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An easy link to Net in your mobile phone

Anand Parthasarathy

“We push the information sought by you in a compact package”

— Photo: Anand Parthasarathy

‘Netting’ all mobiles: Rajesh Reddy, head of July systems, whose Mi tool uses SMS and voice to access the internet from a mobile phone.

Bangalore: The galloping numbers of new mobile phone owners in India, make this the world’s fastest growing telecom market, at close to over 8 million new subscribers every month. But only a tiny fraction of new phone buyers use their handsets to access the Internet.

Most use the mobile just for voice calls and short messaging services (SMS), perceiving Internet access through what is called GPRS or General Packet Radio Services to be a costly facility for which they have to pay a stiff monthly charge to the service provider.

A young telecom developer company fuelled by Indian brains, but boasting a large U.S. client base, thought this was all wrong: The mobile phone was acknowledged to be the Internet appliance of the future, poised to outstrip the PC by a huge margin. Then why was the scene so different in India? “We re-looked at the numbers in a slightly different way — and the results surprised us,” says Rajesh Reddy, Chief Executive of July Systems.

“The mobile phone subscribers in India numbered over 290 million. We did not ask how many of them used their phones for Internet access. We asked how many of these phones were capable of accessing the Net. The number was over 106 million, according to eMarketer.”

Mr. Reddy found that almost every Indian mobile service provider, offered GPRS service even to prepaid customers. Activating the feature was usually a simple operation. Users could then pay just for the size of Internet download, not a fixed monthly charge. Traditional Net access — going to web sites to look up information — would still prove too pricey (and too intimidating) for these lay users; so engineers at July Systems’ Bangalore labs created a tool that took the techno challenge out of browsing; you could send an SMS message to selected companies and they would respond with an SMS that was an easy link to the exact web page you asked for: to check a stock price; or get news for your neighbourhood — or an exam result. It also put the download on a diet, shrinking the size and cost the download to a few rupees worth. If even sending an SMS was a challenge, one could make a voice call in one’s own language to get a link. They are calling it Mi — short for My Mobile Internet.

An early partner Mi has been the NDTV. SMS MiCri or STO (for a cricket score or stock quote page ) to 56388, and you will receive a link to the relevant web page in seconds. Other media partners are due to be announced any day.

“The difference between Mi and normal browsing from a phone is the difference between push and pull,” Mr. Reddy explains. “You don’t have to pull in the information you seek; we push it to you, in a compact package.” You don’t pay for the actual information, he adds, only for the download time or size.

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