Recently Affle announced a tie up with Airtel on the sms search front with its SMS 2.0 product which would be powering the sms search on Airtel. We felt there was a need to get a sense where this Industry i.e. the mobile search space was headed be it sms search or search via mobile internet.
We spoke to Industry players like Affle, Mobile Worx, Metromela, Asklaila and Yulop who are providing the mobile search feature in one form or another to better understand what was their take on the Mobile Search. What is the kind of numbers they expect. When to do they expect their services to scale and how mobile search compare with desktop search online.
“Mobile Search (both sms & gprs) will be 50% of all searches (sms, web via desktop and gprs) done in 2-3 years!”
Both Pankaj Joshi - Co-Founder of Metromela and Anuj Kumar Executive Director of Affle (South Asia) felt that mobile search would have 50% share in the total searches made. Though Anuj was slightly more upbeat than Pankaj and felt that the 50% share would be achieved in the next 2 years while Pankaj felt it would take 3 years. Asklaila Co-Founder Shriram Adookurie was very conservative though and felt it would be only 20% of overall searches in the next 3 years. Asif Ali CTO of Mobile Worx said that it was hard to say what would be the numbers like given the differences in mediums.
SMS Vs GPRS - Which takes the cake on search?
All those asked felt currently sms takes the cake. Sridhar G Co-founder of Yulop stated that 95% of searches via mobile would be via sms while gprs would account for 4-5%. Pankaj of Metromela said that he is betting on the upcoming 3g access on mobiles and felt that it would redefine the numbers of sms vs gprs search. Shriram of Asklaila was of a different opinion on the numbers of searches currently. He felt the mobile search was equally divided at 33% each for sms, wap/gprs and USSD Gateways. Anuj of Affle and Asif of Mobile Worx said that it was difficult to give the split as there was no third party data accessible to them.
Revenue Models that will work for Mobile Search in India?
Most of the Industry players thought that charging consumers for accessing search was surely not going to work they felt that the scalable model was that of mobile advertising. Sridhar of Yulop felt that besides for ads Location Based Services has lot to give if GPRS penetrates and the best revenue model at this stage would be a lead generation, where with the help of LBS application, one can actually bring the consumer to their shop via moble search. Pankaj of Metromela also felt that besides for ads lead generation would be a good revenue source for mobile search in the future.
Shriram of Asklaila also felt that Ads would work on mobile. His reasons were that yeild is much better on mobile. According to him the mobile user are more serious and would have higher conversion. he also felt that all long tail advertisers would love mobile advertising.
How Big will the mobile search market be in the future?
Sridhar of Yulop felt that only WAP/GPRS based mobile search would be a 500 crore market in the next 4-5 years. Shriram of Asklaila felt that the total mobile search market i.e. sms/wap/gprs would be around a 50 million $ (250 crores approx) market in 2-3 years. Pankaj of Metromela felt that 70% of their own revenues would come from mobile search 3 years from now. Asif Ali of Mobile Worx stated that in 3-5 years 25% of all mobile advertising revenues would come via ads served on mobile search pages. He stated global numbers of mobile search being 2.4 billion $ market by 2011-12.
What are people searching on mobiles?
Shriram of Asklaila felt that 60% of all the searches on mobiles would Local searches in 3-5 years time Currently he said that only 10% of mobile searches were local in nature as almost 90% of it was adult content and VAS related searches i.e. ringtones, games, images etc. Asif Ali of Mobile worx felt that free content was very popular currently and though local searches were catching up a mass adoption of mobile search was still a few years away.
Finally What’s Stopping Mobile Search? What are the biggest hurdles?
Asif Ali of Mobile Worx listed out the following obstacles to mobile search:
Cost – it has to be free to the user, just like the Internet. If it has a cost attached to it especially the current pricing of SMS, mass adoption will be difficult.
