May 2010

Cell Phone Uses Gesture Control The next generation of cell phone interfaces is currently under development at Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory at the University of Tokyo but instead of using a touchscreen the new interface is touchless. Click here to view the embedded video. Source: textually.org

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.