Mobile Handset Software Solution

Book Smart- Books price comparison for India market

2011-03-17T02:03:00.000-07:00

Released pre beta version of books prices comparison app on Android app store. Got few good suggestions also from users and hope to update the app with some of them by today (that would be very fast). Doing service launch gives you lot many learning about the market, UI, user etc. than working in isolation to build so called best product/service. We have many more scheduled release on the same line for books and other categories on multiple platform. It also give a very good and relevant feedback to the team, excitement of releasing an app and in the end fun + satisfaction.

OJAS party

2011-03-14T04:28:00.000-07:00

Sunny day today but it was a good fun at OJAS portfolio companies party at Confident groups resort on Bangalore outskirts (Bannerghatta road). Though Mango is not in the their portfolio now but Rajesh and Pavan are kind enough to invite us for the get together. Good to know the growing and diverse portfolio at Ojas (video algos, banner ads, campus connect etc. domain)

Zynga growing in Bangalore

2011-03-10T21:47:00.000-08:00

Interesting to see that companies like Zynga who have built popular games on social platforms like Cityville, Farmville etc. They plan to open a complete game studio and they would be focussing on creative conceptualization from this studio, it's good for the overall SW product industry here and it shows that we are growing in value chain.

AppData, a US based entity that tracks the traffic on social networking platforms says 92.9 million active users spend a considerable time playing Zynga’s latest game, Cityville. Farmville still remains to be a considerable favorite with over 49.6 million active users owning virtual farmlands.

Tablet PC/Pad's

2011-03-10T05:55:00.000-08:00

After seeing iPAD2 demo video, i'm more than convinced that everyone else is fighting for number 3 and beyond slots.

No. 1: iPAD2,

N0.2: iPAD1

Haven't seen any tablet PC yet which is better than iPAD1 (not in terms of useless specs but what matters to the end user). Few killer features for me are user experience, battery life, instant on speed (no lag), and access to so many apps...

Angry Birds Maker Rovio Raises $42 Million

2011-03-10T05:49:00.000-08:00

Wow...Currently, Angry Birds is played by 40 million monthly active users. The company has 50 employees and raising $42 Million.

more at http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/10/angry-birds-maker-rovio-raises-42-million-from-accel-atomico-and-felicis/

Reasons to get stuck on Qt: a baker’s dozen

2011-03-10T03:22:00.000-08:00

Nokia is giving so many reasons to developers to stick to QT but they themselves are not sticking to it, why ask developer?

below are the 13 reasons on official nokia blog site.

http://conversations.nokia.com/2011/03/10/reasons-to-get-stuck-on-qt-a-bakers-dozen/?sf1168252=1

new ventures in MNC ecosystems round table

2011-03-10T02:51:00.000-08:00

Interesting discussion at the Round Table Discussion on How do new ventures in MNC ecosystems proactively overcome interfirm asymmetries? at IIMB.

Panelists:
1. Mr Sunil Maheshwari, Co-founder, Mango Technologies
2. Mr Srini Rajam, Chairman and CEO, Ittiam Systems
3. Mr Sanjay Shah, MD, Invensys Skelta
4. Mr T.K. Srikanth, VP, Sasken
Anchors: Prof Shameen Prashantham, University of Glasgow and Prof K Kumar, IIMB

Since this is an event which is eventually geared towards publication, there were small invited audience of other faculty, observers and students.

Great learning for myself from other's experience.

Smart phone sales up but overall handset sales down

2009-05-21T02:19:00.000-07:00

According to Gartner Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Declined 8.6 Per Cent and Smartphones Grew 12.7 PerCent in First Quarter of 2009.

Few key points: Nokia's sales declining but interestingly Blackberry and Apple is growing very fast.

Now again Motorola is trying to catchup with others and trying to regain the lost glowry!

>80 and going strong

2009-05-11T00:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I watched two old man, one on TV and another one live performing in Bangalore.

First one is LK Advani, BJP's prime ministerial candidate, he is 81 years old and the way he was giving his speech at the NDA rally in Punjab, it was great. Almost from last 2 months he is traveling expensively across India, giving multiple speeches, taking flights and reaching to the new destination.

Second one is Manna Dey, the great Bollywood singer, he is in his 91st years. He was giving live performance in Bangalore and almost sang for more than 2 hours, his team was much younger than him (must be in their 30s or 40s) but they asked for a break in between not him. Amazing stuff.

