their existing and potential
users
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Business Model

• Celedu plans to finance its operation mostly from investors and grants
at start
• After the trial runs Celedu plans to generate money from marketing
cooperations
– Demonstrating a Mobile Operator’s service and a phone
manufacturer’s product to potential users, and if possible sell
them too – Celedu to act as agent
• By 2012 Celedu will target end users directly and aim to generate a small
amount of revenue per user but from a high number of users
Planned evolution of Celedu’s
Development and revenue
Limited market sources
Large scale market rollout
Test phase rollout

Subscriber/usage fees from

Subsidies and fees endusers
from
Investors
•Mobile Operators Sponsorship fees
Grants from
Phone manufacturers Marketing cooperations
• Int. foundations
•Educational
• NGOs
institutions
• Government

2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

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Marketing and Sales Strategy

2009-2010 2010-2011 2012-

Objective Test and Scale-up High growth

experimentation
Where 300 villages in North 2-3 major regions National
India where
ReadingWise has a
Target network
Illiterate in place
women, rural Illiterate women and Literate and
Group areas men, rural areas illiterate

Service Reading and writing in Reading, writing, math Reading, writing,

form of a game math
languages
Mode of NGOs find and select Celedu develops its own basic business,
One-to-one etc.
model
Operation community organizers agent network and community
model
Key sales Independent community Own agents, own Mobile operators’
channel organizers organizers WAP portal

Marketing Organizers Word of mouth Joint marketing

Agents activities with MNOs
Local activities and phone manuf.

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Competitive Analysis

• At the moment there are no real competitors

• We expect that it will change over the next years:
– Some of the exisiting Value Added Service developer companies,
especially the ones with Java applications and game development
capabilities could decide to move into this field
– New competitors, international VAS developers/providers may
appear on the market
– Educational firms may also target this field (although they
may want to partner with Celedu, instead of going through the
mobile development and operation process

• However the market size allows that a number of

competitors could be active and still generate high
revenues and profits
– First mover will have an important advantage

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IT Development

• Develop an application platform

that will support the literacy
teaching method implemented by
ReadingWise, but also be scalable
to other educational applications

• Application will be a game interface

that can be easily loaded with
various learning materials

• Server/client architecture can push

new information to phones as
needed

• Servers developed in Java/MySQL

• Mobile client using Java ME

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Key Milestones - Timeline

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Team

• Rafael de Cardenas: Institutional Relations

• Claire Cunningham: Software Officer
• Hank Huang: Software Technical Lead
• Gyorgy Paris: Sustainability Officer
• Swaminathan Sekar: Program Manager
• Alex Shih: System Architecture Officer

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