‘We Want To Be A Cisco In Our Space’
Vijay Shekhar Sharma of One97 says the idea is to have a core business and then everything that surrounds it.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and managing director of One97 Communications, can be called an early starter. A child prodigy, he passed class XII at the age of 14 and started his first business venture while doing his third year at engineering college. His company, Xs! Corporations, was later sold to Lotus Interworks in 1999. After working for Lotus for a year, he founded One97, which provides a platform for delivering mobile value-added services, in December 2000.
From starting with astrology forecasts over the phone in 2001 to becoming one of the largest mobile value added services players today, his company has come a long way. “I think we were lucky to enter this space early, which gave us a lot of opportunities to learn,” said Sharma. It was also tough to convince operators to put up One97’s platform.
The other day it struck me how fast my journey of over these three years with One97 has passed! And then this thought came of sharing some of the good times with you.It has been a very exciting and learning journey! Have seen the Company growing 10 times from the time I started. We were just 70 at that time, a small, cozy team…I can even recall all names and faces. Everyone used to be on the same floor: from Sales to Service Delivery.
I still remember the first day I joined. It was quite an experience to see the mix/dynamics of teams sitting together. Shortage of space never really came in the way of getting things done for One97. Sometimes I miss that small team, which was more or less like a family . A family that kept growing and so quickly! Soon we were spread across 3 floors: Devika Tower, 1st Floor to 2nd Floor to 10th Floor and then we moved only the Engineering team to another building. And as suddenly as this movement, we moved to Noida in one building, four Floors indeed.
We recently saw our annual day celebrations party 2009. I still remember our Annual Party Dec 2006. Smita, Puneet, Anupam and I had gone location-hunting only to be told that everything was filled. We had then finalized on this small banquet hall above Turquoise Cottage…Days of the Raj. The party was totally enjoyed by everybody. Since the then first grand party to welcome the year 2007, there has been no looking back, year after year, more people, more hard work, more challenges, more achievements, and not to be forgotten, more fun all the way! One97 is a young company of young generation. We believe in working hard and partying hard. Read more »
At least for now the general consensus is that there is no prime time for mobile internet consumption.However, afternoons are more productive than late nights it seems.
The best thing about mobile internet is its availability and ease of use. Carry the world with you sort of approach.
I know of folks who are constant surfers – it means they log on their phones even before they brush their teeth and the last thing they do before hitting the sack is check their online accounts, twitter, facebook, mail and blogs.
Mobile internet is their lifeline and they refuse to go on holidays where there is no mobile bandwidth
At the same time I have friends who refuse to buy high end phones, lest they get addicted to mobile surfing.
I am a non-believer of predicting ten things for next year or next decade. (What better than doing those things, instead of predicting?) This kept me from posting this post for a while.
We have a very happy start of a new year in India’s telecom market, consumer has more choices and these choices will grow even more as year progresses. Value Added Services or as I like to call our business Telecom Applications and Services business is reaching center stage and hopefully will empower consumer even more.
A wise consumer, who has started to get more out of phone than a call is now wanting more bang for buck + many more services. Cloud (network) side hosted services are favorite for our market. Simply because they are easy to distribute/discover and available to everyone. They can be updated easily and there is QoS control of service provider.
Market is ripe for sizeable telecom applications / services business, here are my 5 items that should be growth drivers for next 12 months.
Matured Consumers: Consumers are now expecting more from their phone. It is very obvious from kind of handset features today we see them buying. The more they wish, better are the opportunities for us to make and sell services to them. Also majority of our target consumers are on network for more than 6 months – a typical time after which they start exploring additional features. Read more »
