GPRS being less popular

1. Pretty bad infrastructure on GPRS – one on within circle, two in roaming and three on speeds

2. Lack of handsets (being price sensitive, too few,,, while thats changing pretty fast now)

3. Lack of device management tools,,, meaning just about 20% of capable handsets are enabled for GPRS

4 Lack of killer apps as yet
(well again changing at fast pace with just a blackberry email app)

5. Consumer awareness and low internet penetration (while this finally would cause high usage in the end state)

There are no weightage for thes points and they vary from operator to operator & region too!

Slightly complex, but fairly good subject for deliberation.

Content uploader

Take a complete back up of the content on your phone, including contacts, calendar, ringtones, video and other data and restore this data in case your phone is lost. Looking at the growing occurrence of phone theft, upgradation of handsets we saw an opportunity to offer an integrated solution that provides customers with full backup and restore services of mobile contacts, calendar, tasks and other data.The data will be stored in a central repository and maintained by us. It is the choice of the subscriber if he wants a part or whole of the data to be publicly shared with other customers. If the subscriber has created a ringtone or a wallpaper, or shot an exclusive photograph, he can wish to share it an earn royalty on each download. It will be a copyright of the owner and he will ear the royalty from each download being made by other subscribers.

 

How can a subscriber use this application?

 

What are the requirements for a subscriber to use this service?He can access his data from his GPRS enabled phone or through his PC by using the Internet. We will provide a user ID and a password, which could be accessed from anywhere across the globe. There is no charge for uploading the data but a subscriber will have to pay for each download they make, which is currently being charged by the operator. However, we will keep it at a competitive price to encourage subscribers to download so that the uploader earns a royalty.

 

How do you foresee the response of the market to this new application?

 

Well, it’s a a huge market, which will drive the user-generated content in this sector. There is a huge demand for content with the easy access to the Internet. The most popular ringtone, Crazy Frog witnessed enthusiastic response from mobile subscribers worldwide. It started in the UK and even made way to the Indian market.This is an application to boost the latent talents of the young minds. This is a community-based service and we are optimistic to receive encouraging response from the market. With majority of subscriber own a camera phone, they can share those exclusive photographs as wallpapers, rest depends on the consumers to decide rate the creativity.

 

The subscriber will be given a mail ID and a password, and he will have the choice to make his whole or part of the data public or personal. He can access his data through GPRS from his mobile or through the Internet. The data will be safe and secure as in an email account.

Social networking kicking

Older teen(17+) adopt technology faster

JupiterResearch says that it has found teens ages 17 and older among the leaders in embracing new technology. In a new report, JupiterResearch found older teens are more than twice as likely to be early adopters of some key new technologies as younger teens. Despite the initial disparity, the study indicates the gap narrows significantly as technology matures.

“Adoption of technologies like cell phones or MP3 players among older teens is initially much higher in the early stages, but within a short period of time, that changes substantially, ” said Zia Daniell Wigder, Research Director at JupiterResearch. “For example, in 2004, eight percent of older teens embraced the iPod as compared to two percent of the younger teen population. Within two years, use by both 13- and 17-year-olds had increased to almost 30 percent.”

According to the study, the same trend does not apply to internet usage. During a five year period, 2002 – 2006, there was a near uniform increase in time spent online among all teens. Although older teens recorded the highest hours-per-week online, usage by most teen groups increased by approximately 20 percent regardless of age.

“Teens play a very significant role in influencing the purchasing decisions for new technology. Although older teens are consistently found to be the early adopters, the rate at which younger teens adopt the technology is not insignificant,” said David Schatsky, President of JupiterResearch. “Understanding this behavior will help marketers determine the best strategy for promoting new technology to younger consumers.”

Online dating :: When do you like someone like yourself?

 An analysis of online dating

Online dating is gaining momentum and is an easy, socially acceptable way to find partners for dates or relationships. To a social scientist, the wealth of data stored on online dating services has enormous potential in the study of interpersonal relationships. Instead of having to take surveys and interview people, scientists can now discover findings by looking at the statistics of what actually happened. Actions speak louder than words. Never before has something so human and primitive been reducible to such quantitative discrete values.

Do opposites attract? Apparently not. This study of an online dating service measures the importance of a matching characteristic when choosing a partner. The data is extracted from the contacts initiated by the users.

