The Hindu : Front Page : Some ‘cool’ tools for mobiles

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Wednesday, Oct 31, 2007
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Front Page

Some ‘cool’ tools for mobiles

Anand Parthasarathy

Push-pull effect: Viresh Parashar (left) of SlingMedia shows how home TV content can be ‘pushed’ to a mobile phone anywhere; while Rishi Dawar of Aims Migital displays a range of made-in-India cell phone application at the Nokia’s developer summit in Bangkok on Tuesday.

Bangkok: You are far from India — maybe on another continent. But when homesickness strikes, you can cure it — by switching on your mobile phone and synchronising it to receive the favourite Hindi serial or a music programme that your family is watching on the television back home.

The technology to make this possible has just been launched worldwide — but the brains that made it happen are based in Bangalore in the development centre of SlingMedia. Viresh Parashar, the company’s Foster City (California-based Director of Business Development says the additional software to extend the reach of the SlingBox to mobile phones is a $30 download in the U.S.

This was just one of the examples of India-driven innovation, that drew a lot of trade enquiries at mobile handset leader Nokia’s regional developer conference that opened in the Thai capital on Tuesday.

Ever wondered how an SMS message can do double duty? It’s called SMS 2.0 — and another outfit driven by desi ingenuity — the U.K.-based Affle — provided a ‘sneak preview’ of what will soon be available in India and elsewhere: While you are reading the incoming text message, the unused bottom of the screen runs scrolling content you have subscribed for — cricket updates, or an astrological forecast or even a joke-of-the day. When you have read the SMS, the extra content blooms to fill the screen, with more details — even some pictures or a video. The application was crafted at the company’s Gurgaon centre, explained Executive Director Anuj Kumar — and it has already been snapped up by service providers in Singapore.

Sense Media

As you walk past a clothing store in a mall in Chandigarh or Bangalore, a message pops up in your mobile phone, inviting you to step in and look at ‘new arrivals’ in the jeans section. How did they know that you were just there? It’s called Sense Media — a ‘cool tool’ that hotels, shops and cinemas can use to contact potential customers using the short range wireless technology of Bluetooth. And it is the work of another Gurgaon-based developer, Aims Migital Technovisions. Reliance recently tried out the technology in a conference situation and will shortly use it to drive traffic at its Adlabs multiplexes. Migital has also created dozens of tools, which can turn your mobile into a voice recorder, an answering machine or hide your messages in case the phone is stolen.

‘Avatar’ was a much used word at the Nokia expo: Japanese and Chinese developers facilitate mobile users to create their alter egos or ‘avatars’ — building from a library of body images, clothes, shoes and accessories.

These are then used as screen savers, or animated characters you can create to personalise phone-based games. One Chinese developer — Simlife — showed technology that allows mobile gamers to control the on screen action by blowing air on their mobiles, swinging them like tennis racquet or tapping the dots and dashes of the Morse code on the handset’s body.

What brought mobile tools of tomorrow to one developer ‘mela’ was a common platform such as Nokia phones or those sharing the same basic operating system. “Web2.0 is already here.... It is now time for Mobile 2.0” said Shankar Meembat, Regional Director, Forum Nokia.

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