Indian Mobile Phone Industry News and Analysis

Music Download in India

2011-12-05T03:45:00.001-08:00

Every once a while, a not-so-tech-savvy relative of mine would ask me about a "good site" where they can download songs from - I am not too deep into torrents & stuff so it is not an easy answer for me. (Not that I purchase songs - I usually pick it up from someone who has already figured it, that is all :)). All I do is search in Google for that particular song they need and get it somehow. But then, it really is just giving them (the proverbial) fish to eat & not teaching them to fish. BTW, the moment I talk about paying for music, they think I have gone mad (even people as old as 65 years who would have paid through the nose to buy cassettes then).

As I do these searches, I wonder why no iTunes equivalent has really come up in India with price points that seem OK to people (Does Weber's law really work here? Are we people similar to the ones Jobs mentioned when he introduced iTunes - that we choose to download from pirated sites only because there is no easy equivalent?)

Also, I recently heard that a significant portion of the revenue for music labels come from the "CRBT" services that operators run. And not really from sales of CDs or online music.

Given that, why do the labels not make MP3 downloads completely free at their site? If there is a place where they can download songs that are zero-priced & hassle-free (pop-ups, viruses etc), would that not be THE place people go to download? Revenue from CRBTs would anyways keep coming because the operators control it. One could think of other ideas like inserting ads between songs in an album, selling merchandize on the site etc.

Anyways, I am sure people in the music industry has thought about all these things more than a hundred thousand times. There would be no lack of such ideas - it is a problem of the industry structure beyond these.

Then why am I posting this here? Hey, no one said I was providing solutions here. Just some thoughts, OK?

Mobile Applications for India - Are we living up to the potential (Speech)

2011-12-04T21:28:00.001-08:00

I was supposed to speak at the CSI event in Ahmedabad earlier this month. Due to a freak delay in flight departure from Bangalore, I did not reach Ahmedabad at all - went till Mumbai & came back. :-)

Nevertheless, here is the speech I had prepared for that:

[Personal intro, Intro to Vodafone Dev Program go here]

Let us now move into the topic "Mobile Applications for India - Are we living up to the potential". First, a quick take on how mobile apps are faring in India right now. There are scores of application stores, with stores of handset vendors like Nokia, Samsung, stores of platforms like Android, iOS, Windows Phone, stores of mobile operators like Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, Aircel and also some independent stores like Getjar, Opera etc. There are also niche attempts by Indian start-ups like Onward Mobility, AppBazar etc that have seen some mind share from developers.

There have been several Indian applications: NewsHunt, TukTuk Meter, TaazzaGo, Zomato, CardsCreator, Sparsh etc. Apart from the app companies, there have been other successful companies around mobile ecosystem: mChek in payments, InMobi on mobile advertising, Infosys has its own platform called Flypp offered as a white labelled app store.

On the downloads front, we have great statistics from everyone. Airtel claimed 2.5 million downloads right in the first month. For Nokia, India is the top download center for Ovi Store, India is an important market for Android and Windows Phone too. Getjars and Operas thrive on the downloads from India. Our own application store at Vodafone, live for the past couple of weeks has seen tremendous numbers.

In summary, we are doing wonderful. You don't want to clap?

Everything is hunky dory, right? We are the next super power in the world. Silicon Valley, move on! India has taken over. Is that so? Is this all we can do? Come on!! Without taking away the successes we have had, let us look into this more deeply.

First, some numbers: Indian population: 1.21 billion, Mobile Subscribers: 800+ million, Handset distribution: Close to 10% smartphones, 70% Java enabled phones. More than 100 million data users. Forget the accuracy of these numbers. They are huge, aren't they? Now, is everyone using an 'App'? Barring a handful, how many pure Indian Apps are there? A slightly deeper look into this question will show why we are nowhere near our potential.

To understand the potential, let us now think about what an app itself is. What is an app? Angry Birds, right? Like the joke goes, our smartphones now have the same computing power that NASA's super computers had in the 1960s. However, NASA put a man on the moon and we put birds on pigs. Jokes apart, if you look at it, an app is an "encapsulation of an experience". It could be reading, listening, transacting, playing etc. You get the point? Newshunt is an encapsulation of the experience of news reading - on a mobile phone, Mundu Radio is an encapsulation of the experience of listening to FM Radio - on a mobile phone, NGPay is an encapsulation of the experience of booking railway ticket - on a mobile phone, Angry Birds is the encapsulation of the experience of playing slingshot - on a mobile phone. So, who are the competitors to mobile apps now? It is the thing that the consumer now uses - For NewsHunt, it is the newspaper, for NGPay, it is the IRCTC website or the counter at railway stations and so on. Do you follow me?

Now, have we reached a stage where every possible encapsulation of experiences into a mobile phone has happened for the Indian consumer?

The simple answer is, NO!

With so much of potential in this space, let us look at some of the issues in creating mobile apps for India.

Not enough local content is available. For example, if you want to build an app to track the traffic pattern in Ahmedabad, there is no ready data / APIs available for one to use. If one wishes to create a mandi price app for rural India, the area is so fragmented that unless one starts building a network of agents, it is impossible to do. And so on.

There is minimal Indian language support in the handsets. Of course, there are phones with Indian language support, both display & input. But frankly, doesn’t the user experience on all of them suck? Which is why we have Panini & Sparsh keypads out in the market, right? Don't get me wrong, I know Nokias & Samsungs are doing their best but it is still not good enough.

Data penetration is low. Of course, the operators are trying their best and there is growth but the penetration is still low. It is actually a chicken and egg story. Data penetration will increase only with killer apps and killer apps would come only with data penetration.

Device/Platform fragmentation has been a huge issue. There are more than 90 handset brands. Even among the feature phones, there are so many versions of Java running on them that it is close to impossible to build a Java app that would run on all of them.

Next is monetization. With very low credit card penetration in the country, most people are dependent on the operators for billing. And they behave pricey. We operators have started changing now but it is going to be a while before significant changes come in.

Finally, to marketing and distribution. It is one thing to be on all stores but effectively, unless you break into the top league, you are not going to see significant downloads. And you need deep pockets for other kinds of advertising.!

So there are several issues like these. And we can keep whining about them. But that is not going to help anyone! As Woody Allen said, "The only person standing between me and greatness is - ME." It is like saying, if only I were born in the Silicon Valley, I would have been Steve Jobs. You might remember a dialogue from the movie Social Network: Zuckerburg says to the Winklewoss twins: If you had invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook. Likewise, if I were Steve Jobs, I would have been Steve Jobs. Not whining about stuff. Don't get me wrong. This is not to demean anyone, just a fact of life. Issues would exist but we just need to find ways to overcome them. I know it is easy to preach but then that is what I am here for!

What I want to talk to you next about is the kind of opportunities that exist in this space with all those issues?

First of all, you need to decide - What business are you in? Building an App? Building a bunch of apps in a category (say games)? Build apps for someone else - that is pure services? Or into one of the associated business that come with apps stores. I will now list down some areas that I have noticed beyond just building apps for oneself or for others. Some of them could interest you!

Application Stores, for distributing others apps - Well, this is a big boys' game right now but there are indeed attempts by companies like Onward Mobility to build their own apps stores.

Analytics on apps stores - So many developers do not have internal analytics for their apps. Why don’t you build one? There are companies like Distimo/Flurry in this space but no one in India. Apart from analytics to developers, you can also sell research reports based on analytics to apps store providers. I can tell you that I desperately need it to get to know about Indian apps but there is no clear report available right now - I can be your first customer.

Recommendations - With apps stores getting crowded, discovery of apps is huge pain point for users and in turn even developers. Can you build a neat, personalized recommendation mechanism specifically for Indian users?

Cross Platform tools - Right now, developers are struggling to get their apps built & tested for multiple platforms/models. Can you build a service that makes it easy? There are so many HTML5 based cross platform tools out there - but one for India, supporting all Indian languages & that comes with a Siri like service for Gujrati would be wonderful.

DIY tools for app creation - In the late 90s, every brand, big & small, wanted a 'web presence'. Likewise, very soon, every brand would want an 'app presence'. Imagine your dentist having an app, your favorite restaurant having one, your hairstylist having one and so on. Would you not be thrilled? But can these guys now afford the insane amounts charged for mobile app development by the services companies? No. But what if they have a do it yourself tool to create one for their needs? There have been attempts by Google, Nokia & some third parties towards this but none as close to having your favorite sweets ordered from the "Bikanerwala app" on your phone. There is a huge scope here.

Enterprise Mobility - This is an area of huge growth and the speaker after me is going to explain it better. I would like to urge you to not think of Enterprise mobility as something for large enterprises alone. In the consumer segment, to a lot of Indians, their first experience of internet is through a mobile. Similarly, to a lot of small enterprises in India, their first experience of an ERP is going to be through a mobile.

Remember, I have not even mentioned the scope in the areas of building a business with an app as its basic interface here. That is an ocean. Just get out of this building (once my talk is over) and see for yourself the amount of opportunities that exist. Encapsulate every experience of an Indian into an app. Let Apple's statement of 'There is an App for that' be true to every experience of an Indian.

Well, you know what; this list is bound to be incomplete, even wrong in some areas. That is because; we have only scratched the surface here. And these come from me - an armchair critic, if you will, sitting in a large organization & preaching to others. If you get on the field and attempt to come out with solutions, there will be 1000s of problems that are waiting to be solved. By you, right now, right outside this campus!!

Finally, a quote from Steve Jobs! It is customary to mention Steve Jobs in such presentations and have his quote. I do not want to be left out. Jokes apart, he says

"When you start looking at a problem, it seems really simple—because you don’t understand its complexity. And your solutions are way too oversimplified, and they don’t work. Then you get into the problem and you see it’s really complicated. And you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going and find the key underlying principle of the problem and sort of come full circle with a beautiful, elegant solution that works.”

In terms of mobile apps for India, I think we are in the stage where our solutions are still oversimplified ones. Soon, we will realize that they do not work. And then come up with convoluted solutions. And then some of us will keep going and find the underlying problem and come up with an elegant solution. I would like to believe we have one of them in our audience today!

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. It was a pleasure speaking here!

MoMo B Meeting with Mike Short

2011-11-21T04:54:00.001-08:00

MoMo-B guys had arranged for a meeting with Mike Short (an industry veteran, currently with Telefonica) while he was here last month. And Kesava Reddy was kind enough to include me there. There was a short speech by him followed by some Q&A. It was good to see a veteran in the operator industry answering questions that were critical to the operators :-)

Here is a short compilation of the Q&A. Needless to say, they are not verbatim and are based on my understanding. Read it with the disclaimer that it could all be wrong.

What in your opinion is the need for 3G services?

3G gives an operator a way to improve 3Cs - Capacity / Capability / Content. (He did go into the details of all Cs but I do not remember the details)

What are the top 3 focus areas for Telefonica in the near future?

Combination of services (Fixed and Mobile)

Making usage of data services easy (particularly in emerging markets)

Better International Reach (through good roaming agreements & VOIP services - Jajah Acquisition is towards this)

What is your opinion on how operators should react to Over The Top players?

Operators should leave the basic services to the OTT players and not really compete but collaborate with them. Instead, operators should go after new areas like Education, Healthcare etc

Given the high penetration of mobile subscribers in many markets and several markets saturating, what would be the next growth area for operators?

M2M is going to be the next big opportunity. I expect to have about 20 billion mobile connections by 2020 (more than twice the population). Healthcare, Education, Energy & Transport are going to be some of the major industries.

Why has there been no major Network Innovations while the application innovations are so rapid?

Network innovations are indeed happening but is not coming out to public knowledge because we are used to talking about networks in generations over generations (2G, 3G etc). So only the quantum leaps are known. Incremental innovations are not.

Innovative Indian Language Keyboard Layout

2011-11-13T20:33:00.001-08:00

Sparsh Indian Language Keyboard

Very interesting concept. Wish the OEMs in India pre-load such an IME on models launched in India.

Available in Android Market here

PS:: Sparsh team is known to me for several years.

Micromax in Dubai

2011-10-23T03:29:00.001-07:00

Indian Languages to fail online?

2011-09-28T03:07:00.000-07:00

Read this first: Why Indian Languages Failed to make a mark Online! | being practical

This is a well written article, like most articles by PJ. However, I sincerely wishes that this prediction of his fails.

Here are some of his comments & my thoughts

Consider India – while Hindi is leading official language, but no single language has adoption across the country. State governments have endorsed respective regional languages as official, Hindi failed to find the common ground – but English did!

Well, while Hindi might not be spoken across, the sheer 'number' of Hindi speakers in India is more than several other languages (like say Japanese / Korean) which have a high degree of Internet / Mobile usage. So would be the case with Telugu, Tamil & several other languages. Let us not look at the urban populace alone. Think about the number of people in rural India who are conversant in English.

Take market like China – The innovators, the early adopters, the influencers, the decision makers, the entrepreneurs – all of them DON’T KNOW English! So innovators developed softwares, websites, products in Chinese; early adopters used Chinese products and so did the influencers, decision makers, and everyone else in China. Take India – we know our Mother Tongue (our Mother Tongues are different) + we know English!

I agree 100%. The 'early adopters' / 'innovators' / 'influencers' in India knowing English could be the single biggest reason for the state of affairs currently.

It can be confidently said that the percentage of users who will read/write/speak English language will keep growing for next 50 to 100 years. The same cannot be said about Indic languages.

Same is the case in China / Korea too, ain't it? Please, let us not wait for 100 years for our (currently under privileged) country men to start using the Internet.

many users prefer to give examination in English language and during their classes learn computers that have English versions of Windows / Office and other software applications.

It could just be a question of availability & the UX

One of the most favoring factor for languages like French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc was the fact that they followed alphabets from English language (ABCD…XYZ). No additional fonts, hardware or input devices were required to be created when uses adopted computers usage in these languages – both reading and writing.

I used to think on similar lines till I visited Korea. You think Chinese / Korean / Japanese scripts are any easier?

While content was created in other global languages based on English alphabets from early days of Internet – it took a long time before content in Indian languages started appearing on Internet. By the time ability to create content in Indian languages was available – English had taken a mighty lead in its adoption as Internet’s mother-tongue for India.

Agreed, but there is a huge segment of population without knowledge of Internet. It is still possible to break the lead. Actually there is no need to compete. There is enough opportunity for every language here!

As users we consume all regional languages through other Media – Television, Radio, Newspapers. Its very easy to consume on traditional media and the ecosystem exists for – content (TV programs, news content, audio content for radio), publishers (multiple TV channels, news papers & radio stations) and advertisers (promoting products in Indian languages). There is huge amount of content produced, audience availability & consumption, and advertiser interest.How many times have you sent an official email in Hindi? No business may deny communication in lndian language if it gets you more business – but did you send? and other questions.

Well, you & I (& the readers of our blogs) are not the audience for this. The audience is something that needs to be built. As you have said, for other media, the ecosystem exists. For this, the ecosystem needs to be built. Speaking of media & consumption, we cannot ignore the diaspora (which our film makers are exploiting).

I agree with the points about rewards & monetization. As I see, that is all part of ecosystem creation.
Finally, about the litmus test

One fine day if he declares that only SMS in local languages will be accepted. How many users you think will send the answer as (केबीसी क्यू क, ख, ग, घ) or any other local Indian languages? Will there be a SMS responses go up or fall drastically?

I do not agree this is a litmus test. This CAN remain in English and Indian language Internet can grow. It need not be a "this" or "that".

Finally, while the tools for content creation evolve (with better UX & what not), it might be essential to focus on making sure the 'content consumption' is done well. So many of the phones / browsers still do not support Unicode (or have Indian languages enabled) by default.

Let us actually get a bit impractical (no pun) & drive the Indian language adoption on Internet please. :-)

Cool charger

2011-09-25T22:25:00.000-07:00

Used by the security guys in my apartment. Costs just 50 bucks!

Hyper Local Classifieds

2011-09-08T02:57:00.000-07:00

[This is an advertisement in Tamil for a clinic that offers surgeries for piles & related medical conditions - a very common site in my place]

These kind of posters have been existing from time immemorial (or the time I have been following wall posters).

I was wondering why the medium of "mobile" has not reached Dr. AK Biswas at Latha Clinic yet.

The real need for a hyper-local classifieds solution might exist there - Not with the top end Smartphone using crowd. Just saying! :-|

UID Authenticity

2011-09-08T02:46:00.000-07:00

Sad to see this:
Cracks appear in Unique Identification Authority of India's enrolment process

Like I said before, I see quite a few issues in the process. There was some anecdotal evidence too I got recently: A friend of mine who lives in Bangalore managed to get UID in Mysore by showing address proof of his father's house there. Now, can Passport / SIM be issued to him just based on this? More fearful is the fact that his wife got her UID by just "saying" she was his wife it seems - no documents needed at all. Atrocious!

I hope these were just teething issues and things do get resolved. But the hope is reducing by the day.

BTW, here is the UID form being given in Pondicherry (picked it up there from my folks).

Front Page (click to enlarge)

Back page (click to enlarge)

India's First (& Only?) Killer App?