Characteristic	Increased Contact	Marital status	1.64x	Wants children	1.54x	Number of children	1.39x
Physical build	1.28x
Smoking	1.25x
Physical appearance	1.23x
Educational level	1.19x
Religion	1.17x
Race	1.14x
Drinking habits	1.12x
Pet preferences	1.11x
Pets owned	1.08x

Demographic findings in this study:

• 62.8% of members were male and 37.2% were female, but 55% of active members were female
• The median age for men was 36 and women was 33
• 78.2% of messages were never responded to
• Members sent an average of 1.5 messages
• Men initiated 73.3% of messages, but their initiations were 17.9% less likely to be reciprocated

A more detailed analysis of online dating is given in the author’s thesis.

I found this paper by browsing the list of Judith Donath’s students, who was also one of my professor’s advisor. Fiore’s Masters Thesis was about online dating — I bet that made for interesting party conversation.

Fiore, A. T. & Donath, J. S. (2005). Homophily in Online Dating: When Do You Like Someone Like Yourself?. Proceedings from CHI ‘05: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1371-1374. [PDF]

I am a veteran of Internet Dating and Social Networkinng sites. I have tried almost all the services out there. Starting from v-india, match.com, fropper, eHarmony, etc. to the more recent web 2.0 ones: myspace, bebo, orkut, zorpia etc. There were many forgettable ones in between (lovehappens, friendster, ringo etc.). I have also tried out some of the Indian online marriage classified sites: Rediff Matchmaker, JeevanSathi etc. Given this background, I consider myself as a seasoned campaigner (maybe I should start a wiki about how to make these services work for you; there lies a profession in there!).

But IMHO none of them address the basic issue Return on Investment (RoI). Males are meant to pursue females. Thats the way we are built and the way our society works. Given a 50:50 ratio of both sexes, each girl will get requests from at least 10 to 25 % of the guys on the site. Which creates 1) a problem of choice for the girl (if she is indeed looking for a date) 2) spam (if she is not eg. on SocNet sites). This phenomenon is most visible on Orkut (at least amongst Indians). All the girls on Orkut get hundreds of friend requests from guys looking for a date. The more attractive looking female gets more requests. Some girls refuse flatly, some check out the profile once before refusing and sometimes, once in a while, she accepts! As usual the odds are stacked against the males here as well. The hit rate is around 1 % and the chances of some action is even lower; around 0.01%.

That is simply too low. It results in too much hard work without a guaranteed RoI. The traditional methods have much better hit rates. Ask your friends, join a salsa class or just randomly approach girls on the street (yup, i have done that too). To make these SocNet sites work, they have to increase the odds against the guys. The service has to assume that there will be more guys on the site and each guy would preferably want to try out all the attractive looking girls out there (why not!). Its job should be ensure that he has a fair chance of accomplishing that.

And the best way to do that is to offer incentive to the girls. A rewards based system in which the girls would want to interact with the guys since its in their interest. Feed their greed (gifts, shopping vouchers, talk time on mobiles etc.) and make them more responsive. Leave the rest up to the guy. Its up to him to get a date after that! Given a large and diverse userbase, such a system would end up being much more effective. After some hits and misses, you might just bump into your soul mate and she will at least reply back once (trust me, that is a big step). Its a win-win situation either ways: the guys get to romance a bit, and the girl gets some real meat out of it.

AFAIK there are no incentive based Internet dating services yet. There are numerous methods of implementing such a service. Make the guys pay during registration, distribute it to the girls when they actually respond to guys and keep a commission for yourself. Have a concept of virtual money which can be encashed with real money. Have a phone based system where the guys actually pay twice the amount to talk to the girl. Create implementations which caters to niche user groups. The underlying concept remains the same. The females are rewarded and the males pay for that.

It would be an interesting experiment to try out at least. Maybe I should talk to a VC. And get this patented as well. In case I don’t get the funding, I’ll at least become rich if someone else does! That would also automatically ensure me a date .

I am really interested in studies regarding matchmaking and dating ( I have worked on one of the leading matchmaking sites). What I feel is this – as comprehensive the machmaking process is, response from girl’s side will be better.

The idea of incentives is great if it is a pure dating site.

But more than incentives, you should give a non-materialistic reason to contact guys directly.

