The Hindu Business Line : Net’s next frontier

Search and find — on the move: Delegates at the GSM Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, check out Yahoo’s oneSearch solution for handsets. The tool is being offered by four mobile operators in India.

Anand Parthasarathy

Macau, Nov. 14 “The mobile phone is NOT a small computer!” warns Mr Wang Jiangzhou, head of the world’s largest cellular provider, China Telecom. “Don’t talk of putting Internet on phones — you have to create new Internet experience for the handset.”

It was a message that seems to have sunk home to the world’s leading Net players – who were present in significant numbers at the GSM Association’s Asia Mobile Congress that opened here on Tuesday, on a heady island locale better known for its casino culture.

With mobile phones outstripping PCs by a factor of four — and India and China alone adding 100 million subscribers a month — the cellular space was clearly seen as the next big thing by Internet providers.

Portal players like Yahoo responded by creating a new ‘look and feel’ for the mobile avatar of their legacy PC-centric offerings: Three Indian cellular providers — BPL, Aircel and BSNL — joined Idea Cellular on Tuesday to provide their customers with Yahoo’s oneSearch tool specially created for portable phones.

The basic Yahoo page for mobiles — Yahoo!Go — has been designed bottom-up to enhance the Net experience, explained Mr Steve Boom, Senior Vice-President for Mobile and Broadband.

The largest Net company in Japan — SoftBank — which had plunged into the deep end of the mobile business in recent years, was offering handsets which came with a special key to open the Yahoo page. This one-touch access was largely responsible for making Yahoo the search tool with a 2/3rd share of the Japanese market, explained the Softbank CEO, Mr Masayoshi Son.

Mobile money transfer

The GSM Association announced a partnership with Western Union to offer in early 2008, through its members, a standard system for mobile money transfer: Airtel would be the first to offer the service in India, the GSMA CEO, Mr Robert Conway, announced.

The Bharti Airtel CEO, Mr Manoj Kohli, whose network was hailed as the world’s fastest growing warned delegates that they had to innovate — or die — in an environment where the world’s next billion phone subscribers would come from disadvantaged sectors of society whose usage might contribute less than a dollar a month in revenues. “Yet they have expectations that we have to meet,” he added.

As if in tacit agreement, the GSM Association selected the down to earth application of a rural financial services terminal from Bangalore-based Integra Systems as the region’s Most Innovative Mobile Application for Vertical Markets.

The IMFast terminal enables banks to operate in areas without branches – using smart card and near field communication technology underpinned by the mobile network.

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