Medium –SMS is the largest medium now and mobile search companies must also focus on SMS as much as they need focus on WAP. But that's a difficult problem to solve as SMS is not feasible for small and medium players until the revenue cycle starts and that is a deterrent.
Content and Relevant / Local results: It should help in delivering absolutely relevant search results – delivering first 5 of 5 billion search results alone doesn't help
Content discovery is not easy and should be become easier and seamless – this is still a bottleneck (which I believe, google and a few others are addressing to certain extent) where the pages on the Internet must be well formatted to fit the mobile phone incase the mobile site is not available.
Network speeds - the current connectivity offered by carriers is good but definitely faster connectivity and 3G in Metros will really help accelerate adoption.
Anuj Kumar of Affle pointed out the following obstacles:
1) Penetration of Mobile Internet, which is contrainted by the cost of plan, and difficulty which an average user faces to activate a simple data plan on his handset. Getting a data plan on your handset is sometimes the most painstaking experience which differs by MNO and by circle 2) Getting users to start using the mobile for data services - Actions like launching browsers are alien to most people.
Sridhar of Yulop felt that operators needed to realize that they were sitting on a goldmine with their gprs services. He questioned how did the operator plan to monetize gprs once 3G came into India? He felt gprs should be given free by the operator.
WATBlog Analysis - Mobile search is most definitely one of the key areas where the Indian market could boom in the future given the mobile subcriber base booming in India. Also given the local information being extremely critical i.e. be it road information, hotels, restaurants, shopping etc mobile and LBS could work really well in India.
A considerable time after it sent out request for proposals, BCCI.TV, the Indian cricket body’s new official website is finally out. The site is neat, fresh and ordinary and hasn’t broken any path in its effort to bring Indian cricket online (officially at least). So you find a scorecard of India’s last international match, overview of domestic tourneys, news, and perhaps the most interesting part the archives (subjective).
The site is built and managed by Global Cricket Ventures which itself is a joint venture by Netbluelinks Holdings and Live Current who own properties like cricket.com. They had pumped in close to $50 million when for IPLT20.com and BCCI.TV was in fact part of the same deal which would continue for the next 10 years. GCV had essentially bought exclusive rights to content including video, photos, live scoreboards, match results stats, etc. for the sum, which had ultimately led to the media-BCCI embargio just before the IPL in April.
The only interesting and perhaps ‘exclusive’ content would be the featured video and archives section that perhaps would be difficult to find elsewhere.
The impact of this news ideally wouldn’t be much. The important aspect to look out for would be BCCI’s monetization strategy of the website. It currently has Adsense’s contextual ads, so there are possibilties for sure that they might pursue sponsorship opportunities with advertisers on the site. Now, having not covered Indian cricket’s online escapades widely before I am handicapped by lack of information here. However, it is seeminlgy obvious that there will be a revenue share between GCV and BCCI on the monetization of the site, and perhaps the reason the cash rich board is even pursuing monetization is so that GCV can make some money.
Earlier, we had reported that ticket sales online on BCCI.TV was ehavily promoted on TV only to be forwarded to Kyazoonga. It would be interesting to see how such partnership would be powered online. Especially if say someone like a Bookmyshow decides to offer cricket ticket’s powered by BCCI’s site and how this would affect the commercials. Online streaming of matches would perhaps be the most interesting piece of action on the site if they do happen. For it officially cuts down the need of any broadcasting middleman, at least on the face of things.
Monetising popular archives through the featured video, and the archives section would be interesting. For one, they can be less in demand compared to the millions of viewership they can expect for other exclusive content, however, given the cricket craze, it can also sell at a premium to hardened connoisseur of the game. I for one simply love the fact that I can watch the classics at my conveneince online.
What’s sorely lacking is any social features on the website. Though this is primarily a personal opinion, I genuinely feel both GCV with their tremendous online experience and BCCI with their monster archive of content missed out on a window of opportunity to push the content aggressively by not having any social media feature. The level of engagement that cricket can bring online would be hard to match by anyone. Just imagine a BCCI blog with ex-players and current contributing an article a week (even ghost written), the traction would have been enoromous.
