Indian Telecom News, till 13-Dec-09

Devices

The third largest phone maker in India – Spice – will start manufacturing in India next year. Currently, they manufacture in China.

Some official numbers on (Samsung’s) handset market share here – 16% in volume terms and 18.5% in value terms, making them a strong number 2 in India.

There was a product that Comviva launched a few months back – one SIM that holds multiple numbers. I found an article this week on the possible utility of that. I am not so positive about the need for this. Any member from even the bottom most income stream might aspire to have his own mobile as soon as possible – so it is better to focus on reducing the cost of devices and make them affordable to that segment.

Services / Apps

mLearning has been a slightly untouched area for many VAS service providers, apart from a few like mGurujee etc, with most of the available too concentrating only on CAT, GMAT, English Language etc. This week an announcement around mLearning – Upside & Skill-Pill have tied up to provide “2 minute learning videos” on soft-skills. An article on how mLearning may get a boost with introduction of 3G at Businessline here.

A P2P content sharing platform has been created by a joint venture between mTouche and VASSoft. I do not know how different this would be from the other apps/services that already exist (like mZone) and even mobile social networks like Mig33 and RockeTalk.

Unique ID Project in India will open up APIs for third parties to utilize. From what I understand, if you start a service which has a KYC need (more importantly, the need to authenticate the customer as an Indian citizen), you can utilize those APIs to verify – possibly, you would send the signature/thumb impression of your customer to the UID system which will return back the details of the person! The complete architecture document is available here – I have not gone through that yet. Nokia too seems to have developed some interest around it – though the statements are very confusing, as usual.

RML has found one more channel to sell its services – Future Group’s Aadhar Retailing limited.

An article on Nokia’s two new SMS based services – We Meet & MoMart – at Forbes here. MoMort is similar to mBazaar of Bangladesh, touted as the Craigslist there.

mGovernance is on the upswing as I had noted last week. RCom has bagged the contract for implementing such initiatives in 2 states – Kerala & Maharashtra. IIST Infotech & MobMe are the VAS partners.

Apart from Government, even other traditional service industries are trying to innovate around SMS – A security firm has introduced mobile based SoS system.

Reliance GSM has launched USSD based games for its customers at affordable prices. As Nikhil has noted in the article, even I am not a great believer in the future of USSD. Affordable GPRS/3G may be the way forward, I feel.

Comics on mobile is the new trend – after Airtel, Voda & DoCoMo, Idea too offers Amar Chitra Katha on mobile.

IMIMobile is going places – after their exploits in South Africa, they have conquered Ireland too – An Irish operator has chosen to use their platform for music download service.

While I have covered RML, Lifetools etc here quite a bit, I feel a bit embarrassed that I did not know about Behtar Zindagi of Handygo – till I read this.

Operators

Uninor is the toast of the advertising world now among telecom operators. Just as I did not like the name Uninor, I did not like their ad also :) After all, the translation of Ab Mera Number in tamil makes no sense and I guess it would be the same in several other languages too.

The quasi-MVNO in India Virgin Mobile is getting into GSM services also – after all, when spectrum owner Tata moves into it, why not Virgin also!

Regulation

The confusion whether 3G auctions are postponed or not continues. While Raja keeps saying it will happen as scheduled, the delay in even announcing the licenses has people guessing it will be delayed. Nevertheless, even if auctions happen now, the spectrum would be available only post-June. There is also news that spectrum would be available only for 3 players.

TRAI is expected to submit its recommendations on overall spectrum management later this month. 2G spectrum allocation in the future, delinking spectrum license & revenues etc are supposed to be analyzed in that. CDMA players have upped the ante meanwhile by saying that auction for 2G should happen only after 6.2MHz is allotted to all operators.

Mobile Banking continues to remain an issue with multiple stakeholders having concerns (several of them valid, IMO). An analysis of RBI’s vision for electronic payments can be seen here. RBI Deputy governor is not happy with the enthusiasm shown by the industry in spite of detailed guidelines.

Introduction of one more digit to mobile numbers in India is causing a bitter fight between CDMA & GSM operators (as usual)

Miscellaneous

Mumbai Film Festival will host documentaries shot on mobile phones! Go start shooting with the phone in your pocket :)

Oscar winning AR Rahman has opened his own ‘music store’ – I do not know the reason for starting this but if it is for making money, a bit foolish, IMO.

An insightful article about mobile subscriber segmentation is available at WATBlog here.

Nokia has launched a ‘Concept store’ in Gurgaon, around the same time they have closed two in the US :)

Indian Telecom News, till 06-Dec-09

Products

Someone at FoneArena was so compelled to post something on a Sunday, here is what he came up with this – iPhone has not been launched in India because of weather conditions. Grr.

Spice has launched a mobile bundled with several useful features for the Indian market – probably a first.

Other major release this week is Blackberry Curve on Tata DoCoMo.

CE biggie Videocon has ventured into the mobile phone business. With their CE business itself running weak, nothing much can be expected from this, me feels.

Services

A case study on how the passport office in Madurai is improving its services using SMS is available here. Not very innovative or something but shows how the public sector can use such services! Another one by Himachal Pradesh tourist department here. Kerala Government seems to be having more ambitious plans. IRCTC also has some plans around SMS notifications.

Tata Photon+ has launched a TV service using their data card. The service is provided by Apalya Technologies. Subscription charges look really less, may actually become a hit with the mobile workers.

Aircel has launched mReceptionist service in Tamil Nadu circle – could be good for a small enterprise & freelancers. Pricing looks high though! They have other services like mGurujee (powered by MosPay I guess, or is it MajiMob?) & mConference also.

SMSONE – a local newsletter over SMS at Pune has been covered in Techcrunch.

Applications

MapMyIndia has launched a very useful application (location based, of course) – it resides on the phone and does not need GPRS. The pricing is SO high though, at Rs. 2500. They better try to sell as much before data penetration becomes high and the likes of Google LBS applications enter India. Meanwhile, BIGMaps, on whom I had a lot of hope to be giving tough competition to Google in India, have finally launched a mobile app – no APIs as yet though. (Update:: APIs are indeed available - see http://api.bigmaps.com)

Regulators

To extend the reach of banking further, RBI has come up with guidelines to have entities like kirana stores, PCOs etc to be banking correspondents – not telcos as yet. Further, RBI has come up with a new set of guidelines for e-commerce and m-commerce transactions. Looks like, the likes of Obopay, Atom, mChek etc might get affected it seems. RBI’s complete “vision” for m&e payments available here.