2011-09-04T01:31:00.000-07:00

Mobile Social Networking Platform of IIT-B

2011-08-29T22:42:00.000-07:00

The Hindu : Business / Industry : Sibal launches two mobile applications

The other application developed at IIT Bombay is an intelligent mobile social networking platform (MSNP) similar to Facebook or Orkut based completely on mobile phones. It enables the service providers to develop personalised applications and send messages to users in the network based on their preferences such as demographic profile or interests.

Got curious with this and wanted to figure more of what is it that has been developed. Like Government / semi-Government sites, the site did not open. A bit of Googling took me here.

Here is what it is:

Looks to be a good product - a few pieces of which can be used by mobile operators to offer personlized ads etc. Otherwise, having to launch a new social network is probably not a great idea. Just pick the "recommender engine" and offer APIs to developers & partners to create personalized ads / services. Partners could include social networks too!

"Applications on the MSNP platform can be used by all subscribers of any service provider" it says. How will it be personalized without call detail record information etc from each of the service provider is not clear to me.

Apps for India

2011-08-28T08:17:00.000-07:00

Following are some "India Centric" apps that came to my notice in the last few months. Just documenting them here:

Appnomy Bangalore

2011-08-28T04:37:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Pluggdin guys, I had the opportunity to be there at the Appnomy event yesterday. Needless to say, they had done a great job in terms of organization. Good venue, good infra etc. [Aside: I did not know Oxford college had such a good auditorium]. Now to the event itself.

The session by the founder of SourceBits was insightful and interesting. Someone from outside of the industry (he is a doctor) to have cracked this speaks of passion. They have a neat business model of creating apps themselves to showcase their capabilities thereby attracting clients and then charging them for apps created for them. This should probably be the way for several app developers in India to sustain. In my earlier life, I have suggested this to several app developers: To develop free bada apps for the apps store to showcase their capabilities and then I could help them connect with brands who wish to develop bada apps. I of course had the ulterior motive of getting a few bada apps done for free but frankly, that was not the only intent :) The problem with several companies is that if they focus on one (say creating own apps), they lose focus on services. But SourceBits has cracked it so neatly. Salutes to the team. Another interesting note from him was about spending 60% of total time on design (& the rest in engineering).

The second session from SpiceLabs was actually insightful for people who develop apps as business (& not as a service). But a mix of poor presentation (the way it was presented, including wrong use of the microphone), poor presentation (the power point slides with all wrong color combinations & unreadable font sizes) & preachy nature made it a bit useless I should say. Kudos to Prashant for putting in all the effort to bring insights but I am afraid not everyone understood what he said.

The next session was from the design head of Sourcebits (a gentleman from Poland). While the title "Traps of Design for Mobile Experiences" was so appealing, the presentation was well, not as much. I personally did not receive any new insight from the presentation - same old small screen, less user attention etc were being repeated with a heavy dose of praise for Apple (what else to expect!). Added to that, the speech was so monotonous. May be I am being too critical but then I was expecting a lot from this presentation. In fact, this was one reason why I attended the event in the first place.

Then there was a panel discussion with the title as "One App Business Vs Business of Apps". I do not think many entrepreneurs would have this dilemma. If we abstract it, it is only a question of "Product Vs Service" and this is a question that someone would have answered at the very beginning. Because of this, not much of discussion on the panel was on this and went around other topics about what will a VC fund, what is a VC interested in etc (Significant insights like - VCs do not want copied ideas but a original idea that solves a problem - came out of it ;-) ). Not too impressed.

I left the event towards the end of it. I guess the product demos in the afternoon should have gone well. You may look at the companies that presented at the Appnomy site.

Overall, it reinforced my opinion that one [at least who reads about the industry everyday] should attend events for meeting people and exchanging business cards and not for getting insights & enlightenment through the panel discussions & speeches.

Hindi version of Android

2011-08-12T04:18:00.001-07:00

Samsung and Google are planning to develop a Hindi version of Android operating system.

Hindi version of Android?

If this is true, this is probably the greatest positive thing that can happen to the mobile ecosystem in India. This is one area that even Microsoft has not tread. I used to longingly look at Korean / Chinese / Japanese versions of Windows and wonder when such things would be possible in India - Imagine how the PC adoption rate would increase with that. Microsoft did attempt something with XP & Vista but the results were disastrous.

With all the hype about mobile-first internet market & so on, Android being available in Hindi (& other Indian languages) would be God-send. BG Mahesh would be the happiest man in this - he has been struggling with such issues for over a decade.

With all the challenges with fonts & input mechanisms for Indian languages, it requires an organization like Google to really take the lead. Hope they really do.

My contacts in Samsung India are not even aware of this and I guess this is more likely to remain a rumour, though I sincerely hope it does not.

UID - Some Thoughts

2011-08-11T07:05:00.001-07:00

I have been following the UID space on & off. With several people opposing it off late & comparing it with the now-defunct sytem in UK, I have decided to study it a bit more. Whatever thoughts I have around it, I shall put them as posts. They would mostly be random ramblings & not any structured document. Bear with me.

Demographic Data - Big Brother

One of the biggest concerns raised is about the Government misusing the demographic data collected (like for example, using this data to target & harm all Muslims in Gujarat, all Tamilians in Bangalore etc). The demographic details that are being collected are: Name, DOB, Gender, Address, Email ID & Phone Number. No religion/caste/mother-tongue details are collected - but critics could argue that certain things can be found out just using the name. Well, point taken.

Demographic Data - Other Concerns

By going through some of the documents in the UIDAI site, some concerns I get around demographic data being collected are more than this big-brother-targeting business. I am afraid it might just not be effective and what the UIDAI intends to achieve might get diluted. Let me explain.

3rd Party Enrolment & Random Audit

Third party registrars do the enrolment on behalf of UIDAI. We know the skill & expertise level of the entry level people in places like LIC. When they collect the details from a resident & verify it, I am afraid there is bound to be a lot of issues. I feel one can easily fool them about the address details & show fake passports / bank passbooks etc to convince them. So, potentially a person can get his UID with correct biometrics but incorrect demographic information. Not to mention of malpractice that may happen within the enrolment agency itself by some unscrupulous employees.

UIDAI claims to do 'random verification' of the information during its audit. Random? Are you kidding? As a potential user of UID based authentication in the future, how can passport office trust this data without going through physical verification through the police station?

Further, post enrolment, UID would send a "letter" to the resident to the address they have provided with their UID number, demographic & biometric details in them. It is not necessary for the person to be there to collect it - anyone can collect. Just the address should be existing. Further chances of misuse.

Sending biometric info in a letter

More scary is that fact that the biometric info would also be sent across with the letter. Why at all? What if a postman collects all those details and stores those biometric information for his future use. And sells it to people who want to misuse the system through fake gloves with these info etc. I know I am thinking like a C-grade masala movie writer but the point I wish to make is, it can be misused.

Other Concerns

Then there is this concept of "Introducer" - Since the primary target of UID, the urban poor, might not have address proofs with them, someone with an address proof can "introduce" them (similar to opening a bank account). There can be a lot of fraud happening with this too.

There were further bombshells like 'updating information' : "If a service provider authenticating or enrolling a resident finds, through its KYR process that the information provided by the resident (address, name, etc.) does not match with the UID record, or that the biometrics need to be renewed, it can ask the resident to update their information in the UID database." So the fictitious resident of ours can enrol with one address (by giving some fake proof), avail of some benefit, go to another service provider, claim the information is wrong and update it there with another address, to claim one more benefit and so on.

In short, I wish to say that the demographic information captured (particularly the address) cannot be fool-proof. A sensitive & important thing like passport issuance cannot happen trusting this. Probably SIM card sales can use it [actually it is dangerous if terrorists / non-state actors(!) start using it] for address verification - operators anyway do not like KYC much. Not really for sensitive cases.

There were a few fraud scenarios too mentioned but IMHO, they are very very few. I hope a lot more fraud scenarios have been considered too and just not documented.

Just as ID proof

Instead of dealing with demographics, if it can just be an ID proof, would it not be fool-proof ? One can argue it already has ID proof and places like passport office can use only that part. Point taken, but by removing demographics from it, the critics who argue about big-brother-targeting can also be shut up.

For ID proof, all that is needed is biometric info (with photograph if at all). Not even name. Your UID number is your username and your fingerprints are your password. That is all. Thinks like NREGS can immensely benefit with just this, I believe. [Though, in places like PDS, one can get ration cards in multiple states with the same UID since the PDS systems of the states would most likely be not linked. Even with address info, as I said before, I can get it done but it is a bit more difficult, that is all]

References:

UIDAI Strategy Overview

Demographic Data Std

UID and PDS

State of the Mobile Web in India, May 2011 [Opera]

2011-06-29T03:02:00.001-07:00

Opera: State of the Mobile Web, May 2011

This report focuses on India this month. Statistics are usual but some insights are interesting!

In most countries, the top two spaces in most popular sites to visit are occupied by social networks and search. However, in India shopping and classifieds take a solid second place for favorite sites to visit after social network sites, well ahead of search, as combined site visit data from AdMarvel shows.

That is a bit surprising. Google anyways is the top site but still Search is not the top category!

we see how India stands tall as a country in rapid development, with internet-based knowledge at the forefront of that growth.

Cough! Cough! I wonder how filestube, zedge, songs.pk etc contribute to our "knowledge" growth!! Cough! Cough! We are probably still an entertainment-starved or entertainment-addicted country. :-)

And finally, top-10 devices are all Nokia, once again. Last month, one Micromax device made its appearance. And there were blog posts & mail chains about it. No one will notice now I guess :-) After all, we all like to poke the big guys!

Aadhar Enrolment & Demographics

2011-06-23T05:39:00.001-07:00

Aadhaar: Enrollment, Authentication & Beyond - MediaNama

Good that very minimum demographic information is being collected. There was always a fear of people getting "targeted" based on their caste / language etc if made available in the wrong hands. But I wonder how this will be used in cases like caste based reservations, income based subsidies etc. Probably there should be another database of that with the UIDs mapped!!

Who are making those devices for enrolment by the way?

Mobile Data Growth to Stall / Reverse?

2011-06-23T01:07:00.001-07:00

Mobile Opportunity: How to Shape the Mobile Data Market

Read all 3 parts for a very interesting analysis of mobile data in the future. Michael Mace makes a bold claim about the data traffic REDUCING in the days to come!

While everything there is not directly relevant to India / Emerging markets, a couple of ideas make a lot of sense. Particularly these:

2. Require a data gas gauge and speedometer in smartphones. Can you imagine buying a car that didn't have a gas gauge and speedometer? That's essentially what we do today with smartphones. For most smartphone users today, there is no easy way to tell how much data throughput you're getting from the network, and how close you are to any limits on your data usage. Some operators bundle apps to do this, some have more arcane ways to check, and some send you a text if you get close to the limit. But I think it's fair to say that most people are in the dark about their usage until they get their monthly bill, and if they do go over a limit they will have trouble figuring out why.
4. Enable toll-free apps and websites. As I discussed in Part 1, we need the data equivalent of a toll-free phone call, in which a website or mobile app company would pay for the data traffic generated by a particular app or site. This requires changes to the operators' billing infrastructure, but I think it will be essential for enabling the growth of mobile data. It should be an extremely high priority for the operators, and it's in the interest of web and app companies to get together with the operators to define standards for these charges, so they'll be easy for developers to work with. I suspect there's an important role government regulators can play in helping to encourage these negotiations.

Perspectives on Mobile Apps & Mobile Web

2011-05-12T03:50:00.000-07:00

A Not-So-Brief History of Third Party PC Software^{1, 2}

Before PCs came into existence (Pre-PC era?), computers were primarily used by enterprises for business needs. By nature, software for those computers was specific to each enterprise and would have been³ written separately. There would have been more or less no "app development business" possibility. Once the PCs⁴ came into being, computers became a 'personal' (or at least a family / household) thing and thus B2C & B2P (business-to-professionals, like photographers) possibilities for software would have begun. With standards like "IBM-PC running MS-DOS", "Apple's computers running Apple's OS" and various such combinations, it would have been possible to create "write-once, run-in-many-similar-computers-&-peripherals" kind of software.

The next stage would have been the need to eliminate the dependency on device-drivers of peripheral makers, which I guess MS did with aplomb. And then with Windows 3.1 taking dominance, Win-Tel alliance and with Windows 95 achieving world domination, desktop software business should have reached its peak maturity. Several software makers would have flourished in this period (like say Intuit). But not several did, for two reasons: (1) MS tried to kill them (by purchasing them out or by offering a free/cheaper variant of the software, sometimes bundled with Windows) AND (2) there was no sophisticated retailing channel. Retailing was only through special retail outlets or mail-in orders etc, delivered through disk drives. At this stage, the following kind of companies would have existed: Software Product Companies (example: Intuit), Companies that made other products but software was a part of the overall solution (e.g., Sony-Video Camcorder maker with software to edit videos), Software development service companies (example: ABC Tech⁵, developing some portion of Quicken for Intuit OR developing the video editing software for Sony) etc⁶. Retailing the software (for software product companies) at this stage would have been by means of disk drives sold through physical retail stores or through direct mail-in orders. The pain in all these would have meant that there was no gold rush in software development.

Next stage of software development on the PC was on the 'Web', with the advent of Internet. A browser was available in all OS/hardware⁷ and more importantly, businesses and consumers could communicate & transact easily without being physically present or wait for the post man. At this stage, the following kind of companies would have existed: Pure Web companies, solving problems users face in the web (like Yahoo solving the issue of classifying websites through their directory service), Offline businesses establishing their web presence (like Sony), New online businesses with no/minimal physical presence (like Amazon), Media Companies establishing web presence (like New York Times) - these are indeed a part of offline business turning to the web but are significant to be mentioned separately, Web Development service companies that create/maintain websites for others (like ABC Tech, who can provide service to Sony, Amazon, Yahoo, NYT or anyone) and Companies that made "tools" for DIY web development (Cannot remember an example, Geocities would fit?). There was nothing like 'retailing' for this software - The product (website) reached right into the users' browser. The massive spread of Internet ensured that the market for these kept on expanding. However, making people realize you existed was an issue: Enter search engines! The ease of development & large growth of the market meant that there was indeed a gold rush that ended with the dot com bust. Note that at this stage, companies from the previous era also thrived; Web could not do everything a native app on PC could.

After a brief period of confusion, the Web regained prominence (Web 2.0, 3.0, whatever!). Web became more powerful and several things could get achieved within the browser. More importantly, Web became so elaborate that several niches started appearing. World Domination was only for a few - they became 'products' + 'platforms', like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. The same set of companies from the previous stage existed here too - with "platforms" being a significant addition. The availability of platforms meant that web development became even easier. The concept of 'cloud' & 'on-demand computing' saw its day and ensured that software product development over the web became less expensive too! This is why concepts like the Cloud-Top (Chromebook) have become reality! Slowly but surely, B2C software product offerings have all moved to the browser - can you think of any new B2C software product that gets 'installed' & runs completely on the PC? Things like Photoshop do exist but they are rare! Other exceptions could be the ones like the software that accompanies your phone/gadget (iTunes kind) but it is a matter of time before all of them move to the cloud. Native PC Apps are trying their luck through the "App Stores" that are getting established (like Intel, Apple etc) but then, native apps are really past their prime – Angry Birds is available on a browser starting today, not as a Win-32 app, see! J. An App Store for PCs would have made a lot of sense in the early days of the Internet when the power of what could be achieved in a browser was less. With the obvious benefit of hindsight, it is strange no one attempted that (Seriously, why was there no 'store' in Windows 98/XP?). But with HTML5 capability becoming a norm, it would not fly for long.

BTW, there was no gold rush in this second Web era for two reasons: First, people learnt from the past decade's experience and the second, gold rush was about to happen somewhere else (shortly shown, as if you do not know!).

For the sake of remembering, let us call the five stages as: Pre-PC, Early-PC, PC (Windows), Early Web & Web.

PC Vs Mobile, The Evolution Compared

Comparing the Mobile Era with the PC Era

When we get into the tricky topic of comparing evolution of PCs with mobiles (and obviously force-fitting a few things for making things simpler), we can see that mobiles too have had similar phases (see figure).

Cellphones correspond to Pre-PC, Java/Palm corresponding to early PC and so on. While there are comparisons about Windows 95 & Android (in terms of their attempts to throw away Apple), I find the comparison of PC Apps (mainly Windows) to Mobile Apps (mainly iOS & Android) more apt. Whether Android will overthrow iOS is immaterial when it comes to the larger question of - Will both of them be overthrown by the web apps (just like PC Web made PC Apps irrelevant).

Nevertheless, at this stage, apps seem to be ruling the roost and that is where the "gold rush" is. While the debate on apps Vs web continues, comparing PC Apps (of 90s) with mobile apps, it emerges that mobile apps have two biggest advantages over PC apps: (1) Availability of App Stores & (2) Availability of web services. In no other time in history does an independent software product maker have had this kind of an ecosystem and reach. Hence the gold rush.

While it sounds egalitarian to find that anyone can develop an app, the crowd brings with it the problems of discoverability & capturing attention of the consumer. Interestingly, in this aspect, the mobile apps start resembling the PC-Web: Availability of many web services to quickly make a product and more importantly, the issue of discoverability & getting the consumer's attention. This is probably why several pundits have thought of mobile apps as the next thing after Web (possibly ignoring the coming of the bigger beast in mobile Web). While Google emerged to become the gatekeeper for the Web, we need to see if someone emerges as the gatekeeper for apps (there are so many available already, like AppBrain etc but possibly they are all the Altavistas of those days, Google is yet to come). Likewise, we see a lot of DIY App development tools (like the DIY for web). Similarly, like the role played by Alexas, Technoratis etc for the Web, companies like Distimo play the role for Apps. Will they be eaten by the yet-to-come-Google-for-apps? Or will the emergence of mobile-web render all of them useless and see through the emergence of newer companies?