How do they get this kind of energy and enthusiasm in whatever they do? If i just look around with people in their 20s and 30s, i don't find the same zeal to get going. Where is the vigor or spark? Can we take 2hrs flight in the morning, attend one meeting, again take a flight for another place, attend one more meeting, return to your home and come back fresh the next morning to office?

Are we just doing something because we have to do it to earn our livelihood? Where is the creativity? Where is the emotional connection with what we are doing?

Smart phone OS-Continue

2009-05-09T09:14:00.001-07:00

Smart phone OS list:

Symbian, IPhone, Blackberry, Android, BMP (BREW Mobile Platform from Qualcomm), Win Mobile, QT, LIMO.....

Nokia is desperately searching next killer thing for the emerging market, recently they started testing Nokia Life Tools, which is nothing but few pre-embedded apps with services flavour.

Where is the industry moving?

2009-05-08T08:04:00.000-07:00

Are we becoming more and more fragmented in the mobile phone software world?

People started consolidating towards 1 or 2 smart phone OS world and there you get IPhone and Android and complicated the whole world with their differentiated offerings. We used to think that all smart phone development would move towards Symbian but looks like Nokia's acquition has changed the game here.

Apple has shown that good usable phone and option to user so they can choose what they need on their personal phone.

I was thinking and discussing with guys in my organization that what could be interesting for end users, developers and telcos to add in to the low cost device?

Various things came during the discussion localized UI, location based apps, local search, gaming, news, dynamic idle screen, advertising, mobile banking etc. but all of these things are making things more complicated.

Innovative UI and option to user so they can choose what they want. That could be the killer on your low cost device.

What is the defination of an innovative UI? Will try to discover more as my discussion progresses.

Mobile OS and Indian market

2008-10-01T05:09:00.000-07:00

Two interesting but disjoint things i have noticed today:

First got a mail from Informa Telecom about the new event on mobile software framework, MAPOS'08. (more information @ www.maposevent.com)
Pls. have a look at the below content... It would be very interesting to see how these big players control our small device in the future.
------------------------------------------------
There can be no doubt that recent industry developments have propelled both Mobile Application Platforms and Operating Systems right to the forefront of discussion and interpretation. This has in turn changed the structure of our ecosystem for good, creating new relationships where none existed previously, and breaking those that we thought could not be broken.

So where are we headed?

Is the future all open? LiMo, Android and the newly created Symbian Foundation seem to think it is, but Microsoft and Apple can never be discounted. In fact fragmentation and in-fighting has raised the question that this may not be the case. Are we moving towards an ecosystem where the same handful of companies dominates? And how does this affect
everyone else?

The 5th Annual Mobile Applications Platforms and Operating Systems (MAPOS) Conference will answer these questions and more. Tackling such hard hitting subjects as how the mobile industry is reshaping, what effect new technology will have on the ecosystem, the rise of the developer, the worsening threat of fragmentation and the issue of open versus proprietary, this year’s conference promises to be the most controversial yet! MAPOS 2008 is unique in its subject of Application Platforms and Operating Systems. With in depth presentations covering the issues you need to know, MAPOS 2008 promises to be a conference you cannot afford to miss.
---------------------------------------------
Second is the news from Samsung India and their plan to get 15% of the mobile handset market in India.
(http://www.livemint.com/2008/10/01145612/Samsung-eyes-15-of-Indian-mob.html?h=B)

Samsung is really gaining market in past few years, let's see if they can really challenge the might of Nokia.

Mobile Marketing

2008-09-29T03:39:00.000-07:00

One of my colleague Ani has recently attended conference on Mobile Conversations:- Bangalore Everything you wanted to know about mobile marketing'. It looks to me that whole world is moving from mobile VAS to mobile marketing arena. Is it the Google effect and everyone wants to make money through mobile advertising? Or everyone is thinking that Google is gonna acquire them one day if they build a cool solution for mobile advertising?

Whatever it is, it'll be good for the end consumers as they would get more and more free content sponsered by the advertising world on their mobile device. Would the current US financial crisis impact the mobile advertising plans in a big way? Yet to be seen the great mobile advertising world, so don't care.

