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There are 6 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India" New TRAI’s Directive to Allow You to Talk MoreCome September 15th, prepaid subscribers in the country will start rejoicing as a new directive released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) today allows them to use almost the full value of recharges done for their mobile phones. The regulator, with this directive, has directed the mobile service providers in the country to discontinue charging the processing fee that is levied on the recharge coupons currently. Thank TRAI for ThisAlmost all of the mobile operators offer mobile recharge coupons for various denominations. However, most of these recharge vouchers come with a talk time that is almost half of what you pay for the voucher. This is because the operators levy a hefty processing fee and taxes on the amount. Thus, you are only credited a part of what you pay. Now, this directive instructs that the operators charge only a small administrative fee, not exceeding Rs. 2 per recharge voucher, plus the taxes. This means that you can get almost the full value of the recharge voucher of any denomination. Although this move will be welcomed by the millions os subscribers all over the country, it will definitely go undigested with the mobile operators. According to the Hindu Business Line, almost 85 percent off all the mobile subscribers in India are prepaid subscribers. These subscribers account for almost 70 percent of the total revenue generated by the mobile operators. Effectively, these mobile operators will now have to offer more talk time to these subscribers due to TRAI’s decision. Does this mean a fall in the revenue for the mobile operators?To some extent, yes. TRAI’s directive has had no effect on the actual price of the recharge vouchers. So the operators end up getting the actual value that the user pays for. They, however, will now need to start offering more talktime to the users than before. Also, since the users now get more talktime to toy with, the frequency of recharges will decrease to a great extent. Previously, if you spoke worth Rs. 400 in a month and required 2 recharges for the same, the same will now be possible with just one recharge. That’s almost a saving of 50%. This, after September 15th, the mobile operators will see a huge drop in the revenues, due to this directive. Not only that, the operators now will need to spend more on revving up the infrastructure, if at all there is an increase in the usage. So if you start experiencing dropped calls more frequently than before, you know who to blame. But what made TRAI take this drastic decision? To put it in simple words, it was the ‘lack of transparency’. The regulator has also announced other consumer-friendly initiatives. For example, a subscriber can now move from one lifetime validity plan to another without paying any additional fee. These customers also do not need to recharge more than once in 6 months. Here are the highlights of the Directive:
These initiatives will be applicable from September 15th, 2008 and will be available for both new and existing subscribers. Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult IOL Netcom to offer CDMA services in Mumbai and DelhiIOL Netcom, who had so far become synonymous with broadband and IPTV services in Mumbai and Delhi with its tie-up with MTNL is now all set to enter as a player into the Indian telecom market. The company has entered into an agreement with state-owned telecom service provider MTNL, which has presence in the Mumbai and Delhi circles. MTNL currently offers both CDMA and GSM services in Mumbai and Delhi under the brand Dolphin and Garuda. This franchise model agreement between the two companies is based on the Tata Teleservices-Virgin Mobile deal which is currently in service. RSP Sinha, the CMD of MTNL, told Business Standard:
MTNL had invited bids for CDMA operations in Mumbai and Delhi and IOL Netcom emerged as the winner in both the circles. According to the agreement, IOL Netcom, which plans to operate its brand under the name ‘IOL Mobile’, can have upto 2 lakh customers in each circle. The company hopes to launch the brand and its services within the next 90 days and is supposedly targeting a user base of 1 million in the coming months. While the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) for any operator is Rs. 230 / month in India, IOL Mobile is aiming for the Rs. 450/month mark. IOL Netcom also plans to introduce a variety of Value Added Services (VAS) such as multi-play services, comprising mobile, data card, desktop CDMA phones and already offer IPTV and broadband services. It now joins the seven other companies that have just received licenses from the government to provide mobile services throughout the country. The Department of Telecom (DoT) has also given a go-ahead for MVNOs to operate in the mobile sector and global companies have already started to come calling. The Indian Mobile industry holds huge potential for various companies in the business. We just need to wait and see how the year 2009 (Hopefully, the year of 3G) fares for the consumers. Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult Star News To Launch Website Soon.. Likely to be Starnews.inStar News new head of new media Mr.Ramakrishnan Laxman who moved from Publicis Digitas to join the joint venture between ABP TV and the STAR Group known as Media Content & Communications Services India Pvt. Ltd (MCCS) has said to afaqs that Star News would be soon launching its own website. Given the fact that star news is a hindi news channel would the website will also be in hindi? There is no news on that front yet. If one might remember currently all the star channels online initiatives are routed through one portal only i.e. indya.com. Indya.com was acquired in the post dotcom boom phase of 2001 for millions of dollars and since then Indya.com has been the online destination for all star tv channels which have grown in number over the years. While competitors in the news space like Zee, NDTV, Network18 and the latest entrant UTV were quick to launch individual sites for their news channels Star has been lagging behind for sometime in this arena. Star has many other properties as well like star world, star utsav, star gold, star movies, star vijay which dont have a dedicated site. The only properties of star which have dedicated sites are StarPlus, National Geographic, History Channel and Channel V (which is only a domain redirect to Indya.com). Star is like to launch the news sites on the .in domain names which have been booked for the channels starnews, starworld, starmovies and even starutsav. Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult Google Chrome: Everything You Want To Know About The Google BrowserHere it comes, the much awaited Google Browser. They call it Chrome. Google announced it in its official blog. Interestingly, they have described the entire technology behind Chrome in a comic. Here it is. Google Chrome, from what I have seen till now, is not just another regular browser, build on top of an existing base. The features they have introduced are well thought out. All of them are intended to make life easier for the users and also for the developers. So what’s new in Google Chrome? The Chrome is build from scratch, ground up, based on Apple’s Webkit rendering engine. Webkit is the same engine that fires the Apple Mac OS X’s Safari browser. And Its also used in the android system for mobile phones. Though originally developed by the Konqueror team, the engine is now jointly developed by Apple, Google and Nokia. To give you a sense of the ubiquity of the platform, let me tell you that Webkit is now used by Adobe AIR, Nokia’s Series 60 phones, iPhone, and even Google Android. So, under the hood, there’s a pretty robust engine. What does it looks like? Well looks like common browsers. Tabs, address bar. Search box etc.. One important difference here is that the Tabs contain the Address bar. Or, the address bar is placed, below the tab. And that has a lot to do with how they have designed the system. Tabs are far more important, from a design point of view, in Google Chrome. Tabs Are Important, yes. But How Are They Far More Important In Google Chrome? Well, a common problem with today’s browser was crashing. We now have multiple tabs. And we like to open up as many tabs as possible. This loads up the memory with all the stuff that we are using. Now, the modern browsers are all designed so that the browser program takes up one thread for all the browser activities. So, one thread for all the tabs. Think of this as a thread which passes through, and therefore links, all the different tabs. The problem with this process is that when one of them goes kaput, it affects all the tabs. Thus, the complete browser crashes. So, what Google Chrome does is, make a different process for every tab. SO, each tab has its own process, which means it has its own memory and its own global data structures. If something goes wrong in that tab, nothing happens to the other tabs. You close that one tab, and you are done. The entire browser doesn’t crashes. Ohh, that’s a wonderful approach. But also a new one. Have they tested it? Google claims that they have tested the Chrome browser on millions of webpages. More correctly, millions of most trafficked websites. Google already has an index of almost the entire web. Not only this, it also has information about the usages and traffic of each website. It can thus know very well about the traffic of different websites. Google says it’s system can test Chrome on millions of websites, within 20-30 mins of a new release. V8 - The new Javascript Virtual Machine Because Javascript is such a prominent part of the web today Google went ahead and developed a completely new Javascript Virtual Machine (VM) for Chrome. The V8 will be made freely available to others. Anyone can incorporate the V8 engine and build a browser on top of it. The Address Bar - The Omnibox Omnibox - that’s what they are calling their address bar. We have already tasted what can be done with this space in Firefox’s Awesome bar and Internet Explorer’s enhanced address bar. It can be used for search. And when you type a letter, it gives you only the result that you have typed. So, when you type “w” it gives you watblog.com as an option and not http://www.watblog.com/2008/08/14/microsoft-live-search-will-it-steal-the-show/ . This is what we really want, isn’t it? Also, when you reach a website with a search box, like Google.com, Wikipedia.com or Amazon.com, the search boxes on those pages get captured on your local system. SO, next time you want to search Amazon.com for “The Alchemist” all you do is type this in Address Bar - Search Amazon: The Alchemist, and press enter ! You are done! Pretty neat, I must say. The default page is a home page like opera. With nine screenshots/links to the most visited websites. Besides this, there are also links to the websites that are recently bookmarked, plus the links that were recently closed tabs. Security Apart from the tabs being put in different processes, Google Chrome uses something called Sandbox. So, a sandbox is virtual container in which a computer program may run. So a plugin , always runs in combination with Javascript and HTML. Google Chrome takes this plugin, and keeps runs it in a sandbox. What this means, is, if the plugin crashes, it doesn’t results in the crash of the entire browser. Apart from this, the Google Chrome program constantly downloads two lists - one of phishing websites and the other for malware websites, and constantly checks the pages that we request against this list. Anytime it encounters a