I decided to take a short cut and copy the map using Google Earth….well what do you know , I am now officialy lost ( and I have lived here for over 5 years!!).

So let me attempt doing it the old fashioned way and describe some land marks.

The address is One97, B121 , Sector 5 , Noida, India

Option A - Coming to Noida Using the DND Express Way

Option B- Coming to Noida Via Mayur Vihar

Option C - Coming to Noida Using the Kalindi Kunj / Greater Noida route

How to reach our Noida Office

And if all of these fail to help…here’s the most tried and tested route…ask for directions to the Indian Oil buidling and drive down on the road, with the Indian Oil building on your left…keep driving for about 1.5 km ( not measured…just an estimate) and you will see One97 building to your right!!!

Ring Back Tone service (aka Hello Tunes/Caller Tunes/Welcome Tunes etc) has a feature on many networks that a user can press * while calling a person on same network and listening ring back to copy it as his/her own ring back. TRAI “figured out” this has generated in significant number of wrong provisioning as user does not know if it is going to cost her some cost. Whoops !

Though it acted like a good content discovery tool but it probably generated enough noise for TRAI to suggest extra confirmation on it.

Secondly, many VAS are offered to user by an interactive dial out call (Out Bound Dialer ’s Call , OBD) in which user listens to about the service, its charges and even options of content. If user wants to activate the service, he is asked to press a key to select and to reconfirm and avoid any confusion a second confirmation key is asked so that any chance of pressing a key by mistake are avoided.

This has been working good, giving users a chance to know about service and content which sits inside the network. No promotion method could peer it as this is very simple (in local language, detailed) and even has experience of content (like listening the exact song clip)  which user can get by paying clearly stated amount.  A confirmation of charging and suggesting to recheck eliminates possibility of erratic provisioning.

According to TRAI, this doesn’t work as your phone might not be with you and someone else who has a phone (like your child ) does know about it and you are charged for service which you “did not want”.

I do not think this has been reason for customer dissatisfaction, instead it could give India a way to reach its telecom masses and give them knowledge about services, content which they want to know and get.

Now TRAI expects users to fax, email, send letter to telecom operator to confirm that they wanted to avail the service. The even suggest if the customer originates such provisioning request (Sending SMS, Calling a number) , it will defined as confirmation to provision the service.

I think users doing  double confirmation, periodic communication to customer of method of de-provisioning , knowledge of single destination to manage such subscriptions, proactive confirmation before renewal could work as customer delight or errant remover.

Will the authorities soon ask all those who take consent on phone (like Credit Card companies ) to ask for a second leg of customer originated request. That could be interesting!

Going by the mobile penetration level India is perfectly poised to leapfrog the internet revolution to land directly into the mobile broadband revolution. It has already begun with the fast changes on all fronts of digital media including improvement in handset features, network bandwidth and quality & variety of content. Mobile has fast evolved from just being a device to talk to a centerpiece of our lives. Users are now looking for varieties of content delivered on the screen which is always there with them.

Traditionally, VAS business in the country has been driven by the ABC genres which are Astrology, Bollywood and Cricket. The first wave of applications was focused on ABC since the consumers were exploring mobile as a medium and were getting used to it. In the first wave of mobile VAS, service providers could get away with sending the same content to the large and varied Indian population e.g. Bollywood content to every user whether he is in Tamil Nadu, Gujarat or Bihar or Delhi.

Demand patterns in India are however changing and we are already seeing a silent shift. With the users becoming savvier and more comfortable in accessing content on the mobile, they have started looking for content more specific to their taste and their needs. Further, with the addition of millions of customers from the semi-urban and rural areas, demand for differentiated, long tail content is growing. And a lot of this demand will be on Voice and not an SMS or WAP as has been the traditional thought process. The majority of the Indian mobile consumers who are not English literate are much more comfortable to use voice-based content in their local language.

Some of the leading media houses have started working on their digital strategy in right earnest and there have been some movement on using the mobile media. This trend has caught up and now regional media houses are also jumping onto the bandwagon. However so far traditional media’s use of mobile medium has largely been limited to (tele)voting, contests and polls. However there is lot more to be harnessed and synergies to be utilized.