-Sunil

One more blast in Delhi

2008-09-27T23:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday there was one more bomb blast in Delhi. We have increasingly seen that terrorists are using technology (especially mobile phones) to kill people. Can we use technology to save people? More effective information exchange in such times and as a precaution, teaching the masses through these mobile devices?

-Sunil

G1 Phone and emerging market devices

2008-09-27T03:04:00.000-07:00

Why are we interested in a new software for mobile devices?
Mobile phone frameworks are around since the mobile phones are around and now it's more than 25 years. What are we doing so special or wants to do so we need these new generation of software frameworks for all kind of mobile devices.
One interesting fact is that more consumer or may be Telcos want people to use non voice services. Revenue from voice is declining and all of us are finding many different ways to talk (Skype, GTalk etc.) So now you need to push more and more content to consumers handset. But the problem with our mobile phone is that it's a small screen device, memory is limited, processors are slow and last but not least power consumption is important too!
Googles or Microsofts of the world want everyone to use their serivces from their respective phones and mobile phone industry is so fragmented that they can't port it once and get the assurance about their service availability on majority of the devices. What developed contries are using as mobile device and networks, we in the emerging countries are still not thinking about (we may have global launch of very high end handsets from India but still users for these devices are very low). 6 out of 10 new subscribers are going for low cost devices in one of the fastest growing markets like India and believe me most of these consumers are prepaid users, who loves to give missed call if they want to talk to you.

How do the complete ecosytem run on these kind of scenarios?

Someone has to fund for the entire effort, so now atleast for the top 20-25% of the mobile market segment we have Apple, Google, Microsoft, Symbian, who don't want to make money through their software but from the services provided on these devices.

There are many unanswered and comlicated questions about the viability of these option, which are primarily driven by potential Advertising, music download etc. kind of revenue opportunities.

Regards,
Sunil

G1 Phone Launch (Android)

2008-09-26T03:39:00.000-07:00

It's so confusing in the media about the Android based phone story. Whose phone is this anyway? Is it T-Mobile, HTC or Google's phone? In any case Apple and Google has shown power of software in consumers phone. What differentiate these phones from already existing hundreds of models is Google or Apple software behind them.

It's like Intel inside in the PC world so now you have Google inside in the mobile world. Let' s understand why is this so interesting?
- It gives more power to the consumers but that is still a dream.
- It may open up more revenue opportunities for VAS companies, Telcos of the world, if they take it positively.

What it'll do for the emerging market devices: It really depends upon the end user pricing for these devices or how much subsidy *someone* can provide for these devices.
Can Google subsidize them for the potential advertising revenues from these devices? It's not a proven model yet in any market but Google has all power to do this else it'll become like iPhone launch in India (priced around 32000 INR = ~700 USD).

I was just thinking about the bottom 50% of the handset consumer segment. Can we provide the good user experience, flexibility in the software framework and end user specific application? Or we just want to worry about the price point for these devices? Aren't we already reached at the trashed hold in terms of the price points in these market?

I'll write more next time and try to find answers to these questions.

Regards,
Sunil

Human Excellence and Device (Mobile phone) Excellence

2006-06-26T02:50:00.000-07:00

Human excellence and Device (Mobile phone) excellence:

Yesterday, I had been to the Ramakrishna Math and brought one book “Personality development through Human excellence”. On the first page of this book there is a quotation from Swami Vivekananda:

“Teach yourselves, teach everyone his real nature, call upon the sleeping soul and see how it awakes. Power will come, glory will come, goodness will come, purity will come, and everything that is EXCELLENT will come, when this sleeping soul is roused to self conscious activity”

How wonderful!

If one has a look around their workplace, government, community etc., they would find that we have so much of potential but no one is willing to realize or exploit it. Still every company talks about human resource scarcity (especially in the IT domain).

Is the scarcity real or is it a delusion persisting for the lack of awakened souls?

Not many organizations or managers of resource pool are focusing on the strengths of resource. Instead of working on the positives of a resource people are too busy worrying about negative points and shortcoming and trying to find a replacement for the resource as whole. Hence starts the cycle of organization searching for that right fit for a position and persons search for the right organization that can exploit his/her full potential.

No wonder the industry seems to be galore of blind dates but no marriages. There hardly are any long-term commitments let alone the lifetime loyalties as in a marriage.

Flourishing Industry is the manifestation of excellence in people- excellence of body, mind and soul. No industry can sustain only on the strength of money or machine sans quality personnel.