Wireline versus Wireless Web

While the emergence of mobile web seems inevitable and there is a lot of hype around it (including the tone of this article), in practical terms, they may not be approaching that soon.

Will wireless broadband spread (telcos spending on it) & adoption (consumer interest on it) be as fast as the wireline broadband adoption for PCs? While wireline broadband itself struggled its way to ubiquity in PCs, wireless broadband may struggle even more. Without that happening, mobile web taking over apps will remain a dream. If there are going to be some distruptive technologies, this may get achieved faster (for example, technologies like compression that ensure heavy-duty data need not get transferred, technologies like HTML5 that bring in native like experience on a browser etc)

There is another important factor: While ISPs (& their walled gardens) were rendered useless early on into the PC-Web world, telcos might not leave it out that easily: Walled gardens would continue to exist without the effect of it being a walled garden. For example, you are open to access any video service like YouTube (Net Neutrality achieved) but if you access MY video service (say TelcoTube), you get a discount on data charges & even faster speeds. This would mean that the third party better play nice to the telco to be the TelcoTube: Innovation might not necessarily happen in this situation.

Further, unlike PC-Apps, Mobile-Apps have a healthy backup through multiple (walled garden) stores like Apple. Which means, all the human energy that can be devoted to mobile Web will not be devoted and at least some will go into mobile Apps.

However, if pushed to take a position, we can safely say that it is only a question of when will mobile web take over than will it.

What about Enterprise Apps?

As stated earlier, all this discussion has been on consumer apps. Enterprise Apps have been and will be needing a lot of customization - be it in PC-App, PC-Web, Mobile-App or Mobile-Web. Almost always, the trends from consumer apps will flow into enterprise over time. Which is why we still have several PC apps being used in enterprises. They are still in "early web" days but will surely come out of it. However, as always, business models for enterprises would be different from consumer apps.

How is it all in Emerging Markets?

Will things be different in emerging markets? In terms of evolution of PC / Mobile Apps, I think emerging markets might not be different from developed markets: Not because there is no scope but because not much of technology innovation happens in emerging markets8. However, emerging markets may see some stages disappearing 'faster' than they did in the developed world (so much so, that it would appear that some stages were skipped). What would be completely different in emerging markets are the revenue models & monetization strategies. How exactly would that be can be a separate article in itself.

Conclusion

Like the answer to a true blue management case study, the conclusion is "it depends". :) However, if this article provided a new perspective of mobile apps in comparison with PC apps (by comparing their respective evolution), I would be happy.

____________________

1. No 'enterprise' software is considered here. A small note about them is added in a specific section

2. Further, 'technology platform' software are also not considered (like Apache) - Only 3rd party software running on top of a platform are

3. I say "would have been" in several places where it is only an informed guess I make. And also to avoid sounding BIG and OLD like a dinosaur

4. I use the word PC for all "personal" computers including the Mac

5. ABC Tech is a hypothetical term to refer to the hundreds of services companies that exist

6. The primary purpose of this article is about the first set of people: Software Product Companies. The other people have different motivations and might not really innovate in this space: They may at best follow these companies, is my theory

7. Java indeed attempted to be the write-once-run-anywhere thingie but did not really fly

8. Remember to slap me next time you talk to me ;-)

Two Events & Thoughts on LBS

2011-05-03T04:46:00.000-07:00

Update after a long break!! Tweets too have slowed down, will resume pace soon :)

After long, I attended a couple of events last week. One was the Navteq developers event on LBS (where I was part of the panel) and the other was Cellstrat event on Mobile Web & Apps. The events were so-so and did not offer great insights. Some keynotes ended up as sales pitches and panelists (on the topic of mobile apps innovation) said they are not app-users when asked to list their favorite apps. :-|

Anyways, here is what I spoke at the LBS panel. (Title was 'Future of Location Based Services: 3G & Beyond')

I briefly touched upon 3 ideas on location based services & presented some strawman thoughts. Not really presented answers or identified the silver bullet for location services - Well, if only I can :)

My first point

Is there something that can be called purely a "location based service" at all? In my opinion, the answer is NO. Location is an "enabler" for every service possible - some more than the other. Location enhances the user experience of the real "service" at work. Without location information, a solution can provide ads, route
information & so forth but it cannot provide a relevant ad, not a relevant route. The relevance is important to user experience. Now to something that usually does NOT need location: A music app. But location can still add value here - by identifying the preferences of the user when she is at office or is at home or a restuarant. Or a news app: Sorting the news that are more relevant at work or more relevant to home as the location is - Business news on top in office and entertainment news on top while at home. Even if an app is purely about something else and needs no location, but monetizes based on ads, location based ads could be more relevant and fetch more money.

My next point

Who is the customer for these services - the "location enabled services". Individuals need it for Social Networking, Local Search, Navigation etc. Government needs it for security reasons, emergency response & local surveys. Enterprises need it to present routes to their businesses, offer location based ads; Tracking employees/goods etc. A niche rural user may use it to check appropriate weather information, logistics etc. As a solution provider, it is essential to find who among these to target. And go deep in. At this moment, B2B based monetization seems lucrative in India:: I referred to a recent Interview in Pluggd.In by Latlong/Onze founders and also mentioned TaazzaGo & Vidteq (that offers video navigation to real estate companies). On the B2B front, I think only the surface has been scratched. Only the large truck / transport companies use GPS based tracking systems etc but the potential could be huge.

My last point

All important issue of privacy. There is going to be a huge intertia on this aspect. Initially, things could go well but the moment a user has a negative experience or hears about a negative experience of a friend, he is going to get paranoid - Who will get to know about my whereabouts, when will I be caught by surprise etc. Customer Education is essential.

More & more, there is a need for a gatekeeper. Nokia Siemens conducted a study in 2009 and 69% of the people prefer a 'single source' to trust all their location information with. When 100s of applications are going to vie for users' location information, who to trust and who not? The single source should then decide this for the user: Who needs the location info, for what, how accurate is the need for location and for how long. And then decide the access provisions. But it should be elegant to the user: Where only the individual is involved, for example, a POI search - it should be different, where social framework is involved, for example, a Friend Finder - it would be different. And there should be no annoying pop-ups. Should this be done by location providers (say the operators), the Government, the OS providers, some other trusted source like the certificate providers? Who should build that business & technical framework? I do not know.

Data Service Opportunity in India

2011-01-06T04:08:00.000-08:00

With lots of hype about 3G and the opportunities it brings with it for data services in India, here are some thoughts of mine around it. After all, this blog is a place where thoughts can be poured without much worry on the ramifications :-)

Crystal Gazing

First of all, let us indulge in some crystal gazing to see how the data services market might evolve over the next few years in India:

Data Usage

o 3G service uptake will be slow: Current GPRS users will slowly migrate into 3G but only slowly. Enterprises might take it up faster but that is only ‘relatively’ and that might just be restricted to the top & middle management.

o GPRS usage will increase: With reduced choking of networks and power users shifting to 3G, GPRS speeds would become tolerable and prices reasonable. That would mean more non-data users would join the data bandwagon through GPRS. 3G would still be at prohibitive prices for them. No-rental, pay-as-you-use models will thrive.

o 4G services will not compete with 3G: Leaving out the technicalities of what is 4G and which technology (WiMax or LTE) wins, the holders of BWA spectrum will begin their services soon. RIL will take the lead, obviously. They are planning to make ultra-cheap tablets already. Expect some smart surprises from them – they will once again try to control the eco-system and actually be fairly successful at that. A repeat of the R-World success is on the cards. However, they will pose no threat to the 3G holders. They will be a success with the tablet surfers and people would move out of fixed line broadband to these. Enterprises would lap it up. Already tablets are being lapped up by enterprises of all sizes and shape. 3G might be too slow for them – 4G would be the way to go! And yeah, broadband for rural India could be only through 4G but even in crystal-gazing, that area looks a bit weak.

SMS will continue to be the top data application:

It is told that the telegram triggered a revolution in communications post the pigeon days, to be followed by wired telephones and postal services which have long been replaced by wireless telephones, email and instant messages. The next set of services such as VoIP providers, Facebook & FourSquare are stepping into their toes. But, never underestimate the grand old data app, probably the biggest killer app on mobiles – the SMS. It will continue to play a major role but there will be a seamless transfer between SMS & GPRS/3G without much intervention by the user. What can be done through SMS, will be done through SMS only.

Handsets

Will evolve and fragmentation issue weakened: Handset capabilities will obviously improve but the fear of fragmentation will die. Well, fragmentation is here to stay but we would have learned to live with it. Google will control the number of Android versions released and will ensure the compatibility of apps across device vendors. Same will happen with other platforms, including bada and the numerous other platforms we can expect (including from the chipset vendors). A developer will not be left worrying about this. He would of course need to build it on multiple versions of a platform but need not worry about different handsets with the same version of the platform (like the J2ME days). Who knows, with Oracle in command, fragmentation issues in J2ME also might also get solved. All browsers would get standardized too, around HTML5, BONDI & WAC standards. In short, the fragmentation issue would get weakened and solvable. We may have 2 versions of Android (low end & high end), 2 versions of bada and so on. We would have having about 7-8 platforms to target but that would be clear

Tablets will be used in every enterprise:

Enterprises are going to take up tablets in large numbers and they need data services more than anything. Depending on the enterprise and the need, they are going to use 3G or 4G. However, this will not reduce the usage of smartphones – these will eat up into the data card segment (Enterprises giving a laptop and a Tata photon Plus) will start giving tablets with 3G capability. There will be a plethora of application development needs (enterprise mobility) around tablets from these enterprises

Users do not change:

The need & behavior of the users would remain same. There would be significant demand for local content. We will suddenly not see users behave the way the models in TVCs for mobile devices behave – they will behave as they always have. There will not be a great demand for BBC news in India all of a sudden. It will remain the Sun TV and ETVs of the world that would be in demand. ABC of VAS will continue to rule the roost. Indian language content will be consumed a lot (though user generated Indian language content is questionable). The tradeoff between ‘perceived value’ & ‘practical value’ would remain. While companies keep launching ‘mandi prices’ services, it is the ‘bollywood wallpapers’ that would continue to be consumed. While mandi prices may offer tangible benefits, it is the bollywood siren wallpaper that provides the (much needed!) emotional benefit to the user. When we talk of local, we cannot immediately jump into ‘location based’, it is more like “native” than local. A North Indian in Bangalore might not be interested in “local” news or entertainment but only in his “native” language. Same with a Bangalorean in North India.

Apps will be the interface to the user:

Applications would continue to be the way to reach out to a user. While the current hype around a few specific stores would die, reason would prevail and better ways of reaching out to users would arise – not always through an application store, but through various agents. When you buy a TV, the salesman in the CE Store would download the ‘remote’ app for your mobile. When you go to the dentist, she would download the app for notifying you about the medicines/next appointment etc. She may use BT/WAP Push or different mechanisms but it is SHE who will give you the app. You would not be going to an app store searching for it. Further, like the user has a “contact list” on the phone, there would also be an “app list”. The list will be added/removed as need arises/goes away. Not many might be interested in having a dentists’ app when not having a root-canal treatment, for example.

Opportunity around Mobile Money

will be huge but Operator Billing will remain the most convenient mechanism: Major infrastructure improvements are required for mass adoption of other payment mechanisms, involving several stakeholders – including the mobile operators. While that stuff happen in parallel, operator billing will remain the most convenient mechanism for users. However, billing share of more than 70% is not going to continue for long. Like the pay per second plans introduced by Docomo, someone is going to start off a “revenue share” war in the future and share is going to get much better for developers.

Competing Forces

The forces in India that compete to provide “services” over mobile phones using SMS/GPRS/3G are as follows. Some of them may actually not really be “forces”, in the literal sense!

The Operators

Needless to say, being first parties in the mobile services, it is in their best interest to offer services that use SMS/GPRS/3G (popularly called VAS). They have been successful in some areas like CRBT and miserable in several others. They have chosen to partner with select 3rd parties for long but recently, they are opening up and are offering a ‘store front’ to all developers, big & small. Airtel AppCentral, PocketApps by Aircel and the application stores of RCom, Vodafone etc are examples of this. However, no one has been successful as yet in offering a “developer program”. They have just been store fronts, operated by service providers. The operators’ role remains just in taking the revenue share.

Sure, operators have launched developer programs with a lot of fanfare but they have all been damp squibs, primarily because most of the work around it was “out sourced” – not just the implementations part but even the “strategy” part, if there has been one. The latest news about Airtel’s developer program too has the same issue – it is outsourced to Infosys. Similarly, RCom has been having “innovation labs” since long. There was a Dhirubhai Ambani Developer Programme, as early as 2002 that morphed into a 3G innovation lab recently. May be it had its successes when R-World was widely used but not anymore.

Apart from developer programs and applications stores, services from operators have only been partnerships with other providers and seldom their own. To say it again, the operators’ role remains just in taking the revenue share.

Handset Vendors

Already outwitted by Apple (in the developed world), handset makers started setting up their own developer programs and application stores (at least in the model of Apple) only in the last couple of years, worldwide. Quite a few of them have been replicated in India as well. Nokia’s Ovi Store (& Forum Nokia) is the prime example of this. While they have been successful in rolling out the service and having India as one of the top downloading nations, it is a pity that they still do not offer operator billing facility in India – and we know they might not be the party to be blamed for this.

Apart from the application store, Nokia has been trying to launch several services in India, including Life tools, Classifieds, Social Networks, Tej, CRM etc. None of them can be considered a success as yet. Though multiple reasons could be ascribed to it, the primary reason is that many of them do not have this option of micro transactions billing that only operators can provide. Multiple operator support for Life tools has been announced recently and we still need to see if that is going to make a difference.

Independent VAS Cos/ Managed Service Providers/Media Outlets

These are the likes of OnMobile, Netcore etc. While their primary revenues have been from offering services to enterprises and operators, they do have a few services launched on their own but none have become sustainable mainstream businesses. It is early days for services offered by companies like Rocketalk, Mig33 etc. While there seems to be good traction, how sustainable they are is yet to be seen. Once again, without the support of operators for billing micro-transactions, they are out of business. With the monster revenue shares taken by operators, how good their margins would be, is anybody’s guess. The media outlets (like the TV channels) have been offering services but mostly in collaboration with operators.

Some of these players like OnMobile have their own developer programs too but they have not been widely successful as yet, at least in B2C segment. Even Rocketalk is trying to be a ‘platform’ now, their success remains to be seen.

Web Services

We already wonder if many of our handset makers and operators have become the advertising agencies for Facebook. Such is the amount of ‘Facebook’ present in their ads and the impact it has created in India. Google has been around in India for longer and has been taking definite steps to get to the mobile phones. They even have a long code for SMS based search (since a short code is going to mean customers pay more and operators gain) and introduced voice search in Hyderabad. However, their services have not been run-away hits like they have been in the US/elsewhere. They had difficulty even with Google Checkout in India till recently. For Android phones (more specifically, the Android Marketplace) to gain foothold in India, what they need is billing support beyond credit cards and the only set of people that can provide is the operators.

Others

There are other players who offer services too but most of them have been in the non-profit sense – Either quasi-government bodies offering services or enterprises offering services to their customers (who will be charged by other methods).

What should these people do?

While every one of the players mentioned above can do something to improve their data service revenue, we will focus on ‘operator’ here! Some of what we discuss can be come by others fully/partially but if there is one player that “owns” the customer in a mobile based service game, it is the “operator” and no one else. That alone is the reason why others have not been able to make a mark, and may not be able to make a mark in the foreseeable future. Sure, handset vendors have the access to phone’s idle screen and the menu-screens like no one else, the web services like Facebook are extremely popular and the media outlets have the power to reach the customer through multiple mediums but no one can match an operator. All of them are dependent on operators to act as middlemen and provide channels for communication and billing. Only an SMS, phone call or email pushed to a smartphone can interrupt their users in real time, not any other means. Further, the operator has one control that no one else has and it is the power of handling micro transactions.

And we dismiss them as bit pipes. But is that all, that an operator possesses? Not really. It is unfortunate that the operators are not doing more. Let us look at what else can an operator do in a minute. Bit pipes to smart pipes, if you will.

The biggest benefit an operator is going to provide to developers is going to be around “network services” – something that any other party cannot offer. Network services, not only offer better functionality & stickiness to an application but also significant business opportunity to the developer. The following points should illustrate that better:

· Customer Data, a mine of wealth: When the customer data available with the operators is aggregated, analyzed and exposed, it provides a great raw material for application developers. For example, it would be of considerable interest to an enterprise CRM application to know that a customer is currently in a time zone that is not suitable for a phone call and intelligently decide to send a text message.

· Even a B2C application can perform a good amount of targeting, segmentation & profiling of the user based on network information. For example, travel profile (home worker, city-commuter, national traveler, international traveler etc); spending profile (based on their mobile usage bills and the payments made) could be of use to an m-commerce application in showcasing right kind of products.