Anyway, with the highly anticipated India Australia series on the anvil, which the site tells me very kindly is only 10 days away, we would perhaps see the site geared up to its fullest potential, and a proper judgment of the site can be done.
Delhi based Educomp Solutions Ltd, who acquired a 51% stake in Learning.com for Rs. 105 Crores and acquired Singapore based Ask n Learn back in May 2008, have now announced that they have been handed a project to implement Computer Aided Education in the schools of Karnataka.
Karnataka’s Department State Education Research and Training (DSERT) have gotten into an agreement with Educomp, according to which the company would be responsible for implementing the project over the course of 5 years and is set to bring in the company a total of Rs. 109 crore. The computer aided educaton is planned to be executed and implemented n 1571 schools across the state.
The company, which set it eyes on acquiring $500 million in May has a similar deal with the government of Chhattisgarh. As per this agreement, the company targets 52 hostels in the state. With this 100 crore project, Educomp Solutions Ltd. will add over 8,00,000 new students, taking the total reach to over 5.8 million students in almost 9000 schools.
As the country progresses, more and more rural schools and educational educations are seeing the light of computer aided education for their students. This ensures that the child received hands-on and updated knowledge from around the world.
Company has been giving. The company has distributed around 10,000 test SIM cards to its employees.
RCom has invested around Rs.800 crore and erected 2500 towers. By mid-December, the company plans to launch the full GSM service.
The testing began in the cities of Mumbai, Bangalore, Surat, Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Ludhiana.
The second stage of funding will involve vendors and associates. The company says, by the time of the official launch of the service, 5 lakh people are expected to me associated with.
Reliance has been making strides into the GSM market. After Qualcomm officials declined to lower the royalty on CDMA phones, it was made clear that Reliance will come up with their full fledges GSM service.
In 2001, Reliance launched its CDMA service and changed the rules of the game. The big player that Reliance is, it can compete aggressively on price. The tariff war was sparked off by the launch of Reliance’s CDMA launch. The tariffs in India are already at the all time low. However, after Virgin’s offer of giving away talk time for incoming calls, Reliance will have to resort to some tactic to lure the users, Knowing Reliance, I believe, that will. Hey have claimed a mammoth figure of 25% market share on launch. That’s huge, considering India’s mobile users base is more than 300 million. It’ll be interesting to see Reliance once again bringing on some turbulence in the market. From the company which started it all.
What was your first reaction when you read the title of this post? Was it elation, wishing it were actually free? Or was it contempt wondering “Who the hell uses dial-up these days?”
According to Hindu, BSNL has made its dial-up connection, NetOne, available for free. Now, better not get worked up so fast because it ain’t really free for your pocket. You still end up paying the telephone call charges. It is the internet access charge (of 10p/minute) that’s been waived off.
Looking at the idea more closely, I wonder how such an offer can prove any useful to BSNL. It is just akin to announcing that the internet charges have been slashed by 6 rupees per minute! Although Anil Jain, BSNL’s Deputy Director-General, informs that there have been almost 1000 sign ups every day since the announcement, I feel it’s nothing but a result of the “free internet access” effect than the move itself.
Anyway, such a move by BSNL spurred a thought in me. What if dial-up connections are actually made free in India? Will that see people making bee lines outside land line operators’ for new connections, all year round? How can an operator leverage on such a scenario. Let us try to analyze how life would be, in a world of free internet (dial-up, of course).
The Business Plan
Let there be an option of “speed select” where the consumer can select the speeds that he wishes to browse in, dynamically, any time he wishes.
Off all the plans, there could be an option to select a slower speed, say 40kbps that shall be offered absolutely for free. No Access Charge, no call charges.
The other plans could be priced accordingly.
