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Tuesday, January 17, 2006 |
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I came in a little late into this session, so missed the moderator's opening comments. Moderator is Ajit Balakrishnan MD and CEO, rediff.com. Panelists :
Lav Gupta - BSNL What justifies multi-crore investments in broadband? VOIP does not really require broadband. For indiv users, the experience of browsing doesnít improve much with broadband. Egovernance, telemedicine, distance learning don't really need it so. Then why are we building it ??? Because we are moving to video applications - IP video, network PVR etc.We're still at the bottom of the learning curve. Tech phase to business phase, have we even really sorted out the tech phase? Lots of gaps still in the tech phase. Business phase - what does the customer want? We need to deliver services that the customer is willing to pay for. If all pieces sorted out - in both the tech and business aspects, it is predicted that India will have 26 mn broadband video customers by 2008. Content owners need wider market, service providers need new streams of revenue, government needs ways to promote eco devt, customer wants more applications, ease in use.
Ecommerce in India today is a rocking business, it is
real, it is profitable. They started
railway ticketing on the internet - between 2003 and 2005 increase was
76% in ticket sales, and 99% increase from 2005 onwards. The industry now needs to come forth and offer value to customers. What's needed to grow is greater connectivity, broadband - the better the customer experience the greater the reliability, the greater the profits. We also need more payment options - people fear cybercrime. Ends with an interesting observation - the learning period seems to be 19 months, growth very slow until then, then it takes off. Does your business also take 19 months? Sunil Buch - Reliance Web WorldWe believe broadband is the future and it is here. India will have to RAP which is --- Retail Access Points will continue to deliver significantly to access percentages. Broadband has to be fair. Want our mothers, daughters, wives, sisters to safely roam the digital highway. 105 cities with 240 reliance webworld digital destinations exist. The future is in gaming which is the 6th genre of entertainment, distance education will be a reality Sanjeev Bikchandani - Naukri.comMissed a little but he seemed to suggest that unless we get out of the English trap and get into the vernacular, the internet will never really become mass in India. Sanjay Trehan - Times Internet Raises the issue of what is broadband ?/?? Is 256 kbps broadband ? Japan in comparison has 100 mbps, Sweden 1 GB. How can we have
on-demand media or gaming when our broadband is at 256 Kbps? The
larger broadband revolution took off
because of entertainment and media industries - not just the mobile
ones. Access is not an issue, technology is pervasive but we
need compelling content. Another issue - how do we make money out of it ? What business models? Challenges - intellectual property rights, DRM. They are constantly exploring how the bank can look at new markets - new technologies, new markets. We see ourselves as facilitators of an eco-system that offers security and convenience to help entrepreneurs re-invent how payments are made. Broadband access at 256 kbps may well be enough as long as it is always on. Can we leapfrog into a system where the internet can enable customers to access service and access banking? How can the bank facilitate this - by taking a PC into the home. It can become an alternative to landline - it can alter how he behaves - the customer now can use mobile devices as his payment device.Anupam Mittal - shaadi.com How does one go about understanding broadband growth - and what applications and business models to apply - there are more questions than answers in the Indian scenario.There will be indigenous applications specific to India (eg. Gaming in Korea). The answer is not in putting up a lot of Bollywood content alone. We need customer segmentation, it is then easier to come up with business models and applications that cater to them. Also, broadband is not video but a lot of different things -how do you assess whether it makes sense to do something or not. 4 parameters :
Should we be pushing for higher speeds on broadband, or look at always-on instead? Some form of standardization may be useful - a basic minimum speed and democratizing it may be the way out. Need efficiency available to as many people as possible. How can we encourage cybercafe proliferation ? shaadi.com has assisted cybercafes for instance on the ground and they are doing so well.Digital Summit 2006 Mumbai 1:23:13 PM  comment [] trackback []
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It is really disappointing that an industry seminar such as Digital
Summit has no provisions for wifi, and neither was I getting a signal on my
Reliance phone. So all my plans to