· To the developers, usage analytics of the applications, providing information on the consumption pattern of the application/service would be very helpful. More importantly, information on other customers of similar profile would be a tremendous advantage for their marketing campaigns.

· While the capital barriers to develop applications are close to nil and any small company can build such an app, ‘information brokers’ who provide the needed raw material for successful usage of the application become the kings – The operators should play this role. They should enable an app to initiate an action at the right time, on the right medium and to the right person.

· Yes, I know you have been thinking of privacy concerns right through this, but have we not learnt from Google & Facebook that users are ready to shed privacy for better experience (with an option to go private anytime, of course)? Actually, certain privacy compliance techniques and tools can be provided to the developers directly to address this

· Remember, we have not even spoken the beaten to death story of “micro billing” though Network APIs here which by itself is a huge thing

App Distribution is another area that operators can get innovative. While a store front through an application store (ODCs, WAP, Web etc) is essential, it should be possible to get apps from any customer touch point, including the smallest of the retail outlets where the re-charge happens. App distribution should become as easy as (pirated) songs-distribution.

Revenue Sharing: While it might be the simplest of the measures to offer more share of the revenue to developers, this is something that would affect increase the top line and decrease the bottom line of an operator. But that said, status quo cannot prevail forever. Before a bloody war starts on this, a smart operator should start sharing revenue in intelligent ways, including sharing a portion of the data charges and not only for the content. And remember, content includes software.

Some other unexplored areas by operators are the ad aggregation, converged device management, subscription billing and store-in-store model for local handset vendors who have no app store of their own. These could yield rich dividends in data services, as well.

If the operators remain aloof to all these, we will end up in a case like “You might buy the Apple iDevice in 2015 and it’s a device that comes with content and connectivity bundled in. You don’t need to go and buy a separate service from somebody else; you just pay your service money to Apple. But, of course, Apple’s buying wholesale data from operators in vast quantities” (quote from a recent insight report in Vision Mobile blog) sooner or later, in India too!

And at that time, if you are the company who is going to be buying data from operators in bulk, Congratulations, you are my best friend! Do remember this article & hire me :-)

PS-1: This article references countless number of articles, insight reports and interviews by mobile industry thought leaders. Hence not many of the ideas can/should be considered completely original.

PS-2: This article intentionally avoids providing links to other articles and using illustrations for statistics, since they remove the focus of the reader, many-a-times. Do contact the author if you need them.

Top News from 2010 (that would affect 2011)

2010-12-30T06:31:00.000-08:00

Here is a motley collection of 2010 news

that have good potential to affect 2011

Mobile Money related regulations:

What an year 2010 has been on this front!! Mobile Banking, Mobile Trading, Prepaid Instruments, Mobile Linked No Frills Accounts, UID and what not. In my guess, this will be the most important thing for 2011. Get yourself ready, both as a customer and as an application developer/ solution provider.

4G & RIL:

While there is a lot of hype around 3G, the big brother (literally!) is cooking plans to serve 4G with his BWA spectrum. See him in action in 2011

Tablets:

While just a few tablets released in 2010, we may see a lot more in 2011 and in fact, a lot of tablet usage in enterprises. School Teachers/ Medical Representatives/ Insurance Agents etc etc. And this is closely related to above - Big Brother's plans.

Android on low end phones:

The game has just begun with Micromax. Next year, we should be seeing an avalanche. But do not rejoice. Most of those users would not download apps. By the way, who do you think would head the local vendors next year? In 2008, it was Spice. In 2009, Micromax and in 2010, it has been G-Five (not really local, a Chinese vendor). Who in 2011? And how low will the market share of the biggies go? Or are they set for a revival, helped by the Government's intervention with SAR & other radiation related regulations?

Nokia's services:

Nokia launched/expanded its services. Lifetools got the support of more operators, Tej started appearing in ads and in news about partnership with Sify, the CRM service for SMEs with Intuit and of course Music/Apps through Ovi. It is a pity that there is no operator billing for the Ovi Store. I strongly feel one of the parties will budge and there will be operator billing in 2011. Let us hope Nokia wins the negotiations :)

GPRS Penetration, Pay-per-site etc:

GPRS penetration really "took off" in 2010. From about 10m subscribers, the estimate is about 50m now, thanks to the no-rental GPRS plans. That IS SIGNIFICANT growth. But the future does not look rosy. Pay-per-site plans, Airtel's plan to increase the charges etc do not give much confidence. Hope usage does not fall in 2011. Are you thinking of 3G? Sorry, it will not reach mainstream in 2011.

MVNOs:

Future Group launched its T24 service and is set to make it pan-India in 2011. I expect a lot of us to have their connection, as our 4th SIM. :)

Security Issues:

Chinese infra vendors got into trouble. So did RIM. 3G Video calls are banned temporarily. No SMS during Ayodhya verdict. Prepaid bans in J&K. Our Government was really busy in 2010, we should say. We can expect Skype kind of people to run into trouble in 2011.

Operators:

The bleeding that began in 2009 thanks to Docomo kind of ended and operators are back to making minimal profits. Airtel expanded to Africa & Bangladesh, apart from Srilanka. And got some rebranding done. Voda was in news for a Rs 700 phone that I think sank without trace and then for tax related cases, that is all. RCom seemed to be in financial trouble. Several other operators were in lots of trouble around scams that you can read about elsewhere.

Gadget Sites:

Several popular tech blogs launched their 'gadget sites' - a sign of the growth of smartphones, tablets & other gadgets.

App Store launches:

Airtel, Aircel, Nokia, Blackberry, Samsung, Reliance, Vodafone, MTS, Idea etc etc etc launched/expanded their App Stores. Android marketplace got paid apps for India. Will we get carrier billing in 2011? Further, Quite a few "Indic" apps made news. Newshunt even went for a FM Radio Ad. And yeah, Aircel TV ad showed them and a lot more. Indian Apps "arrived" in 2010. Will they explode to a lot more, in 2011 or will our companies be content in being custom app development shops? Will "Enterprise App" become serious news in 2011?

Product Managers & UX Engineers:

A lot of noise was made about these professions, in 2010. As companies mature and become real 'product cos', these professions might be in demand in 2011.

Mobile marketing (aka spam SMS) regulations:

The deadline has been pushed to Feb 1 so it is technically next year's news. Anyways, companies like MyToday have raised genuine concerns. Hope they get addressed.

3G Spectrum:

Need I say more. You can read enough out there! Just search for it and any blog worth its hosting fees would have pages & pages written about it

MNP:

Oops, I said something that has potential to affect 2011, right? Take it from me, this will NOT affect :)

This is by no means exhaustive / accurate. I am writing the top of the mind items without any 'reference' - hence the lack of appropriate links :)

If I have missed any or if there is a factual mistake, accept my apologies & please do leave a comment.

Wish you a wonderful 2011 :)

No More News Digests

2010-12-30T06:28:00.000-08:00

As you would have realized, I have decided to stop making "weekly newsletters".

Instead, everything I want to share is available at twitter.com/mobilenewsindia :)

I promise not to spam you there - Just about 5-6 items every day! Do follow me there.

News updates till 20-Nov-2010

2010-11-20T08:34:00.001-08:00

The 2G spectrum allocation issue has had so many twists and turns, the minister has quit, PM is in trouble, leading businessmen and even journalists are supposed to have been involved. Great going. Now it looks like the new operators (who got it at low prices) will be asked to pay more now or quit the business. Wonder what will happen to the old operators who got more spectrum than they were entitled to. Here is a nice infographic (as they are called these days) about what went wrong with 6 operators.

Tata Indicom’s pilot (more of CSR) projects for fishermen and farmers has been successful and they are planning to expand it to commercial services. Hope this remains alive. We never get to hear about these kind of services after their launch stories. Except Nokia Life Tools, that has gone up to Nigeria recently. Vodafone is also launching its very successful M-Pesa in India, finally, in association with HDFC. The prepaid cash provider Oxigen plans to go rural too. Another money transfer facility called “Fino” is making news too recently.

In the operator scene, Airtel has been in news big time with their re-branding exercises (which seem to have some teething issues) and Sunil Mittal has told that 3G services would be affordable. Thank you, Sir. Waiting for that. Please make it lesser than Docomo too. And with that, if femtocell also becomes available, it would be wonderful. Meanwhile, Blyk (that was supposed to be entering the Indian market for a long time now) has launched its services through Aircel, where one can get free recharges for putting up with advertisements. Wonder if it is an exclusive thing with Aircel or if Blyk would be available with other operators too soon.

Not much big bang news happening on the handset front, apart from Sharp’s entry, if that can be considered one. LG (whose share worldwide has been slipping like crazy) have announced that they will altogether exit the feature phone segment. Victory for the desi cos, I would say (with Micromax launching online store & all). How successful can LG be in smartphones is a different question altogether. May be they will end up selling only $10000 phones in India then And yeah, the Jesus phone may finally come to India this month-end. Fanboys rejoice.

Misc TidBits

How to use MNP service – a guide
Nokia is getting 3 million app downloads a day. I hope it is “app” alone because they used to report content also before. A “torch” app made by CellApp is on top in India. (1100 or Smartphone, India needs a torch, haha) [Update: It is including content. Refer: http://tinyurl.com/3yorokq]
The ping-pong between Indian Government & RIM continues – with both sides claiming different things after meetings . Looks like Nokia & CISCO are also going to be in trouble soon. In another security related measure, encrypted SIM cards are being planned too.
Soon, it may be enough if we show only an SMS for our train tickets. I was planning to buy a printer at home – the only requirement was to print train tickets. May be I should cancel that
KBC is available on mobile phone now. Time to become virtual crorepati
Mobile trading seems to be picking up slowly. Birla Sun Life & Indiabulls launch mobile app. NSE has made a generic app for all its brokers too. Their downloads seem good too though many people seem to be only interested in information access.
Some music related stories: Uninor launches music store, Nokia launches shorties and it is offering new Kannada songs before movie releases. Good to see some localization around its services
A Chennai based company has launched celeb management via mobiles. Namitha happens to be their first celebrity. Ha!
CDMA seems to be doing good in the data card segment – 0.25 million collections in a month is not bad. No?

News from the second half of October

2010-11-01T06:38:00.001-07:00

Services

The next few months would be filled with news about the 3G launches of different vendors. Tata DoCoMo obviously leads the way – they would begin in just a few days from now. Apart from trying to buy out other operators in India, they also wish to establish a 3G app development center in India. There were talks about they establishing such centers even an year back, guess nothing of that sort worked out. Oh yeah, Vodafone also has plans to establish an R&D Center. Airtel will bring 3G only by end of the year. Reliance by end of the year too. Qualcomm, which had won BWA license and claimed grand plans for India, wants to sell it now. Airtel & Aircel are eyeing it.

There seems to be a CUG being created for all Gujarat Government employees – pretty interesting project. It would be good if all their numbers are published in a directory also so that any citizen can reach them when they want.

Opera browser is being promoted through MTS’ My MTS Zone, it seems. Wonder how? Do they bundle the Opera installable on the SIM? India is indeed an important market for Opera – it is 3rd in their user base and it says its users pay about Rs 42 over data plans every month.

Push Email stories: RIM has been given time till January to conform to “Indian Security Standards” and operators claim they are ready with their solution and RIM claims it will not compromise on their security architecture for this. Let us hope! Meanwhile, there is a Bharat Berry that has come up using this as an opportunity. Competition to Blackberry? May be not. Competition to BlackMail, I guess yes. And yeah, Rediff has also launched a push email solution for its (Rediffmail) users. Wonder they have a partnership with MTNL alone, though.

Mobile Money Stories: Infosys launches a mobile banking solution – the news byte is not clear if they are meant for banks or directly to consumers. I assume it is for the banks. SBI continues its partnerships with local organizations for financial inclusion – after Eko, it is AISECT in Madhya Pradesh. SBI has also bought 20% stake in “A Little World”, a specialize in financial inclusion through NFC devices. Union Bank is trying to establish cashless campuses, again in MP. Either MP is doing something progressively on this or some PR Machinery is at work . With banks not doing much about mobile banking (& only some sporadic services being launched), other players seem to be filling the gap – Wall Street Finance has applied for a license. An established prepaid player, Oxigen brings in international technology through Luup to power its business in India. Meanwhile, TRAI has sought telcos’ opinion on mobile banking.

The big old joke of MNP still plays around – It was told to be available in 11 circles from early November and has now been pushed to 25th November. The latest news says consumers can ‘apply from 25th’ – does it mean it will be done or just application accepted. While MNP itself is so delayed, it seems TRAI will bring in regulation to stop unsolicited calls by November 15. HaHaHa. Another news on the regulation front – There seems to be plans afoot to have a totally new regulator just to oversee the spectrum allocation business.

Rocketalk seems to have beat FB, Twitter and Orkut in terms of access from mobile phones! Way to go.

Devices

LG has launched 6 new CDMA models. With rumors about CDMA iPhone being available for Reliance & Tata, CDMA seems to be keeping itself relevant in India. Very surprising this is, considering that GSM has become the clear winner.

Micromax continues to surprise me. Proving that they are no one-model wonders, they are continuously trying to differentiate. Latest is their tie up with Israeli company “Modu” to bring in their smallest touchscreen phones to India. Another Indian vendor Spice has launched India first 3D phone. While such positive news keep coming, negative ones about the Indian vendors have also started coming – like the one about Wynn & Lemon.

Misc

Subscriber statistics for Sep can be seen here. About 12 million connections added. If the new verification norms are to be seriously implemented, we may be adding only about a million connections a month, if at all :) We hope to see realistic numbers from next month, with the operators having been told to report only “active subscriber” numbers from now. Another pilot project to find this out is also underway.

Further, do you know that our text messages might get stored in the operators’ servers for 6 months?

News Digest, till 16-October-2010

2010-10-16T06:57:00.001-07:00

After the previous post (which was after more than 2 months of the one before that), I thought I should post one every week regularly. But when I began last week, I realized that there was not much I had “starred” in Google Reader. It should be one of these: (1) I have reduced the amount of reading I do (2) News that seem important to me have gone down – could also mean I have matured enough to know exactly what is important (3) I finally realized that this blog is a ghost town with exactly 0 readers* (4) I am finally doing enough work. You decide! On to this week,

Services

One more banking related service launches: If Western Union customers (recipients) in India have an SBI bank account, they can easily transfer money to the bank account. Umm, Okay! But why none of these services are spoken about after their launch? Wonder what is seriously lacking in the mobile money service in India – even the regulatory hurdles seem to have gotten cleared now well enough! I have high hopes on Airtel with the prepaid cash license they have received. Let us see!
Blackberry issue continues! As usual there are different reports – some talk about extension till 31-Dec while some talk about 31-Jan. Canada’s Government also is trying to talk to the Indian Government to resolve this. And our Government has asked for a “firm commitment” from RIM, haha.
Nazara Mobile claims to have captured 45% of the gaming market in India. They claim to be receiving 4 lakh page views per day on their mobile portal. Hmm, I still feel it is their operator tie-ups that will be bringing in money. Here is a related news: Future Group may acquire 40% stake in ACK.
There seems to be a competition on ‘App for the Women in Developing countries’ – I did not see it being promoted much by the Indian blogs or even by the usually alert MoMo community. Wonder why!
The biggest cricket game since Book Cricket has been launched – Audio cricket, press 8 for a straight drive, 3 for a hook etc Interesting! However, I take strong objection to this Chennai Super Annas thing. When will we have the marketers understand South Indians better than going by the simple stereotyping with things like Annas! Grr. Talking of cricket, people have started talking of World Cup 2011 already. Reliance is going to live stream it.

Misc

Detailed broadband & wireless subscriber statistics for the month of August is available here. Broadband seems to have reached the 10 million mark. Unrelated to this, I have a concern. Why do we report things in millions & billions while most of our folks understand only lakhs & crores? Does it not make sense to call it as 1 crore broadband connections? I was glad to see a Nokia ad recently that said 40 lakh songs were available in Ovi Music Store – They used to say 4 million earlier (during the Indian Idol time – where poor participants were made to say that often) but now better sense seems to have prevailed.
A Raja’s woes seem to be continuing with most people (wow, even the PMO) coming in to question the 2G spectrum allocation & even canceling some licenses but the CBI seems to be protecting him so far. However, he is continuing on with his mission of whatever, the next target seems to be the USO fund. OMG!

Devices

As if there was not enough competition for the Nokias of the world, Bharti group is getting into handset business. It is not getting into the ultra low cost segment, as thought before. It has directly launched a 3G phone, at a low cost of course! Nokia’s MD says majority of the new device makers would be a ‘passing phenomenon’ – Sir, the only concern for Nokia should be, how long is this phenomenon going to last – Even big brands like Swaroski, MTV or recently Nat Geo do not seem to have any concern associating with them. Hope this passing phenomenon is not a case of “we are all dead in the long term”. His answer to the question on ‘manufacturing unit’ is interesting, it sounds to be filled with contempt! Have a look. Like I had mentioned last time, MVL’s recruitment ad was full of salesmen & nothing more!
We only think of mobile phone sales when it comes to the telecom growth in India! The complementary products, like memory cards too seem to be growing great, particularly in rural segment. Interesting!!
CDMA version of iPhone might come to India, it seems. What a joke! I think the fanboys would have anyways bought an iPhone already, even the CDMA guys would have changed their numbers for this. And now, how many existing CDMA users would buy this now? I guess too few number.