malicious page, it notifies the user about it. Also, the owner of the malware website is also informed of their website being blacklisted. This prevents False positives. Compatibility and Scalability It’s a common knowledge that as a developer, there are different things that you can do with different browsers. Google Chrome is based on something called Gears, which provides a platform for creating APIs for the browser. Released under the BSD license, Grears can be used to add functionality to a web browser. Google will make the code of Chrome public, so that public participation can take the project further. Moreover, Gears can ensure that other browsers are not far behind and can deploy many capabilities in them, too. Compatibility won’t that much of a problem, then. Conclusion I was pretty much impressed by what I saw. The different standards that Google has brought to the browser are all open standards, and keeping it in the open domain means further apps/plugins can be built on top of it. How the Chrome actually fares, will be known only once its out in the open. Which will be later, today. Till then, let’s just wonder on how will the other two giants react to this. What are your thoughts on Google Chrome? Can it tip Firefox and more importantly, Microsoft Internet Explorer? Do we actually need a newer browser? Let us know. Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult Mobile Value Added Services (MVAS) To Grow 70% YOY To Rs.16,520 Crore Market By 2010 - IAMAI & IMRB ReportIts seems like IAMAI and IMRB are on a report releasing spree. Now they have released a pretty comprehensive report on the Mobile Value Added Services (MVAS) Industry in India. This is their third report in just 2 weeks. It also comes at an appropriate juncture as IAMAI is conducting the National Conference on Mobile Vas in Delhi today. The report covers the following aspects: An Overview of the Indian Mobile Telephony Market, Need for Mobile Vas, Defining Vas and its different categories, Mobile Vas in rural markets, MVas Ecosystem, Mvas access devices, Impact of 3G on mobile devices, Growth drivers for MVas and Future of MVas in India. Check out the report below: One can also download the report from here. Following are the key highlights of the report:
On the whole the report is a great resource for anyone who wants to understand the VAS industry in India in detail. There have been other reports as well which we have covered here. This industry is set to boom and its no surprise that Venture Capitalists are eyeing this space and are looking to invest funds. What will be key though is how the operator, technology enable and content provider relationships work out in the future given the rapid change in technology policies wherein Wimax players could be granted telecom services which would make this space far more interesting and value of differentiated content would increase tremendously thereby making it more lucrative for content providers. Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult 160y2.com Rolls Out New FeaturesOver the last month, the folks down at SMSCountry have been making some additions to their 160by2.com project. Around three weeks ago they came up with MyAds, which allows users to post their ads (under 65 characters) that will appear after the SMS of people. Anand, the chief blogger for 160by2.com said on the company’s blog:
Each user gets 5000 rupees worth of virtual cash that he can use to create ads (each SMS costs 1 rupee). These ads can turn out to be really helpful. One could use this as a classified or even to publicize his/her blog. They were also clever enough to give options to people to select the cities so that only users from that city would receive the SMS and hence make the ads more relevant to the users and advertisers alike. However, as of now it only includes four metros and AP (You can obviously opt for Pan India otherwise). You are supposed to mention your contact information (mobile number, email address, website) in your ad itself. Once you have exhausted your allocated amount, you will be given additional virtual money depending upon the quality(apart from some other factors) of your ad. An interesting question now arises. How do they plan to execute such a quality check? Especially when the number of users on their site is increasing at a rapid pace. The reason 160by2.com decided to have this feature is probably because they have been having good success through their advertisers and hence decided to open up their advertising service to people for free as well. The paid advertising service requires a minimum of 5000 SMS to be sent, this way they Quite recently, they expanded MyAds and made those ads available on their online platform as well Anand explains the move by saying that it was the logical thing to do. With this new feature, the ads will be included in search results and also be made available to all the 160by2.com users apart from obviously going out to the recipients of the free SMS. The 160by2.com team is overwhelmed by the response. They are currently sending out 2 lakh SMS daily tagged with a MyAd. One of the points which remain unclear to me is: Could events be promoted using such a service? This could be effectively used to publicize a garage sale or an unconference and could reach out to a lot of people. However ofcourse, the issue of filtering would come up again and the authorities might call the ads irrelevant. Rajiv Adds: There are other services like 160by2 like mGinger which has the backing of DFJ and 2 Million Dollars. There is also Way2Sms which according to alexa rankings is one of the most popular sms services in India. We had done a complete round up of such sms advertising services last year. Have a look here. Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult More Recent Articles |
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