My thoughts on Carol Realini and Judy O'Brien being named as Top Silicon Valley Women of Influence by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal.....

Q: What does it mean to you personally to be named one of the Most Influential Women in Silicon Valley?

Receiving this recognition is such an honor. There are a growing number of influential women based here and those of us being recognized with this award are the tip of the iceberg. I am flattered at being recognized and expect the recognition is really more about Obopay and less about me. Obopay is such a big idea - using the global ubiquity of mobile to bring banking to billions of people who have been unserved by traditional banking business models. Oh, I almost forgot...Obopay is also committed to bringing a new level of convenience to the rest of us - so we all have banking services that empower our life and work.

Q: What do you think the potential is for women in business to lead and make a difference today?

For a while now when asked this question, I have been giving the same answer - the potential is broad and deep. When I started in technology in the 70's, the industry wasn't used to women engineers or women leaders. That has all changed now. Plus, we have many new high growth companies - like Obopay, Facebook, Twitter, and many more - that represent great opportunities. If you have the talent and leadership, companies want their employees to step into the role of maximum contribution. So they don't care what sex, religion, race, or relationships you have. Instead they care about results and market leadership. And they are always asking who among us can take on this new challenge. These are great environments for women to contribute, grow and lead.

In addition, there are also great opportunities in more establish companies and in start up companies. Everyone is more comfortable with women leaders including VC's, board of directors, peers, even husbands are more comfortable and supportive than ever.

Q: What challenges do you think still exist for women to excel in the workforce today?

In many ways, the challenges are the same for women and men. You have to be good at your job so you need to develop strong competencies. In most situations women don't have to be better than men to succeed or be recognized. But they do need to learn things that may not come naturally to them. Like fighting a good fight, recognizing organizational obstacles and eliminating them. Most of all, they need to stop worrying about people liking them and worry about doing the right thing.

Q: Having both the CEO and General Counsel from Obopay named Women of Influence in Silicon Valley is quite an accomplishment. What do you think this says about Obopay’s leadership?

It says we have a great leadership team - and that two of those people are women. I am really proud of the strength of our executive team. They are top leaders with extensive mobile and financial services experience. If there was a list of top men or list of top leaders in India - I would expect that we would get on those lists also.

Q: How has Obopay General Counsel, Executive Vice President and Secretary Judy O’Brien made a difference at Obopay?

Judy was a top lawyer - led a large practice at Wilson Sonsini. Then, she became a VC for a few years. She could be general counsel for a large public company or run a large law practice. We are so lucky to have her at Obopay. She is at Obopay, like the rest of the executives, because of the big idea - next generation banking and electronic payments that brings a whole new level of convenience and extends banking to billions.

Judy is also totally committed to building a global company from the start. On her first week at Obopay, we traveled to India to set up the operation there. We knew we wanted to be global, sowhile we are building our business in the US we are also building (on the same platform) our business in India. Now we are also in Africa and talking about expanding in Asia, Europe and Latin America.

Q: What are you most proud of in your career as a female leader?

I am proud of many things. I have been involved with building 3 companies before Obopay. All of them successful. I am proud of raising capital - which is very tough. And most of all, I am proud of Obopay. Before Obopay I thought my career was behind me. When I was traveling in Africa and saw mobile phones in places where infrastructure was weak, I realized my career was in front of me.

Q: If you had one nugget of advice to give young women leaders today, what would that be?

Don't listen to anyone that tells you "you're not good enough". And (just one more)....surround yourself with great advisers and team members. And (just one more please)...dream big.

Obopay CEO Shares Strategy to Transform Mobile Payments - pymnts.com

PYMNTS.com asked industry expert and author of Paying with Plastic, David S. Evans to profile industry thought leaders and executives to find out what's next in the world of payments.