Operators

Travelers rejoice. Roaming prices may fall, with TRAI thinking about reworking on the circles in India. Okay, if they have started discussions now, by 2013, it should get operational. TRAI seems to be on a larger consultation exercise too – with fair usage policy & so on.
Idea has launched a ‘helpline’ to help people speak in local language, apparently. My first reaction is to dismiss it as a gimmick to accompany its latest TV ad. However, if implemented well (& if it is going to be cheap), it should be useful. I am afraid they will be charging 6 Rupees per minute or so.
Docomo seems to have taken the lead in 3G services – They are launching by this Diwali. Wish they bring in all their Japanese concepts like imode here! And if rumor mills are to be believed, Vodafone is going to be having its data center development out of India, for all of emerging markets.

* There are not 0 readers really. There are some bots which keep copying the data & posting on their own sites. I am happy, at least some bots read this, no?

Noteworthy news from the last couple of months

2010-10-03T04:44:00.001-07:00

It has been REALLY long since I posted a newsletter here! Blame it on the conked out motherboard of the laptop at home. Will catch up here with all of them, in brief bullets of course.

Handsets

Motorola seems to be getting back to business in India, with dual SIM phones, preloading maps on phones etc
Nokia finally launched its dual SIM phones in India but CDMA does not interest them much still
There is no way one can track all the myriad handsets that get launched in India these days but you cannot ignore this – Docomo launching an Alcatel handset with Yahoo services preloaded – let us see how they sell. BTW, I hope it is something more than, press a specific Yahoo button and that opens the browser to open m.yahoo.com
Another significant entry into handset business is that of Bharti Airtel.
Desi vendors are indeed growing from strength to strength, as the recent IDC report shows (see Misc section). They offer a lot of quick innovation, not possible in established cos – like incorporating Rupee symbol, Hindi QWERTY, SIM change by rotation etc. In spite of all their claims about innovation, design, R&D etc, I wonder what kind of engineering resources they have. A recent recruitment ad by MVL was telling: It was only about sales, logistics etc. No engineering resources needed at all. There was one Product Manager opening but even that did not need engineering degree. (But I got to appreciate their customer service over email a lot – A mail from me asking details about their push email service got answered very convincingly)

Services

Nokia’s TEJ finally seems to be going mainstream – CavinKare has adopted it. This comes, soon after Nokia & Intuit typing up to offer mobile marketing services for SMEs.
Nokia’s Life Tools is also going strength to strength – After Airtel, Docomo & Reliance offering billing for those services, IGNOU is offering an “English certificate program” through NLT. BTW, has it started making money for Nokia yet? That is going be a great day for services in India. Speaking of IGNOU, they are told to be offering eBook readers to their students. Wonder what kind of eBooks they would be? Kindle? Or desi ones like Pi, Wink etc? On the m-learning topic, another noteworthy news is Ipomo campus launching in Bangalore in tie-up with a few colleges.
In spite of all these service launches & operator tie-ups, none of Indian operators figure in the list of 91 operators with whom Nokia would have billing for Ovi.
I have been making fun of BlacMail but they are going places – After BSNL tie-up, LG is preloading them on their models. On the subject of preloading, Mig33 seems to be making serious overtures to operators & handset makers, offering them revenue share & stuff
Telemedicine seems to be the latest fad – After BPL/Loop tying up with Healthcaremagic, it is Aircel’s turn to tie up with Apollo
Mobile Trading services have begun, first launched by BSE and immediately after by NSE
Real Mobile commerce services are becoming a reality: After mobile trading, pre-paid cards have also become completely legal – Itzcash has received authorization from RBI, so has Bharti Airtel. The complete list of digital payment providers can be found here.
After a reply-all service with an Indian operator (Idea?), SMSGupShup launches the same with a Philippines operator too. Guess it is one of the few companies to have realized the value of SMS. While there has been a lot of noise about bulk-SMS being bad blah blah, Bharti exiting the business etc, the recent ban of bulk SMS due to the Ayodhya verdict did shake up people – not just the bulk SMS providers but also people who could not receive alerts from banks! With companies like Blyk establishing in India, this area would only get better & bigger

Apps

Indian developers seem to be the toast of the world. They won several awards at Nokia Dev Summit in London. In Vision Mobile’s recent ‘Dev Economics’ report, more than 50% of responses are from Indian devs. But my friends, where are you all? And why are you not making many India-centric apps?
I thought the Airtel AppCentral & other new services from Airtel are all incubated in the Innovation Fund they launched sometime back. Guess I was wrong. The Fund is being shut down. Next to launch an incubation fund is Qualcomm. And yeah, one more called PollenEight.
After Airtel, Aircel is the only operator to have launched a serious App Store, with TV ads, every day ad in ToI (app of the day) and what not. Virgin Mobile is told to have tied up with GetJar, even Reliance did that but I wonder why they are not promoting it yet.

Regulation

The RIM-DoT issue seems to be getting stuck again. After a long drawn negotiation, it seemed they agreed upon something but latest, DoT has rejected RIM’s decoding solution. Media reports have been really confusing on this. Anyways, the last word is not out. So let us wait. But it was funny to see people like Blacmail immediately say they will offer full access to the Government, Nokia setting up a server etc

Operators

Reliance claimed to have unveiled 3G already to the public but I see no ads yet, probably they are on their way soon. Other biggies, Airtel, Voda & Idea seem to be collaborating to achieve pan-India 3G services since no one has spectrum for all circles. Airtel plans to launch only by December.

Miscellaneous

IDC circulated a report showing Nokia’s MS to be just about 35%, prompting Nokia to take a serious exception to that
Subscriber addition statistics for August here: New operators have clearly lost pace and it is back to Airtels topping the additions now. In fact, Telenor was almost about to pull out of India. However, Docomo keeps introducing new policies – like ‘pay per site’, ‘air time roll over’, a welcome thing for post paid subscribers who have been all but forgotten of late
Read this report to get a different sense of the subscribers in India – it claims there are only about 300 million subscribers now!
Nokia has introduced a browser, specifically for S40 users that works in tandem with a server, like Opera Mini etc. Will this affect the 3rd party browsers? Not much promotion by Nokia is seen, though.

News Bytes for the week ending 01-Aug-10

2010-08-01T03:26:00.001-07:00

Qualcomm’s plan for LTE roll out – Qualcomm seems to have laid out detailed plans for rolling out services with the spectrum it won in BWA auctions. It is not in a hurry to go to bed with the telcos as yet, in Phase-1, it is planning to just set up ‘partnerships’ with infra cos in different regions of the country. To start with, it has sold stake to GHC & Tulip, while retaining 74% to itself, thus conforming to the FDI laws. Meanwhile, RIL, the other giant with BWA spectrum is also planning to rope in a lot of strategic partners to help its ambitious goal of coming back to the telecom industry & succeeding again. Telecom Yatra has some suggestions for them here. All this could be very significant, considering that there is a huge hunger for high speed data services in this country – F&S predicts 20% of subscribers in metro would switch to 3G within one year of launch.

Nokia’s 0% EMI schemes – Nokia has rolled out 0% interest EMI schemes in 8 cities – It should rather spend more energies on selling such schemes to rural India through their partnership with SKS Microfinance, who incidentally have come up with an IPO recently, that seems to have been received well.

Blackberry’s woes continue – The Government is in no mood to relent with RIM this time (or so it sounds) – They are being urged to bring their servers to India or shut shop. Given that RIM does it in other countries (recently they have been in trouble in UAE too), with a million+ customer base, guess India deserves too, me thinks. Meanwhile, Nokia has also been notified about this issue in their Nokia Messaging solution, but the goals of IB & DoT seem to be different in this.

Miscellaneous

You may soon be able to speak on the phone ‘right after the flight lands’ and need not wait for the doors to open – but I guess a lot of people already do this, the noise of blackberries all around right after landing is for everyone to see (hear).
McAfee takes over TenCube for their ‘Wave Secure’ solution – does this mean McAfee is digging deeper into the mobile security segment? And I do not understand why One97 bought stake in TenCube just to sell it off in a few months. There are other companies like Kaspersky too that are active in this space in India.
In what could be a cruel joke to you if you suffer from frequent tele-marketing calls, the Government has imposed a fine to all operators and in total, is collecting a princely sum of Rs. 49,000 BTW, if you ever wondered how your mobile number reached someone, here is the modus operandi
Security concerns of the Government is going to hit the operators hard – they have been asked to be responsible for the security restrictions & are free to include Chinese vendors too – but they need to follow stringent guidelines by the Government and also share source code. Equipment vendors are already seen crying foul.
In what could be a blow to immediate traction for mobile-banking in rural areas, the RBI has shot down a request to relax the rule that business correspondents should live within 30 Kms radius of a bank branch. I actually wonder why this news did not get as much importance in the active mobile blogs!
mBillionth award winners – Many of these might never really go ‘mainstream’ – but for ‘inspiration’ on what is possible, do read the list

News Bytes for 25-Jul-2010

2010-07-25T08:09:00.001-07:00

Operator Tussle – We would usually see CDMA & GSM operators fighting against each other, but right now we are seeing a case of GSM operators fighting against other GSM operators – COAI is kind of split – Tatas against the older operators. Further, none of the new operators seem to be doing all that well, while the overall subscriber additions even in June has been very healthy. It might be time for consolidation or going the MVNO way. Virgin Mobile seems to be doing OK, or at least trying to getting a lot of brands on board.

The costly third generation – Sunil Mittal says 3G will not come cheap for city-dwellers. Will it take the Ambanis to do something on this, to reduce the 3G rates? Or will newer players like Tata DoCoMo do something. After all, post the per second billing, they have also introduced “free calls” for data users.

Security Conundrum – There was a lot of brouhaha a couple of weeks back on RIM etc that they should resolve the issue within a week etc, but the issue seems to be died down again, RIM says they are waiting for DoT to call them. Meanwhile the ‘block list’ of telecom equipment seems to be hitting the CDMA operators hard. It really does not help the Chinese that Motorola has accused Huawei of stealing stuff, though it is being denied.

Content Craze – The report from Informate shows that there are not enough desi destinations for content – While Ovi tops the list (obviously due to the market share of Nokia), Getjar, Brothersoft, Songs.pk are the other top destinations! Am surprised to see no operator store there.

Handset News – A law is being proposed to boost mobile manufacturing in India, that may spell trouble for desi makers. They are expanding to other countries (like Micromax in SL & Bangladesh), even newer people like Moser Baer (with Mindtree) are entering the fray, and are coming up with what all concepts – “Alpha keypad” phones, it seems!! Well, on second thoughts, it seems alpha keypad is not a bad idea to someone not used to PC keyboards. Talking of PC, yeah, PC makers like Dell are planning to make it big in India too. The old fox, Motorola has launched 5 low end models but given the crowd there now, they may sink without a trace. Leaving all these aside, it seems ‘luxury phones’ are also doing well in India – no doubt, it is told that there is a market for ‘every possible segment’ in India.

VAS News – After CRBTs, voice based social networks seem to be the next big thing for operators (like every other service launched ), with Bubble Motion even getting profiled in Techcrunch. Cross-operator services are also emerging, like Indiatimes HiBuddy. Well, in my opinion, instead of listening to celebrities, there are a lot more sensible ways of using voice – like the CGNet Swara – a citizen journalism concept in Chandigarh. But then, do you have money to be made there? Next in line is ‘mobile TV’ – once 3G is in place, we may see a lot of them coming out – we already see news about Zee collaborating with Geodesic (whose Mundu TV is getting famous) and ‘made for mobile’ bollywood movies.

Applications – The ‘mobile only social network’ Mig33 seems to be growing from strength to strength in India. They just partnered with Lemon for pre-embedding and are claiming ARPU of 1 USD per month from Indian users. Well, when did all companies start talking in ARPU terms

Nokia’s desperate attempts – With Ovi Store, music store etc not picking up as much as they would have wanted (probably), Nokia is trying to sell them through ‘retail outlets’ – not a bad idea, I would say, if executed well. At least certain content will get sold once – when the customer buys it. And some good news finally for Life Tools – Tata Docomo have also agreed to partner – for a really long time, it was only Idea.

News Bytes for 11-Jul-2010

2010-07-11T18:43:00.001-07:00

3G services are supposed to reach 250,000 villages by 2012. MTNL & BSNL are slowly improving their services – Dialogic will provide “video services” to MTNL. Meanwhile BWA spectrum have been allocated and one of the winners of BWA auction, is offering its spectrum for rev-share to 3G winners.
At the other end of the spectrum, one is glad to see specific services & solutions being developed for people with no Internet access – like the one from HP which lets companies develop applications for use through SMS. What makes it even more better is that it is developed by the Indian R&D.

Applications & Services

NGPay, the “mall on mobile” is launching a Hindi version – With higher GPRS growth off late, hope they reach a significant section of the country
NDTV’s iPhone application is supposed to the most popular one in India and a few other countries too
Affle, who made the SMS 2.0 (heavily promoted by Airtel a couple of years back) are coming up with 2 more apps – one based on SMS and one on gaming.
Nokia is launching an application, Mobile Communities, which, IF executed well (did you see the big if) could help in converting the default social network (the phonebook) into much more.
Okay, I have been making fun on Blacmail here for a while but it looks like they are going places – now bundled with operators & all.

Some news on Mobile Finance

Mobile financial services are the safest in India, apparently – because no such services exist hahaha – just kidding, it is because of RBI’s stringent guidelines and the fact that any m-commerce provider should tie up with banks.

Indian handset vendors are going the extra length – for battery backup. Zen now offers “72 days” – Will we soon have “lifetime offer” With over 85 handset vendors in India now (heard so), the unauthorized service centers are only bound to grow.
TRAI’s “Do call registry” may become a non-starter since the spammers are bringing on an emotional angle to it – that of the employment of people in the industry

News Bytes (5-Jul-10)

2010-07-05T05:44:00.001-07:00

Growth of the Mobile Internet in India is bound to get better – Operators are continuously introducing free packs for social network access. Airtel offers free facebook access for 2 months. Just as I write that, I see that DoCoMo has taken away a lot of their plans – including free social network access. Hmm.

Found a nice website for phone search. Hope they continue this way without adding a lot of clutter through ads & stuff. And here is a new “review” site for India – Revu – modeled around Foursquare, apparently.

Indian Government is back with its security concerns – Blackberry, Skype, Gmail – all of them are in trouble this time. About an year back, it was only RIM but even that was put into backburner after a few weeks. This time, RIM has been given only 2 weeks. Juniper Networks seems to be one company that may be the Government’s friend now – it is offering tools to track & stop malware getting into the telcom networks. After Chinese networks, Israeli companies are also being suspected. Meanwhile, Tata Tele says 3G spectrum allocation should be stopped till these issues are resolved.

Blyk, the erstwhile ad-based MVNO in the UK and now a messaging company, have started operations in India. Hope to see innovative ad-based VAS from them. Not just them, even Facebook is hiring, if you are keen

People may crow as much as they want about how India is crazy about football also – but statistics that matter to this blog – the mobile access rate proves it is not. It is nowhere near the IPL frenzy.

Low end handset space indeed gets crowded – The Oscars, Lemons and everyone are all up in the arms. Let us see how many of them actually stand the test of time. Everyone want to be the “Nano of handset market”. Just getting the handset assembled from China may just not be it in terms of handsets, right? People like Lemon are even talking about “App Stores” and even Push Email. And yeah, they have international plans too. Nokia, for its part, is introducing EMI schemes, throwing money into SMS schemes like WeMeet and launching music stores (with advertisements in Indian Idol), but that may not really be enough. At the other end of the segment, people are waiting for their dope to arrive to achieve self-actualization – yeah I mean the iPhone4.

Nokia launched a bicycle charger for the handsets – now there is a charger based on “heat on the feet”. Are we supposed to keep the mobile under the shoes? Or may be just the battery? While that was news on the feet, there is something right up to the head – there is a phone app to determine eyeglass prescription.

Latest statistics on mobile subscriber & broadband additions available here. CDMA still seems to be seeing stable growth – Out of 16m connections in total, about 5m are in CDMA. On the pathetic state of broadband, here is a passionate article from the Rediff CEO.

I had promised not to talk much about mobile number portability here – but here is a news worth highlighting – it got postponed again to October 31.

MyToday SMS, one of my favorite services has gone paid. One hopes this keeps operators happy, who were anyways against the free concept.

MTN has no operations in India but they are always in news – with Airtel trying to acquire them, then Reliance trying to do the same and latest, they trying to purchase Reliance and then Loop.

Human operated “voice search” seems to be the flavor off late. We have had MapMyIndia’s driving directions service and then AskBirbal, a Q&A service in quick succession.

Reading Bytes for 27-June-10

2010-06-27T02:06:00.001-07:00

Airtel AppCentral has completed 4 months of existence – They claim to have 71000 applications and have clocked 3.5 million downloads already. I would take the 71000 number with a pinch of salt – Several applications seem to be counted more than once, if they occur in more than one category. Nevertheless, this proves that the AppStore opportunity for mid end phones is a reality and should be taken seriously. No doubt, several white-labeled providers (latest one being CanvasM) emerge, special ad-networks for Java apps (like VServ) also are coming up and Java Verified is still going strong.

