The center point of the Conclave will lie in understanding how emerging and start-up companies can reap economic benefits out of upcoming web-based social platforms, mobile devices and AppStore. Vijay will be speaking on a current hot topic: “Smarter and Faster: How will cheaper smart phones and 3G networks impact the mobile ecosystem?” (more…)

Organised by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and partnered by One97, Bangalore witnessed the first Mobile Application Developers’ Meet at Indian Institute of Management (IIM) yesterday.
The flavour of the seminar revolved around promoting innovative changes in the mobile ecosystem and to give a single platform to application developers to drive the industry to higher levels.

Vijay enthralled the audience with a speech on “Potential Business Partners” which included the following key points:

• Application developers evolve by deciding how to make an application as per the market needs. But what must be noted is that very few go for actual research
• The consumers are unaware of what they need
• Amount of resource needed is inversely proportional to the time required in the development process
• The application developer should always be on the lookout for long term benefits and opportunities
• Don’t add one feature and give it to the market, some body else might be doing the same strategic move
• For resource optimization, emulate consumers’ lives. Your mobile application will not grow if the developer doesn’t attempt to understand the consumer’s mind
• If you are not the best consumer of your product, you will not be successful

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Saturday night brought good news for One97 with our mobile application, Dakia being declared as one of the winners in the ‘m-Inclusion’ category at mBillionth South Asia Awards 2010. Held at Hotel Intercontinental Eros, New Delhi, mBillionth witnessed 165 mobile VAS nominations, 121 coming from India alone.

Our persisting efforts behind making Dakia possible attained recognition when it was announced as one of the winners of the big night. Dakia is a voice based multi-lingual mobile application for the aggregation and dissemination of community centric information in rural areas, irrespective of the literacy levels of the user. It is meant to empower the rural population by being informed about major issues like impending power cuts, weather reports, crop diseases and treatments, new market prices and general welfare, which in turn affect their daily lives.

As Vijay puts it in an earlier interview published on Medianama:

“We have an application called Dakiya. You can’t sell SMS in the rural market – even Hindi is non-native. You have to have a vernacular application, and vernacular in text does not exist. (more…)

July seems to have arrived in 5th gear – going by the number of things lined up.

• Vijay is moderating a session on Mobile Marketing at the IAMAI conference – Free for SME’s. on 6th July 2010 at Habitat Center, ND. Event details here (http://ievents.iamai.in/ict4sme/agenda.php). (more…)

Many of you may have caught the One97-SAIF partners Mobility Initiative news by now. We are extremely proud of being part of an initiative like this. As a team that has seen this industry take shape, we realize that this is just a beginning. Life on the m-screen only gets interesting and better.

Since there are a few discrepancies in some stories being circulated in some sections of the media.  Here is the link to the official release.

http://businesswireindia.com/PressRelease.asp?b2mid=23046

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I remember when in 2001 I got my first customer for One97 and how few months away I was blown away by cash flow problems. My customer liked what we offered and delivered but the payment was not as prompt as I thought so. I did some Internet consultancy, made few websites/e-learning lessons for side revenues.

This cycle went on and soon when we thought of offering new services was important, there was significant cash crunch. I was shy enough not to be in Delhi’s Entrepreneur/VC circle and seeing no other avenue, I took loans. Loans from all those who could lend, my friends, my family, my family friends. Without any credit history banks were not there for any debt funding so these loans came at all costs including the biggest being the costliest (as high as 24% ROI) . And now I was cash crunched and had additional burden to service loan. (more…)