In this edition of the CEO Series, David interviewed the CEO of Obopay, Carol Realini -- the entrepreneur behind Obopay which has allowed customers to send and receive money through mobile phone SMS since 2005. Carol came out of retirement to pursue this opportunity in payments after traveling around the world and realizing the shift toward mobile.

Obopay was born out of an opportunity to use mobile phones to exchange money and extend beyond the traditional bank branch model. This has brought Carol and Obopay to the forefront of innovation in payments. With a continued focus on technology, Obopay is also drawing attention to building relationships to take their services to a larger number of consumers and prove to be what's next in payments.

Nokia Money Initiative in India

What is Nokia and Obopay announcing today?

We just launched the first commercial version of the Nokia Money in India. Read about it here.

The launch is starting with a commercial pilot in Pune, which is one of the country’s largest metropolitan areas in the region. It is being offered in partnership with Yes Bank and is being called Mobile Money Service by Yes Bank powered by Nokia. It’s the comprehensive service which allows you to transfer money to another person just by using the person’s mobile phone number, pay bills, as well as recharge your prepaid SIM cards.

We’re also working to enable consumers to pay merchants for goods and services in the next few months.

What is so special about your service offering?

In many ways our offering with Nokia and Yes Bank are taking mobile payments and banking to the next level. This new service is one of the most comprehensive services available in the market. It’s going to change the game for mobile payments. Obopay brings operating experience with mobile payments from around the world. The offering combines Nokia’s retail reach, brand awareness, and handset expertise to provide unparalleled access and ease of use for these services. Additionally, the service offers a comprehensive feature set that enables people to use it to meet all of their daily payment needs including utility bill pay, top-up minutes, send money using P2Pand pay merchants using P2M features. It’s also the only service that is designed to convert physical cash to e-money, which is being delivered in a way that provides unprecedented access to financial services through Nokia’s retail reach. It’s also the only mobile payment service with a user-friendly application that can be accessed by the masses. Our application uses secure SMS, rather than requiring the user to have a mobile data plan.

Why did you select India as the first emerging market to launch Nokia Money initiative?

We chose India because of its enormous scale and potential as the home to a population of 1.5 billion people. It’s also got the fastest growing cellular market in the world. Right now there are 500 million mobile phones in India, but it’s expected to be more than 900 million by the end of 2013. 41% of India’s population does not even have a bank account. Combined, the market potential here is huge in India.

Nokia and Obopay also bring significant experience and resources to the Indian market. Nokia is among the leading brands in India in market share with over 200,000 retail stores throughout.

We also have a lot of operating experience in India. We have been live in India with YES BANK since 2008. We have a deep understanding of the complex marketplace, the regulations, and ecosystem.

With our combined experience and market potential we felt there was no better place than India for a service offering like this.

What are your expansion plans in India?

We plan to extend the launch over the upcoming months and aggressively roll out the service to all major cities in India within a year.

What does Nokia and YES BANK add to the service offering?

Nokia brings the strength, trust, and the vast distribution of their brand. They’ve got 200,000 retailers across India who could serve as authorized Nokia Money agents. They also bring enormous handset expertise and uniquely developed mobile elements.

YES BANK, who is a long-time partner of Obopay, is the fastest growing bank in India. In fact, it was awarded the “Most Innovative Bank in India.”

We’re a strong company and have strong partners for this service and will continue to grow the ecosystem of partners including mobile operators, banks, distributors and merchants to bring Nokia Money to the market successfully.

How will this impact the lives of Indians?

This service has enormous potential to empower the lives of its users. It has the potential to bring finical services to the hundreds of thousands of Indian Citizens who have previously not had access to them, improving their lives in the process. It’s safer, convenient, and more efficient than cash. It gives consumers and merchants the ability to manage their finances in ways that were not available to them before. It’ll enable business to get paid faster, which will increase productivity.

Last Day at Davos

“I know first-hand in Kenya, where farmers have seen their income grow by as much as 30% since they started using mobile banking technology and one World Bank study found that a typical developing country, a 10% increase in the penetration rate for mobile phones led to an almost 1% increase in per capita GDP. Put this into context, that would for India translate into almost $10Billion a year.”