Talk of mobile adverts, some more news here: NAVTEQ, popularly associated with maps alone, is going big in multiple services, including mobile advertisements. SMSGupShup continues to be in the news as “India’s Twitter” – now with claim of having about 150 advertisers including several leading brands. And SMSGupShup is utilizing its bulk SMS capabilities with other services too – like “Reply All” service from Loop Telecom.

Now that the auctions are over, it is time to allocate spectrum – BWA spectrum would be available immediately while 3G will come only in September.

Rural services are back in the news – with IMIMobile’s CellShakthi – Sensibly, they have taken the IVR route alone with no SMS business. Is IMI Mobile trying to become a B2C co with this?

A no-brainer service in pre-paid, to have “reserve minutes” in case of emergencies, has finally been launched – by Idea. Hope others also follow soon. And yeah, there should be no “special voucher” etc, should be available for all subscribers.

“Radio” based services (serving FM radio content through mobile) seem to be the flavor of the season – Latest in the offing is BIG Digitial’s “on demand content” service.

Some statistical confirmation on what is already believed widely – Indian brands are eating up into Nokia’s share. Nokia seems to have lost almost 12% in one year. With brands like Infibeam going strength to strength, it is unlikely to stop in the future too. Indian brands move into “services” also now – MVL is launching Push Email service – it is not clear how they are achieving this.

Weekend News Bytes [20-June-10]

2010-06-20T00:28:00.001-07:00

Operators

The newest entrant amongst the operators, Future Group, begins operations in style – by being completely free. It is just that you need to buy stuff from their retail outlets :) It is coming in 140 cities soon,

Poor Arun Sarin, after a good stint at Vodafone worldwide, he may take over the top job at BSNL. Can he do wonders and revive it - I am skeptical.

Subscriber addition statistics for May can be seen here. Not many surprises, except probably Videocon’s dramatic entry.

Airtel has completed its Zain acquisition and is now officially a major player in Africa – They have hired Essar CEO to head the African operations.

The ADAG group tried to sail on several boats at the same time and seem to have developed trouble – They are selling stake in their tower business and their mobile operations are being eyed by Etisalat. Meanwhile, the older Ambani seems to be going strong and making a re-entry into telecom business.

3G & BWA news: BSNL & MTNL may not be able to pay up for the 3G spectrum – They anyways know the real worth of 3G after operating 3G for more than a year now :) The final results of BWA auction is available here. As with 3G auctions, there are no pan-India operators, some biggies actually drew a blank. The one with maximum has been taken over by Mukesh Ambani, and that seems to be welcome by the market players. These auctions are seen as the end of road for WiMax in India. Qualcomm would be partnering with Airtel to launch LTE.

Consolidation amongst the operators continues – Maverick investor Siva wants stake in Loop and Korea’s SK Telecom wants stake in Videocon. It is interesting to see DoCoMos and SK Telecoms of the world taking interest in India – let us hope they will be as successful as they were in Japan & Korea and bring in as many advanced services.

Services

Nokia’s continues its services push – Even the services originally meant for high end phones are moving to the low end – like Push Email. With Blackberry’s focus too turning away from corporate to many other segments, Nokia HAS to do these. Their “Ovi Mail”, in spite all the huge registrations may really not be that big a hit. Meanwhile, the “Email to SMS” services like Jaamun continue to make news, even Microsoft is doing it for Hotmail.

Continuing on the Nokia story, the “emerging market” services too are expanding – The money service, that was available only in Pune has been extended to Chandigarh too.

“R-Fi” is a service for parents to track their school going kids. Well, it is just about the time when they enter & exit school. Please provide this to teachers first in Government schools!

Mobile Internet started gaining traction with the introduction of low-priced packs last year. It is all set to take off now – with introduction of unlimited plans – Reliance & Videocon have already begun. I am very glad! With 3G too coming in soon (Aircel says within 6 months), the era of mobile Internet in India has begun.

I am not too big a fan of NFC based use cases (usually payment) that assume NFC capable phones being available with everyone – I believe in the NFC enabled SIMs/memory cards though. However, if this news comes true, most phones may have NFC in a couple of years.

I am very happy for InMobi – I have had discussions with them in 2008 and found them to be very sensible and not any “hyped up” entrepreneurs. They have launched in the US and with the tussle between Apple & Google, they may see early success there too. They have also launched a developer fund using which they share 100% revenue with developers. Great!

Indians continue to be one of the top downloaders for the Ovi Store.

A new location platform has been launched – Loc8 – The idea seems very good, we will have to wait to see the execution and the results.

Handsets

The entry of new players in the crowded handset market in India continues – Infibeam too has jumped in now. How has the sales of Pi been, by the way? Who is going to be their brand ambassador for this? Latest celebrity to endorse a handset is the Big B – for Zen. With Aamir for Samsung, Shahrukh/Sharman for Nokia, Akshay for Micromax, Kapil Dev for Olive, Dhoni for Maxx, Yuvraj for Lava (or some such brand), not too many celebrities are left. We may have more handset brands than celebrities. :)

Local handset vendors have certainly risen up the ranks and are giving tough times to the global players – One company that has helped them achieve this is Mediatek, that provides chipsets at a low price – They recently did a market research which (predictably) says that Indians still prefer low cost phones. The comments in that article made interesting reading – how there are our own “fan boys” for Nokia & Samsung! :) That reminds me of an interesting discussion that happened on the MoMo-Bangalore group. Cannot link it here – you would need to register at MoMoB and check. Meanwhile, at the other end of the market, Airtel & Vodafone are bringing iPhone 4 to India by July. Will they really be able to bring it that soon?

Nibbles for the day [06-June-10]

2010-06-06T03:12:00.001-07:00

India News

Reliance, one of the leading operators in India has gotten into trouble and is either selling stake to Etisalat or is merging with MTN. Etisalat seems to be the fore-runner, MTN has anyways been denying that it is interested. Has consolidation begun? Or is it just some old knots getting untangled, as this article claims? Meanwhile, the elder brother, who originally started the RCom business seems to be starting off again too!
Latest speculation of “data users” in India is at 149 million – Operator-wise details available here. Further, for more detailed statistics on mobile sub additions for April, broadband additions etc, head over here
After a long time, Nokia has been in news in India for very meaningful reasons – Launch of dual-SIM phones and also a bi-cycle charger, that may be a hit in the hinterland. Will it be a repeat of 1100 magic? Are rural users still considering Nokia to be an aspirational brand or have they long converted to the new vendors that provide more features is yet to be seen. One more Nokia news – N900 is coming to India. Sure, Nokia still rules the complete spectrum of devices! But one Mr. Balmer seems to be thinking that India is only about low-cost phones. Why not provide a lighter/cheaper version of Windows Phone 7 for us, Sir?
Flip-flop on security continues – Chinese vendors are now allowed provided they have some “western” certifications. Satellite phone services also come into the security net now
Eko, the ambitious mobile financial service provider that already has partnered with SBI has claimed to have forged a partnership with Bharti AXA insurance also. Meanwhile, India’s Paymate launches in Srilanka too. As someone commented in the recent GSMA Money Forum, it is time for all such efforts/projects to be consolidated to see meaningful action in the mobile payments space.
The department of telecommunications is planning on how to go about the next 5 years (ahem) and more importantly, are seeing how to get out of TRAI’s clutches :)
Our own JUSTDIAL seems to have had a successful launch in the US. Happy to know that one of the Indian companies/ideas is seeing success elsewhere :)
Several news on “services” :: Airtel launches “Airtel Explorer” to enable easy discoverability of its services, MTS India launches its own App Store, Voda launches a movie voice-portal, Voice Blogging expands to offer more features and Nokia’s launch of IM service
Even as the BWA auctions are in progress and is being touted to cross the 3G earnings, the Government has received the money from 3G winners – a whole 67K crores of it. This could be one of those rare years when the finance ministry can see their deficits reducing in a big way!

Global News

With the Apple-Adobe spat not going to be solved soon, solutions on converting Flash to HTML5 have come up
Some consolation for Android phones – You will soon have only one update a year
1.2 GHz Snapdragon is out to touch all our lives! Very recently, our PCs too did not have such high-speed processors, ain’t it? :)

Nibbles for the day [29-May-10]

2010-05-29T08:13:00.001-07:00

[While composing this, quite a bit of news got lost mid-way due to my carelessness / issue with Live Writer. So I write what I remember, so very less links will be seen here! Apologies to the 35.3 odd readers this blog has. for that. :) Yeah, this number is small but I assume them to be influential people in this industry, no? :)]

India News

Tata Indicom is one of the recipients of the grants for Mobile Money projects. This is the project, in association with mChek! A service by Visa & Monitise is also being launched soon in India
After 3G auctions, BWA auctions also seem to be going on successfully. Meanwhile, LTE forum says 4G is the future for India. Indeed, but when? :)
White Blackberries are to be available in India soon. Is it not an oxymoron? :)
Subscriber numbers go from strength to strength. 16.7 m added in April, taking the total to 638 m
We got to forget MNP – It has been postponed to after 3G roll out! Looks like, the Defense Ministry might cause further delays in 3G roll out itself
DoT is now trying to convince Home Ministry that the Chinese infra vendors are not all that bad
Looks like the Yahoo-Nokia deal might have an unlikely player getting affected – MapMyIndia – who have a deal with Yahoo in India
Not necessarily mobile – but important nevertheless – Google Translate now has Hindi also
An insightful article on what the strategies of operators should be, post 3G auctions can be found here
Mindtree, that acquired Kyocera’s India division recently, seems to be ready to launch its own handsets – thankfully, they are not looking for a B2C model

Global News

OLPC people too have gotten inspired by the iPad. It is going to be OTPC (not literally) from now – One Tablet Per Child. But the Chinese are so advanced – They have already released a clone as iPed
While the world is envying Apple (now that they are the #1 tech co in the world, in terms of market cap), they are very afraid of Google. With the announcement of Google TV, the “hobby project” – Apple TV – is going to get serious and serious enhancements are expected soon
Motorola’s iDEN project is still kicking and is getting launched in Latin America too
After the SAP-Sybase merger, enterprise mobility space saw another merger: Trust Digital with McAfee
An interesting experiment of a hotel using smartphones as keys – see here
An insightful article on Android fragmentation is available here
iPhone development can happen on Windows PCs too now – with DragonFire SDK

Nibbles for the day [22-May-10]

2010-05-23T05:37:00.001-07:00

India News

3G auctions finally came to an end and the BWA auctions will begin on 24th May. BWA auctions are expected to bring in even more successes. See an interview with the minister on how he thinks it is all his success :) Hey don’t forget him, OK? :)

Here are the updates from the 3G auctions:

First of all, get to know the basics of the auctions here
The operator & circle wise results can be found here
Inspite of their crib, Bharti & Vodafone may be the first ones to break even. Let us hope they will not end up expensive for us consumers

Other India News

IndyaRocks, a mobile gaming company gets funding from ValueFirst
Hindustan Times launches iPhone application – first Indian newspaper to do so
SBI has extended its mobile banking pilot to across India
TRAI may review its 2G spectrum pricing policy after severe criticism. Vodafone has been very vocal and their global HQ seems to have lost all patience
Reliance & Videocon (yeah they are also operators in India) have launched the lite-weight facebook access from India

Meanwhile the subscriber addition statistics for April is out – After long, Airtel is on top.

Global News

The week of Google News it was. A complete note on what happened at Google IO here:

If you do not want to read multiple links – here is an update of all ‘crazy things’ that Google announced
Froyo for Android got showcased (& even updated to NexusOne devices soon after). (Froyo has tethering – soon enough, iPhone might also get)
Google TV got launched – here is everything about it
Apart from the HTML5 & Flash war, Google brings in its own video format for the web – WebM. True to their style, it is made open source
An App-Store for the web – some sort of an extension of Enterprise App Store
Google Wave is made open
They were supposed to launch “Google Storage” also but it just ended up as a rumor

Other Google News of the week :)

The AdMob deal has been approved by the FTC.
They are mulling about launching their facial recognition solutions amid severe privacy concerns.
They also bought over an IP video solutions company and may launch video chat on Android
Meanwhile, for the Android battery concerns, Google blames the apps – now you know why one Mr Jobs is paranoid.

After all these Google news, you also need to have a look at the hilarious Onion video on whisper ads

Nokia, the wannabe “Internet Company” plans to tie-up with another Internet company, Yahoo, to offer internet services like email, search etc on their mobile phones. What then happens to their own services on Ovi? Meanwhile, they have partnered with Harman to get into Car entertainment also and Blackberry is buying navigation solution from them (Navteq)

LiMo, that is almost on life support gets a new lease of life with 4 operators planning to release devices this year. Meanwhile, NXP joins the Android alliance.

It seems to be the year of “music streaming” – While Apple, Google etc getting into music streaming service, there are also new services like mSpot that stream your own music from a server. Okay, all that is for the developed world. For us, it is going to be pirated music at cheap CDs. :)

Nibbles for the day [17-May-10]

2010-05-17T06:46:00.001-07:00

India News

Aircel is going great guns when it comes to innovative applications & solutions – They were the pioneers in innovatively pricing (& promoting) the GPRS services, they launched Peek & INQ devices in India and now they are offering “social” solutions like social games in partnership with ibibo and also the usual on-demand music service in partnership with Hungama

3G auctions are still going on and it is being feared that this will affect the prices we may need to pay. One just hopes BSNL sets a trend with lesser prices before the other players jump in. Speaking of BSNL, they have also crossed 100 million subscribers after Airtel, Reliance & Vodafone

See India’s top 5 budget phones in India – Do you see Nokia missing there?

TeliBrahma, the company best known for its bluetooth based advertising solutions, seems to have launched a “mobile store over bluetooth”. There was an email from them calling developers to submit their applications but there is no news about it on their website as yet.

image courtesy: http://www.cartoonstock.com

Global News

“Convergence”, a concept we have been hearing for more than a decade now is slowly turning into reality – A lot of Web TV solutions are coming up, including the latest one from Google, Intel & Sony
Samsung maintains its #1 position in the US. See complete US Wireless market update here. Have you started preparing for the bada Dev contest as yet?
The company that taught the world how to search, is not providing search in its mobile application store, even after the latest upgrade
More scary news on the mobile health hazard issues – tiny evidence has been found mobile radiation to cause cancer. Please take care :)

Nibbles for the day [16-May-10]

2010-05-16T01:25:00.001-07:00

India News

TRAI has made recommendations that the operators need to pay for the excess 2G spectrum now, based on 3G auctions. This has caused considerable resentment amongst them and are demanding the DoT not to accept those recommendations, though TRAI claims it is not much. Meanwhile analysts are also against these recommendations and stock market too reacted to this.

Amidst this din, another important recommendation by TRAI has gone slightly unnoticed – TRAI has recommended that the lock-in period for the operators should be relaxed and M&A should be allowed, with some riders. This should help the top-tier operators get into consolidation business.

The issue of security threat from Chinese companies continues to make news. ZTE has been asked to share more information and Huawei agrees to share source code with the Government. Meanwhile, WTO angle is also being discussed with India saying there is nothing against it.

It is interesting to see original content being created with mobiles considered an important medium – Balaji Telefilms is at the forefront and I hope they succeed in this for more people to follow.

Miscellaneous

A research report on what worked and what did not – with mobile solutions – for IPL this season is available here.
Latest 3G auction updates – Suddenly, Bihar has seen a sudden increase in demand
INQ Mobile, that were selling their social networking only handsets through Aircel so far, are planning to sell it unlocked soon

Global News

Enterprise Mobility space had a major shake up last week with SAP acquiring Sybase
With dev conference of Apple coming in a couple of weeks, expectations & rumor mills are at work. At the forefront is the expectation that iTunes streaming will be launched
Poor Google, their direct to consumer model of retailing phones online just did not take off and they are taking away the online route. Operators rule in the mobile industry, let us see how the Chrome OS fares in the PC industry – the first Chrome OS device may launch in just about 2 weeks
One of the most popular mobile applications, Skype, seems to be skipping Windows Phone 7. I guess this would be a temporary thing
4G service will soon be launched by Spirit
The next version of Android, “Froyo”, is to be out very soon. Tethering & WiFi Hotspot are among the new features expected
Microsoft has launched Office Mobile 2010 – usually, this will be on Windows phone alone, this time it will be on Nokia phones also
Apart from radiation related health hazards, there are also issues caused because of lightning, new threats from Srilanka reveal
RIM offers explanations for what a “super-app” is here. Talking of App Stores, here is an app development contest from an unlikely player – Volkswagen.
A patent filed by Apple shows interesting location based services (including ads) that we can expect with future iPhones. The use cases all seem to be already discussed / available by other companies but when Apple does it, it does it in style! Let us see

Nibbles for the day [10-May-10]

2010-05-10T07:12:00.001-07:00

India News

Innovative App Update: A Pune based company launches an app to block unwanted calls & SMS – MobileWatchman. The name is for sure, more interesting than XBlocker, that sounded like a game to me.

If you have “green ideas” to offer to TRAI, please do.

The DoT is supposed to be formulating a security policy – let us hope it is not for the ministers/officials to get security after scams.

