News Digest – Week Ending 18-Apr-2010

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.

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News Digest – Week Ending 18-Apr-2010

News Digest – Week Ending 18-Apr-2010

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