Hillary Clinton, Sec of State

The last day has been good. Wrap up with the technology pioneer WEF team. We gave them feedback on how they could improve the program. Mostly about communications and preparation before the event. They have a buddy system but some buddy's were more helpful than others. It is essential that you prepare for the event ahead of time since once you are here there is too much going on to set up all the meetings you want on the spot.

We also recommended trying to get the technology pioneers a little more involved in the larger events. We discussed the value of that to WEF and to the pioneers. It was clear that making that happen was non-trivial. They coached us on how to get ourselves more engaged with WEF and an indirect result could be more involvement with sessions.

I went to two sessions - one was a CNBC live broadcast on Gender equality in the workforce. The picture above is the CEO of Coke talking about how Coke is aggressively pursuing more women at all levels. He seemed genuine and committed. That being said there are many complex issues with workplace, culture, and home. Others on the panel were COO of Facebook, CEO of Booz. Good job for traditional global inc. issues, not as great on international issues or SME issues. Nothing about access to capital.

The other was the Global Economic Outlook. What follows are my notes. Very brief and may be of interest. I am sure you can go online and get more comments from WEF. Larry Summers was articulate but talk about unemployment of MEN in the US. They should get someone to media train this guy. It was embarrassing that someone that high up in the US government was so politically incorrect.

A good day. I am very tired from a long week but this was the best conference I have ever been to. All the technology pioneers felt the same.

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Notes from Global Economic Outlook session.

India. Growth is strong. need policies to bring down deficite - slowly. Complex. Investment needs to be increased. Financial reform.

Japan. Change structure of economy. Lehman shock gives us the opportunity. More focus on local consumer. Capitalism needs reform to prevent these speculation drivers of growth (subprime crisis). International regulation.

China. 8.7 percent. Consumption growth is strong. Regional disparity getting better. Structure change and deal with over capacity. 33 percent investment growth. 15 percent consumption growth - need this to get larger - closer to 33. Overcapacity big issue. Pure export driven has to change. Structural issue. Need international cooperation.

DB CEO - legacy assets - still may be an issue. Regulatory issues - have to deal with these. Regulators part of the solution.

US - Summers. Statistical recovery, human recession. Moderate gdp growth rate expected. Unemployment is a Big issue. 1 in 5 not working. Recovery will mean 1 in 7 or 8. Job creation and credit access esp for med size business is key. Optimistic about US commitment to global economy (immigrants implied here)

Strauss - Kahn. Improving re-balancing. Growth - now looking at india and china to fuel growth. US will not. Corporate cross border banking.

More From Davos

"Obopay, founded by Carol Realini, particularly struck my imagination, and was enthusiastically explained by Tom Standage ...the opportunity was clear enough, without Standage's endorsement. Obopay offered people who had never had a credit or cheque card the means to send money to relatives, or pay for utilities or food using their phones.

"Half of the world's adults [or 2.5 billion people] have no access to banking," Realini said. Obopay, and companies like it, could empower those people, making them more economically productive, and overturn banking. That's the kind of thing I look to technology to achieve." - Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review

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This has been a great event for mobile banking and Obopay. Mobile Banking is discussed in many sessions and conversations. Yesterday I attended a private workgroup on Mobile Banking. Since it is private I am not allowed to discuss it but I believe the WEF will write a report that I will hopefully be able to share with all of you.

The Technology Pioneers program is a dream come true for a entrepreneur; recognition and a chance to build a very broad and deep network around the world.

It is hard to get into a rhythm at Davos. The day starts early and ends when participant just can't stay awake any longer. I have not yet made it past 11PM - but the evening activities go way later - until around 2 PM. On the first few days I wanted to do everything. Then I realized that was impossible so I have now settled into an approach that is 1/3 sessions, 1/3 preset 1-1 meetings, 1/3 general networking.