TRAI is planning to ‘examine’ mobile tariffs – With Airtel cribbing about predatory pricing by newcomers. I believe TRAI cannot set anything like ‘Minimum Call Rate’ :-)

The Government plans to increase tele-density in rural areas from 20% to 40% in the just about 3 years! How exactly, is not spelt out. One big hope is the USO Funds. Well, they need to somehow show the private players money by operating there! As I see, the private players have 2 ways to go to increase ARPU – Focus on data services in urban areas and/or focus on rural areas.

Paranoia towards security, particularly about Chinese vendors is increasing by day (& probably is justified). The operators should now get Government approval for any equipment purchase!

There was news about 3G auctions getting delayed again but they are on schedule, the IT & Communications Minister says! Meanwhile, Microsoft is suggesting that India should use the “White-Fi” also. (Is this the same White Space that Google vouches for in the US?)

Operators

Telenor has launched services in India – as Uninor, and immediately triggered off the next round of price war. (Their ads are absolutely unimpressive though!) They seem concerned about running short of spectrum soon. Wonder what Raja & Co have for them – after all, if at all the ‘spectrum scam’ is true, Telenor should be the beneficiaries, ain’t it? Meanwhile, DoT is still under trouble for what it did in 2007.

BSNL has put on hold, its plan to acquire Zain Telecom.

MTNL has shortlisted Virgin Mobile for 3G franchise. BSNL has received 5 bids for WiMax.

Miscellaneous

We will soon have 11 digit telephone numbers. Looks like human mind cannot comprehend anything more than 7 digits! We need to evolve, may be! :)

Mobiles with no IMEI numbers have been blocked finally. The Mobile Store is reactivating such mobiles for Rs. 199.

Indian Telecom News, till 22-Nov-09

Devices

End of November, we may see a lot of devices with no IMEI being blocked. ICA & Nokia are running a campaign to educate consumers on this. However, how “fake IMEI” devices be handled, there is no idea. Economically advanced states seem to be ‘advanced’ in terms of having fake handsets too – TN, Maharashtra, AP & Delhi.

HTC has launched another Android phone, this time with Vodafone. Their first phone was with Airtel. Man, Motorola is still launching devices in the country! When is Droid coming? BTW, N97 Mini has come to India.

Applications & Services

BBC seems to have launched ‘English’’ language courses for operators in Bangladesh. Why have Nokia Life Tools etc not considered them as partners? NLT’s partner for education is EnableM, who power another service too with BSNL & OnMobile as partners. Speaking of NLT, they have partnered with ITC e-Choupal now. Hope it helps in large scale adoption of the service.

The number of data subscribers in the country seems to be going up for sure. A “video download” service by Reliance seems to have had 300,000+ downloads in 10 days. (Or is that, I want data subscriptions to be up for my own reasons and so am pulled by these kind of news?). Is this same as the ‘mVDO’?

Foursquare is set of enter India (Mumbai at first), claims WATBlog. So, Trackut, WeMeet  kind of services, who operate on a very similar model better consolidate before they come in.

A hospital in Karnataka apparently uses ‘iPhone’ to screen for diseases. So among the few iPhones sold in India, there are several like these so can we really count the number of iPhones used by Apple fanboys in India with one hand? ;-) Nevertheless, the news is about tele-medicine and there is no need to highlight iPhone there, me feels :)

Some statistics about Ovi Store have come out – India figures in the top-10 downloads for them. With no operator billing and with no option to pay in INR, one wonders how many of them would have been ‘paid’ – could be just people trying out of curiosity. Also, there is no news about the real number of downloads or revenue made. Blackberry have also launched their AppStore for India – with just a few apps that are specific to the Indian audience.

An European VAS firm, NeoMobile, seems to be entering India with ambitious plans. They seem to be really big at their home, hope they get good partnerships going on here.

RML says it will break even only after 2 or more years with the rural info service. Goes on to show that only people with big pockets can attempt such things. Services for ‘mobile learning through games’  & ‘info service for fishermen’ has been launched now – but with profitability so many years away, wonder how long such services can survive. Government sponsored services like this would indeed survive.

Nokia has launched WeMeet and plans to launch ‘Nokia Money’ in India early next year, irrespective of the strict regulations in the country. They are in talks with 6 banks already. Meanwhile, Nokia ‘Point & Find’ will come to India only in 2011 it seems.

Orkut is opening up (finally) APIs for mobile applications. It might be late for companies to develop an application for Orkut alone but will be good to have Orkut also if there is a regular social networking aggregation app. Mobile social networking is indeed coming up big in the country, with players like Mig33 having ambitious plans.

Roamware, a company based out of Bangalore, has services at both the extremes of the market – people who roam globally and those who cannot afford any banking at all.

The Tatas (Indicom & Docomo) have launched a ‘push email’ solution – iSeeMail – does not seem like something that would become a hit.

Rediff has tied up with Diamond comics to bring comics like Chacha Chaudhary, Tenalirama etc to mobile.

Geodesic is launching a mobile TV service soon with several Indian channels. VuClip also going great guns on this. Nokia too seems to have interest in this area. Guess when 3G becomes a reality, we will have TV on mobile, for sure!

Operators

BSNL has commercially launched 3G in Chennai (whatever it means). Subscription rates seem extremely affordable and hope they achieve the 150000 subscriptions in the next 2 months as planned. In Punjab, they got only 5000 subscribers. MTNL seems to have about a lakh subscribers in Mumbai & Delhi. Also, BSNL is not focusing on mobile phone subscriptions alone. They have partnerships with Dell & Haier for 3G Netbooks too.

Price war has made the operators really bleed – Mobile services revenue has decreased for all major operators! Reliance seem to have been the worst affected. Looks like the pied piper himself might fall off the cliff. They are putting up a brave front though. The next innovation in pricing seems to be ‘location based pricing’.

Operators want the ‘Lock-In’ policy removed since it is not sustainable to have 12-13 operators in each circle. Makes sense to me. They also want ‘auctions’ for 2G spectrum too.

Uninor is launching services very soon in the country – the pricing does not seem all that innovative, but they have declared to be taking an FMCG route to market their service, with different segmentation et al. Looking forward to the new segmentation. Hope others like STel (about to launch service in a few months) also do something different.

Regulators

After talking of charges in hundreds, the regulator has fixed the ‘maximum’ price for Mobile Number Portability to Rs. 19. Irrespective of this, I don’t think there will be a huge number of people moving away from one operator to another. It still remains ‘elitist talk’. But what worries me is, why is it Rs. 19 and not Rs. 20!!! :)

The defense & telecom ministries claim to have reached an amicable solution regarding the spectrum allocation. But hey, have we not heard these kind of things several times already? Don’t be sure till you actually start using 3G from your phone!