Why don’t girls respond that much? Many reasons.
1) Lack of trust.
2) Waiting for a better ‘offer’ (a.k.a Choosy)
3) just feeling ‘all are flirts’.

May be we should think baout these more. my 2 cents

Update: Some assumptions validated in study.

Good design and usability;mantra for success of mobile internet sites

June 14th, 2007 by Sidhaarthaa

One out of every 11 people worldwide who log on to the net through their mobile phones is an Indian, according to a survey by UK-based  Bango Plc . Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a technology which lets users access the internet on their mobiles. India is expected to become the third largest mobile population by 2007, and developing a WAP site is no doubt on the to-do list of every respectable consumer brand.

The growth in this sector is fuelled by the efforts of network operators such as Airtel, Hutch, Reliance and portals such as Yahoo, Indiatimes and Sify, which have a mobile Web presence. Besides these, there are content developers such as Mobile2win and OnMobile, which create websites especially for the smallest screen.

However, the medium possesses certain limitations such as slow connectivity, more distractions in the form of unending links and limited space for content. These can really move surfers away from mobile surfing.

One way to avoid this is by avoiding clutter on the navigation at the top of the page.The key to making a good mobile site is to provide clarity, limit scrolling to one direction, provide the surfer with precise content and ensure the page size is within the memory limits of all basic devices.

One should think of the circumstances in which a user accesses a WAP site – whether he needs immediate information or is logging in for leisure. In short, the content must be relevant to need.

Creating a WAP site is different from creating a Website. There are three basic elements that must be considered – content, delivery medium (i.e., the phone) and usability. The site must be compatible with the lowest models of compatible phones. Basic things such as readability, fewer links and images, and easy navigation are significant.

A WAP site follows a typical Web development life-cycle. For most end users, it would be great if they use an existing service on the web like Winksite.com to create a mobile site. A mobile phone doesn’t have a large keyboard or mouse, so the number keys and a few special keys form the keyboard here, thus the usability of a WAP portal needs attention.

One of the problem areas in WAP is its speed and utility which, after 3G networks and more sophisticated terminals, has made possible the concept of the Internet over mobile devices a reality

A good WAP site should adhere to the 3Cs – cost, content and context.It’s an arduous task to customise the tools on a tiny screen, so it’s important to give users as much relevant content as possible in the given space.

The process of building a mobile site can take anywhere from 45 to 60 days and some of the cost parameters could be user interface, phone browser compatibility, and features such as search and personalisation.

The mobile phone has a wraparound quality that can touch one easily. For marketers, mobile sites present a very engaging medium, which, if utilised appropriately, can strike the right chord. More than just exploiting the intimacy of the phone, companies should use the technology in a form that invites an environment of friendship and fun. Consumer empowerment and user-driven marketing can find its roots in the interactivity of the mobile

Link: Just how design drives mobile WAP sites

Source: Agencyfaqs

gaming

Gaming has a big potential in India for sure thats why so many gaming cos have jumped into the bandwagon. Well at the moment mobile gaming is yet to pick up in India but PC games are surely much ahead.

Its a matter of time when mobile gaming actually picks up. With GPRS penetration on the rise,there will me more and more content available through the mobile internet.

As rightly said by Sandeep community based multiplayer gaming will have a great ppotential. As more and more smart phones are entering into the market with mobile internet speed getting better, this will soon be a reality.

Also another major area of development will be ad supported mobile content. Advertising in mobiles is the next big thing and already big organizations like google,yahoo,Aol,microsoft have already laid down big plans to invest on mobile advertising. AOL has already acquired Third Screen Media one of the larest mobile ad providers and similarly Microsoft has acquired Screentonic another big name in the mobile advertising space.

This space is hotting up and I am looking forward to Mobile TV as well.

Multiplayer games and community building via those games will be next big thing in gaming market….for this we have to have some value additions in place like if users can chat while playing games – will rock.

report latest

The Mobile Value Added Services (Mobile VAS or MVAS) industry could be worth nearly a billion dollars (Rs 4560 crores) by the end of 2007, from its current size of Rs. 2850. These findings are a part of the “Mobile Value Added Services Report” jointly prepared by the Internet And Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International.