The Justification behind such an Outrageous Business model
Today, mobile service providers like Airtel already provide unlimited data download via GPRS connection at the cost of Rs 200 - Rs 500 per month, depending upon the location.
This makes me wonder, why a land line service provider can also not provide unlimited download plans on their dial-up since they already charge a monthly rental for the connection.
Supposing that a man stays online for one hour a day and the operator charges 40p per minute for the internet access (in today’s scenario), the customer ends up paying Rs 720 per month for 30 hours’ of internet, every month. Who are we kidding? Who would wish to use such a service?
The land line is the traditional mode of communication that is trusted by all and is default mode of connection for a vast majority of Indian population. Moreover, despite there being more mobile connections than land lines, India still has more households with a landline than mobiles. (nope, I ain’t contradicting myself. I’ll leave it onto you to figure out how! )
This gives immediate reach for the service providers in many “not accessible” areas and also opens up opportunities of “going online” for many citizens.
Since the Indian Government is keen to better connectivity for the whole country, such a move of offering internet services for free just might get them a grant or two, as well, to cut the costs.
Isn’t it a Step Backward?
Some might argue that, especially during the times when we are trying so hard to popularize broadband (always on connectivity, at speeds not less than 256kbps) by regulations, grants and lowering down the costs, doesn’t a move like making dial-up available for free undo all the efforts.
Well, no sir! Such a move shall help in strengthening broadband’s presence all the more.
Following the market dynamics, if dialup costs plummet to as low as free, the costs for the so-called better services are also bound to reduce.
Moreover, no serious internet user shall ever be satisfied with speeds that dial up connections offer. So, broadband connections shall never phase out.
Today, websites have gotten bandwidth hungry by leaps and bounds. Services like YouTube, Flickr and Picasa are almost useless on dialup connections. Even considering how many pages a serious blogger needs to visit even before he decides to blog on a certain story, a dial up shall always be out of the question.
Even today, we have cable operators providing 40kbps unlimited connections at very cheap rates. But the very cost involved in setting up the connection deters most people from using it. This particular segment could be absolutely wiped out if the very land line that a household already uses provides dial up connections for free.
Moreover, the service provider can always earn the dough by providing other value added services with the connection.
So, what do you say? Is free internet really viable in India, so what if it’s 40kbps?
This is just in:BigAdda.com Reliance ADAG backed social network has tied up with Jivox the video advertising platform which recently recieved 10.7 million $’s in funding will power both the video technology on Bigadda as well as the ad serving and monetizaton of videos via its Jivox’s Premium Video Network. After the addition of Bigadda to its kitty Jivox’s Video Ad network would be having a total reach of 55 million viewers worldwide.
So how big is this deal? Well BigAdda which claims to add 15000 users a day also claims that 40% of its users consume videos and share them. This claim may be true given the fact that 40% of BigAdda users come from tier-II towns like Tuticorin, Bhilai, Amritsar, Guwahati, Surat, Nasik whom I expect to have a higher affinity towards media consumption rather than creation i.e. Tier II audience is more likely to consume media than blog or post pictures. Also the kind of content on Bigadda is more mainstream with bollywood and entertainment centric videos catering to the mass audience of Tier II and Tier III.
Now given this kind of consumers its also important to position the brand well in terms of advertisers who are looking to target the Tier II audiences (which would be mass brands having universal appeal.. Think FMCG, Colas etc). Also it may also be a good option for local advertisers if targetting is inbuilt. But Im not really sure Jivox currently has that capability given that tradition advertiser still spends only 5%-7% of their spend on Ad networks.
We shall be getting in touch with Naren Nachiappan, Managing Director of Jivox India to get more dope on how they plan to attract advertisers from India.
The global statistics point towards a brighter future for mobile social networking:
As you can see from the above chart the average penetration is about 1% so even if in India over the next two years this is about 1% of the then 500 million mobile subscribers then the total userbase for mobile social networking would be 5 million users! which is not a small number!
