You may have heard the news by now, yes One97 Communications (www.one97world.com) has made a strategic investment in tenCube, a Singapore based mobile security application firm. tenCube is home to WaveSecure, (www.WaveSecure.com) the award winning and much acclaimed mobile security software. The deal is nowhere close to Rs 100 crores as being quoted in some sections of media. That is not a substantiated figure. The deal is much smaller and is part of One97’s strategy to invest in companies that have a strong presence in mobile ecosystem innovation. tenCube is a young entrepreneurial company much like One97 and the fit in business objectives is exciting.
How does it work?
This deal gives us an entry into the rapidly growing mobile application market. These are key area of interest for mobile operators and handset manufacturers. The investment will give One97 priority reseller rights for WaveSecure in multiple geographies including India. WaveSecure as a popular Smartphone service, is also an excellent entry strategy for One97’s portfolio of products for developed markets like Europe and North America. The strategic investment will enhance One97’s capability in the design, development and go-to-market in the mobile applications space.
One97 and Telecom World
One97 Communications has previously invested in mobile advertising start up Oorja Mobile Services Pvt Ltd as well as incubated PayTM and oc2ps, a mobile commerce initiative and social networking platform respectively. One97 works with telecom operators offering Value Added Services – music download, application discovery, self-care, customer communication, content provisioning, subscriptions alerts and ring back tones. These services are available across all Indian telecom operators and are used by over 300 million telecom consumers. One97 was named the Emerging Company of the year by Voice and Data and was rated a Top 10 Fastest Growing Indian company in Deloitte Fast 500. The company’s has sustained growth at 428 percent CAGR.
WaveSecure
WaveSecure offers users complete protection for their mobile device, data and privacy. It enables users to remotely lock, track and locate lost phones, get a copy of their data securely backed up, and remotely wipe data off the phone to protect privacy. WaveSecure is a popular service that has been adopted by users in more than 130 countries, and has received numerous recognitions, most notably being a Top 3 winner at Google’s recent Android Developer Challenge. Read more »
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 »
Last week we heard about Airtel Mobitude 2009 – a survey which captures the preference and choice of over 116 million mobile users located across India.
“Airtel Mobitude 2009 reflects the true choice of India. A mobile phone is considered by many as an intrinsic part of their daily life, be it a user in a small village or in a large town,” said Atul Bindal, President- Mobile Services, Bharti Airtel Ltd.
HT City carried an article which highlighted the fact that April fool joke beats Oscar winning Jai Ho track from Slum Dog Millionaire when it comes to most downloaded music of the year.
This is sure good news for One97!
“Jab dekho phone kar dete ho” CRBT was recorded in One97 studios. The trend reinforces our strong faith in generating non-royalty content.
One97 Communications has been ranked by Deloitte Tech50 annual survey as the 10th fastest growing company in India. It is also the only company in its segment in the top slots. One97 has also been ranked at the 78th spot in the Asia Pacific ranking of the Deloitte Top 500 Technology Survey. The survey is a ranking based on business performance and technology innovation of the technology driven businesses in India and in other Asia Pacific countries.
More details of the ranking can be found on this link
It is wonderful to see one’s enterprise grow by leaps and bounds but what it does the most is inspire the One97 teams to move to higher benchmarks with each day. It also reaffirms our faith in creating that ‘wow’ factor’ for our customers.
It helps that we are in an industry that is fast evolving and serves a large customer base – in retail, corporate and enterprise segments.
Christopher Morley said There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning.
Recently I came across an article in TheHindu titled “Make money through the mobile phone”, obviously being from the telecom VAS industry these words are more precious than gold. One does get curious about what new idea someone has hatched that may lead to the next Big thing in the Telecom industry.
the actual article is here http://www.hindu.com/2009/08/09/stories/2009080952741000.htm
The summary of the article is that txteagle.com is bringing the concept of crowdsourcing to the masses thru the mobile, and better still the users will be able to get paid for their efforts. Mobile being the natural extension of Internet, is the logical next step in evolution to carry Crowdsourcing to the next level, and Txteagle.com has harnessed on the power of both Mobile and Crowdsorucing.
Crowdsourcing is not a new concept, the most common day-to-day example of crowdsourcing is when one makes buying decisions about a product or service based on reviews or feedback published online. which basically translates to making a complex decision based on smaller inputs from others, i.e. crowdsourcing Read more »
On 10 July,2009 we officially unveiled our mobile commerce product, PayTM, in India. It is an easy to deploy mobile commerce offering that enables consumers to conduct commercial transactions through their phones.
PayTM has been built keeping in mind the potential of mobile commerce to empower masses. The product is simple, device agnostic, secure and can be used by anyone with any phone, ensuring unparallel reach on the network.
PayTM complies with the highest security standards available today. With specific emphasis on the product usability, it is geared to ensure that mobile commerce becomes the prime utility on the phone.
Speaking on the occasion Mr. Rajiv Madhok, Director, One97 Communications said “We are very pleased to launch PayTM as a part of our other offerings. This capability will provide immense opportunity for the mobile operators and enterprise businesses to extend a variety of services to their users… With this service we are one step closer in making mobile phone “the device” for all transactions”
With a few key strokes, users will have the ability to transact for a host of services.
Users can make payments for mobile prepaid recharge, mobile postpaid bills, content downloads as well as other transactions from their mobile phones. The service also gives the user the power to make payments for their utilities, insurance premium, DTH and broadband bills. It also brings access to transact other services provided by enterprises. Some of these services are:
Movie Ticketing
Travel Booking
Flower Delivery
Movie Rental
Tele-shopping
Utility Bill Payments
Toll Plaza Card Recharge
Insurance Premiums
Movie/Music Purchase