I can't say enough how full every day has been. And how amazing. Almost all of the corporate attendees are CEO's. I have had an opportunity to talk to CEO's of 3 major Mobile Operators, 2 of the world's biggest banks, and many others. Not only do you meet them, you connect with them. We are all here as "equals" so the normal barriers between people breakdown. It is a unique gathering.

I am not sure what I was thinking but at one technical pioneer event there was an "incident". There was a journalist - who will go unnamed - who was berating a technical pioneer. This journalist didn't understand or appreciate the value of the tech pioneers business. So I got up and told the journalist that he was out of line and to back off. He really was out of line and also I think he didn't understand the business because he couldn't even imaging the environment of an emerging market. His context was so stuck in Silicon Valley. Time for Silicon Valley to open up its view of the world and understand the emerging markets and the next 3 B consumers.

(If someone from Obopay's PR agency was at this meeting they would have wanted to put duck tape over my mouth. This is not the kind of thing a entrepreneur and CEO should be doing with a major journalist. I just couldn't sit by and let this go on without speaking up.)

At that same meeting there was a process where the attendees selected those tech pioneers whose companies were the "best". The criteria was subjective - but I think the most important factors were - was this going to be a large global successful business and was this business going to change the world. I'll am happy to report the results - Obopay was selected as one of the top pioneers.

Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review, wrote an article about this - check it out.

Davos Day 2: OboPay Is One of the Fairest

The attendees of the World Economic Forum chose the startups they like most.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/pontin/24732/?ref=rss

More From Davos - by Guest Blogger Joe Tumminaro

Joe's Session Notes

Will India Live Up to Global Expectations

This session was a debate moderated by Indian TV at the WEF for the first time. Questions were taken from the audience and opinions were registered from facebook users worldwide during the debate. There were some testy words about and with Pakistani members of the panel and audience.

India must provide growth and a leadership role achieving stability and peace in the region. A growth that's based on trust and a democratic process.

India has the potential to have the largest middle class in the world. It must focus on developing all of it's own people. This has been an issue in the past. Poverty is a huge issue in India. 500 million people in India lack access to commercial energy. Infrastructure projects are many but urbanization still produces many city slums.

The panel did not want to compare India's growth with that of China and for good reasons. The growth is fundamentally different. However, they are the 2 fastest growing regions and it's hard not to notice some differences. The region around China has benefited from the growth in China while the region around India has not seen the same multipliers. This is an issue because one country in a region cannot sustain growth without including its neighbors.

The expectation is that India should have an external responsibility to the rest of the world, not just for trade but for leadership in the region and the world.

A permanent seat on the UN security counsel is a high expectation of India.

Nuclear Non-Proliferation: Getting to Zero

This session covered current efforts to reduce nuclear weapons to zero. Policies have failed big time in the last 10 years and it seems that we have new players emerging (North Korea and Iran) from the confusion.

Gerath Evans (leader)
Dr. Yan Xuetong
Larry Brilliant
Dr. Amano - New Head of IEA/EA
Dr. Allison

Lightly attended. Evans upset that there is only one session scheduled on the topic and that the one session is at 9am late in the week.

NPT meeting this year to focus on getting agreement of something by 100 countries. Weak and modest goals which do not point to action very soon.

US has been incompetent for quite some time but high hopes with the new administration. All looking to March meeting in DC for a real change in policy.

China (which has 250) will not reduce weapons until the US and Russia reduce to less than 1000 weapons (currently they have 21,000) This is a ridiculous GAP. It seems to me that with 95% of the Nuclear Weapons, the US and Russia are the actual players in this game who could make a difference and that the continued dragging of feet is unproductive. The delay actually gives time for non-nuclear nations to go nuclear.

