Today, mobile phones are not just
about making and taking calls - they are boosting India's
m-commerce with both India's central bank and the market regulator
mulling over proposals to allow active trading via mobile phones.
While the Blackberry has become a lifeline for a million urban
Indians, the rural junta has not been left behind in the race, as
telecom operators slug it out to capture the biggest slice of
India's growing rural markets.
According to research firm Gartner
'mobile applications with money transfer via short message service'
lead the list of top 10 most used mobile applications, followed by
'mobile search' to drive sales and marketing opportunities on the
phone, 'mobile browsing', 'mobile advertising' and 'mobile
music'.
Most kids in rural India do not have
access to formal education and often end up working on the farms
during the day. So to help reach out to these children, an
inspiring project, Millee, is under consideration, which uses
mobile gaming technology to enhance access to literacy among
children of school-going age in the developing world. "It is a very
interesting and encouraging initiative." said Sidhartha Bezbora,
who regularly writes about technology and telecom on his blog
www.wirelessduniya.com. "Another very interesting project is
farmers using a phone to water their farmland in Gujarat."
In december 2009, infosys announced
the launch of Flypp™, an application platform that has delighted
digital consumers with a host of ready-to-use experiential
applications across a universe of devices. Mapmyindia, in
partnership with Sygic, has launched mobile apps that give the user
street level directions, and lets them search across
points-of-interests (PoI) on their mobiles without the need for a
data plan. That's not all… mobile trading will soon be a reality,
and India's markets regulator SEBI is currently working on the
final guidelines.
According to SEBI's proposal, brokers
who provide internet-based trading are eligible to use wireless
technology after getting approvals from stock exchanges. The net
worth requirement per broker is proposed at Rs 50 lakh if he
provides the facility on his own. In case a service provider
provides the internet trading facility on behalf of a group of
brokers, the net worth criteria stipulated by his stock exchange
will apply. Already, Nokia has partnered with ITC e-Choupal to
offer personalized agri-services on the Nokia Life Tools to
e-Choupal network. And, information giant Thomson Reuters' latest
offering for farmers, Reuters MarketLite, is already "all the rage"
among the village folks who use information on seeds, weather and
other farm inputs regularly.
With intense competition driving down
tariff s, mobile operators in India are increasingly focusing on
value added services (VAS) to generate revenues. VAS, which covers
the entire gamut of services from downloads of movies and music, to
sms and mms, ringtones, callertunes and games, has been on a solid
footing globally, but given the low base and the familiarity with
information technology, it is witnessing exponential growth in
India. The global VAS industry is growing at about 40-50 per cent,
but the Indian VAS market has seen growth rates of 60 percent in
recent years. It is estimated to touch 251 billion rupees ($5.5
billion) in 2009/10, on the back of a pool of more than 500 million
mobile customers.
Although most Indian consumers are not
very comfortable with non-voice usage of their mobile phones, that
trend is gradually reversing, helped by the entertainment sector,
with music and film companies, game makers and television channels
aggressively entering the mobile content market. Around 60 percent
of all Vas revenue currently comes from music downloads and
ringtones, and driven by a huge youth market, demand for gaming,
mobile imagery and streaming audio and video is rising.
Recently, IMImobile, the global
service creation partner for operators, media providers and
enterprises launched DaVinci Social, a white-labelled service that
enables people to easily manage their mobile digital sociallife. It
is apparently the first Bollywood streaming application ready on
Nokia s60 5th edition devices and streams Bollywood songs, movie
trailors, director's cuts etc. "When the internet came, people
hardly thought it would be useful and look where it has gone now.
so having access to high speed internet on mobiles with 3G will
allow people to do a lot more of the stuff they are now doing on
their laptops, at the same speed," says Suraj Nalin, a software
engineer working at Yahoo!
A recent study by consultancy
Informate Mobile Intelligence revealed that mobile users spend
15-20 minutes on messaging activities daily, while 40-45 minutes
are spent on entertainment where users listen to a minimum of 2-3
songs and click 15-18 photos in a month. The study also revealed
that card and puzzle categories are the most favoured among gamers
in India. With its mobile subscriber base growing rapidly,
advertisers in India are also adopting innovative ways of reaching
out to the consumer on their mobiles. While basic promotional sms
alerts are used by everyone- from small businesses to
national-level politicians, advertisers are focusing on more
complex mediums such as embedding promotions within mobile
games.
Indian telecom firms currently draw
only a small portion of their revenues from Vas, but this will
likely grow to about 18-20 percent in 2010, and once 3G services
are launched in the country in 2010, this could increase further.
The Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) from non-voice services,
including data card access and sms, is expected to rise from 9
percent now to about 25 percent. Data services should see a surge
in adoption and usage. High-speed applications will open up a lot
of possibilities of innovative Vas enabling diverse infotainment
service opportunities in this film and cricket-focused country.