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. 1st 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.
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