Cell-Net!

Quite a complete article on the various technologies in the cellphone internet access market. CDMA's superiority is also experienced in the related wireless mobile internet market of datacards on laptops, where the speeds offered / experienced are far superior to other technologies.

But I agree with the author - GPRS really sucks in terms of the speeds it offers on datacards at least. Wonder what the iPhone would use when it comes to India - I think the US market has a CDMA version only as of now with AT&T being the provider.

MSN - Mobile Social Networking

Getting an Instant Messenger onto the cellphone is obviously the single largest imperative in the mobile industry today. The obvious reason is that even today, after more than 10 years of the internet's existence in India, the single largest reason for use remains "email & chatting". In the era of converging technologies, the cross pollination of established consumer habits across devices is a no brainer. What makes the IM of the PC all the more interesting and germane is the high rates of adoption and use of the mobile SMS communications. What remains now is to integrate SMS with the features of IM, viz. groups, buddy lists, group chats, conversation history... and so much more.

I also see the reverse trend happening, viz. the ability to send SMS's to mobile devices from the PC. The guiding principle remains the cross pollination of usage habits, with the added rule of screen size based granularization of intent, behavior & experience

More to come on this...

Mobile Advertising

Another frontier falls to the might of capitalism's unbridled exhortations to consumers! With new technologies enabling the advertising on mobiles & with the increasing capabilities to deliver wireless internet on the move to mobile devices, we are in the age of convergence.

The imperative now becomes one for the media houses to create content with granularity relevant to mobile handhelds. The only attempt by Hutch to deliver stand-up comedy sequences to handhelds does not seem to have taken off, if one could draw inferences from the lack of its being repeated in the market. However the following content streams do have potential for small-screen delivery
1. Always, always porn
2. Comedy
3. Movie trailers
4. Movie songs (in India...!)
5. Rock artist music videos

True enough, Doordarshan (Prasar Bharti) seems to be at the forefront and is already evaluating MediaFlo (QualComm & CDMA again!), one of the various multimedia streaming technologies for delivery of content to mobile devices. (Jargon Alert : DVB-H => Digital Video Broadcast -

While these are some thoughts on the entertainment front, there would be utility content which is more important. But thats another post :-)