The issue is how secure nations feel. If a nation feels secure, they are less likely to need to arm. Dr. Amano, speaking as a Japanese National (Japan has no nuclear weapons), indicated that he feels confident that nuclear weapons are not needed in this world. Dr. Yan (China, 250 nuks) answered that it's easy to take that view when you are guaranteed security by the US. Quite an exchange.

The North Korea crisis was completely screwed up. All powers changed position after the second nuclear test. Focus on security guarantees for countries not economic carrots and sticks. Stick with the security issue, don't cloud it by combining NNP and economic issues. China is upset about having to side with the US on the North Korea issue. Now that it failed, Iran sees that it's strategy is good and is emboldened.

The Global Zero movement and the movie, Countdown to Zero were both mentioned by Larry Brilliant.

It seems to me that the US and Russia must make drastic cuts in order to make progress on getting to ZERO. It seems like this head to head negotiation is only making modest impact. The Russian elite seem to need a security threat in order to stay in power. The US has the same issue. Why are we still negotiating at the same levels and topics that existed during the cold war? Why not just invite Russia to join NATO and make them part of the solution.

The US has got to stop bumbling along on this issue.

Rethinking E-Governance

Very lite turnout.
At least one speaker no-showed

Good table discussion on the need for governments to make all data available in a common form and online. Issues were brought up about who should be trusted to slice and dice the data into meaningful information. In the US we have many people shoving information at us telling us different things from the same data. Most of these are News organizations or think tanks representing certain points of view. Its hard to know who to trust.

For developing nations, having the government make all of the data available is not enough. In many of the developing nations, NGO's are doing much of the governmental work and they are not required to make their data available. Indeed they may have 90% of the useful data and they would protect it because it might get in the way of additional funding or mission expansion.

Davos Post - Joe Tumminaro's notes from Wednesday at WEF

These Notes were contributed by Joe Tumminaro

Rethinking Values

(Panelist Dr. Yunus, Allaire, Glocer, Hasegawa, Ostrowski, Wallis, - Chaired by Quigley the CEO of Deloitte)

The Global Financial Crisis is causing us to question our values. The incentives and motivations have warped our values from “having all I need is enough” to “You can never have enough”. The question is not when will it end but how will the crisis change us. Fools learn from their own experiences, wise men learn from other peoples experiences.

Fewer than 20% of people in US or EU believe that CEO's are credible sources of information.

95% of companies are owned by large fund managers, surrounded by speculators and run by independent directors and executives motivated by stock options.

Government has fallen into the same trap of for profit (moving the party agenda by getting reelected)

Individual responsibility is the ultimate issue.

We have to move the metrics of success for businesses to a Common Good Economy. Social businesses need to be paired with traditional for profit businesses with common good goals. All it takes is to change the metrics of success and make social businesses a reality. A social business has a social goal and makes a profit but the profit is folded back into the company to achieve a broader reach. (Dr. Yunus)

Rethinking Security

(President Abdullah, Shevsova, Sehgal, Moussa, Allison, discussion leader Chipman)

The definition of security was freedom from the fear of being harmed by another country. This definition was relevant until 1991 or the end of the cold war. All the wars of the 20th century before 1991 killed 80 million people. Since 1991, wars have killed 1 million people. Putting things in perspective, 11 million children under 5 years of age have died from preventable diseases since 1991.

Clearly the definition of security needs to change because fear from harm is no longer limited or defined by country boundaries. Also, we have many things to fear that are not related to war such as fear from a pandemic or harm by preventable diseases because of inadequate health care.

Fundamentally the theory that aggression is brought about by the clash of different civilizations is invalid. Most civilizations agree on the basic tenants of life. Aggression comes from the fringe elements of civilizations, the radical right and left elements.

Peace in the Middle East will be achieved only after the Israeli / Palestinian conflict is resolved. A 2 state solution has been in the works for quite some time but has not been achieved. An interesting question was raised whether a shock treatment of a UN imposed mandatory Palestinian state is in order.