The Hindu Business Line : Kodiak offers range of 2.5G products

As other companies wait for 3G (third generation of telecom networks) to arrive, Kodiak is making hay while the sun shines by supplying the latest mobile services for present 2.5G networks. It offers presence management, group SMS, push-to-talk and conferencing applications. Positioning conferencing as the first of its offerings (rather than push-to-talk) in India, the company hopes to repeat the strategy in China and South East Asia.

With Kodiak's conferencing solution users can interact with as many as nine contacts in their phonebook, said Mr Giridhar Boray, Country Manager, Kodiak Networks India.

The SIM card-based conferencing solution (as opposed to the handset-based ones) is available to Airtel subscribers. The company tied up with Idea Cellular to offer another application called Group SMS, which can save 45 per cent of an operator's bandwidth. The company believes such value-added services can increase ARPU (average revenue per user) for operators.

The company is also in talks with other service providers in the country. It offers Voice Notes, a service that allows a user to send a voice message to many voicemail inboxes at a time. Voice Notes will arrive in India in six month, said Mr Kris Patel, CTO, Kodiak Networks.

Presence management has been added to the conferencing software. Users can choose between `Available', `Unavailable' and `Do not disturb' options that are updated in real-time.

The company is working with handset manufacturers to integrate presence management with the phonebook. Video conferencing, said Mr Patel, will need sophisticated mobiles, with more memory and processing power, and these are still unaffordable.