3G Policy annoucement

Recently, the 3G policy in India was announced. This is going to be a important moment for several players:

Existing telecom operators
New operators who want to enter the telecom space
Foreign players who want to enter the Indian shores
VAS providers
MVNO ( Those who dont own the network and infrastructure but still can be a part of the ecosystem by paying certain sum to the Govt.

The spectrum will be auctioned in blocks of 2×5 MHz in 2.1 GHz band. There can be a maximum of 10 players in any circle and in most cases the number will vary between 5-10 players. The license will hold for 20 years and besides 3G license fee firms will have to pay spectrum usage charge

The Govt is going to raise around $10 B in Auctions, which is a huge sum.

Interesting SMS services

The phones keep getting smarter but that does not stop the innovation at the bottom of the pyramid. I'am talking about the innovation in the SMS applications. This is very much relevant to the countries such as India, Philippines where SMS rules ..Below is another interesting SMS play in Italy ..

Users fire off a message to the SMS Consumatori service, and they get a response showing the average consumer prices in different parts of Italy, as well as wholesale prices. Interesting — another example of mobiles being used to spread information so markets function more efficiently. We’ve seen several examples of this in Africa, where farmers and fishermen use mobiles to check on market prices and get other information. Reuters is testing a similar mobile market information service in India

I feel that there is a definite scope for a similar aggregating service for India and I believe something like this is easily achievable. The key in not technology but the business model..I always believe this for a success of any product ..

Downloadable app Vs Browser based app for Mobiles

This is the the most common controversy that exists in the mobile application development. There are several views/contra views on each side..Just felt that I could add my views in this post. In one of his posts, David Wood of Symbian summarizes the following:

• Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) has been asking the Google Mobile team why they only make one app release every six months, whereas development of apps for PC web-browser happens much more quickly
• Downloadable apps for mobile devices are fraught with problems - including BIG issues with device fragmentation
• Taking Google Maps for mobile as an example: there are 10+ platforms to support, requiring 100's of builds in total - it all adds up to PAIN
• There must be a better way!
• The better way is to deliver services through the mobile web, instead of via downloadable applications.

Towards the browser apps, the drawbacks are as follows:

• Mobile web apps suck too!
• Javascript takes time to execute on mobile devices, and since it's single threaded, it blocks the UI
• There's often high network latency
• The mobile web apps lack access to location, the address book, and camera, etc.

Further, he states...

Four challenges facing mobile web apps

The four factors I generally highlight as limitations in mobile web applications vs. downloaded apps are:

1. The UI provided by a web browser is general purpose, and is often sub-optimal for a more complex application on the small screen of a mobile device (an example of the unsuitedness of the web browser UI in general is when users are confronted with messages such as "Don't press the Back button now!" or "Only press the OK button once!")
2. Applications need to be able to operate when they are disconnected from the network - as in an airplane or during a trip in an Olde World London underground train - or whenever reception is flaky. On a mobile device, the user experience of intermittently connected "push email" from the likes of BlackBerry is far more pleasant than an "always connected web browser" interface to server-side email
3. Web applications suffer from lack of access to much of the more "interesting" functionality on the phone
4. Web applications are often more sluggish than their downloaded equivalents.

So, where do we stand ? Guess, it is the choice the product managers need to make and not the developers ..