live-blog vanished in the first few moments. Still, I took some notes and posting them here during the breaks. Forgive the typos and absence of links! Session 1 : The Potential of Internet Access via Mobile
Rajesh Sawhney - Reliance. Correct a perception that only 2 mn users of internet - Reliance alone has a base of 17 mn folks of which 10 mn use the Rworld portal at least once a month. 4 screen paradigm for entertainment : Cinema ---> TV ---> PC ---> Mobile Mobile is the most pervasive of all. Its with you anytime anywhere. In sheer numbers, mobile phones dominate. Nos. Cinema : 1200 , TV : 100+, PCs : 12 mn, Mobile phones : 80 mn. By 2010 - forecasts that it will grow to 300 mn. All of these are transitioning. Changes in cinema / tv - single screens to multiplexes, plasma and IPTV and DTH , PCs - broadband and triple play services. He sees the evolution of a Universal Mobile Device - cam phones, music devices. Entertainment is definitely getting digital and mobile. Key enabler - broadband. Content drivers - Movies and derived from that music. Sex and gambling. Sports and gaming. Entertainment is beoming short and capsuled. Analog technologies are the forces of control and digital technologies are the forces of freedom. Consumers want control and interactivity - digital entertainment is becoming user generated. Arun Gupta - What is internet on mobile - how do you define it. 10-20% of the phones GSM are capable of browsing the internet, the estimate is only about 15% of that is infact browsing. By 2010 expect that the number of java-gprs enabled handsets will go up 10 fold. The challenge too is how do you get consumers to use it. For a lot of people its just too painful currently.Arvind Rao - manages and runs the voice portal across every mobile operator. On Mobile, they use speech as the interface, and not sms or wap. Trying to simplify the user interface, need to make it easy not just for consumers but also for operators. Services launched - biggest use is music and entertainment, also online dating service called checkmate, call from your cell and ask for the score, and also listening to live commentary of cricket matches. Corporate and M-Commerce - entirely thru voice and speech
recognition. Interesting to note that only 20% in English, 30% in hindi and the
bulk is in vernacular languages. Limitations are hi network equipment deployment, operations complexity so hi investment reqd, billing and reconciliation complexity. 600 mn calls per month - increasing to 65-70% per annum. Linear presentation of content. What's interesting is these are walled gardens - on top of them you can launch media portals - where you can have TV channels layered in. Ravishankar - Yes Bank. For everything online, the challenge today is how can services collect payment - how can the services be made easily accessible, and how can I get customer buy-in. Mohit Bhatnagar - Airtel Get geared for mobile operations, its going to be huge. Customers earlier were looking for simplistic things like cricket scores and astrology. Key consumer insight - need to personalize his mobile equipment. In next three years, gaming will be huge, and then serious digital entertainment. Challenges in the market place - too many commoditized content providers, we need to start thinking like service providers instead. Need to step into the retail space, where the customer can buy his groceries from his phone.Youth in India buys because friends buy, not necessarily because its advertised well, so how can we use that. SMS spam - will have to take care of that. 2 trends predicted :Corporate and SME world will adopt this world more seriously - there will be a lot of opening up of portals - currently smart plumbing model with brands, but this needs to transition to Pipe activities that will only get larger. Traffic will move from sms and voice into data services - so businesses need to morph their businesses from simple text and sms into rich multimedia environments. Q&A What efforts are being taken to make tech more user-friendly - speech has made it easier, try to make the call flows easier, number of steps to get there less. Also, background noise is very high in India, so the customer should be able to press buttons to complete transaction. Opening up of walled gardens - the end game is there will be a subscription to hit a url, they will be able to find content free - and then there will be premium content. Also, there will be a gate where the user can actually move to a different url. Shopping on the mobile - world experiences? Korea and Japan (close to 40% pf all auctions happen on mobile phones, and 60% of these transactions are made by women) really are the two markets where it has taken off - auction sites in the US tried it but didnít work - the form just wasn't easy. Here in India, we need better browsing experiences and handsets here for this to take off. Infrastructural issues need to be sorted first. A smile at the end of the session - how soon will we have a national 'donotcall' list for mobile
operators :):):) No answers of course ! 1:05:20 PM comment [] trackback []
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Copyright 2009 Dina Mehta
