Rajesh Jain can be termed the messiah of the virtual world as all that he has touched relating to the Internet has turned into gold. He demonstrated that in the late 90s when the IndiaWorld portal was bought by Sify for over Rs 400 crore. However, it is his new passion, the mobile world, where he foresees more innovations. As head of Netcore Solutions, Jain is involved in some breakthrough technology applications. He sheds some light on the future in a conversation with Amit Tripathi

You said recently that publishers haven’t succeeded in creating media on mobile. Can you elaborate?

In these times, the mobile phone is the only sure medium to reach a person at any given point in time. Now we can get news headlines, stock status etc over the phone... but are they personalised enough? Do I get what I want or all that is necessary for me?

For media on mobile phone to be a success, publishers need to do a lot of customer profiling. Moreover, they should utilise the medium (of mobile) to serve them (customers) relevant content. Most media, be it TV, newspaper or radio, have made their presence felt on the Internet to leverage that as a channel for greater revenue. What is the next logical step in your view?

The next step is to see things from the other side. Organisations must find out whether the Internet is inviting the desired eyeballs. Mobiles can be a medium to enable that. If utilised properly, they can drive the traffic to the Internet. It is not just publishers, in fact all enterprises need to look at how best two moments can be captured. I term them as empty moments - moments of waiting and know-now moments.

What are the other trends in mobile phone technology?

We have developed a technology to push the e-mails that you receive as SMSes to your mobiles. We will launch this in ten days. You would receive an email that is there in your mail inbox in three parts of 160 characters each (if the mail is of 480 characters). In case the mail is more than 480 characters, you have to send an SMS on a prescribed number to read the full text. Of course you may not view the attachments along with the email but you will at least be prodded through the mobile to take the action of viewing your email once you are online. Thus the initial viewing of e-mail happens without logging on to the Internet. Moreover, it works on all existing mobile phones and requires no GPRS connectivity.

What are the developments in the PC segment in the face of prices dropping to all-time lows?

Low-cost PCs are not going to take off unless three aspects are taken care of broadly. Convergence, connectivity and services are important for PC adoption. The convergence of TV, internet and mobility has to happen with a PC. The connectivity has to come up significantly and the quality of services in terms of relevant content has to be taken care of.

One interesting development is that connectivity providers or telecom providers are becoming the centre of service delivery.

For example, MTNL’s will provide NetPC in collaboration with Novatium in which a barebone PC is available for Rs 4,500 without a central processing unit. All necessary applications can be downloaded as service.

This makes sense and, going forward,we would see more content providers handholding with telecom players to provide content to users.

Say for instance, someone installs video cams on major traffic points, ties up with a telecom player whose servers it would use for distributing that data to a user’s mobile or PC, settles a revenue sharing agreement and charges the users on a monthly basis to provide the status of traffic on a real time basis. I believe everybody would like to pay for such a service.

That was just one example. All kinds of service providers can get into similar agreements. We would see telecom players in India setting up their cloud computers to enable such services.

This is where I believe India can be a test bed for many such innovative approaches due to our telecom and mobile boom. Once they are successful here we can then take them to international markets. India can be a leader in providing mobile value added services.

Source : DNA