Mobile should be looked at by the media houses both as an enabler for its other properties and as a source of revenue. Some of the advantages that media houses can look at from the mobile media are the following:

• With the growing interest in long tail content traditional media should use the combination of the mobile media and its existing properties to heavily increase interactivity and make the communication with its readers and listeners two-way. This will address one of the biggest challenges.
• Developing of a regular relationship with its target segment. This is a utopia which is quite difficult to reach in this era of hundreds of channels focused on all kinds of content. This dream can very well be possible by utilizing the mobile media to engage the customers and touch them on a daily basis
• Monetization of existing content by only repurposing it for the mobile screen.
• Utilization of multiple business models to drive additional revenues by every media house
• Expanding the reach to a much broader audience. This is especially true for local media houses
• It can work as an additional source of local news and user generated content on the lines of citizen journalism

In India it’s the mobile handset and not the computer screen which will drive the digital content consumption. This unique nature of India’s digital landscape will entail that media houses create a digital strategy specifically for India which is focused on engaging the customers through voice and through highly differentiated and local content.

This article has been written by Team One97!

This is also reflected in the kind of investments that we see in the sector. Getting a little more specific lets look at the M-VAS industry. (  I would like to attribute the following observations to a recent story in DNA Money http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1238568 and One97 view of the industry )

Consolitation seems to be the key. A number of players in the VAS space are taking the merger and acquisition (M&A) route to expand their businesses. Experts believe the kind of money being raised by companies in the M-VAS space currently hints at a possible surge in mergers and acquisitions. A key indicator is the significant rise in the number of large quantum or Series B fundraising by mobile VAS companies.

The Indian M-VAS market is pegged at $400 million. It currently comprises well-connected players with good exposure in the industry. Companies that have been around since the last 7-8 years not only have gained momentum in terms of deployment, operator relationships etc, but also have the necessary management bandwidth that new entrants will lack. Such companies will be keen to take the M&A approach to absorb smaller companies.

At least in so far as its positioning is concerned, LinkedIn ignores the fact that real people have virtual worlds - it does not let you buy chicken feed using some LinkedIn $$ or suggest that you try finding people based on their A/S/L/I. LinkedIn should continue to ignore it simply because it focuses on the notion of business networking - a rather real world need!

Real World is different! The Real Real World of today includes the real world and the virtual world. In the Real Real World, people distinguish between the people they would want to ‘groom’ - my brother, my sister, one of my many cousins I am particularly fond of and so on, my bar-hopping buddy, and the people that they would not mind being an acquaintance of, and the people with whom they would only have a business-like relationship, and including but not limited to the people they would want to avoid at all cost - I confess that I sometimes add a contact to my phonebook just to be sure that I do not pick up the phone the next time I receive a call from that number!

That is one part of the real world ‘connections’. Real people’s need to escape their real world and engage in the non-real world is as real as those people themselves.

Jack will, at times, want to be a fighter pilot chasing the bad guys! This is his virtual world. And I believe, that Jack’s want is as real as Jack, the CEO himself! So, Jack will have in his list of the people he knows, his employee Alice, his daughter Emma, and his “co-pilot” Maverick. Of course, all but Maverick are real people in Jack’s lives. Maverick is a fantasized entity, who is Jack’s co-pilot in a virtual world, and is a role that is probably being played by another John, who is as real as Jack.

In the above context, these all-encompassing terms such as ‘connections’ or ‘friends’ or ‘buddies’, in my opinion, are probably incorrect terms in the real world!! I would say that the ‘list of names’ that I see there are not my connections, they are the ‘people I know’ to a lesser or greater degree. Some of them I know well, some of them are my close friends, some are my relatives, some close, some distant. I have some relationships with each of them. Some relationships I value more, some others less. In certain contexts, my fantasized relationships may become more important to me than my real ones!

One could say, that the relationships I value are my connections. Alternatively, some of the people I know, I consider them as my connections, and hence value them more - “I know the Mayor!”.

As the CEO of the 5000 people company, the 45-something Jack will not think of the 18-year old Alice (the trainee engineer) as one of his connections. He will not care whether Alice is having shushi or rajmaa-chaawal tonight, or whether she likes rock or jazz. Unless of course, Jack has begun to like the witty notes that Alice leaves once in a while for others to read.

But what about Alice? Alice would probably give herself and her entire neighborhood a treat, on the day she receives a hello from Jack!

And if instead of Alice, we were talking about Emma, Jack’s 14 year old daughter, Jack would probably want to be the first to know when she has a running nose!

What should change?