If the Government is concerned about the Chinese infra players undermining security, the Chinese have other plans – they also want to manufacture handsets in India :)

A Turkish operator seems to be buying stake in Zain, whose African operations have been bought by Airtel already. I assume this would not affect the African deal made by Airtel.

Global News

Layar, the pioneer in augmented reality applications has come up with “AR stream” – that makes it easy for people to search & consume AR content
Intel is about to release new low-power consuming processors to replace Atom in ultra thin laptops
WiFi & WiGig alliances are to work together to come up with high speed wireless networking – in thr 60 GHz band. Okay, let us dream about those speeds in India.

Nibbles for the day [9-May-10]

2010-05-09T04:42:00.001-07:00

India News

After a brief lull, when it was expected to close, the 3G auctions again picked up momentum last week and stand at near 13000 crore mark.

It was expected that the ban on Chinese companies on telecom equipment would create diplomatic tensions between India & China. But there seems to be a problem within our Government itself – our environment minister goes to China and says that our home ministry is coming up with ‘alarmist’ & ‘paranoid’ policies, unnecessarily. Thank you so much, Minister. You may need some history lessons from Mr. Nehru on the “Hindi-Chini Bhai bhai” policy and what happened thereafter. There are serious doubts of Chinese Army’s involvement in Huawei and there seems to be a Pakistani angle also to this issue. Speaking of Pakistan, they seem to be doing a better job at utilizing the USO fund. Meanwhile, TRAI is trying to improve local manufacturing. USO may be a source of funds for that.

The latest innovation in a mobile phone seems to be the “answering machine”, from Movil.

Some questions I had about the “mobile radio” services launched recently got cleared with this interview! Yours might too!

Nokia gets serious on faster roll out of its services. Lifetools got launched in China recently and there seems to be a big push for Ovi mail in Bangladesh. Operator relations seems to be their nemesis everywhere.

Aircel, that kind of pioneered low priced GPRS packages has taken a step back and if now offering Facebook over SMS.

Global News

Rumors have already begun on the “webOS” based tablet from HP soon!
Apple might be harping on the utility of HTML5 in public but it is told to be developing an alternative for Flash. Or is it something on top of HTML5?
Google Goggles brings out its next useful use case – translation.
Self-styled web evangelist Tim O’Reilly finds Apple trying to create a fundamental alternative to the web
Google is told to have patented ‘location based advertising’ – Does it mean others cannot offer? I guess these are just arsenals companies build up, just in case.

Nibbles for the day [6-May-10]

2010-05-06T07:31:00.001-07:00

India News

Telenor (owners of the Uninor brand), as expected are in a loss in India. It is still early days for them anyways!
3G auctions might end in a couple of days, with no activity seen for the past 2 days – but looks like the spectrum will not be available even in September
SBI is having huge plans to enhance their PoS presence – One hopes they do something seriously for mobile payments also, along with this

Global News

HD Recording is kind of confirmed in iPhone 4G. Well, Samsung brought it in 2009 (OmniaHD) but would anyone even say that Apple copied? :)
Read an interesting article from Om Malik on why Intel will fail in the mobile space, here
Two Rumors, the first one more believable

Apple is supposedly building a model of ad-analytics for its ad-engine, that competing engines will not be able to replicate
Nokia is going to make Windows Phones! :)

Unrelated but interesting: Read about the early days of Facebook & how Mark Zuckerberg dealt with the various VCs here!

Nibbles for the day [5-May-10]

2010-05-05T08:22:00.001-07:00

India News

In a new push for “SaaS” and “Cloud offerings” in India, Novatium has tied up with Airtel to provide their thin client devices on broadband. Miles to go before these become mainstream, me thinks. Meanwhile, mobile broadband got a boost with the successful Tata Photon+ service being available for mobile phones too.

Vodafone has launched its much touted 700 rupees phone in India – Let us now see what the market thinks about it.

Movil Mobile, another desi handset vendor has grand plans. I do not want to really find fault with what they do – all of them are soon going to have 40% market share in India!

Expect further delay in MNP roll out in India. As usual, operators are not ready!

Idea Cellular has chosen to act brave – and not react to the “location based tariff” plans that are being introduced by the new operators. I remember the time when all of the established ones were pooh-pooh-ing the per second plans and then rushing to offer them in no time.

Huawei plans to build a factory in Chennai to address the security concerns of the Indian Government. Good move, but will they not have any expats in that factory? Meanwhile, all operators have suggested an auditing agency to ensure security. When it comes to security, I would say it is best to follow the Home Ministry’s advice.

In another “defense” related issue, BSNL’s WiMax’s plans are in the dock because of concerns by the defense ministry.

Global News

Quite a few MS news today:

Windows Developers out there, want to know more of “toast” Vs “tile” notifications, or the advantage of Push Notifications in a Windows Phone, head over to this page.
Microsoft KIN, the social networking phones will be available in the market by 13th May (in the US) through Verizon. Find reviews of these phones here.
Rumors about “Menlo” project of Microsoft, apparently to replace Windows CE with Windows NT on mobile devices abound
Microsoft Labs has an interesting project called Spindex on social network integration – But I feel it is a start-up that can come out with a product on this. Not big corporations! :)
You may remember that MS & Nokia had announced of a partnership last year – The first result of it is – the availability of MS Communicator on Nokia devices.

Boy Genius has provided his insights from the iPhone OS 4.0, including file-sharing, media player widgets and multi-tasking. We can expect such insights flowing through all tech blogs for several weeks now!

Intel has released its smartphone processor comparison chart – They seem to be content proving that Moorestown is on par with other processors, not really better! After all, all they need now is a foothold in the market.

Motorola has acquired “Azingo” to create its own platform – After all, they know best what happens when you bet on others to make your platform, first with MS and then with Google :)

Move over, Amazon & Apple. eBooks for the masses is coming – from who else but Google.

One of my all-time favorite apps, Dropbox is on Android and provides “mobile” APIs! I am too keen to see what kind of applications get built. After all the service is simple (like Twitter) – that means the potential for applications is huge!

Nibbles for the day [4-May-10]

2010-05-04T07:41:00.001-07:00

India News

Nokia’s foray into services continues but remains half-cooked. Nokia Money is being announced in a big way in India. See all details here. For God’s sake, please tell me if a service that is available with only one bank (that I agree is one of the most progressive but is so small), in only one city, that will work (well) only with Nokia phones and with criteria like “minimum deposit” of Rs. 10000 succeed in India? Agreed, this is only the beginning but once the RBI comes clear with its decisions on the recommendations by the IMG, the operators will pounce on the opportunity and appropriate all the value, me thinks. For all its pioneering activity, I do feel Nokia deserves to be given an applause. Good Luck to them.

In what could be “big deal”, NetCore has acquired OneIndia, both big properties in the Indian Internet/Mobile industry. You might know that the founders of these companies were one of the early successes in the Indian Internet scene – with India World & India Info. Old people (who were accessing Internet in the late 90s) would remember these sites :) See an interview with the founder of OneIndia here.

In what *should* be a scary news to Nokias & Samsungs in India, the local manufacturers expect about 40% share of the mobile handset space this year, up from 25% last year. Not a joke of ‘Chinese Phones’ anymore. Wake up, giants.

NewsHunt people seem to have made a specialized app for “Hindustan Times”. Glad to know that there are quite a few improvements!

While 3G auctions are still underway and there are concerns that this might go the European way (of being high priced), partners in the eco-system are getting ready – like MFormation, the device management company. Meanwhile, shocked by the ban on their equipment, the top officials from Huawei are trying to reach out to the Government for a possible change in the policy.

If you want a 10-crore salary, head over to BSNL, they are looking for a CEO :)

Global News

Face.com, a promising startup in the face recognition space has opened up its APIs
Android’s fragmentation issues seem to be getting over – see chart here. Majority of devices still run on 3 different versions. :)
Windows Phone developers have a new set of tools released to them. How are these in comparison with tools from other platforms?
The acquisition by Intuit seems to have only increased the vigor with which Mint grows. Their Android app has been released. Meanwhile, Nokia has made everyone with a valid RSS feed to become a developer through their Ovi App Wizard. Looks interesting! For sure, the person responsible for getting “x” number of apps on the store by some deadline would be very happy with this idea! :)
Like people were busy making iPhone killers, this seems to be a season of iPad killers. Blackberry’s plans are seen here. Let the games begin! Meanwhile 1 million iPads have been sold but the iBooks sales seem be a little dull
Read a wonderful article on “Disposable Content” and payment mechanisms from MG here

News Digest, Week Ending 2-May-10

2010-05-01T23:19:00.001-07:00

Devices

Vodafone will soon bring the 700 rupees phone it announced in MWC. Competition for the likes of Karbonn, Micromax & Co? I do not think, they seem to have scaled up and are targeting the ‘aspirers’ among the lower end – not really the lower end late adopters.

Applications & Services

In what could be the news of the week for applications stores, Reliance decided to outsource its application store business to GetJar – They already offer their white-label solution to several operators. In my opinion, this is a master stroke against Airtel’s AppCentral (which they anyways have outsourced to several partners).

Nokia decided to make press people busy this week – They suddenly announced that RBI has permitted YES Bank to provide money services with Nokia – I wonder if they did only now, otherwise how was the pilot happening so far? The announcement mentions that the customer can walk into “any of the 2 lakh retail outlets” across the country and create an account. But the Nokia Priority Dealer in Koramangala, Bangalore has no clue whatsoever about this service! Meanwhile, smaller finance companies seem embracing mobile technologies to help their operations – Muthoot Finance seems to have enabled “m-collection” in association with Atom Technologies. Among banks, Axis bank started offering mobile banking recently with NGPay as the solution provider.

While Nokia & operators might want to play a large role in the mobile banking in the country, RBI is not too keen – They still have not considered any of them to be allowed as valid Business Correspondents for banks.

Nokia has been talking about Ovi Music Store, Free Download etc for several months now – There was news about it again. Hungama is their service provider and they seem to become a monopoly of sorts in mobile/digital music distribution in India. While people like Saregama try to be in the play and launch their own stores, they seem no match for Hungama.

Another Nokia news – They have made ‘Nokia Messaging’ – their push email solution free! I doubt if it has enough operator support in India. Though everyone wants to take on Blackberry, no one has offered a compelling value to the operators are RIM has.

Talk of push email, the push email provider ‘Blacmail’ (ridiculed a few weeks before here!) has tied up with BSNL & Univercell.

Online Radio seems to be the trend picking up – OnMobile tied up with BIG and now Airtel is offering Radio Mirchi on their network. I wonder why players like Geodesic who have had Online Radio application for years are silent.

Operators & Regulation

The tariff wars are all but over – With the actual per minute / per second rates already reaching the lowest possible levels, operators are into other games. While DoCoMo offered everyday changing packs, Uninor is offering ‘instant discount’ after every call based on the time & location of the call. The other new guy Videocon has some plans on “loyalty” – this move might become important. Going forward, all operators might offer discounts only for consumers that have stayed for say a month or two.

Uninor wants MVNOs for faster role out of its services. Why not just sell their spectrum off to some established operator?

3G Spectrum prices have reached gigantic proportions in some circles and has just not taken off in some other circles – May be this shows the “digital divide” that we have in the country. The auctions are expected to close in a few days (though the minister says, it WILL end :))

In a very bold move, the Government has come out in the open and has banned importing telecom equipment from the Chinese vendors. This might snowball into a diplomatic issue, it seems.

S-Tel claims to have about 1 million subscribers already – most of them from B & C circles. Do we really have an operator that understands the BoP needs well now? What might be their ARPU? How many minutes of usage happens on their network. If you read the comments in the article, it does not seem to be a rosy picture at all.

Miscellaneous

The mobile marketing industry seems to be convinced that spam is the only way to succeed – They are opposing the ‘Do Call’ registry that is being proposed.

News Digest – Week Ending 25-Apr-10

2010-04-25T09:14:00.001-07:00

Devices

Another feather in Micromax’s cap – A windows mobile phone with MapMyIndia maps preloaded. QWERTY phones from Intex are now available at Rs. 2200. Latest handset manufacturer in India is Alcatel – They have launched with 3 models with Kangna as the brand ambassador apparently. Next in line is ZTE. The leader meanwhile has launched 4 new models and is also dropping prices.

Applications/Services

Nokia have answered the criticism that most of Ovi store downloads would be the ringtones & wallpapers – They claim that 75% of downloads are apps! That is certainly interesting & impressive! No data on India alone though!

(Photo courtesy: Telecom Talk)

God on Mobile -- Airtel has launched “Live Aarti” service – live devotional hymns from popular (& money making) shrines across the country. This link also shows other such services available now, do have a look. Reliance has introduced ‘fables’ on voice portal targeting children.

See some innovative location based applications here – winners of Navteq challenge.

Google’s voice search in India is either a complete failure or it was done only for some data collection purposes – the plug on it has been pulled.

Slowly, apart from operators, other brands like educational services are also getting into mobile based service offerings – ILFS is launching a service for English language learning.

Operators

Airtel has launched a world SIM that lets you pay less while roaming outside the country - mCarbon has developed it. Airtel’s foreign buys are finding one problem or the other – the Bangladesh buy is to be probed by the parliament there, apparently.

Unitech is not participating in 3G auctions – nor is it giving any right signals to succeed in the market. Meanwhile, Videocon is looking for a foreign partner.

Regulation

3G auctions continue after 13 days and 76 rounds, prices have almost doubled, with Delhi & Mumbai leading the way. An analysis of the fair price for 3G auctions is available here. Meanwhile, MTNL is launching newer & newer services on its 3G network – IPTV is the latest.

Miscellaneous

An article on the growth of Chinese smartphones in India is available here.

Citibank’s results with ‘Tap & Pay’ trial in India is available here (free subscription needed). No major insights to me – except that a lot of people use it just to get free handsets :)

News Digest – Week Ending 18-Apr-2010

2010-04-18T08:46:00.001-07:00

Devices

Heard of Wynn Telecom and their handsets? Saif Ali Khan will be endorsing them soon, so you will get to know.

(Photo Source)

Zen, an Indian handset vendor has introduced ‘square’ shaped phones now! Look like KIN to me.

Motorola is planning to launch new versions of ‘SIMs’ (called iSIMs) in India through the operators that can be controlled in better ways than the normal SIM & STK.

Applications/Services

Bulk SMS providers are in news again – Way2SMS claims to have reached 10 million users & are cash flow positive – without embedding advertisements in messages! Meanwhile, their larger competitor 160by2 have launched an application which helps them send up to 145 characters from the previous 80 characters. Would it be a binary SMS to be extracted and shown with the ad? Got to check!!

A Jaipur based company has launched ‘SpyBubble’ – an application to spy on others (children, as their use case mentions). It is available only on Android & Blackberry alone! Do they really have the Indian audience in mind?

Here is an ‘analytics’ company from India – Informate – but only for Smartphones again, which are already known through AdMob kind of people. Will someone do it for feature phones without GPRS, please?

Operators

Oh we thought it finally went Bharti’s way with Zain but there seem to be hurdles from Congo coming on.

Regulation

3G bidding updates: While Gujarat was the most sought after circle for the first several days, Delhi beat them recently. Meanwhile, the price kept inching higher and higher – beating the expectations of the Government. Meanwhile, the Government wants to conduct 4G auctions also soon it seems! Oh Really?

The Government seems seriously confused about how mobile phones can cause security threats in Jammu & Kashmir – They banned SMS for all pre-paid users and immediately withdrew it. Bulk SMS alone might be banned. With all these confusion, there are no bids for 3G auction too there. Not about Kashmir alone, the rule that infra import by any operator anywhere needs Government approval has led to a situation where no import has been done for the past 3 months. Meanwhile, the Chinese companies like ZTE against whom such regulation exist seem to be investing more & more.

In what could be a landmark approval, the framework for mobile banking has been approved by the Government. The banks will apparently start implementing in July and by end of next year, we will have it implemented across India. A lot of work might be there for a lot of VAS cos. No? Nokia seems to be getting ready for that – they are expanding their money service to multiple geographies/banks.

Licensing for mobile TV is the next thing – TRAI has submitted its recommendations to the Government – and a lot of it is told to be impractical.

Medianama seems to be in possession of a notification from the Government to the operators to make location based services more accurate & relevant.

It seems the jawans in border areas pay as much as Rs. 5 per minute to talk to their families – it has now been reduced to Re .1 per minute. IMO, it should be FREE for them, I am ready to pay more to subsidize that.

Miscellaneous

Subscriber addition statistics for March are out. Vodafone leads again – What happened to Tata Docomo? Lost its mojo? Was it just a fad? Uninor, though they made a not-so-hyped entry seem to be gaining traction – or will they also lose the sheen after VAS like cricket commentary lose their appeal?

Accenture has released a report on the rural market of India – The biggest insight to me is that ‘handset & service bundling’ might work well.

News Digest – Week Ending 11-Apr-2010

2010-04-11T04:30:00.001-07:00

Devices

Another handset manufacturer will come into the Indian scene in May – Luminous.

Applications/Services

Nokia plans to launch ‘unlimited music download’ service in India too – following China. I read that the service is sans DRM in China. If the same is done in India too AND if the service is priced right, it may stem piracy a bit. Vodafone too has launched a music store in Mumbai – at 1 rupee per song.