According to above statistic chart by emarketer the future looks even brighter as the penetration and use of social networking is expected to rise from 2.7 % in 2007 to 18.8% in 2012 and even if India is pegged at 5% out of the total 600 million mobile subscribers (approx) by 2012 that would be a total of 30 million accessing social networking on mobile and in 4 years time thats a huge number!
So Who are the Players in India?
Recently BigAdda announced its social networking on mobile via wap, sms and a downloadable app for users and even started marketing the same via a mass media campaign TV, Outdoor etc. There have always been others like Indyarocks and Ibibo who have had sms and wap versions of their online social networking sites.
The Rise of The Standalone Mobile Social Networking Application
Two standalone apps for mobile social networking have been launched recently. By standalone I mean is they aren’t your online social networks porting the social network to mobile as well but they are focussed applications meant for the mobile phones. Lets look at two such apps which launched recently:
Qeep Enters India
Qeep a mobile social network for Java based phone owned by Blue Lion a company based out of Germany has officially launched it app for the Indian markets. Qeep is a freely downloadable application and offers features like Private messaging, photo-blogging and live multi-player gaming. The two Qeep founders Cornelius Rost and Christian Schulte(former executives of T-Mobile International and Nintendo) have stated that India already contributes 20 per cent of the 300,000 members in qeep! inorder to see how many Indian’s might be there I downloaded the app and tried registering with the nickname Rajiv. It gave me an error saying that Rajiv as a nick was taken and Rajiv10 was available! Surely if 9 Rajiv’s have registered the number 3 lakh users from India can be believable! Which is a very sizeable number for a mobile application still not launched in India. It will be interesting to know how many downloads has Bigadda seen given their aggressive offline marketing push. Qeep can be freely downloaded from www.qeep.net.
Also one can check out the video demo of the application below:
RockeTalk Goes Public Beta
RockeTalk which until recently was in closed beta has now opened up to public. RockeTalk is also a downloadable app which has features like instant text, voice, picture, video messaging, sharing of content and interact with mobile communities. The RockeTalk application is currently available on over 100 Nokia and Sony Ericsson mobile devices more devices being added every week. Besides for the regulars networking features on mobile RockeTalk also plans to add IM chat compatible with Yahoo, Google Talk, MSN, AIM and ICQ in the near future. RockeTalk can be downloaded at http://www.rocketalk.com/get_it_now.php.
RockeTalk is founded by Rajiv Kumar in 2005 who is an IIT Mumbai alumni and and ealier built and sold Bluetooth® software company WIDCOMM to Broadcom in 2004. RockeTalk headquartered in San Diego, California, USA with offices in Delhi, India and has raised $7.1 million from iSherpa Ventures, EDF Ventures and Mission ventures.
Here is a presentation that explains what all can you do on RockeTalk
Anyway, such a move by BSNL spurred a thought in me. What if dial-up connections are actually made free in India? Will that see people making bee lines outside land line operators’ for new connections, all year round? How can an operator leverage on such a scenario. Let us try to analyze how life would be, in a world of free internet (dial-up, of course).
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Qeep a mobile social network for Java based phone owned by Blue Lion a company based out of Germany has officially launched it app for the Indian markets. Qeep is a freely downloadable application and offers features like Private messaging, photo-blogging and live multi-player gaming. The two Qeep founders Cornelius Rost and Christian Schulte(former executives of T-Mobile International and Nintendo) have 
RockeTalk which until recently was in closed beta has now opened up to public. RockeTalk is also a downloadable app which has features like instant text, voice, picture, video messaging, sharing of content and interact with mobile communities. The RockeTalk application is currently available on over 100 Nokia and Sony Ericsson mobile devices more devices being added every week. Besides for the regulars networking features on mobile RockeTalk also plans to add IM chat compatible with Yahoo, Google Talk, MSN, AIM and ICQ in the near future. RockeTalk can be downloaded at http://www.rocketalk.com/get_it_now.php.
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