News Bytes (5-Jul-10)

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.

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News Bytes (5-Jul-10)