Mobile Monday Mumbai - June event
nirav June 8th, 2007
I attended the Mobile Monday Mumbai June event, hosted at Reliance Communications. A large portion of the Monday was traveling to and from the venue. But it was a good experience.
Reliance Communication has a campus spread over some 148 acres. About 13,000 employees work there, and this is also the place where you can see the National Network Operations Center - NNOC. The famous NASA like control center setup of Reliance. We reached there at 4.45 and were quickly taken to the NNOC tour. The whole tour was informative - how they laid cables across India in just two years, the 500 Rs. phones that got a million subscribers in two days and even the plans for expanding the services and network reach.
An interesting demo was the digital home entertainment / communication system they are building. This is a settop box, connected via cable. There is a wired and wireless remote, and it doubles up as a VoIP phone and input device. The box connects to the TV - can show the typical cable entertainment channels, and also a whole lot of other content hosted on Reliance servers - magazines, karaoke video songs and much more. I remembered the “Microsoft Home” setup I had seen ten years ago when I was at Microsoft campus. They had a similar TV setup, and the whole setup integrated extremely well with other devices in home.
The NNOC was a good sight! 20,000 square feet area, giant full wall screens on two sides of the walls and about a 100 people monitoring both wired and wireless network of the company - spread across the country. It is great fun to look at the 225m2 projection wall that Barco built for Reliance - and it’s also fun to watch the whole thing from a bridge suspended few meters in the air!
The presentations by Anil Pande and Vinod Vasudevan were good. Insightful and inspiring, both the sessions gave a clue of what’s emerging in the mobile applications field. The idea of payments to a mobile phone was very interesting. I got to learn a lot about operators, their strategies for the future and the overall environment in the mobile space in India.
The panel discussions and questions after that revolved around mobile app vs mobile web, revenue sharing debates, operator agnostic applications, telecom regulations and a lot of other common issues. The revenue share part comes in any discussion I believe! Content providers are not happy with the share they get from the operators. Operators hold the customers and squeeze the most from the revenues. The Reliance guys described how NTT DoCoMo charges separately for the data usage and then gives a higher percentage to the content provider - essentially resulting in lower revenue for the content provider. The debates went on until Veer - the moderator - said no more questions on revenue share anymore!
The discussions over dinner varied greatly. From my crazy idea of mobile phone being used in a grid computing network, connected with a TV for output; to new products people are launching in the mobile space, to how Danger designs easy to use phone systems. And also high tech research happening at Infosys SETLabs to VoIP solutions using Asterisk.
I made a comment at the end of the group discussions that there is a lot of hype about mobile apps and its reach, but the reality is different. It’s very difficult for a new person to first develop a killer mobile app, and then to take it to the customers. There are numerous hurdles on the way and the path is definitely not as rosy as many evangelists paint. Krishna Durbha of Reliance caught me on this at dinner time. We had an interesting conversation about the future of application development, how it’s shaping up and how one needs to keep playing to win. There is good money at the end, but one must keep walking! Don’t get into the mobile app space with the hope to make a quick success, it’s not the way the game works!
On my way back, I had great company of TCS Hyderabad folks. Between jokes, pranks and business wisdom, I didn’t realize when we reached back.
Thanks to Veer and all the organizing team. I am looking forward to more MoMo events. And especially MoMo becoming a platform to support and encourage entrepreneurs who want to get into this field!