IAMAI Session V: Perspectives for the Future of Mobile in India

Tomihisa Kamada, The Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Access Co. Ltd, Japan delivered the keynote address while Atanu Mandal, President of ACL Wireless, Viren Popli, Head of Mobile Entertainment for Star India, and Milind Pathak, Co – CEO & Country Manager, Buongiorno (Hong Kong) Ltd. Shared their insights on Mobile VAS in India.

Here is a compilation of what we at WATBlog think is the most relevant analysis with respect to this topic.

There are essentially 3 phases that a mobile market can go through:

Phase 1: Voice and SMS

Phase 2: Ringtones, wallpapers, information, entertainment

Phase 3: Rich Media, Open Internet, Convergence

Today the Internet is PC Centric. In the Future Internet access from mobiles will overtake the PC.

In Japan, the number of mobile internet users is already more than PC users. One will see that 3 years down the line in India as well primarily because of the volume of mobile penetration.

Mobile in the future will not only be mobile ‘phones’. Mobile will extend to cameras, dvd players, books maybe – a ubiquitous Internet.

The Internet on mobile has also evolved quite a bit. 1^st there was cHTML, 256 colour, Java & SSL, IRDA, Flash, HTML with email, full browser support with Adobe PDF support and now mobile TV is accessible.

One has also simultaneously seen a convergence between TV and Mobile – where the mobile is becoming increasingly powerful and the PC is becoming increasingly mobile. Mobile technology providers have also innovated greatly with things like zoomable fonts where users can optimize fonts on the mobile phones for reading etc and thus make the browsing experience on mobile phones equally good as that on PC’s.

Another thing that one finds becoming popular in the Mobile Internet market is mobile widgets. One has already seen that on the PC’s with Apple’s OS. Now we will see widgets for mobiles as well. This makes the touch and feel experience better and users can have a more ‘graphic experience’. This will also lead to users bookmarking favourites as widgets.

One also sees mobiles becoming advanced communication devices with high end cameras, voice recorders etc. Thus mobiles automatically need to be tapped as avenues that can crowd the space of user generated content.

Mobile optimizers are also developing transcoding softwares and servers where Internet ‘.com’ websites can automatically get converted to surf on a mobile platform. This will do the mobile VAS market a World of Good primarily because browsing times and website loading times will fall dramatically. Also, websites will not find it too expensive to migrate to the mobile platform thus making it a thriving eco system.

Yahoo Launches R&D Lab in India

Yahoo will be opening up an R&D lab in India soon. The lab to be opened at Bangalore will be a centre for excellence for the next generation of web, search and advertising technologies. The focus will be deliver memorable experience to the users. Yahoo said Yahoo-Labs-Bangalore will be responsible for making the Internet simpler and easier for advertisers and users.

After rebuffing the offer from Microsoft, Yahoo seems to be focusing more on creation of assets to align with its business. Setting up an R&D lab in makes sense. And its not just the cost factor. A majority of Microsoft’s products are developed here in India, its second biggest development centre after Redmond, United States. The engineering talent in India is capable of producing the cutting edge technology products in a world class manner

ICICI Bank Admits A Hit Of $264 Million From US Subprime Crisis

Maybe it’s time to brood for ICICI Bank CEO KV Kamath (right). The bank has become India’s first financial institution to admit that the US subprime crisis (see Wikipedia entry) has cost it dear. The credit crunch in the US has resulted in losses of about Rs 1,050 crore ($264 million) in 2007-08 for India’s second largest bank, after the state-run State Bank of India. The information interestingly did not come from the bank directly, but was revealed by P K Bansal, the minister of finance in the Union Ministry, who was asked a question in the upper house, Rajya Sabha.
ICICI Bank has large overseas operations especially in the US and UK, and is likely to have had a larger exposure to overseas assets than any other Indian bank. According to an article in Mint, ICICI Bank has about $2.2 billion worth credit derivatives exposure, while SBI has only about $1.1 billion. The bank, however, said it had neither invested directly in the USD market nor taken an exposure in the US subprime loan market.