MoMo Sept: Rural Kiosks, Mobitop Launch
Saturday, October 13, 2007
This has been a long pending post. MoMo Sept event happened on 24th last month as usual. Unfortunately it clashed with the Twenty20 final between India and Pakistan and the attendance was pretty thin. But we all managed to catch the last moments, thanks to a TV in the OnMobile cafeteria. Here's a short summary of the event.
Our speaker was Ashim Roy of Comat Technologies. Comat is a Social Enterprise based out of Bangalore which provides e-Governance solutions targeting the BoP segment. Interest in rural consumer is increasing in India. Several big names are expanding their footprint in rural areas and coming up with services and products which can be marketed to them. ITC's E-Choupal is one such example. Reliance is another big name in this sector.
Comat is one such company which has set up kiosks in rural areas which provide consumers access to information technology products and services. The talk was about how these kiosks can be used by other entrepreneurs for offering their services. They are looking for concepts and solutions which can be rolled out as additional services. It is one of the biggest challenge as well as opportunity in India today. If you have read the Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid you'll agree. So if you have a bright idea, get in touch with Ashim. Find the presentation here (pdf).
The demo was from one of the regulars of the Mobile Startup scene in Bangalore, Mobisy. Lalit presented their flagship product called Mobitop. Mobitop is an application development platform for Smartphones. The language is HTML and Javascript and the platform provides device access. It supports S60 currently and over a period of time they plan to support all major Smartphone OS's. They also take care of signing and certification process. It attempts to solve one of the biggest pain point for mobile application developer: the diverse OS platforms. Usually an application needs to be ported for each one of them separately. With Mobitop you dont have to worry about porting.
Another interesting part of Mobitop is that it enables rapid development of Mashups for mobile devices. Since its Javascript, any web based API can be accessed from the phone over GPRS or a WiFi connection. An example, which they cited, is product search using the mobile phone camera and the Like API. It also opens up the possibility of using Ads. to generate revenues for mobile application. Right now the only ways you can earn through a mobile application is to either deploy it using an operator and signing a revenue sharing deal with them or selling it directly to the customer. Both of these have severe issues. With Mobitop you can have an ad based business model! So if you are thinking of a mobile application, Mobitop is worth a shot! Slides can be found here.
Another nice MoMo event. Even though everybody's mind was on the score, we participated actively. In fact, Ashim stopped in between the talk and asked for the score as well :).
Rajan covered it for Livemint. Read it here. And if you are in town on 22nd Oct, do drop in. The announcement will be up by Monday on our blog.
Our speaker was Ashim Roy of Comat Technologies. Comat is a Social Enterprise based out of Bangalore which provides e-Governance solutions targeting the BoP segment. Interest in rural consumer is increasing in India. Several big names are expanding their footprint in rural areas and coming up with services and products which can be marketed to them. ITC's E-Choupal is one such example. Reliance is another big name in this sector.
Comat is one such company which has set up kiosks in rural areas which provide consumers access to information technology products and services. The talk was about how these kiosks can be used by other entrepreneurs for offering their services. They are looking for concepts and solutions which can be rolled out as additional services. It is one of the biggest challenge as well as opportunity in India today. If you have read the Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid you'll agree. So if you have a bright idea, get in touch with Ashim. Find the presentation here (pdf).
The demo was from one of the regulars of the Mobile Startup scene in Bangalore, Mobisy. Lalit presented their flagship product called Mobitop. Mobitop is an application development platform for Smartphones. The language is HTML and Javascript and the platform provides device access. It supports S60 currently and over a period of time they plan to support all major Smartphone OS's. They also take care of signing and certification process. It attempts to solve one of the biggest pain point for mobile application developer: the diverse OS platforms. Usually an application needs to be ported for each one of them separately. With Mobitop you dont have to worry about porting.
Another interesting part of Mobitop is that it enables rapid development of Mashups for mobile devices. Since its Javascript, any web based API can be accessed from the phone over GPRS or a WiFi connection. An example, which they cited, is product search using the mobile phone camera and the Like API. It also opens up the possibility of using Ads. to generate revenues for mobile application. Right now the only ways you can earn through a mobile application is to either deploy it using an operator and signing a revenue sharing deal with them or selling it directly to the customer. Both of these have severe issues. With Mobitop you can have an ad based business model! So if you are thinking of a mobile application, Mobitop is worth a shot! Slides can be found here.
Another nice MoMo event. Even though everybody's mind was on the score, we participated actively. In fact, Ashim stopped in between the talk and asked for the score as well :).
Rajan covered it for Livemint. Read it here. And if you are in town on 22nd Oct, do drop in. The announcement will be up by Monday on our blog.
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Prahlad(Peggy) Krishnamurthi, 11:38 PM
Prahlad(Peggy) Krishnamurthi, 11:38 PM