A detailed MoM on the 3G Auctions update (which several foreign operators skipped & where the Govt was ill-prepared) is available here. BTW, 3G auctions will happen even in circles like Rajasthan where there is no spectrum available, following Airtel’s request. BTW, Google is rumored to be bidding for WiMax in India jointly with MTNL.

After so much of delay, USO Funds are getting amended and operators do not need to ‘bid’ for subsidy to launch projects in rural areas. Guess if they submit a proposal of merit, it would get approved.

The ban on pre-paid mobiles in Kashmir has not gone well with everyone the state. Protests galore and a notice from Supreme court has been slapped on the Government.

Others

October has seen 16 million new subscriptions, 10.3 million of them GSM – tele-density stands at 45%. There was a hue & cry about the wrong statistics on subscriptions; that seems to have died down. Once again, Tatas have gained the most of these new additions. But with all operators moving to pay per second plan in Oct & Nov, how they do in the next couple of months will be crucial.

Sony Ericsson have closed down their development center in India, with 60 people put out of job. The China center remains though. A sign of things to come? :-p

Verizon Business feels ‘voice will go over the cloud’ – the next step to cloud computing.

Mahindra Satyam has joined the Symbian foundation. Why now? And why is this big news?

An interesting news about ‘iPhone Scam’ available here. After all, claiming someone else’s work as ours is nothing new, no? ;)

Indian Wireless Telecom News, Till 06-Nov

Note

I am sorry for this long delay with the posts! The previous post was in mid-Sept. The last couple of months have been really tight – a few travels (personal & official) with increased work at the office! Nevertheless, I assure you – no news has been missed. You get a collection of everything that happened since then here :-) The only glitch being it is going to be a slightly longish post.

[Sincere thanks to those who emailed in / DM-ed to see if all was well]

DEVICES

Hundreds of devices have been launched – I frankly lost track of them. As much as 27 new vendors have come into India in just 1 quarter – the competition is getting really heated up at the low end / feature phone segment. Cellphones assembled in India seem to be selling like hot cakes. Vendors like Spark & Karbonn aims for 7-10% market share. Even if they take only half of that, it is significant. Even television manufacturers like Salora are turning eyes on the Indian handset market. Airfone is another fringe player to emerge. ZTE also comes in, with $20 mobiles! Players like Fly keep launching series of handsets, all dual SIM. Reliance has tied up with Coolpad & Yulong, both Chinese players, to launch phones in India. The Government is also trying to boost local manufacturing of handsets.

Biggies better take note of them and counter them through pricing / advertising! Mind you, these are not ‘Chinese vendors’ that need to be ignored because they do not care for standards/health issues etc and so you cannot compete. These are serious players.

Let us look at what the biggies were doing during our break.

Reliance has launched special Windows Mobile solutions – not seen often in India. HTC Touch 2 has been launched with Reliance mobile. This was probably the first Windows Mobile 6.5 phone in India? Reliance is even trying for ‘hub & spoke” model for mobile distribution in India – first such an initiative it seems. Acer too gets serious about Smartphones – Several Windows Mobile phones are being launched in India. DoCoMo is also expected to launch Windows Mobile phones soon. Guess the mobility team in MS India has been working overtime!

LG has launched a ‘solar phone’ – just as the Samsung one before, this too would work for about 2 minutes after more than an hour under the sun. :). Qualcomm plans to launch its low cost 3G Netbook ‘Kayak’ in India in the second half of next year. It will be priced at about Rs. 10000 (~USD 200). Blackberry goes network independent – service/payment will be through operators only, of course! But Apple, that promised to offer unlocked phones to India has backtracked. ASUS & Garmin have launched a phone with GPS.

While these players are all fighting below, the grand daddy, Nokia, still with 50%+ market share in India was just playing with Diwali offers!

Market share of handset vendors is available here & here. It is only a question of who is second, as far as India is concerned. Samsung it is! If you want to know about the mobile handset brands that you have not heard as yet – look here.

SERVICES/APPS

Nokia has been making a lot of noise about ‘services’ business, particularly in emerging markets. Let us see some news about them here: An analysis on Nokia’s Life Tools is available here – mostly negative – but they have expanded this to Indonesia also now! See here a drilling interview with a Nokia person on their music store! (Aside: Hey Nokia Store people, I am not even able to unsubscribe from your mailing list!). Finally, Nokia’s free messaging service has come to an end. It is not clear if payments through operators has begun. Nokia Tej also seems to be taking off – though not advertised well, I heard they are actually calling up people who registered with them & are offering them demos, special rate plans etc. They have “Affordable Business Solutions Private Limited” as their partner for this. What concerns me about Nokia’s (mostly laudable) initiatives here is – They do not seem to have the support of operators in many of these. What use is it if I can access Nokia Life Tools only from Idea? Should it not be pan-India all operators/all circles?

Time to discuss Mobile Social Networks! A new mobile social network called Cellufun has arrived in India. Reliance has partnered with Moko.Mobi, an Australian firm to develop a mobile social community. Apparently, Airtel already has a relation with them. This is similar to Mig33 and RocheTalk. Unfortunately, none of them have been really as successful in India as they have been elsewhere. The big boss among social networks, Facebook too has India plans. They even conducted a developer meet in Delhi recently. They are trying to get hold of operator support for mobile adoption – there is no denying operator’s power in the country. They launched their SMS Subscription service too (you get an SMS every time there is an update on your favorite FB page) in partnership with SMSGupShup. Meanwhile, TringMe has created an app for Facebook – to make voice calls (VoIP based) from their Facebook page! Looks very interesting, they even offer to mask the call with your mobile number (just as an ID) so that the receive knows that it is from you!

Mobile Banking & Payments are a topic that is being discussed in India for a long long time with not much progress. WATBlog has an article about it here. As rightly said there, without the need to link up to a formal bank account, it just cannot take off in a big way. Operators are big time willing to work with banks to bring out mobile payment services. Vodafone’s chief boss expresses concern that he is not able to offer mobile payments to Indian consumers. Reliance has tied up with Atom. There was even a plea to allow telecom companies to act as banks.  However, may be the conservative nature of RBI will save us on this too, just as their conservative nature saved us from the recession! :-) As of today, this is what you can do with your mobile phone in terms of banking! Launch of railway ticket booking over mobile  is also delayed because of these regulations. Meanwhile, One more mobile payments company has come up – Beam! Just as Pluggdin argues there, their positioning is really not clear!

