Interesting Applications

Among all the activities at the mBillionth  the 1st Ever  South Asian Mobile Content conference, hSenid launched its cloud enabled developer platform with Etisalat. It was a very important thing for us, as we had been doing this outside and not at the place where we call it home. I find that alot of people cannot still figure out how and why the apps we are talking about are different. Unlike other mobile application stores which rely entirely on the device capabilities this application developer platform that we launched focuses on utlizing the operator network capabilities like SMS, MMS, LBS, etc. Let me come back to a description of this on a separate blog on a later date( hopefully). 

On the day of the mBillionth I was actually living in parallel worlds, where I had to attend the Developer event and also the Jury of the mBillionth. Thanks to the good hearted people at the mBillionth they gave me an hour time to attend the developer event and play whatever little part I could. So I attended the appzone launch for an hour and then I did the vanishing act from the event to make it in time for the Jury Proceedings.

Then commenced the Jury proceedings which was a battle in its own right. 14 Members of the grand jury from four countries, putting all their heads together and going into the wee hours at Taj Samudra category by category debating, discussing, voting and of course selecting winners.

There were some non - commercial mobile applications that caught my attention and of course at most times, the attention of the other Jurors too.

Suruk http://suruk.com/

Its a J2ME application for a cause. Its an innovation which is capable of converting the mobile into a Simple yet effective instrument to fight auto driver scams. The idea itself of boldly using the mobile to fight a common mans daily war is commendable. The icing on the cake of the solution is that it provides a feature to lodge a police compliant via an SMS.

SMS Based Automated Registration of Admission Test http://www.sust.edu/~admission/

Shahjalal University of Science & Technology Bangladesh has launched its SMS based registration for admission test. It is a solution which takes out the entire hassle of the admission test registration flow and includes the following steps.

1. Registration for the admission test
2. Verification of the SMS request with the exam board
3. Confirmation of eligibility
4. The payment for the admission test deducted from the mobile account
5. Confirmation of the registration process

Who wouldn't want their universities to also take out the entire hassle of the registration process and of  if possible the hassle of the exams too ;) What next? Mobile SMS exams?

Nepal Wireless http://www.nepalwireless.net/

Started as a project to provide wireless access to the remote Nepal and now seems to be converting it into a project for building a broadband information highway across Nepal . A project I guess started about 8 to 10 years back and today has covered and connected many villages, communities and schools, which otherwise would have been totally disconnected from the rest of the world.

I personally has had a fascination for the geographies of Nepal and hearing about the project has just added fuel to my curiosity. Don't be surprised if I decide to get lost in the wilderness of Nepal for a few days any time soon. :D

I wrote this post a few weeks back and it has been in my drafts for a long time. I didn't want to let the cat out of the bag about the winners of the mBillionth. Anyhow I guess its safe to publish it now since the award ceremony was during the course of this week and I hear that it was a resounding success.

Why not an open source application store!

In my last post I talked about the Mobile Long Tail and the need to eliminate the incremental cost of per new application. Anyhow eliminating the variable cost per application doesn’t completely enable a long tail. It solves only half the puzzle.

A golden rule for long tail is that when you have unlimited selection makes sure it can be easily searched. This is what Amazon, Netflix and others had done. Made sure that they provide a mechanism in which products can be easily searched and shared by the customers. After the unprecedented success of the app stores, most of the mobile client application providers had started to build their own application store.

Some interesting mobile client application stores
Apple App Store , Android Market , Nokia Ovi Store , Sumsung App Store,

JK ,pointed me that google wave is supposed to join the bandwagon very soon!

Now all these long tail models both telco and other industries need provide some common features like, searching, filtering, rating, sharing of products. Isn’t it a waste for each of these people to be developing all these common features over and over again? hSenid Mobile has decided to release the full code base of the application store under GPL.

mChoice Vishma

We have commenced the requirement discussions of the mChoice Vishma, which is the project name of the open source application store. Now we have the high level idea on where we need to get to and the team is getting ready with some proposed UI interfaces, so that it will be used as the basis for community discussions.

Face to Face Meet Up

The Vishma face to face meet up will happen on the 17th of February 2010 at GMT 1.00 PM to 2.00 PM.
That is,
Barcelona Time - 2.00 PM to 3.00 PM
Singapore and Malaysian Time - 9.00 PM to 10.00 PM
Sri Lankan and Indian Time - 6.30 PM to 7.30 PM
Follow the http://soltura.hsenidmobile.com to find the online login details to the session.

Unlocking an uncontested market space for the Telcos

Today throughout the globe Telcos are locked in a fierce battle in a “Red Ocean”. Typical as in any “Red Ocean” they face a great challenge in ensuring a profitable growth. Fighting a price war by differentiation and somehow retaining existing customers had become the mantra of the decision makers. At the same time Telcos are faced with a huge challenge of keeping up with cutting edge technological innovations while keeping the capital and operational expenditures under control. Adding to the Telco’s woos is the complexity in differentiating white elephant technological innovations from the ones which the market is ready to buy.

It might look as if I had made it to sound scary but when you listen to the Telco decision makers when they are in total pouring the heart out mode, you get to know that they all face a similar dilemma.

hSenid being a vendor for Telco grade service delivery platforms wanted to break out of the Red Ocean and unlock an uncontested market space for the Telcos. Hours and hours of brain storming by the hSenid team have yielded Soltura, which is a bundled solution encompassing both technological and business process innovation.

Inspired by the work of W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, hSenid team crafted the product strategy for formulation and execution of Soltura using some of the tools and techniques prescribed in their book Blue Ocean Strategy.

Soltura’s New Value Curve

Using the four actions framework hSenid decided to focus on creating a new value curve and set the priorities clear for the product.

As shown in the four actions framework above, Soltura creates a new value curve for the Telco by providing the following features.

a. Cost Perspective

· Irrespective of the sophistication of the Service Delivery Platform the incremental cost occurred for each new application in the form of both development cost and the operational cost from the Telco side in the form of NCS configurations, testing and management has traditionally been taken as an inevitable cost. Soltura differs from this currently accepted wisdom.

· By making each architectural decision in a cost conscious manner hSenid has managed to come up with a Service Delivery Platform which can be deployed at a Telco without any initially outflow of capital expenditure. One of the important features that are presented by Soltura is the raise of a new industry standard of providing SDP as a hosted solution on the cloud and thereby greatly reducing the Total Cost of Ownership of the platform.

b. New Market Segment and thought leadership Perspective

· By eliminating the incremental cost per application, Soltura creates an opportunity to house thousands of applications and discover a totally new market segment which was not reachable with the existing set of tools and platforms.

· The concept of giving an opportunity of allowing everyone to become a content provider and giving a paradise of choice to the subscribers gives rise to a totally new way of looking at Telco applications – this is what we call as “Socializing the Mobile Network.”

Stay around to see the strategy canvas of Soltura!!!!