Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Thursday launched the revamped version of its My MTNL Delhi mobile app for Android smartphones using which customers can lodge service complaints, pay bills and book new connection, as part ‘Good Governance Day’ celebrations, Reports PTI.
Responding to media questions on Airtel’s plan to charge for VoIP calls at standard rate of 4 paise per 10 KB on 3G network and 10paise per 10 KB on 2G network, Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has reiterated its recommendations for 900 and 1800 Mhz bands, while it has increased the base price by 15 per cent for 800 MHz band
BENGALURU: India, traditionally a bastion for software services companies, is now witnessing a silent revolution. Inspired by soaring valuation of technology product companies like Zoho, Freshdesk and InMobi, several startups that began by offering software services are switching to developing products.
Startups like Prohance, Robosoft and ZingHR are finding out that marketing products delivers higher payouts than just filling out requirements for clients. This change is being spurred by the lure of higher margins, shortage of talent and greater consumption of technology.
For successful product startups, the employee base is smaller than that of IT giants, but their valuations are all close to $1 billion. At the outset, five-year-old Prohance’s founders were focused on being a services company, as they had enough experience from their stint at IT giant IBM.
Two years into the business, they realized it made sense to sell one product, as they could comfortably earn money even while retaining a small team.
“Plus, we got to put our skin into the game. That was exciting,” said Kishore Reddy, CEO of Prohance, which sells employee productivity tools. His firm is now profitable. It earned Rs 2.2 crore in revenue for the year to end-March 2014.
Even Infosys, an elephant in the services space, ensured that its product EdgeVerve was nimble, so it carved out a separate entity earlier this year.
“The cost arbitrage is driven by resources. Companies don’t have to add employees each time add employees each time for a different project, so the gross mare gin increases,” said Sanjay Shah, founding circle member of software product think tank iSpirt.
Although building a product takes time and resources TestingWhiz, a subsidiary of Ahmedabad-based Cygnet Infotech, has won 8-10 customers for its automated testing tool over the past two years and makes little money the value lies in the high margins. So the 14 year-old company has started doing the rounds of exhibitions to promote their new product.
This trend is not just in the enterprise space; even consumer-facing companies like Udupi’s Robosoft Technologies are reaping its benefits.
“We are on the verge of a hockey-stick growth,” said Rohith Bhat, CEO of Robosoft, which created two entities 99Games and Global Delight Apps in 2008. These two units will contribute to 50% of the company’s revenue in 2017. The services firm, which is growing at 30%, has registered 200% year-on-year growth in revenue from its products division.
Generally, the revenue per employee of a product company is seen to be greater than that of an IT services firm. Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu constantly refers to employee productivity metric to drive home the importance of product thinking: An Apple employee is worth $1.9 million, while a TCS or an Infosys employee is valued at a mere $50,000. The reason: the value lies in the IP, or intellectual property, and those who create it.
Source: ETTelecom
By Ajjay Agarwal, Chairman and Managing Director, Maxx Mobile
Mobile has started to impact almost every sector of our life – payments, healthcare, shopping, eating, travel, investments, and education etc. and it is important for marketers to understand the changing trends and design their marketing strategies accordingly. In 2015, we will see the widely discussed mobile-first marketing approach finally develop to take advantage of these high consumption levels. Retailers will push more high-volume, low-cost products through their mobile commerce platform, to gain enhanced data on consumer behavior, locality, adaptation, and ROI.
In 2015, we should gear up for Big Data and Analytics to play a bigger role in next phase of mobile evolution and changing the consumer buying and engagement pattern and interface between the virtual world and the real world taking huge leap of growth.
2015 promises to ride this wave of momentum, as smartphones will become more secure, more contextual, more location-aware, targeted, and more integrated. We will witness the most engaging mobile experiences till date comes to life in 2015. There will be an integration of Mobility, the cloud, and the Internet of Things creating significant opportunities for businesses to expand and for consumers to enjoy. The advent of low-price smartphones and cut-throat price competition in internet tariffs might change this trend and more users in the country may become tech and net-savvy.
Though the smartphone penetration is low in India, more than half the smartphone users are using their devices to make an online purchase while more than 90% use their mobile devices to research about a product before buying it. This trend is likely to change the face of m-commerce industry in India. India is known as price-sensitive country and the availability of low-price smartphones is likely to increase the smartphone penetration as well as kill the feature phone market in India. But these opportunities will also come with newer challenges.
We are now going to witness major consumer transactions happening via mobile driven by mobile payment options such as paytm and freecharge. There is a perfect atmosphere of strong consumer evolution to mobility for every aspect of their lives, as well as enterprises treating mobility as a strategic advantage. We also saw mobile usage of social media overtake desktop usage. The mobile-centric Instagram grew to over 300 million active users.
There are more mobile phones (7.2 billion) on planet than number of people (7.16 billion). Google research shows that 7 per cent of mobile searches led to a purchase within 24 hours, rising to 18 per cent for local searches. Smartphones are also changing communication habits – particularly for younger generations – with 94 per cent of communication time for 12 to 15 year olds spent on text-based activities such as instant messaging and social media, and only 3 per cent spent on voice calls.
Source: ETTelecom
NEW DELHI: Samsung has launched Galaxy Note Edge, the first smartphone in the world to have a display on the side in India, at a market price of Rs 64,900. It will be available for sale from January first week through select retailers in “charcoal black,” and “frost white” colour variants.
Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad is likely to announce some “incentives” to BSNL and MTNL on December 25 – Good Governance Day – in a bid to accelerate the revival of the two state-owned loss-making telecom firms.
New Delhi: The lack of adequate spectrum, or radio frequency, for mobile phone operators for the better part of the year, due to delays in auction resulted in poor voice quality and call drops in 2014, even as the wait got longer for the people to migrate to superior 4G for broadband services.
Huawei, on Monday announced a partnership with Reliance Communications to offer 2GB of free 3G data on Huawei’s new 3G Wi-Fi dongles & 3G Mi-Fi devices.
BOSTON: Apple Inc has pushed out its first-ever automated security update to Macintosh computers to help defend against newly identified bugs that security researchers have warned could enable hackers to gain remote control of machines.
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By Konnect Worldwide