People I know and my Connections should be distinguished and differentiated from each other. Connections are people I groom and it is an asymmetrical kind of relationship. By accepting an add request, I am only agreeing that I somehow know the other. I get all these requests on LinkedIn or on FB. I accept them or ignore them because rejecting them I consider as rather un-social. Sometimes, I accept them because I see no harm. Most of the times these people just occupy the space on my ‘friend list’ and I do little with them. When I send a request however, it is mostly when I consider connecting with the other worth it. I perceive such people to be somehow important to me today, or someone who may become important tomorrow.

My network (as a noun) may be large - all the people in my friend list and then their friends and so on. But I network (as a verb) with only a few of them. These few, I would refer to as my connections. The other larger set is the set of people I only know, somehow. This distinction is important to me. When I look at the friend list screen, rather than seeing the list of 350 odd people, I would rather first see the 37 I consider as my connections. Rather than seeing the events and updates from all these 350 on my lifestream, I would rather see those from my 37 connections, instead. To the world, I would rather talk about the 37 important people in my life, rather than the 350, and so on.

I want my social network to help me maintain these distinctions.

One of the core, and in all probability, the most significant game changing value proposition from digital representations of the Real Real World and its network in times to come will probably be their ability to perform these high fidelity tasks. In this digitized representation, call it simulation if you like, real people will want to be able to first distinguish and keep separate their not-so-disjointed real worlds and virtual worlds. And within each of time, be able to do the high fidelity task of qualitatively distinguishing one person from the other based on the nature of relationship they share. As I read somewhere, someone noted that Web 2.0 (whatever that means) was and is a lot about creating a lot of noise. Web 3.0 (and whatever it would come to mean) would be much about filtering much of that noise. This is a tall ask. It is not just a challenging concept - it has all the ingredients of a best seller thriller!!!!!

My initial search on Google showed me few options to access our official emails on Google Apps. The options were Seven, Emoze, Mail For Exchange, Beta Nokia Messaging client, etc. First thing I tried was Mail For Exchange and educated immediately that Google Apps is not Exchanged based or compatible. Then it was the turn of the most promising client Seven. When I downloaded and installed Seven I was very exited and hopefull and after 5 - 6 days and few posting on the Seven mailing group and blogs, I found myself stuck in a no mans land. Every second person on web said Seven is the best and I looked like an idiot.

Then I tried Emoze and there I was exited to see my first push mails on my E71.  And there was no stopping and I continued to trust and use Emoze and in between they came up with newer versions and I religiously upgrade the same on my mobile. With one version upgrade rollback I never faced any problem. Yesterday when I upgrade the firmware of my mobile I downloaded latest version of Emoze and i was surprised to find that now it supports only 1 email account and I need to upgrade Pro Version if I need mails from additional accounts.

Althought the cost is approximate Rs 700 per annum, but I decided to start my search again for free push client. This time I decided to use Google’s Gmail for mobile Ver 2.0 a access mails. I was easy to get it installed and configure for my both Google App and gmail mails. But it did not take me long to realise that I am not getting any new mail alerts except a brief vibration. I searched everywhere to enable alert and then decided to ask google for an answer and got none. And so I started my search again and Nokia Messaging client was my next option. Although I avoid beta softwares but still decided to give Nokia Messaging client. And since the time my first mail rushed in on my mobile and I am totally impressed by this application. It has a very intelligent & impressive UI and it shows email status details on the mobile main screen. Only issue noticed by me was it s not possible to navigats to previous or next message by pressing NaviKey. Well it is too early to rate this product but overall a good product and shall put a post on the blog if I encounter anything interesting :)

Well as everyone is aware firmware upgrade of any product is not for weak hearted and it is equally tough for Nokia phones. Before proceeding with firmware upgrade using Nokia Software Updater, you are required to make backup of our mobile data using Nokia PC Suite as all your data is wiped out when you flash the firmware of your mobile.  Although all your data gets backup properly, but at the time of restore, PC Suite cannot restore back your most important of all the contact list. And Yes you also end up losing other important data like stored messages, calendar entries, notes etc.

It is a known issue and your only saviour is Nokia’s own tool ‘Nokia_Contact_Transfer.exe’. But it is not so easy to locate this tool on Nokia site and I had to spends one precious night  in November 08 just to locate it and all other tools I could lay my hands on were paid products. This tool is cool as it auto detects and shows all backup files stored on your desktop.  And it helps you select correct stored backup file and recover / restore all your contacts data from the backup file. And this tool is so fast that you refuse to believe your eyes.

Anyway I am happy that I upgraded E71 and it was really worth the efforts I had to put in. And I do have a story to tell about my upgraded N71 but that will be coming tomorrow.