Author Archive
BSNL’s $10 Billion IPO Plans
BSNL board has cleared $10bn IPO plans but the company is facing stiff resistance from it’s employee union. This will be country’s largest-ever listing. However, the unions are against the BSNL management’s contention that listing is necessary for expansion and grant of navaratna status. “It is also decided that if the government moves with the IPO proposal, the entire BSNL workforce of three lakh will get into direct action, including indefinite strike. Other PSUs, including HAL, have been granted navaratna status without listing. As such, the arguments put forth for IPO in BSNL are a ploy to disinvest BSNL and gradually privatise it like Videsh Sanchar Nigam (VSNL).
According to Economic Times, if BSNL does manage to raise Rs 40,000 crore by selling a 10% stake, the telco would be valued at Rs 4,00,000 crore (around $100 billion). This will catapult BSNL into the league of top telcos in the world in terms of market cap. Incidentally, the market valuation of Bharti Airtel is just around $37 billion.
Vishal
LBS Opportunity and infrastructure vendors…
The LBS infrastructure market is currently dominated by Ericsson, Telecommunications Systems (TCS) and Nokia Siemens Networks with respective market shares of 31 percent, 24 percent and 18 percent. Smaller independent MLC vendors such as Redknee are also making inroads into the market.
Business models are reflected in a range of flexible payment options based on volume (per transaction or per LBS subscriber), flat fees, outright purchase, and even advertising-subsidized schemes with price levels dependent on the size of the carrier, the functionality, and the solution type (hosted or installed). Monthly per subscriber platform license fees typically amount to $0.71.
However, despite the expected growth in LBS services, a major threat is posed by the emergence of direct-to-consumer provisioning of remotely hosted third-party LBS applications which bypass the carrier network infrastructure, reducing carriers to the status of bandwidth providers and making LBS platforms obsolete. The challenge for platform vendors will be to focus on unique functionalities that can only be offered via carriers, such as spatial triggers, anonymous bulk location, control plane-based services, and LBS-enabled advertising as well as multi-access network solutions.
Vishal
Gray Market for new iPhone too in India…
The new iPhone has been launched in USA and 21 other countries. But, in India, its still to be launched…and time is not far when we will see new iPhone already being used by Indians even before it’s official launch here.
Though, bookings for new iPhones are being made at around Rs. 25000 (US$ 570) by thousands of enthusiasts in India for official launch in August…but if not more, atleast 25% of these are also trying to get the same from other countries/ sources (like huge gray markets here) at cheaper prices.
Let’s wait and watch the market’s reponse in India…
VS
“It’s a mess,” says Apple’s new iPhone & Service User…
Apple Inc.’s new iPhone went on sale on Friday 8 a.m. and that’s when nightmare for many new iPhone enthusiasts started. Since the new iPhone has been subsidized by the exclusive carrier if bought with their contracts, Apple and the carrier had planned to activate the phone right at the point of purchase i.e. the stores.
Result…huge queues of people were seen outside the store ahead of 8 a.m., many even camped out overnight to be first. What happened then???
First…It took the store half an hour to get the phone activated. This itself caused, the enthusiasm of many in queue behind the first person, die down at that very instant.
Second…there was a global problem with Apple Inc.’s iTunes servers that prevented the phones from being fully activated in-store.
Third…The problem extended to owners of the previous iPhone model. A software update released for that phone on Friday morning required the phone to be reactivated through iTunes.
Fourth…”It’s a mess,” said some, who updated their first-generation iPhone only to find it unusable.
Tata Communications, first provider to launch public and private Cisco TelePresence rooms internationally
Tata Communications has launched its Telepresence services, the first ever offering to deliver both private and public Cisco TelePresence rooms to businesses across the world. This groundbreaking service will enable a broader ecosystem of connected rooms for enterprises and their partners.
Telepresence provides life-like, high definition conferencing facilities with superior audio, video and environmental qualities to provide a viable alternative to traditional face-to-face meetings. Businesses can achieve substantial cost savings through reducing travel while accelerating productivity, and improving long-distance collaboration and decision making In addition, they can significantly increase employee satisfaction with this “smart technology” by enabling executives to have meetings in the comfort of their own offices. Telepresence also promotes environmental benefits, such as decreased CO2 emission from reduction in travel.
Tata Communications lowers costs of implementation of its Telepresence Exchange Services for customers by offering managed infrastructure in the network cloud. The Telepresence managed service includes a concierge service that takes care of reservations, scheduling, customer support, monitoring, management, reporting and billing capabilities, making it easy for customers to deploy and manage a highly effective collaboration tool.
Tata Communications has implemented Cisco TelePresence in several of its offices and that of other Tata Group companies in various geographies. Tata Communications is also making available Cisco TelePresence services at public rooms that businesses can rent on an hourly basis.
This unique offering will not only create a larger network effect of interconnected rooms but also expand the market considerably to small and mid-sized businesses. The first phase of the public rooms are located at the Taj Hotels and in major business centers around the world including Mumbai, Bangalore, New York, Boston and London.
Tata Communications is also collaborating with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), India’s premier business association, to provide Cisco TelePresence services to Indian businesses with four public rooms at CII offices in New Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, and Hyderabad.
“Equipment costs may still be prohibitive for some enterprises, but Tata Communications is bringing a different business case to the table by introducing a hosted service, representing a new option for a more affordable managed telepresence solution.”
