Sell potatoes, buy laptops
on Cellbazaar
Tashfeen Mahmud unveils the brains behind Bangladesh’s slick new virtual marketplace
photo by Andrew Biraj
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What do you get when you cross an artist, an Econ grad, an avid mountaineer and a techie? You get a Kamal Quadir. And by the time you’re reading this article you’ve probably heard of his latest venture: CellBazaar, a slick new way of using cellphone messages to buy and sell potatoes, laptops and everything else in between, here in Bangladesh.
It’s been around 18 months already since Kamal has officially been working on CellBazaar, but he insists its idea dates back to his early childhood days in Jessore. He recalls a newspaper article in the early 80’s when you could buy a basketful of oranges in exchange for a box of matches in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. ‘I just couldn’t get it,’ he told me when I went to his office, drifting back to his memories. ‘How on earth is it possible? How can the product of such great human toil be sold for so little? It was a classic case of information and communication deficiencies.’
Subsequently, Kamal left for the US in the late 80’s; but his experience of economic extremities always came back to haunt him. An art fanatic, he studied Fine Arts and Economics in Oberlin College graduating in 1996. Phases of soul searching followed, and over the next few years he worked on Wall Street, came to Dhaka to exhibit his work and stayed back to work for Occidental Energy. He left for the US once again and completed his MBA from MIT in 2003. It was at the Media Labs in MIT where he came up with the rudiments of what is now CellBazaar. The project even went on to receive a prize.
That was when Kamal decided to practically implement his idea in Bangladesh. He patented the project, and set out on a hunt for investors who believed in him. The software infrastructure was designed by a US company while the coding was done entirely by a local software firm which specialises in outsourcing. But the hardest part, Kamal confesses, has been convincing a major telecoms company that this was a feasible project. The icing on the cake came when GrameenPhone stepped up to the occasion.
However, Kamal refuses to see his work only in the light of assessing commercial endeavours. ‘It’s a social development scheme,’ he argues; he wants technology to minimize the exploitation of middlemen even in the remotest corners of the country. ‘Think about it, a guy can put potatoes he’s grown for sale just by sending an SMS,’ he says.
‘Isn’t that a little far fetched?’ I let my skepticism show. But Kamal is quick to point out that among GP subscribers the most messages per phone are generated from Palli Phone users; followed by Pre-Paid, DJuice and Post-paid users, in decreasing order. He tells me that it’s not necessary that a farmer or a handicrafts artist will have to send the SMS himself to sell his goods — there are thousands of mobile phone shops all over the country from where you can make phone calls and send text messages. Talk about bringing the market to your fingertips — or to your nearest phone shop, for that matter.
So how do you find stuff to buy, or advertise something you want to cell… er, sell?
Well, first, you have to register using a GP phone from anywhere in the country. If you’re from Dhaka city you have to include your thana name, or your district name if you’re from somewhere else. So for instance, if you’re from Dhanmondi, you’ll have to write an SMS saying ‘reg Dhanmondi’ and send it to 3838; if you’re from Rajbari, you have to write ‘reg Rajbari’. The acknowledgement of your registration and instructions will be sent to you via SMS in a matter of minutes or less. It’s very important to have yourself registered for the place you live in, Kamal explains, because your search results are going to be filtered by locations close to you. But what if you type the locations wrong? Like, what if somebody writes ‘reg goalshun’ or ‘reg coolna’?
That won’t happen; Kamal assures me, because it can’t: if you come up with a wrong spelling you’ll immediately be sent an SMS showing a list of similar locations where the correct names are, of course, already listed.
Thereafter, all you have to do is send an SMS indicating the product that you want to advertise — or the product that you’re interested to buy. For the first case, simply type ‘sell’ and send that to 3838, you will receive a message asking what kind of product you would like to sell (say, agricultural). After selecting the product the system sends a message asking what kind of agricultural products (say, potato) you are selling. If you want to buy a laptop — type ‘buy laptop’ and send that to the CellBazaar database, you’ll immediately be directed to the subcategories of laptop i.e. Dell, Apple, IBM.
CellBazaar already boasts nine major categories and over 960 subcategories of products. What’s more, dozens of similar words have been grouped together so that misspellings can’t beat the system. But try typing ‘buy sex’—and you receive a message saying that the term is not allowed. Over 1,200 words are banned at CellBazaar to make sure nobody can use the service for illegal activities.
Hence — to sort out the cost factor from the user’s end — if you provided a valid entry, then your SMS expenses for something you want to buy or sell would account for the number of times you have to text to reach your precise category.
For example, if you typed ‘buy laptop ibm’ you’d come up with IBM listings and eventually price listings and contact numbers of the vendors. As far as selling is concerned, you make your entry under the precise subcategory for your product, and then finally post the quantity and price. Overall the controls and directions are fluent and intuitive, so it’s not much trouble at all. Nevertheless, there’s an expert mode available that allows to search for or advertise a product with a single SMS.
Initially CellBazaar was designed to work over GPRS, but with only 5-7 per cent of GP subscribers using it, Kamal and his team opted for regular SMS instead. The language factor is also a huge thing, he agrees; people would certainly receive the idea more generously if it were available in Bangla SMS text. An internet-based service modeled after the SMS-driven one is currently in the pipeline. CellBazaar 2, the next generation version of the original with GPRS and possibly Bangla text features is already being worked on, Kamal says.
I then asked him the ultimate question: ‘Do you think CellBazaar will survive 5 years from now?’ ‘Yes, of course!’ he said. ‘We’ll evolve.’
‘Economics,’ he tells me, ‘is nothing but managing information.’ And he reminds me — with a gleam in his eyes — that the computer used by NASA for the Apollo-11 Moon exploration had a computing capacity roughly equal to that of a regular cell phone of today.
At the time of writing this article CellBazaar still has a few debugging issues that need to be looked into, and when I had used it I had felt the subcategories could be reshaped a bit. I told Kamal as much. Over the next few years, one could expect the e-commerce scenario to really take off: everyone is going to pay bills and manage transactions and buy and sell and auction using mobile phones. Experts predict telecoms and cellular network-based services are going to get huger and grow near-exponentially — at least for a while.
If it’s the future we’re talking about, CellBazaar seems to be headed in the right direction.
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