News Digest – Week Ending 11-Apr-2010

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 )

News Digest – Week Ending 11-Apr-2010

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