Closer to banking is ‘personal finance’ – our next topic. Tarang Software has apparently released a ‘mobile wallet’ application that will aggregate data from banks. I use web-based Yodlee service on my PC/mobile – it is able to get data from all my banks. What is not clear is – who is the partner for Tarang in this. Further, I do not understand how Tarang is distributing this software. A visit to their site does not help. Meanwhile, Nokia has signed a pact with Tanla Solutions to use their mobile payment solutions (and license management solutions)

Google has launched its ‘Search by Voice’ service for Nokia handsets – that is, in the S60 platform. This has been launched specifically for the multilingual Indian market where the voice search platforms are being experimented. Talking about languages & India, here are some more news: Quillpad has launched a transliteration tool for Indian language SMS usage. Looks good but they seem to be wanting to charge users for it. Ahem, only that it may not work. We are not used to paying for such stuff, are we? :) BTW, there has been some standardization effort towards Indian language SMS – but I wonder when there will be a time when all handsets would support this!

Reliance has launched a “personalized call manager” service at Rs. 15 a month – where one can have a voice mail box, pre-recorded messages for specific numbers etc. Looks good, but I may want it for free :) But this is anyways a much better service than this - Aircel has launched a ‘TALK A MAIL’ service – you need to apparently talk to a human, specify the email ID of the recipient and then talk to a machine to record the conversation. Grr. The recipient apparently receives an email as text – so who does the Speech-To-Text here? Some human again? If not, it anyways is going to be all wrong. So they also send a link to listen to the conversation! :) Instead of all these, would you not just call the person and speak to him? Or just type an email yourself. Seriously, who is the target segment for this, boss? Will its usage be worth the time it got installed, got covered in a blog and then commented upon here? Grr!

Some mobile initiatives by the Indian Government come next! IMD (Indian Meteorological Department) has launched a ‘weather information service’ in partnership with HandyGo. This is IVR or GPRS based. There is no information about the number of operators that support this! Since it is over a short-code and available at Re.1 per minute, it is not possible with the support of operators. One hopes services like this and others like Nokia Life Tools, Reuters Market Light etc develop well and all operators support it. After a lot of noise during launch, there is not much news about Nokia Life Tools now. Who said Indian PSUs are slow to respond? After the LPG agencies offering bookings over SMS, Speed Post has offered tracking of parcels over SMS – I am not sure if even private courier agencies have this yet. Another SMS based info service that made news recently is the “gold rates”.

Next we discuss music & video! Comviva (Bharti’s VAS arm) launched voice based song search this October in partnership with Nuance. Airtel has its ‘voice based’ CRBT setting, right? As far as I understand, it was powered by OnMobile and they have their own voice recognition engine (through Telsima acquisition). Why Nuance now? Also, Dhingana has launched a native app for iPhone – apparently the first music streaming app from India. Mobile Content is getting sophisticated – Apalya has video streaming solutions on the technology side while even CPs are getting bigger & better. Star TV plans to have several of its channels available on mobile while Balaji Tele Films plans to actually create specialized content for mobiles. Guruji has launched a ‘ringtone search’ on its site. I read one more news later that this has been a huge success. I wonder if Guruji a big success at all?

It is a season of COMICS now – After Airtel’s move, Tata DoCoMo starts CoMix on the Go. The usual suspects in comics like Amar Chitra Katha are available here too – the pricing seems to be cheaper though! (well, that is kind of expected from DoCoMo)

Mindtree, that recently bought Kyocera’s mobile R&D division in India & announced mobile production as a future area of business has launched a Bluetooth Health Device Solution for Android. From what I understand, Bluetooth has certain “profiles” for connecting to health devices (like profile for connecting to camera, printer etc) and those profiles have been implemented by Mindtree and an application on top of it.

Some tie-up/M&A news next: Rediff, that runs one of India’s premier portal has bought stake in Imere (I am here!), a location based service provider for mobile phones. Reliance has tied up with Babajob for job search on mobile. BIGMaps has been launched on their GSM mobiles. I had huge expectations from BIGMaps – I thought it would give Google & co a run for their money but it is very quiet since launch. And what point offering it only to RCom customers!

Finally some tidbits: Capillary, a mobile solution for retail businesses, has won the Qualcomm’s B-Plan contest. Zook (mobile search engine from India) has expanded wings and gone international. Telibrahma, that excels in indoor advertising (been to Forum Mall in Bangalore?) have started with ‘stadium’ advertising too! They offer scores, statistics etc and of course ads. IBM claims to have developed solutions for operators – social network analysis & customer analysis. Interesting, but are there takers?

OPERATORS

M&A News first!

• MTNL wants to buy Zambia’s Zamtel
• BSNL wants Ethiopian Telecom
• Airtel tried to bid for Srilanka’s Millicom & UAE’s Zain, where MTN turned a competitor. BSNL’s bid to Millicom was rejected.
• BSNL & MTNL together tried for Zain
• Essar was about to buy Warid Telecom of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Congo & Uganda.

‘Pay per second’ has become the de-facto standard now, with the biggies like Airtel & Reliance too joining the bandwagon, once they saw DoCoMo gaining the most market share for 2 consecutive months! However, the telecom minister is not happy even with this and wants local calls at 10 paisa and STD at 25 paisa. We are told that the SMS rates are the next to tumble.

BSNL is re-evaluating its plans to launch full fledged CDMA service in the country. Not being able to really cope up with the private players in terms of subscriber additions, it has another business up its sleeve – renting out the towers - its latest client is Sistema Shyam. Slowly but not really steadily, BSNL & MTNL are inching their way to woo subscribers for the 3G service by expanding their coverage. Several towns in Maharashtra & Tripura have received 3G coverage now. MTNL has even reduced the prices to as low as Rs. 109 for the connection. After being available in several remote locations, 3G is coming to Bangalore finally! :) BSNL (who else at this moment) is starting it in November.

This news is stale for sure :) The Bharti-MTN deal did not materialize for legal issues! This article covers what was lost because of this! An interview with Sunil Mittal about this. Airtel has upgraded SMS 2.0 application – with a quick search feature. In spite of the heavy marketing spend, I do not think Airtel went anywhere with this. Meanwhile, Affle, makers of SMS 2.0 sold a significant portion of their stake to Microsoft. Wonder what they are up to now! SMS 2.0 is available with Idea & Reliance also – I wonder if they too are offering this upgrade or not. Not that it matters :-) Airtel has even tied up with Twitter – exclusively! More benefit to Twitter than Airtel, IMO. However, since Airtel wants to show itself as launching innovative services every now & then, we see mChek, SMS 2.0, Twitter etc. After the initial hype/marketing spend, Airtel does not talk much about it.

