Gold! Ahoy!
Published by Mysorean on Saturday, August 13, 2005 at 8:30:00 pm.
58 million handsets now. 250 million by 2008. On a guesstimate, I can say that about 60% of this market is going to generate business only on voice and sms. 150 million people will primarily use voice and sms. With the kind of price wars that we have seen in recent times, calls and sms'es are not going to be the cash cows. The money, or the profit as the professionals would like to call it, is in Value-Added Services (VAS). And that's going to come from the remaining 100 million handsets/users depending on your inclination to make money! ;-)
VAS, as of now, includes services like setting caller ring tunes, downloading ringtones for your cellphone, downloading images of your favourite celebrity, MMS (You know this, right?! Courtesy: DPS) etc. Call me and you will hear "Yuhin chala chal raahi" from Swades instead of the boring Tring Tring!! That's called a Caller ring tune. I am charged A monthly rental of Rs. 30/- for using this service, Rs. 15/- monthly rental for this song in particular. But before all this, I would have called the Service Provider to choose a song, right? That call costs me Rs. 6/- per minute. If this is not a Goldmine for the Industry, then tell me what is?!
Let us take a look at what could be the future Goldmines. Imagine you want to play a game with your friend in another city. All you will have to do is, logon to the Server of the Service Provider and send a request to your friend to join in. He will login from the other end and there you go, both of you are onto a game of Chess! No joysticks nothing! Your trackpad and your phone.
Well, the pricing structure for this could be based on many things. It could be based on the game you are choosing. It could be on the number of minutes you play the game. If you are a on a different scheme, this game could be a free access to you. Or else, one of you might have to pay for the whole game, the one who initiated is ideally the payee.
Lets move on to watching movies. The board meeting is really boring, and you want to watch a favourite movie of yours in the meanwhile to escape the yapping! You just get in to the server of your Service Provider and ask for your movie to be streamed your mobile. And there you are, transported into the celluloid world from the stiff collars and diplomatic idle talk.
Pricing again is a question of how big the movie is. Or even maybe, how recent the movie is. There could be a day when a movie has a cellphone release. Ram Gopal Varma's "Industry" releasing in India for the first time on your cellphones. The best part is, you can tune into the movie whenever you want to and watch it right from the beginning. So, you don't have to wait for the Friday reviews!
We get sms alerts from Banks right now. You can send a query to the bank's database with your cellphone and get status updates of your banking accounts. The day is not far away when the bank will have a microsite (I am refraining from calling it a website because it will look small on your screens. But otherwise, it will be your usual website). You will access it from the browser on your cellphone and do a fund transfer to your friend's account. Well, the other part could be that you will be able to track your wife's credit card expenses over the cellphone!! Great, ain't it?!!
This Bank service will become something for which we the end customers won't pay upfront. The Bank will deduct a standard amount (Say Rs. 100/- per month) for providing this service. And they will have a back-end arrangement with the Cellphone Service Provider. Of course, this won't be the first payment mode they will start with. They will definitely start with a per transaction fee and a minimum floor value on each transaction to get a hold of the volumes of transaction that will happen. The additional value I see in this model is that the per transaction overhead cost of the Bank will go down drastically. As everything is automated.
Where's the opportunity to make money you ask? Open a company. Appser Private Limited. Please don't go legal on me. I just thought of an abbreviation of Application + Server. Start building gaming, movie, banking, etc. can we think of more? applications that will interface with the middle and high-end mobiles in the market. Try making them talk to the stripped down browsers that are available in the mobiles. Otherwise, make relevant patches that can be added to the existing browsers on the cellphones and make them available for free download.
Now go to the Cellphone Service Providers and give him this idea that you will do the back-end management of these VAS servers. It's a Goldmine. Atleast in India, I haven't heard of anyone going in this direction. Of course, the networks are yet to mature to this requirement. A start in the direction is all that is necessary. The money here is going to be bigger than Gold!
Tomorrow: Independence Day
VAS, as of now, includes services like setting caller ring tunes, downloading ringtones for your cellphone, downloading images of your favourite celebrity, MMS (You know this, right?! Courtesy: DPS) etc. Call me and you will hear "Yuhin chala chal raahi" from Swades instead of the boring Tring Tring!! That's called a Caller ring tune. I am charged A monthly rental of Rs. 30/- for using this service, Rs. 15/- monthly rental for this song in particular. But before all this, I would have called the Service Provider to choose a song, right? That call costs me Rs. 6/- per minute. If this is not a Goldmine for the Industry, then tell me what is?!
Let us take a look at what could be the future Goldmines. Imagine you want to play a game with your friend in another city. All you will have to do is, logon to the Server of the Service Provider and send a request to your friend to join in. He will login from the other end and there you go, both of you are onto a game of Chess! No joysticks nothing! Your trackpad and your phone.
Well, the pricing structure for this could be based on many things. It could be based on the game you are choosing. It could be on the number of minutes you play the game. If you are a on a different scheme, this game could be a free access to you. Or else, one of you might have to pay for the whole game, the one who initiated is ideally the payee.
Lets move on to watching movies. The board meeting is really boring, and you want to watch a favourite movie of yours in the meanwhile to escape the yapping! You just get in to the server of your Service Provider and ask for your movie to be streamed your mobile. And there you are, transported into the celluloid world from the stiff collars and diplomatic idle talk.
Pricing again is a question of how big the movie is. Or even maybe, how recent the movie is. There could be a day when a movie has a cellphone release. Ram Gopal Varma's "Industry" releasing in India for the first time on your cellphones. The best part is, you can tune into the movie whenever you want to and watch it right from the beginning. So, you don't have to wait for the Friday reviews!
We get sms alerts from Banks right now. You can send a query to the bank's database with your cellphone and get status updates of your banking accounts. The day is not far away when the bank will have a microsite (I am refraining from calling it a website because it will look small on your screens. But otherwise, it will be your usual website). You will access it from the browser on your cellphone and do a fund transfer to your friend's account. Well, the other part could be that you will be able to track your wife's credit card expenses over the cellphone!! Great, ain't it?!!
This Bank service will become something for which we the end customers won't pay upfront. The Bank will deduct a standard amount (Say Rs. 100/- per month) for providing this service. And they will have a back-end arrangement with the Cellphone Service Provider. Of course, this won't be the first payment mode they will start with. They will definitely start with a per transaction fee and a minimum floor value on each transaction to get a hold of the volumes of transaction that will happen. The additional value I see in this model is that the per transaction overhead cost of the Bank will go down drastically. As everything is automated.
Where's the opportunity to make money you ask? Open a company. Appser Private Limited. Please don't go legal on me. I just thought of an abbreviation of Application + Server. Start building gaming, movie, banking, etc. can we think of more? applications that will interface with the middle and high-end mobiles in the market. Try making them talk to the stripped down browsers that are available in the mobiles. Otherwise, make relevant patches that can be added to the existing browsers on the cellphones and make them available for free download.
Now go to the Cellphone Service Providers and give him this idea that you will do the back-end management of these VAS servers. It's a Goldmine. Atleast in India, I haven't heard of anyone going in this direction. Of course, the networks are yet to mature to this requirement. A start in the direction is all that is necessary. The money here is going to be bigger than Gold!
Tomorrow: Independence Day