A break up of the total market size of Rs 2850 crores reveals that P2P (person to person) SMS or Text Messaging, continues to dominate the industry with Rs. 1140 crores, followed by Ringtones, including Caller Ring Back Tones (CRBT) at Rs 1026 crores; P2A (Person to Application) and A2P (Application to Person) at Rs 428 crores; Games and Data at Rs 171 crores and others (MMS etc) at Rs 86 crores.

The P2P SMS revenue is accrued completely to the telecom operators. The remaining MVAS revenues are distributed among content owners, developers and the telecom operators on a revenue sharing basis.

In the case of MVAS (except P2P SMS) the revenue sharing arrangement is heavily in favour of telecom operators. This model is significantly different from more developed markets such as China where typically the operators are entitled to 20-30% only. In the case of enterprise solution services the revenue share arrangement between operator and short code owner is typically 70% and 30% respectively.

Link : Mobile Value Added Services in India 2007- Report

Source: Internet & Mobile Association of India

Cell service providers told to change short code digits

As per national numbering plan, service providers are allowed to use the levels except `0′,’1′,`7′,’8′ and `9′ for allocation of short codes.

 

New Delhi , July 17

Next time you want to participate in a TV poll or download a ring tone using short codes make sure you check the number you message to. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on Monday directed cellular service providers to immediately stop use of short codes that start with either of the digits 0,1,7,8 or 9.

Currently, a number of mobile content providers use short codes such as 7333 (Rediff) and 8888 (Indiatimes) to offer services such as ring tone downloads, games and polling. Some of the TV channels have also been using short codes based SMS services starting with these digits for voting and interactive services.

These short codes have been a major revenue churner for mobile operators and content providers because they are categorised as premium service and is charged at Rs 6 per SMS. Now they will have to change the short code on which they offer the service.

TRAI has said short codes starting with these digits are not permissible under the national numbering plan. It has asked the operators to report compliance to the authority within 15 days of issue of this direction.

National numbering plan

“As per national numbering plan, service providers are allowed to use the levels except `0′,’1′,`7′,’8′ and `9′ for allocation of short codes to their content providers including SMS based services within their network. It was found that some of the service providers are using the short codes, which are not permissible under national numbering plan,” said the TRAI letter.

The numbering plan of telecom services is decided by the Department of Telecom in such a way that the numbers are utilised efficiently. While `0′ is reserved for STD calls, `1′ is used for emergency numbers such as 100 and 101 and also toll free numbers like 1800 and the digit `9′ is used for mobile services.

While `7′ and `8′ are not yet allocated for any service, the Numbering Plan has reserved it for new services.

Here are some India specific Mobile VAS numbers: Market Size is around $ 600 Million, expected to grow at around 60 % and reach $ 1 Billion in 2007. The revenue share stands at 60:25:15 for the operator, provider, copyright owner. On the face it looks very promising. But lets get a bit deeper into it.

Assuming that you are a startup operating in this market, and assuming that you have a great product which will outsell others, you’ll probably still have around 25 % share of the pie. So you’re on target to make $ 60 Million. Thinking realistically, given the number of players in this industry, and the maturity of the consumer base, you’ll struggle to reach the 5% mark. That works out to around 10 Million USD. (Also note that the data is from secondary sources!)

Is that enough to play with? Methinks someone has to be big hit in this segment to make a ton of money. Still Mobile VAS startups did attract some attention from the VC’s this year. But a closer inspection reveals something else. OnMobile is a Mobile VAS platform provider; so you can count them out. JiGrahak and Paymate happened around the same time and that was largely due to the KPCB factor. That leaves IMIMobile and Mauj. They are hardly startups anymore! On the other hand the Web Startups had a sterling year. Notice that there are no other companies but the Consumer Internet and Mobile VAS one’s.

So maybe its time for you give a second thought to that Web 2.0 concept again. Or just forget the numbers and figure out a way get to revenues without help from our VC friends!

Bonus Link: BW’s series on Startups. (Hat tip: Puneeth)

Update: Here’s Sidhartha’s take on the report.

Mobile Phones may be Extinct in 5 Years

They’re the most essential gadget today, but a University professor Nigel Linge, of the University of Salford, Greater Manchester, United Kingdom, is predicting that in the short span of just 5 years, mobile phones will be extinct.

He predicts mobile computers will take their place and he says this is where technology is heading.

Link: Mobile Phones may be Extinct in 5 Years