VS
BlackBerry finally gets a nod from Indian Govt.
Great relief to R.I.M and all the BlackBerry users – the Indian govt. has given a green signal to the company for continuing it’s service as-is.
VS
Using GPS will save enterprises billions by reductions in industry-wide fuel and labor expenses…
Trucking/ Warehousing industries state that global positioning system (GPS) technologies are an essential tool for their mobile workforce. GPS-enabled technologies are helping to increase mobile workforce productivity and enabling enterprises to become more efficient via a reduction in annual labor and fuel operating costs.
GPS-enabled technologies help in reduction of travel distance by an average of 231.2 miles per week and recording $51,582 in annual fuel savings. With more than a million trucking carriers in the United States alone, the potential industry-wide annual fuel savings could reach $53 billion.
Various studies also reveale that enterprises deploying GPS-enabled technologies save approximately 54 minutes per day, translating into an annual recouped labor savings of $5,484 per employee or $5.4 million per surveyed enterprise. It helps companies in knowing the exact routes taken by their trucks and knowing precisely where their employees are at any given time.
GPS solutions enable the mobile workforce to spend less time in traffic or finding routes, while increasing the amount of time spent with new or existing customers. This results in better customer service and higher customer satisfaction.
In my view, with rising fuel costs these days, if organizations worldwide deploy these GPS solutions asap, it will help tremendously in savings of labor and fuel and will also help in cutting down on pollution caused by ever increasing vehicles.
VS
Reuters see business opportunity in Indian Rural areas…
Yesterday, I read an article in International Herald Tribune about Reuter’s trial in India for generating business out of rural areas…quiet an impressive one indeed. I thought, I will share the same with all the readers here as well…
Whether it is for a Wall Street trader or a farmer in India, the right information at the right time is a necessity for success.
For 157 years, since signing a contract in 1851 to supply stock prices from exchanges in Continental Europe to the London Stock Exchange, Reuters has served up numbers to the finance set. The International Herald Tribune has a partnership with Reuters, under which the two companies jointly publish the Business with Reuters section of the paper.
Now, Reuters, part of Thomson Reuters, is trying to provide analogous services to farmers in India, where price information is stubbornly hard to compare. If successful, the program could become a model for economists and international agencies for the use of technology – in particular, the mobile phone – to burnish economic growth in places like India and sub-Saharan Africa.
To that end, the company has been testing a program called Reuters Market Light for several months in Maharashtra, an Indian state about the size of Italy. The state is one of India’s prominent agricultural centers, with farmers growing onions, oranges, corn, soybeans, wheat and bananas. But the farmers’ business suffers from the difficulty of comparing prices from one market to another.
“We kind of saw that there was a clear market inefficiency,” said Mans Olof-Ors, a Reuters employee who had the idea for Market Light three years ago. “The farmer would decide which market to travel to, then would just sell to that market. So there was no competition between markets.”
Reuters has dispatched about 60 market reporters to the region to report on the going price for, say, oranges or onions, and to package the data into a text message that is sent to subscribers.
The service is signing up about 220 subscribers a day at a price of 175 rupees, or about $4.10, for three months at post offices throughout Maharashtra. The average monthly income of a farm household is about $50, according to the Indian government. The service has about 40,000 customers so far – a tiny portion of India’s farm population, which is in the hundreds of millions, but it proves that many farmers are hungry for more information.
Reuters has collected anecdotal evidence from farmers about how the service has influenced their decisions about crop sales. One farmer, according to Reuters, held back the sale of 30 quintals of soybeans – one quintal equals 100 kilograms, or 220 pounds – for 15 days after noticing that prices had been rising for several days. He was able to get 400 extra rupees a quintal.
Amit Mehra, managing director of Market Light, said early data showed that most subscribers were making more money from their crops.
“We’ve seen that about 70 percent have benefited and changed their behavior about when to sell and when to harvest and where to sell,” he said.
Some academic research has shown that mobile phones can have a stark effect on economic growth in rural areas. Robert Jensen, an economist at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, has studied the impact of putting mobile phones in the hands of fishermen in Kerala, a southern region of India. His study found that both fishermen and consumers benefited: profits rose 8 percent while prices of fish fell 4 percent.
VS
Mobile Towers in India being seen as threat by insurgents & Terrorists
India’s Maoist insurgents destroyed two mobile towers and have shut down six others in the country’s east, blaming the network for revealing their movements to the police, officials said.
Rebels, fearing mobiles are being used by informers, have banned the use of mobile phones in villages under their control in India after hundreds of suspected insurgents were arrested this year.
Police said armed rebels set two towers of Bharti Airtel Ltd on fire on Thursday in Bihar state, snapping communication lines in the region.
“The Maoists are angry since the police were able to locate their movements through the mobile network, leading to many arrests.”
Mobile gaming revenues in India expected to cross $500 mn by 2012
India is seeing a huge surge in mobile gaming activities. As a result of this activity, well known research firms across the country are estimating that mobile gaming revenues in the country will exceed $500 million by 2012. This is based on the fact that continually increasing number of users are signing up for wireless services in India, the world’s fastest-growing telecom market. Worldwide mobile gaming revenue is on pace to total USD 4.5 billion in 2008 according to according to Gartner, Inc.
The mobile game market has outshone the PC and console game market in the emerging territories of Asia largely because of the low penetration of PCs compared with that of mobile devices.
Cell Life 