Soon after ‘Pretones’ by Idea (that we covered last week), a similar service called ‘MySong’ has been introduced by Tata DoCoMo – may be this is only about songs while Idea might play ads / jokes etc too.

Virgin Mobile has launched yet another ‘social networking’ service – what I do not understand is, how does everyone claim theirs to be the ‘first in India’? Virgin, by the way, agrees that they are the secondary SIM for most users in India.

VAS Infra player Valuefirst has acquired a mobile social network player Tagg – Looks like it is more about SMS inventory than anything else. Meanwhile, another bulk SMS player, 160by2, that offers services in India & middle east is moving to the middle kingdom (China) too.

OnMobile plans to launch another ‘radio’ service (they just had a tie-up with BIG FM) – looks like it can be accessed without GPRS – is it over voice calls then? God, then how can it be nominal charges?

Regulation

[Image: http://blog.taragana.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/080331_1.jpg]

3G auctions have begun!! On the first day, the bids rose by 12% and the second day was found to be lull. Hey but this is a long process and no point making assumptions about everyday’s bids. And by the way, it is not that the services will begin right after the auctions – though it is claimed by our minister, they can launch services only after the defense ministry vacates the spectrum. If you wish to know how the auction happens in detail, you can download the official presentation from here (free registration needed).

Boy – some scary news here – it seems India will have to ‘defend’ its spectrum else, others may corner it. I thought it was all just air ;-)

The Government has cancelled the license to Switzerland based ByCell – I could not understand the reasons clearly.

Mobile Payments in India are slowly picking up – The Government seems to be taking its time but I am confident they will come out with a good model. Some recommendations from Nokia and other partners (like mChek) on mobile payments can be seen in this link and links from there!

Operators

3G space has gotten very active again – Nokia Siemens has kickstarted 3G hardware production. At their website, they have a nice video too to bust the myths around 3G.

MTS seems to be becoming more of a ‘mobile broadband’ service provider through EVDO – They seem content with that market. They have even tied up with HP to bundle it with laptops. About them (& other operators), Medianama raises ‘net neutrality’ issues since they allow free access to ‘specific’ websites.

Vodafone plans to introduce location based tariff, a plan that has been discussed for a while. This could be the next logical step in the era of ever-sliding rates. Speaking of Voda, they just crossed 100m subscribers in India – after Airtel & Reliance. Their interest in handset market too is on the rise (though their smartphones are told to have viruses) – they plan to bundle Opera Mini on many of their handsets to drive data usage in emerging markets.

Miscellaneous

A good write-up on low cost handsets and mobile penetration in rural areas can be seen here.

Some statistics on mobile web traffic from India to AdMob can be seen here. Tell me something, why is Sony Ericsson having 10% share here while their handset market share is not even half of that? Is it because SE users are more savvy or is there something that SE does specially?

Reliance BIG has made a big-ticket purchase in the gaming industry – UK Based Codemasters! We hope this brings in profits to them, unlike the steel & auto mergers Tatas did!

News Digest – Week Ending 4-April-2010

2010-04-03T23:09:00.001-07:00

Devices

Vodafone plans to launch ‘magic boxes’ again – Was it really a success last time around?

To cash in on the ‘tablet craze’ among the early adopters, a tablet specifically for students – called iProf – has been launched.

Smartphones launch of the week – Garmin ASUS and HTC Smart. BTW, Motorola Milestone is coming with voice guided navigation software.

The growth of local players in the handset market has been nothing short of spectacular – from 0.9% to 17.5%. Nokia seems to be having some reservations about this research though – but still, even 0.9 to 10% is great. With such growth, such ambitious plans by a player like Mi-Fone cannot be fully ignored.

Applications/Services

It is quite sometime since operators launched any path-breaking but simple VAS – Pretones could be the next big one. This might also become a cause of confusion between what to play – CRBT or Pretones!

MTNL has launched a ‘Video on Demand’ service through ROK Entertainment.

In applications, social networking category rules the roost – Almost every application development company develops one – this one from Antarix is found to be good. Mobile Application development companies are getting a positive look from investors too, off late.

An Indian company has developed mobile transactions/payment solutions to a telco in Dominican Republic. Good to build a lot of expertise before we build large scale solutions for ourselves! There has been some movement on enabling purchase of mutual funds over SMS.

SMBs in Kerala might get an ‘SMS ID’ soon following this innovative solution – But I am really not able to visualize the usage/benefit/success of this – Are they trying to eliminate the need for ‘websites’ here?

Nazara, that has been doing a good job selling content to operators, wants to directly access the consumers through a portal. If they succeed, they can save a lot of revenue share given to the operators. But that is a big IF.

I was wondering last week about the ‘launch’ of Nokia’s music service in India – that it has been available for long already! Apparently, it was only a ‘name change’. A rose by any other name smells as good, no?

‘Gaon ki Awaaz’ – a rural news bulletin service – you cannot get as local news as this anywhere else!

Operators

Etisalat has finally launched services – Cheers – yeah that is their brand name! :) Bharti will be using the ‘Airtel’ brand name for its African operations too – I did not even think they would try to have a new name. Their acquisition of Zain is moving fast.

The fear of the Indian Government towards Chinese infra cos is turning out to be good for the European Infra cos – Ericsson has won a huge order from Airtel.

Regulation

There has been no disqualifications amongst the 3G/BWA auction applicants.

The Government has appointed a committee to find out the best means of expanding broadband network in rural areas.

Miscellaneous

Some more details of the IBM-NID project for defining user interfaces for Indian market have emerged.

Subscriber statistics for Feb 09 are available here.

India is a huge market for Qualcomm – not just the consumer market – but also as a market to invest.

News Digest – Week Ending 28/Mar/2010

2010-03-28T03:41:00.001-07:00

Devices

Last week, we mentioned about Motorola’s plan to comeback. This week, it is about Sony Ericsson – They have launched 5 new models and seem to have a plan in place for India, apart from having Kareena, that is! Good to know, but I am a bit pessimistic on them.

Along with Airtel, Vodafone would also offer iPhone 3GS – These were the only people to offer the earlier version of iPhone also.

Applications/Services

(image courtesy: Medianama)

Emantas has launched a ‘mobile education program’ – targeting the US market and planning to target universities in India later. Hopefully they will target rural and BoP later – they talk about Indian language support also. I guess this might be a better model – to target high end users first, make money and then slowly target the BoP where profitability might take a lot of time. The technology & delivery mechanisms might also mature by then.

The next applications store for India is from – Spice. Some clues on what Google thinks about application stores in India can be found here. BTW, middle India seems to be the top users of the application stores.

One more Indic Language platform – with support for fonts, rendering, transliteration, all put together – Reverie Technologies! There seems to be no trials available to check!!

Mobifusion has introduced an eBook reader application for several platforms – They do not seem to have enough content partners though.

You have several applications / usage scenarios based on NFC but crib that not enough NFC handsets are available? Tyfone and FirstData may have answers for you. I am impressed – hope it comes live soon!

Operators

I guess it is time for the RBI to introduce new currency at either ends – While high inflation makes the case for a currency to be more than a “rupee”, the telecom tariffs make the case for having currency less than a ‘paisa’. Well, Videocon, the newest mobile operator is going to have sub-1-paisa plans. So what if the spectrum charges keep increasing (though TDSAT has stayed it) and it takes years to break-even (like MTS), what operators look for now is subscriber-additions! Videocon says that they know marketing and technology can be bought – look like ardent disciples of Peter Drucker who told that the main function of a company is marketing! (though his definition of marketing does not mean marketing communications / advertising alone!). The list of their VAS can be seen here - “Call me back” looks interesting.

3G seems to be slowing getting popular – BSNL’s trends show that – While the first few months had only a few thousand subscribers, expansion of 3G service to tier-2 towns & lowering the price barrier seem to have done the trick. They have more than a million 3G customers now. There is one company that claims the Indian market is not ready for 3G – Uninor. BTW, The eligible participants for 3G/BWA auctions will be known by 29-March (tomorrow) – Let the (auction) games begin! :)

Approvals from Zain have also come for the Bharti-Zain deal. Bharti board has already approved it and claim to have tied $8.3b for the acquisition – SBI is giving them $1.5b loan.

I thought Virgin mobile was one of the mediocre operators with modest subscribers – but looks like India is their second largest market. May be, it just shows the size of the market our country holds.

Regulation

The rapid expansion seen in the mobile industry can become questionable if the Government does not approve operators to purchase equipment fast – I thought it was only for the Chinese vendors but it looks like the rule applies to all equipment vendors.

The Government seems to be working on an idea to mandate all cell towers to be power by solar power. Could become another reason to stop growth.

Miscellaneous

I have long been wondering about what kind of service ‘Roamware’ provides – this article has some answers. They seem to be brokers between operators in multiple countries who may not have a direct billing relationship with each other.

There cannot be any news item / discussion without IPL – so here it is: The statistics of mobile phone viewing of IPL are available here. As with everything else about IPL, this too is a success. I am just afraid IPL is bloating into a big bubble.

A research report about Indian users’ mobile habits – voice calls, messaging & Internet can be seen here.

You have heard/read about celebrity chats – MTS brought in Putin (yes the Russian prime minister) to launch their webcast.

Some good insights about launching a mobile payment service (or any other mobile service) can be seen from the experience of GrameenPhone in Bangladesh.

Indian Telecom News Digest (21-Mar-10)

2010-03-21T06:02:00.001-07:00

Devices

Motorola’s Android phones are coming to India. Hope they make a mark again! After the Yuva series, they completely went silent in India. Finally, iPhone 3GS is coming to India through Airtel – while the US would get the next version in a few months! Indian consumers would not take it seriously unless there is a subsidy! There have been rumors about other operators, pricing etc too. Hope at least Google would get its pricing for Nexus One right for India. Continuing with the trend of operator bundling for special devices, Aircel brings in INQ & Peek – that are pure social networking & emailing devices. In my humble opinion, there is negligible market for such devices in India. Aircel might focus on making better ads with Dhoni than these!

After a lull, LG is back with a new device and an awful TV ad with their new brand ambassadors. I have a doubt – most phone manufacturers end up promoting Google, Facebook, eBay etc through their advertisements, no?

From the local players, there are scores of devices being launched every day but the loudest campaign has been from Micromax with their ‘gaming’ device. They have a super-star but have chosen to show him in the worst possible way in the TVC :) Bling Telecom is the latest player with huge ambitions – can we see a ‘Movil Man of the Match’ in IPL next year? But see local players are coming up with innovations like using AAA batteries for charging, so we may actually have great brands coming out of India.

NID (National Institute of Design) is making a no-frills mobile phone. IBM & some institution from Japan are collaborating on this. Let this not be another simputer!

Applications/Services

This is the season of Application Stores. After other operators, Vodafone too announced their store and claimed 10000 downloads. Airtel (that launched just a little earlier) claims to have had 2.5 m downloads in just 30 days. I just wonder why they call it the India’s “first” mobile application store while others like Aircel launched before them. Airtel has prestigious applications like WSJ India too in its kitty. But beyond the prestige, I doubt if it is of any use. The mass does not need WSJ. Not to be left out, Reliance also seems to have launched an application around social networking.

Apart from operators and handset vendors, managed service providers and VAS players are not launching application stores. SMSGupShup also launched their App-Store with a lot of fanfare. I could not find much worthwhile (for me) in the first couple of days there. Here is a short Q&A with them. Hungama too has launched one.

Infosys has a different approach to participate in this application store craze – through their Flypp platform. They are told to be tying up with as many as 9 telcos once their exclusivity with Aircel ends.

Whatever the state of App-Store, individual applications that create a niche for themselves and more importantly bring in a service from the desktop seamlessly to the mobile might be the ones to succeed in the long term – like BookMyShow, Google Transit (not an application per se but still), BSE Sensex and BIGFlix.

Airtel is also foraying into other service areas – like Mobile Bazaar – but we stop hearing about most of these soon after their launch. Remember, even Nokia launched a mobile bazaar service? However such services seem to be working even in the neighboring Bangladesh. Lots of talk is going around mHealth these days, the latest from Ericsson India – But unless the ‘patient unit’ becomes cheap or actually just their mobile phone itself, these might not become mainstream. They would only be for ‘rich’ and ‘chronically’ ill patients.

One more Airtel service – Mobile Voice Blogging! Unless you have several Amitabh Bachchans offering their content there everyday, these will not work. Boy, why am I saying ‘it will not work’ for everything? :)

This week (rather, month) has a lot of Airtel services covered – here is one more – the one for Bangalore Police. I will not crib about this – just pray I never get to see it working :)

Nokia is going to launch ‘music service’ in India – I thought it already existed – Why are they launching it again :) May be some minor change or something?

One more non-GPRS email service – Blacmail – Ha, what a name!!

Internet Radios on phones seems to be the next big thing (or fad?). While OnMobile did a deal with BIGFM in India, Geodesic has crossed the shores to launch Mundu Radio in Sri Lanka.

Operators

Quickies

bharti board OK-s 9 billion offer for Zain – Note to Zain’s CEO: See what happened to MTN CEO.
Videocon has launched services (in Coimbatore) – They have a 100 cities in 100 days plan!
Reliance crosses 100m subscribers. Vodafone (India alone) is expected to follow that soon
S-Tel’s troubles with their 2G spectrum continues – Their services were shut down, they questioned it and even met up with the wrong man who might actually lose his job soon
Vodafone claims that the spectrum charges are biased towards dual technology operators
Uninor would be in half of India by end of this year. They seem to have developed a special interest in rural areas.
Idea Cellular has started charging for customer care calls – wow, that is a bold move! More so, since this comes after Tata Tele said they will compensate for poor customer care!
Three Indian operators (Aircel, Loop & Idea) are supposed to be on the radar of Vivendi, an European operator with plans to enter India. Voice & Data feels that the best way to manage the limited available spectrum is to merge or lose out.

Regulation

Thankfully, the 3G & BWA auction have reached the next step! There are 9 bidders for 3G and 11 for BWA. The surprise bidder for BWA is Qualcomm who plan to bring in LTE (considered 4G) to India.

I will be surprised (but welcome it) if India really does this – The article refers to it as anti-Pakistan but I don’t think it is. It is just a note of caution.

In spite of a lot of hope and approvals, MNP has been postponed again – Okay, you will read about MNP here again only after it is launched. I am bored.

The Union Budget seems to have introduced a tax for all paid software downloads – well it already is a pain to get customers to pay for apps, on top of it, such taxes would cause more trouble! :)

Miscellaneous

GSM subscribers grew by 13m in Feb-2010 with Vodafone leading the pack! Innovations like daily plans notwithstanding, guess DoCoMo finally gave in. Read this article on the perils of taking all these statistics at face value.

You might know that IPL content is being strictly monitored and every bit of it is being monetized (even your casual glare at a cheerleader could be charged!) – Here are the people who hold rights for the mobile delivery. Smartphone apps need to have a separate license, oh my God.

After several comics in mobile phones, Archies too is coming soon!

The readiness of Indians to pay for digital content is quite high according to a recent survey. It is very difficult for me to believe it.

Indian Telecom News Digest (28-Feb-10)

2010-02-28T00:51:00.001-08:00

Devices

LG, the largest CE firm in the country, has not been as successful in mobile phones so far – they seem to have enough plans for 2010 though.

Apps/Services

Even local manufacturers want to have their own ‘application stores’. Soon Micromax is going to rain India-centric apps. Application developers rejoice. By the way, MoMo is conducting a session on all platforms in March – do attend.

An application to block unwanted calls – failure of NDNC is the seed for this. But if it is a ‘paid’ app, I wonder how many people would buy.

SBI seems to be taking grand steps for mobile banking in India – partnering with Airtel & BSNL. I sincerely hope this succeeds. BSNL & India Post too have collaborated on a similar service. An insightful article on mobile banking in emerging economies from McKinsey can be seen here.

As it has done in other areas like pricing, GPRS packs, free social network access etc, DoCoMo has planned for similar things with SIM based services too. Gemalto will provide these services.

Operators

Despite falling share prices, Bharti seems very confident about the Zain acquisition coming good – The potential of Africa and the ‘minute factory model of Bharti’ make it appealing, they say. There seems a Nigerian problem brewing for Bharti though.

Datacom (Videocon) might finally launch services as an operator – Nahata has exited the business.

Regulation

Okay, so the 3G auctions are finally “in progress” right now. GSM operators have welcomed it while CDMA people want theirs too done soon. Even foreign players are allowed. Read all about it here and here.

Raja has finally managed to start the 3G auctions but the ghost of 2G auctions still haunt him – with someone like Subramaniam Swamy coming in :-)

The budget seems to have not done much for the operators (for their demands) but handset & accessory manufacturers should be happy. VAS players seemed to have some demands too – have not verified if they have been fulfilled.

Ban on pre-paid mobiles in J&K has been postponed by an year. Based on the quality of verification done by the operators, further decision would be taken.

MNP has been delayed by a few more weeks/months – due to some security related issues.

Miscellaneous

Windows Phone 7 is expected to have a ‘starter’ edition – presumably at low or negligible cost, supposedly targeting markets like India. Would be good to see low cost mobiles with a START button in it. :-)

Subscription statistics for the month of January are here.

Motorola has sold off its messaging services solutions to Infinite Computer Solutions.

Mobile TV is the next big playground for value added services. A struggle is doing on to define the technology to be used.