Tata DoCoMo, that prided itself with per second & per character billings did a flip flop with their GPRS plans. They launched their plans as “unlimited” with a lot of fanfare but soon enough, backed off and said it was not “unlimited”. Luckily for them, this issue was not blown out big. I am sure other operators heaved a sigh of relief.

Tidbits at the end: Unitech Wireless & Telenor will launch their service as “Uninor”. I am not liking this name :) Services will start by end of this year. In spite of the security concerns expressed about their operations, ZTE is expanding in India – They are setting up an NOC in India.

REGULATION

3G is back in news :) We usually see news about auctions getting postponed. But this time, it is actually advanced!! It was told to be happening in March but has now been brought forward to January by none other than Pranab da, who has become like a head master for the other ministers – austerity drive, forcing to conduct auctions etc :)  Once the headmaster (finance minister) rapped the knuckles, the student (department of telecom) did complain about other students (defense department) but after some raids and all, things seem to have been settled. One good news is that if an operator wins a bid but does not roll out services, the spectrum will be taken back. In case of 2G, it was just some penalty and even that would be reduced often.

Anyways some important aspects of 3G now - Foreign firms can also bid (we need money, that is all, to cover the fiscal deficit) in the auctions that will start on January 14 (Pongal day!! Politicians in TN, please raise a concern, after all Raja is the minister). AT&T & Telstra seem very interested. Intel has partnered with HCL & BSNL to play a role in the Wimax game in India. Google too was rumored to have had an interest in the Wimax auctions in India – An interesting read on that here. Back to the details of the auction: There will be a 4 stage auction. Private players in Rajasthan & NE will not get 3G spectrum. BWA (Wimax) & CDMA auctions will happen 2 days after the close of 3G bids.  Oh well, though grand plans have been announced, the exact frequency band is not known yet – defense ministry should allot it. For BWA, space organizations have a problem! Good Gods, do you still believe auctions will happen and we will get 3G service ever? Nevertheless, there are estimates that India will have 275 million 3G subscribers by 2013. :)

Security restrictions abound these days! Ban on IMEI less numbers (with a request to ban cloned ones too), banning grey market CDMA phones, snooping of mobile calls – even missed ones, tracking of Wi-Fi users, ban on Internet telephony apart - Indian Government has banned pre-paid mobiles in the state of J&K. ISPs have raised the issue of Net Telephony not being allowed by DoT to the competition panel. Another long dispute is on the cards.

Tidbits time: The telecom minister of India had discussions with mobile operators about rural telephony & usage of USO fund. Some significant announcements can be expected once he meets up with ISPs too. MNP will be implemented as per the plan mentioned here. Let us see if they stick to it! For detailed rules on MNP, see this. Tamil Nadu Government has received 12 crores for m-Government initiatives! No news about the usage of it is known as yet. Provide Samsung-Armani phones to all MLAs, what say? :) A panel from the US has provided quite a few inputs on telecom governance in India that includes allowing 100% FDI & opening up Internet Telephony.

OTHERS

Tata Teleservices have become the fastest growing operator – CDMA & GSM put together. With the kind of pricing policy they have, this should not be really surprising. But, rural India has surpassed Urban India in subscription growth – 48 million added from rural India while only 32 from urban India, in 1H 2009. Here, only the old operators are more active in rural India than the newer ones that have better pricing schemes! Something wrong somewhere! Latest statistics (after September) on mobile subscriptions – here & here. With controversies on the number of subscriptions aside, India has officially declared to have 500 million telecom subscribers as of September 2009. By December 2009, it is expected to have 500 million mobile subscribers alone! It is claimed that one in three people in urban India has more than 1 subscription.

Research time: Opera has released the statistics for mobile web usage from India; A study on the mobile usage pattern in India is available here. Note that this is only for GPRS users! Nevertheless, a good attempt.

Gyaan time: A recent panel discussion on VAS in the Indian market concluded that India is not a very good market for VAS players, given the current climate of relations between operators & CPs. An insightful article on SMS Advertising in India can be seen here! There is going to be an “interconnect charges” regime for SMS now and that will affect all these! Anna University, Chennai has tied up with BSNL to offer a course on mobile telephony to its final year students. Good move, I feel. Similarly, even MBA students can be offered a course on the business aspects of mobile services – after all, several of them might join the industry that is expanding the most.

Indian Telecom News, Till 13-Sep-09

Devices

Karbonn K217, Sony Ericsson C903, HTC Hero, Spice D6666, Samsung Omnia Pro, Intex IN 4477

Nokia’s devices are apparently eco-friendly – They are reducing the usage of hazardous material in their mobiles.

Apps/Services

ESPN has launched mobile TV service for a few of its programs – could not find out about operator support. It supports only Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Blackberry devices now. Airtel offers 50+ channels in its service. Apart from these, MTV, Colors and other channels are on the way.

Navteq has expanded its Indian presence. Slowly & steadily, they are becoming a tough competitor to MapMyIndia. However, people to be noted is – BIGMaps. They have launched now only with Reliance Mobiles but hope they offer services to everyone through APIs soon.

MTNL has launched its own LBS service based on mobile network information itself.

An application for booking doctor’s appointments through SMS has been launched in Kochi.

UshaComm is looking for grand expansion in Africa for VAS services – frankly, I have not heard much about them in India. Are they big? Or are they just into billing?

RML has tied up with Idea Cellular to expand their agriculture information services. What is puzzling is – they have their own service offered separately, offered through Nokia with Idea again etc – how are all these differentiated?

Nokia Messaging may get launched in India in December 2009 with push email support.

SMSGupShup, the ‘Desi Twitter’ will soon launch ‘real time search’ of its messages. Sorry if I am being irreverent, does serious talk happen in SMSGupShup channels, is it not filled with jokes and ‘timepass’ material.

Operators

Numbers starting with ‘8’ have started coming out – Reliance has started a gimmick with that already, the BOSS (8055) series.

Blackberry is trying to get into the customer segment and seems to be getting some success too. Aircel and DoCoMo have started offering Blackberry services too.

Climax of the Bharti-MTN saga is coming soon. Bharti seems to have sweetened the deal a bit.

Essar Group has taken control of Yu, a Kenyan operator. Meanwhile, BSNL & MTNL are rumored to have bought stake in Zain, though they claim to be still only ‘considering’ it.

