Hello Readers!
Yesterday I attended the national conference on Mobile VAS organized by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). It was a wonderful event. Most of the Who’s who community was present there. They are Sanjiv Mital (Vice Chairman, Bharti Telesoft), Prabhakar Seshan (Country Manager, IBM India), S.M.Talwar (Exe. Director, MTNL), N K Goyal (President, CMAI); Vijay Shukla, (Country Head, Valuefirst), Milind Pathak, (CEO & Country Manager, Buongiorno), Suresh Narasimha (CEO, Telibrahma), Prasad Narasimhan (CMO, Virgin Mobile), Gaurav Mishra (COO, Guruji.com), Debasis Chatterji (Director Operations, Netxcell), Probir Roy (Co-founder, Paymate), Suresh Anantpurkar (VP-Products, mCheck), Shekher Shrivastava, (VP – Marketing, ItzCash Card), Ravi Shankar (EVP, Yes Bank), Niranjan Gosavi (CMO, Atom Technologies), Rajat Mukarji (Idea Cellular), AD Mehta (CEO, CellNext), Ajay Vaishnavi (Director Telecom, Times Internet), Rajesh Jain, MD, Netcore Solutions), Jagdish Mitra (CEO, CanvasM Technologies), A.R.Vishwanath(CEO, IMI Mobile), Salil Bhargava (CEO, Jump Games), RajSingh (MD, ActiveMedia), Chetan Jain (CEO, i2i Telesource), Zubin Dubash (GM, Tata Teleservices).
The conference covered all VAS topics, such as SMS and MMS boosting strategies, business models for mobile marketing and advertisement, mobile payment, content products, music, games, mobile TV, entertainment, 3G services and others products available for the telecom market.
Mr.Sanjiv Mital said that Indian companies will not remain Indian but will become global soon after 3G services are rolled out. He also mentioned that when Bharti tries to acquire or partner with telecom or VAS related companies in Europe, they welcome the move and also feel proud to be associated with fast emerging countries like India.
Mr. Talwar of MTNL said that VAS is the only mode left for telecom companies to survive in wake of ever decreasing call rates. If a company is not able to differentiate and provide better and innovative services day in and day out, nobody can stop it’s exit from the market.
Mr. Vijay Shukla from Value First said that in today’s VAS world, there are 8 categories of people involved i.e. Subscriber content companies, Government and Associations like IAMAI, Advertising Agencies, Mobile Marketing Companies, Telecom Operators, Technology enabling companies like IBM, Handset Manufacturers, and Marketers who spend money.
Mr. Suresh from Telibrahma said that brand in India today is about people, community, interactivity and dialogue. But when it comes to Mobile Marketing, first two of the above don’t want to receive advertisements on Mobile as they consider it as a spam. Thus challenges in building the Mobile Marketing are setting right expectations like in terms of ROI and measurablility and setting the right pricing…Talent (both business wise and understanding technology), scaling and integration with the advertising industry.
Mr. Milind Pathak of Buongiorno said that now increasingly digital media like internet and mobile are getting more penetration then modes like radio and press. According to him, to succeed in Mobile Marketing, we need customer engagement i.e. linking of consumption of medium with the brand message. This will happen when there is a blend of virtual with real. Eg. Sites like 2nd. Life are doing so.
M. Prasad of Virgin Mobile said that opportunities and challenges are basically same. He says Mobile Marketing serves effectiveness (by personalization and language freedom), is targetable (segmentation of customers), is highly interactive and; last but not the least is measurable.
Mr. Mishra of Guruji.com said that mobile marketing should quickly move from push to pull strategy else it will die. ROI will be biggest when relevance and pull strategy will be adopted. For mobile search to succeed and be effective, it should be location sensitive, according to customer preference and has relevant content.
Mr. Rajat of Idea Cellular said that fundamental core of mobility is “Ability to receive a call.” On enterprise level, foremost use is for productivity and comfort. Connectivity bearers are four i.e. voice, sms, ussd and gprs. Fundamental requirements of enterprises thus are encryption of messages, compression and scale of an application.
Mr. Chetan from i2i said that for content enablement four factors play key role: branded content (i.e. unique and coming for well established name), presentation (language sensitivity), mobile advertising and analytics (relevance).
Mr. Zubin from Tata Teleservices said that infotainment needs to know customer needs. Today connections are 90% pre-paid and 10% paid. This differentiates the customer into first being budget customer and later being hungry customer. Thus infotainment should be given to pre-paid customers in sachets i.e. according to customer requirement and his budget, not in bulk as company wants, else company will loose the customer. Paid subscribers are hungry for infotainment and always ask for more thus they should be given full version for e.g. A full video or song instead of a clipping. Rural customers also come in pre-paid segment and buy mobile services in order to enhance their livelihood and always see what value addition it will do to their livelihood and lifestyle. Thus, they need to be given highly specific highly targeted VAS which will help them in making their lives better. Eg. Providing them with just in time services like informing them about best market rates in which they will be able to sell their crop or right kind of seed or medicine they should put in different kinds of soil or seasons etc.
Overall it was a great conference and lot business networking for the audience attending the event.
September 3, 2008 at 12:50 am cellstrat
Hi All! Today I attended Mobile Monday (MoMo) Delhi event in Amity University. Agenda for today was mobile advertising. Quiet a few good speakers like Salman Hussain of Vuclip, Vijay Shekhar of One97, Chirag Jain of recently funded smsgupshup, Salil from NDTV, Milind Pathak of Buongiorno etc. presented their views on mobile advertising trends and scenarios.
Vijay Shekhar during his presentation asked the audience as to how many people are thinking of buying the recently launched iPhone 3G, if we become price agnostic, just 3 out of 70 odd people said they are planning to buy. These 3 also said yes, as they are in the process of developing applications for iPhone and thus they will need the same for test purposes.
Though gathering this time was less (in comparison to other events of Momo), with a total of approx. 65-70 professionals from the mobile world. But, overall it was a great event.
A brief about the Mobile Monday is given below for the people who don’t know what it is:
Mobile Monday is a global community of mobile industry visionaries, developers and influentials fostering cooperation and cross-border business development through virtual and live networking events to share ideas, best practices and trends from global markets.
Mobile Monday has the following objectives:
To encourage innovation within the mobile sector.
To facilitate networking between small and large companies, and between local and foreign.
To help local companies effectively participate in international initiatives through the import and export of visions, concepts, technologies, know-how and best practices.
To present innovative visions, trends, studies and forecasts from the mobile marketplace.
To facilitate and create partnerships.
To contribute to the education of the broader public through its publications, online presence and media partnerships.
Mobile Monday is organized by a group of dedicated volunteers from around the world. Originating in Helsinki, Finland, in the year 2000, Mobile Monday has grown into the world’s leading mobile community.
August 23, 2008 at 3:36 pm cellstrat
Cell Life 