Weekend News Bytes [20-June-10]

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?

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Weekend News Bytes [20-June-10]

Weekend News Bytes [20-June-10]

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