DoCoMo have expanded their ‘charged in paisas’ tune to SMS also. After pay one paisa per second, it is pay one paisa per character in SMS.

Regulators

The Government has once again set a deadline to block phones without IMEI – Nov. 30. COAI has already asked for more time.

The ‘pre-bid meeting’ for 3G is planned for 13-October. Here is hoping that it happens for sure. By the way, new players may pay 3% of revenues for 3G spectrum.

The prime minister is interested in mBanking – Good news this.

DoT & National UID Project people will discuss about how mobile subscription numbers can be utilized for the UID project.

Others

When you talk to call center agents at telcos, do not lose your temper – your calls may get blocked. I agree with this, sometimes we behave really bad with them, but then the decision to block should not be left with the lowest level employees.

Statistics for August – Subscriptions, Market Shares etc. And by the way, Indian mobile content market will be worth $2.3 billion by 2013.

One more report from Vital Analytics – on mobile gaming in Urban India. As we are at it, IndiaGames have launched new games on latest movies.

Indian Telecom News,Till 06-Sep-09

(Back after a 2-week hiatus. Sorry for the inconvenience!)

Devices

Quite a few models released. Am just going to list them here, without details: Motorola Debut i856, Micromax X310, X2i, C2i & GC700, Nokia 5230, 5730 Xpress Music, 5800 Navigation, Maxx MX455, MX335, LG GB270 Dynamite, GB230, KP265, Spice M4580, M5252, Onida F830, Belkyn Skype Phone, Fly E105, DS440, Samsung Omnia Pro, Sony Ericsson W205 & W395, Karbonn K550, Intex – 4 New handsets and yeah MTNL branded 3G phone by Micromax and 3G Netbook by TTSL.

Soon to come: iPhone 3GS :) At Rs. 40K. We know the result already!

Applications/Services

A new standard for Indian-language SMS seems to be coming soon. Is there not a world-wide standard for this? (or is it just Unicode across?). Will try to find out how Chinese/Japanese/Korean SMS-es work and update soon.

RockeTalk, the social network app for India seems to be going great guns. They had launched with only LG but now they seem to be going into Samsung & Nokia mobiles too. Further, they have tied up with Channel [V] also. By the way, Geodesic’s Mundu suite might soon get a social networking application also, through an acquisition.

Airtel is planning to launch ‘health services’ with a rural focus. Good, but why don’t Nokia, Airtel etc work together to make an integrated service framework of Life Tools & other such services? On a related note, Homoeopathy clinic Batras seem to be offering “live consultation” over mobile.

Also, if you read the article on health in the news item above till the end, the CMO of Airtel seems to be suggesting that operators might reduce their revenue share percentage soon. Good News. With their own R&D center in India (which might produce more value added service than just timed SMS) & even buying other players, if DoCoMo plans to get into innovative VAS pricing too like in other countries, things will change for sure!! In contrast, there could also be a termination charge for VAS services – that could lead to death of several free SMS services.

Nokia Music Store is alive with 3 million songs – but you cannot buy music from there from a PC. You need vouchers that you will get when buying a Nokia phone or you should buy from a Nokia phone. Hey this is bad, I thought Nokia was a services co but they seem to be still intent of selling devices ;-)

Airtel has expanded its m-Commerce tie up with mChek to include IVR based transactions also. mCommerce might gain ground in India with Nokia launching Nokia Money. A neat analysis of the perils of mCommerce in India is available here.

MTNL has launched a Location based service in Mumbai with the usual aspects like ATM Search, Friend Search etc.

New & niche applications & services are indeed getting launched – Saffron Art app for m-bidding, Antakshari on mobile, SMS based vending machines, Stock Purchase, LPG Refill & enterprise app for data collection by Kaybase. Hope there are enough takers for these.

Yet another smartphone app for mobile tracking, back up etc has been launched in India by a company based out of Dubai.

Nuance is reported to be launching voice based soft recognition service with a few operators.

Operators

DoCoMo’s entry and pricing plans have for sure taken other operators aback. A casual talk with a few people in the operator’s circle revealed that they are yet to come to terms with it. Aircel seems to have taken the first step to counter that – innovative 1-2-3 plans where the tariff reduce after the first two minutes. They have also launched a ‘per second’ plan (similar to DoCoMo) in Kolkata. Meanwhile, DoCoMo’s CDMA alter-ego Tata Indicom has gone a step-further and launched ‘pay per call’ plans – just pay Rs. 3 and keep talking without disconnecting the call. Other innovative models like e-paid (postpaid & prepaid combined) from Loop Mobile are also coming up.

Airtel-MTN talks are still continuing and will go on till Sept-30. They seem to be facing quite an uphill task here. The South African Government supports the deal. Meanwhile, MTN seems to be directly interested in SingTel as well (indirectly through Airtel, they anyways tie up with SingTel since SingTel is a major shareholder in Airtel)

AT&T is interested in taking up stake in BSNL. Will they lose money or will BSNL gain by this? I am afraid it could be the former.

S-Tel plans to launch service by end of this year. Pretty modest guys, they are clear they do not want to get into 3G game now and are content with 2G. They made a tower sharing deal with Reliance recently.

Spice & Virgin have expressed interest in being franchisees of MTNL’s 3G service. Virgin might be able to bring in all their MVNO experience here. Meanwhile, MTNL has plans of acquiring majority stake in a Nigerian operator. On the African Safari of the Indian operators, RCom plans to buy out Zain.

Regulators

Implementation of MNP has been postponed to December 31 (I guess & hope 2009 only ;-))

TRAI has rolled back its recent stringent norms for ‘Caller Tune’ kind of services and has changed it now to make it easy for the operators and also safe for the customers.

It is too late to cover the 3G pricing & auction news! Nevertheless, this link gives you all info you would need – auctions are happening within 90 days! While there are cribs that the price is high, some do feel it is fair. Another department (Space) has woken up now and has expressed concern over the WiMax spectrum interfering with their spectrum. In the hope that the auction would indeed happen as scheduled now, Airtel announces that their 3G services would launch in October 2010. Meanwhile, Qualcomm seems to be going ahead with clear plans for 3G services in India by building a grand ecosystem.

The % of revenue that operators should share with the Government has been different for long distance operators, mobile operators in A Circles, C Circles etc. DoT has decided to do away with this and charge a flat 8.5% on all of them. Further, operators may need to pay only for services using the spectrum and not their total revenue.

Indian Government plans to ban Chinese network vendors from operating in India, particularly in the sensitive border areas – Telcos are worried that this might lead to escalating costs for them. To top it, operators may soon be asked to check their SIM purchases also to have SAS accreditation. And yeah, the Government may set up an agency to monitor all our calls.

