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Tuesday, January 17, 2006 |
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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 didn’t 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 2006 Dina Mehta
