Content has gone thru the cycles of being freely available (on internet) to (sometimes insanely) priced (on today’s telecom networks). I love getting into arguments if this is about keeping it all free or keeping it paid at right value (read: right pricing but not zero).
I loved reading this article in TIME magazine, How to save your newspaper, which you will love reading as content buff. I have been looking with whole lot of commercial interest at content from pre-internet (very little), internet (most of it’s incarnation) and telecom (virtually from start of it at all) days.
One thing I fully believe is If there is an easy payment method, users will pay.
Best case in point is India’s digital music industry on telecom networks. My estimate puts it a $60M+ per month business.
More later, Also what do you think about paid content?
With Number portability set to kick in August onwards I am sure that some Operators would not be able to sleep as comfortably as before .
By a logical surmise, it would mean that all operators start focusing on customer delight with immediate effect.
Consequently we shall see that all operators try to have most competitive tariffs , “no-complaint” networks / coverage , freebies thrown in to loyal subscribers, frequent feedback’s, faster complaint resolution et al .
Perhaps operators will start looking at VAS as significant trump card. Maybe this shall be the onset of a exclusive content, more than ever before. “Exclusivity” is set to be redefined.
Operators would want to port “special” content that is available ONLY on their network.
This might mean that we will have to start getting in content at blazing speeds. Also once we are able to offer the operators ” exclusive” content that we shall not deploy on any other operator , we might be able to negotiate a reasonable Advance Royalty / Minimum Guarantee for all our Products / Content .
This might be end of operators monopoly and arm twisting for revenue share .
Off late a lot has been written about how Mobile Value Added Services (VAS) or Mobile VAS is gaining a lot of momentum in the country. Yes, indeed it is a fast growing market and has a lot of potential, but it wouldn’t be misplaced to term it the tip of the iceberg… ” Telecom Applications” . Applications that will make phones and mobile phones more specifically the all pervasive device for Information, Entertainment and Transactions.
With the largest deployed telecom applications platform in the India One97 is uniquely poised with its array of voice, SMS, WAP and video based services to an equally varied customer base.
To give you some idea of what we are talking about here is a recent interview of Vijay in Network Computing , where he talks about One97′s unique solution offerings and plans for the future. To read more visit the following link
I am using the Blackberry Flip these days and I moved to this from Blackberry bold and before that I used iPhone (first cut) for a while.
I now know that instead of polling-based-email I need a push-email device. Incidentally blackberry does it best and iPhone hack still does not get integrated to enterprise email (we use Google App).
Another important feature is form factor. A big bulky handhald (read: B*B Bold) is skip for me. I like to keep it “hidden” or near to hidden in my hand/pocket.
Third imp factor is music which I can play in my car/take with me and so on. So simply larger HDD does not work but connection of it in my car is equally imp . Either FM transmitter or standard jack which my car could support would do.
Finally, I add app store/app as my last in wish list as I know the most of apps I use are still web/wml/xml based so they can be carried anywhere. A device app which is cool is fancy for few days, rest of days you are struggling with memory and most use app ( in my case messaging). This keeps iPhone 3G out anyways.
the choice lately came between Blackberry Storm (misses wifi ! so no-go ), Palm Pre and an-unknown-next version of iPhone.
Just in case if you haven’t seen the Palm pre yet, here is the video for you.
I am getting convinced that Palm could do the trick with Palm Pre. Did you not love the video and think it is cooler than iPhone? (more…)
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