For a moment, lets correlate this phenomenon of underutilized resource qualities to the underutilized feature set of the handset devices that the industry is struggling with.

So many phones with so many applications pushed on the baffled user.

There are WAP browsers, Sync software, Email clients, MMS, Video-streaming and Mobile TV. What percentage of phone owners needs these features? Few. How many actually use this feature frequently? Fewer.

Most of the phones currently carry high-end but nobody-uses features.

These are the most expensive software applications in our mobile phones and companies are spending hundred’s of thousand USD on licensing these solutions from 3^rd party software providers and integrating them with their existing solutions.

Does not make much sense to me.

Every mobile phone company is talking about cheap phones but they just want to reduce number and cost of hardware components and software applications from their phone.

But then again, what kind of phone you can sell in the market depends on whether it makes enough economic sense for mobile network operator and answers specific needs of the end user.

Already less then 20 USD phone subscribers are giving a very low ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) and if there are no distinctive features that user needs like option to download ringtone, picture messages, mobile payment, ticket booking, etc. no one will gain.

User will own such a phone but soon desire to throw it away. Operator won’t appreciate such phone much as they will not make any money, unless of-course the prices are very low. (yet again, how low is very low?)

OEMs will squeeze themselves to get the loss making market share.

So what’s the way out?

We’ll talk about some possible solutions in our next blog or all the readers are welcome to put their thoughts and suggestions on this topic.

And as Betaal warns Vikram after the story telling session, “Vikram, if you know the answer to this and you still keep quiet, your head will explode into pieces”.

At Least Lets all strive to be like the awakened and the knowing Vikramaditya.

Sunil

Mobile Software market

2006-06-22T23:24:00.000-07:00

A lot of harbinger about emerging market for mobile phones and when it come to developing nations it becomes very important for mobile phone OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and ODMs (Original Design manufacturers) to keep the cost very low.

Well, How low is “very low”? And just how can the OEMs keep the phone costs down?

Not an easy one!

Primarily two approaches viz.

1. Keep the BOM (Bill of Materials) cost very low.

It mainly depends upon the reference design providers like Texas Instruments, Philips, Infineon, Skyworks and various small vendors. All of them are now talking about single chip solutions for the mobile phone with less number of components. That would lead to lower costs

2. Sleek but rich software solution, which provides differentiating applications and look –n-feel.

How is that possible? When you go for better look and feel and features, memory always becomes an issue and it increases the BOM cost. That is a challenge for the smart software architects and engineers.

Another challenge at the software front it score better on time to market and be dynamic for the fast changing market needs.

There is a growing need for customized solutions for the target market segment at reasonably lower cost, which the bigger players cannot address given their high operation costs and even higher inertia.

What kind of market is available for the ULC phones?

By 2008:

India will be having around 140 mn ULC phones.
Latin American countries will be having 275 mn ULC phones.
Other Asia-pacific developing countries will be having around 210 mn ULC phone.
Africa will be having 160 mn ULC phones.
Middle east will be having around 60 mn mobile ULC phones.

It shows that market is huge and there is a great opportunity for ULC to mid end customized phone category, where you can provide customized solution for the target segment market.

What are the different features would be need to for these markets?

Let’s take India as an example:

Innovative UI->

The UI is challenging handset manufacturers, as mobile phones are increasingly handling advanced applications and featuring sophisticated functions that support the mobile lifestyles of their owners. This makes the design of the UI increasingly complex, while the pressure to reduce time-to-market has not diminished. Device vendors need to increase their flexibility to better respond to rapid changes in the mobile handset market as the UI has become central to the success of next generation mobile services. Indeed, vendors are facing strong pressure from operators and service providers to adapt the UI with customized features to ease the usability of services and facilitate the promotion of branded content.

For data services->

The slow growth of mobile data services is currently embarrassing major players in the wireless industry. The unexpectedly slow take-up of these services is partly due to poor user experiences with existing handsets, while the new generation of devices has been slated by users because of their unworkable UIs. As such, an efficient and easy-to-use UI is a determining factor for the success of mobile handset devices. It is also vital for the adoption of both operator-specific wireless services and wireless Internet services.

Voice only services->

SMS based value added services->

We’ll add more data in our next blog, so keep watching and putting your feedback/research in to this topic.

Are the software professional ready to take up the challenge?

Sunil and Lekh