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 »
‘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.
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.
Happy to share that we are getting closer to our goal of enabling telecom networks in becoming the best and most used media to deliver content, information and intelligent transactions to consumers. We have partnered with Nuance Communications a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions globally for businesses and consumers, to take speech based applications to the masses.
Automatic speech recognition based applications will enable both telecom operators and enterprises to establish a better connection with their customers by leveraging One97’s expertise. The new application will ensure product delivery for rural and semi-urban markets where users have not yet been able to achieve benefits of the value added services due to lower literacy levels and linguistic barriers.
Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Managing Director, One97 Communications said “Voice is the preferred application interface for Indian mobile consumers. As the voice application and platform leader, having Nuance’s speech skills will be a great asset for us to build compelling consumer experiences. Together we will be able to address the Indian consumers in not just 28 languages but also in thousands of dialects.”
With more and more mobile subscribers performing mobile payments, it has become increasingly important for mobile payment platform providers to ensure that they offer a secure payment environment to their customers. While we always knew that our PayTM platform was an extremely secure solution for enabling mobile payments, we felt that it is always good to get a second opinion from an independent third party.
So we invited SISA to conduct an external information security audit of our PayTM Network. After an extensive audit process, SISA has issued us the PCI DSS 1.2 (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) Security Certificate. We feel that a third party endorsement of our compliance with global security standards will further bolster the customers’ trust in our PayTM Mobile Commerce platform.
The PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is a multifaceted security standard that includes requirements for security management, data security policies, risk procedures, network architecture and application design. The standard has been developed by VISA, MasterCard and American Express which are among the founding members of the global PCI Security Council. PCI applies to all organizations that store, process or transmit cardholder data. Compliance with this stringent PCI Data Security Standard will enable One97 to proactively protect customers’ account data (credit card details, debit card details and bank account numbers).
With the award of PCI DSS Security Certificate, One97 has become the only secure mobile commerce platform provider in India with end-to-end implementation capability across Voice, Messaging, WAP and Web.