TRAI has been given time till November to decide the 2G policy.

Others

Google claims to have been pleasantly surprised by the number of GPRS Users in India – to use Orkut application. Don’t we continuously crib about the lack of GPRS penetration in India? Probably, it is time to take a reality check – though I do not see these numbers in any of the statistics that come out every month. A little bird with the operator says that the penetration is only about 2% for all operators!

SMSGupShup claims to have 22 million users in India, more than Twitter, Facebook & Orkut combined (in India). Their competitor Way2SMS claim to have crossed 5 million.

There is a highly improbable rumor that we may have mobile voting in 4-5 years.

Nokia CEO meets the PM of India – Nokia’s hope is on emerging markets – with installments for phones and what not.

An insightful article on mobile games is available at AFAQs.

Indian Telecom News, Till 16-Aug-09

Products

A very affordable dual SIM phone by Karbonn has been released. Another player at the low end, Micromax has launched a dual-SIM ‘chatting phone’ with Nimbuzz preloaded in it. Spice has launched a dual SIM model too with nothing less than Windows Mobile in it. Heard that Indian low cost players and the Chinese are fighting for the low end while the high end is safe for the big-brands. Will Nokia’s low end market be in trouble?

Samsung has launched 2 phones in the Omnia series – to compete with iPhone and Touch Diamond.

Applications/Services

Virgin Mobile has launched a phonebook backup service.

NXP’s smart card solution has been chosen by Indian Railways for contactless ticket vending machines.

RCom has launched a ‘mobile conference’ facility at Rs. 99 a month for both its GSM & CDMA subscribers. Up to 9 numbers are supported and all of them should have this facility enabled.

SatNav has partnered with the largest organization that would have information on India – The Survey of India. Hope to see a lot of useful apps now.

SMSGupShup has launched a developer platform to utilize their SMS framework. Way to go!

Tata Indicom has launched a campaign to promote m-learning services.

ITC & Monster have launched a rural job portal. Mobile access seems to be not available yet. Any news about the success of BabaJob and Airtel tie up? Meanwhile, Airtel & IFFCO have tied up to reach mobile services to rural Andhra Pradesh.

A few channels from the Star TV Group are now available on mobile phones through Apalya Technologies. They are available for 2.5G networks also – but who guarantees the speed?

iJiny is a new player to offer ‘micro-classifieds’ in India. You guessed it right – the max length of your classified ad should be 160 characters in length. (The iJiny site is not opening though at this moment!)

Operators

MTNL has launched 3G service Jadoo in Mumbai. Their Wimax franchisee offer has no takers though. But BSNL’s Wimax roll out is on – a US co has bagged the deal for equipment. Bids for its rural roll out will begin on 25-August. BSNL has got 40K subscribers for its 3G service and the price has been lowered too.

An insightful summary of all the 3G/Wimax games played by MTNL & BSNL is available at Developing Telecoms Blog. In fact, there was an ‘India Week’ at DTW – 2 articles on MNP affecting telcos appeared too. (first, second). Medianama’s analysis on MNP can be found here.

For other operators wanting 3G spectrum, please wait – the ministers will hold their second meeting on 27-August.

Mobile numbers starting with ‘8’ may happen soon.

Others

July statistics are out – 325.7 GSM subscribers in all. More at Medianama.

HP, the grand daddy of computing giants will focus on ‘mobile computing space’ from now – with India the focus.

If the mobile carriers indeed share their database, your mobile payment record may be the de-facto credit rating for your loans etc in India.

Vital Analytics has come up with one more report – on the urban internet usage using mobiles.

Indian Telecom News, Till 09-Aug-09

Devices

It is raining smartphones. LG Viewty Smart comes to India. iPhone 3GS launch in India is delayed further, expected by end of August. Blackberry Curve has been on schedule though.

Tata Indicom has launched a ZTE handset for the CDMA market. One of the few places where CDMA is expected to grow further is India. Qualcomm, whose business has CDMA as the core till now, bets on open market for CDMA handsets in India.

Micromax has launched a ‘messaging phone’ too. The lower end of the market seems to have tremendous competition between Indian manufacturers and the Chinese ones.

Services/Apps

Vodafone has launched a ‘busy tone’ service – you may specify your own busy message for a scheduled duration.

Mundu Radio becomes one of the most popular apps in the Ovi Store.

Nimbuzz has tied up with Virgin Mobile to offer IM & Soc Net applications. They already have a tie up with Tata Indicom.

Airtel has launched a ‘subscription’ package for game services – Medianama’s analysis here.

India based international mobile ad-network mKhoj has been rebranded as InMobi. Makes sense. Way to go, guys.

Non-Mobile brands in India are also taking the mobile route to brandings – like J&J & other FMCG majors. Shows the potential of mobile as a branding tool in India. Media companies have already taken over – UTV’s Bindass Buddies, a mentorship program for college students.

India based search engine ‘Guruji’ has launched a special ‘ringtone search’ to its categories.

MTNL has launched a ‘mobile voice remote email access’ service – that is you can ‘listen’ to your emails from your mobile.

Aryty is a service that lets you recharge a prepaid mobile phone in India from anywhere in the world. Odyssey Tech launches a ‘mobile signature’ platform. Good to see innovative start-ups in this space instead of the regular bulk SMS models.

Samachar, a popular news aggregator in olden days has gone mobile. Isn’t it too late to make a mark?

Mobile Retailer Univercell is introducing innovative services for handsets – a ‘security’ solution, health reminders etc. Goes to prove that handset makers and operators have left the field open.

India based mobile coupon vendor ‘Active Media’ has gotten acquired by 2ergo, a world wide mobile marketing company.

Just Dial plans to launch a ‘secretary on mobile’ service by October. At Rs.100 per month, they would find few takers. Let us see the quality of the product first.

Operators

 BSNL will launch 3G services in 760 cities in its first phase of launches. It is already available in 111 cities with a total of 13000 subscribers :) By the time they complete these 760 cities and create an awareness, private operators will get spectrum and will take the market :). But when will they get the spectrum is a million dollar Q. While the government wants to make the most of it, the operators want it dead cheap. Qualcomm expects a huge market for 3G in India.

Indian operators are going full steam capturing Africa. AFAQs carries a feature here. What we found last week – Essar is consolidating its operations, BSNL entering Kenya, Airtel-MTN extending their talks.

Soon after the decision to franchise 3G services, MTNL wants to do the same for WiMax services too.

Telenor, though failing in Pakistan and Russia is expecting to go great guns in India and might even hike their stake. If such companies succeed, more and more foreign cos can be expected.

Tata DoCoMo is going great guns – with launch in Mumbai, crossing more than a lakh subscribers in TN, with creative advertisements and a dedicated twitter account, they seem to be serious competition to Airtel.

Vodafone has launched unlimited GPRS at Rs.95 a month. Hope other operators too follow suit – this would certainly increase the data service usage in India.

Regulation

MNP Guidelines are to be ready by end of August. The September deadline is already gone.

India’s flip-flop with providing mobile licenses has been succinctly captured in this ‘light reading’. Some that caught my attention – no new licenses, 3G only to 4 operators, WiMax base price, GSMA’s crib, firming up of 2G policy and the eternal corruption about earlier allocations.

The regulation to ban handsets without IMEI numbers (‘Chinese’ handsets if you will) looks to be a mere eyewash. Operators are not yet blocking calls from such handsets.

In all innocence, DoT has started talking about 4G already! Saaar, 3G first please. GigaOm too expresses high hopes from India for WiMax. PluggdIn also feels so.

Others

A researcher in the US wants to “crowd source” using the Indian mobile users – for areas like translation.

Statistics for June is out – 12.03m subscribers added. More details here. In spite of the subscriber growth, revenue growth is plateauing in India. No wonder, operators are looking towards Africa. God knows how much of this subscription number is true also – DoT does not seem to believe.

An insightful discussion on enabling m-Government in India is posted here. An interview about mobile payments and financial inclusion by Atom’s Director can be seen here.

An innovative ‘search’ service for rural India has been launched – needless to say, it uses the ‘phone’ – not a mobile phone though, as yet.

A survey by Neilson reveals that postpaid users are more likely to utilize the MNP, once it is available.

Leading mobile vendors are planning to bundle movies into the phone package itself.

Indian Telecom News,Till 26-July-09

Products

Nokia has launched 2 new phones (6700 & 6303) in India in the mid-priced segment. They are positioned at ‘camera centric’ phones and a photo contest has been put up too.

Sony Ericsson Satio will be available in India in September at Rs. 40000.

LG has launched 3 new low end handsets. All usual features are present with a social networking application called Rochetalk embedded too.

Applications/Services

 Facebook is rumored to have tied up with SMS Gupshup to offer facebook access over SMS and in the process, become operator agnostic too.

7seas Tech, a popular gaming company plans to focus on ‘3d gaming on mobiles’ and has gotten funding to do it.

BSNL launches ‘movie on mobile’ in Chandigarh using 3G – with the premiere of ‘JAIL’. What a choice for the first movie! ;-)

Operators

Vigilance has found issues with BSNL’s tender for 93 million GSM lines – the rates are seen much higher than the previous tenders.

As we eagerly await the result of Airtel-MTN talks, South African Government may have the final say in the deal. Is Indian Government not involved? On a related note, Essar Group is in talks with Dhabi Group to invest in telecom industry in Africa.

CDMA players are cribbing that their ARPU numbers are being mis-calculated. They claim their ARPU is comparable to GSM players. Relax, guys, why crib over such reports when you are actually making more money? A related article compares the call costs now with the ones last year.

Unitech plans to launch operations in 5 circles by end of this year. They are raising $2.1b debt to fund these operations.

RCom & Etisalat sign Rs. 10000 crore deal to share facilities, spread over the next 10 years.

BSNL will launch commercial WiMax services in Tamilnadu by November this year.

After MTNL, BSNL also decides to ‘franchise’ its 3G services. Hope it does not have draconian clauses like MTNL.

MTS reaches 1.3 million subscribers in India.

Regulation

Secretary of the DoT is still hopeful that MNP could be implemented by end of this year while TRAI is still asking the industry what should be the charges. The licensees for MNP feel that less than 5% of subscribers may opt for it too.

The secretary has also said that his ministry has left the decision on selling stake of BSNL to the finance ministry. The plan to merge BSNL & MTNL is also put on hold.

We may soon have a nation-wide directory of mobile numbers. Imaging the amount of spam SMS-es/Calls you may receive. Thankfully, there is a way to opt out.

Tata Teleservices is ready with EVDO services for mobile handsets but have sought clarity from the Government before launching it. They already offer it as USB data cards. The Group of Ministers, set to decide the fate of 3G auctions will meet on 31st July, already delayed till next year, in the hope of earning more money. Hope they read all news about 3G from a site like this (hehe) before going to the meeting!

One of the long pending regulations got clear – promoters of the operators that have received spectrum cannot sell their stake for 3 years (issuing new equity is possible though). Well, there is also a plan to not give spectrum to new players at all. Count on them to through one surprise after another.

Others

I have wondered several times about the mobile subscription numbers – how is the churn of prepaid and the fact that some people carry more than 1 SIM adjusted - never really got a clear answer. Some answer is found here and it says the real number is at least 50 million less than what is touted usually.

A parallel industry on mobile refurbishing seems to exist – a company called Pacetel has bagged an award too. I thought it was all unorganized.

Picks from Google Reader #21 July

• GyPSii powers China Unicom's Social Network - Gaining a lot of traction but still, a separate mobile SNS does not make sense, IMO
• HTC to launch feature phones with own OS - Boy, they are out to trouble everyone in feature phone segment too! And I thought proprietary OS-es will soon be passe. Will they make ULCHs too? They are supposed to grow at 24% every year.
• iPhone & RIM take away most of the revenues of the industry - Smartphones seem to be the way to make money! (but HTC moves the other way!). An article about 'Value Share' vs 'Market Share' here
• AOL is putting together a 'clear' mobile strategy - Not too hopeful. When they come up with one, others would be far ahead
• Nokia to launch new 'series' of phones - Rumour mills at work, so many of them - C Series, X Series, Nokia Money,
• File on Ovi goes free - Could affect Decho Corp, Dropbox kind of companies. Or may be not!
• LG claims to have sold 5 million cookies in 9 months - That is a tall order, wonder what is 'baking' at LG, after all, they have openly declared to be No.2 in the world
• Palm Pre to get an update of WebOS - Details of the upgrade on the link, all minor
• Mobile Apps to be as big as Internet, MobileBeat notes - Google says the opposite! Let us see
• TeleAtlas will provide LBS Apps to Vodafone subscribers
• Microsoft to bring XBox to Windows Mobile - Even Sony wanted to bring PSP onto mobile.
• Qualcomm, who coined 'Smartbook' calls Toshiba TG01 as the first Smartbook