The Hindu Business Line : Internet radio on mobile phone

With FM radio on mobile phone, the subscriber can listen to film songs, Indian classical or western music when in transit. But with Internet radio made available on the mobile phone, you could access anything from Bulgarian rock music to Latin American salsa from more than 100,000 radio stations around the world.

Geodesic Informations Sytems Ltd, a company that develops instant messaging tool services for companies such as AOL, MSN, ICQ, Mundu and Yahoo!, has developed such a product.

Mundu Radio

Mr Kiran Kulkarni, Co-Founder & Managing Director, Geodesic, explained that the product, called `Mundu Radio', allows you to listen to Internet Radio stations on your mobile phone. He said that in an evolved market like the US, Internet Radio is the primary mode of entertainment. "More than one out of five people are on Internet radio, for possibly six to eight hours a day," he added.

In India, however, with lower PC penetration — but high mobile usage — it would be a profitable development to transfer Internet radio capability to the mobile device. The software is currently available for a free download on http://radio.mundo.com, but the company would be looking to implement a revenue model, possibly on a subscription, or an advertisement led basis. He added that they are exploring partnerships with service providers, cell phone manufacturers and portals.

Uninterrupted Music

The biggest challenge that the company faced was in facilitating uninterrupted music on the mobile phone, which typically has a download speed of 14 kilobytes per second (kbps) as opposed to a broadband connection that starts with 128 or 256 kbps.

The addressable market is currently a small percentage of mobile subscribers in the country.

Mr Kulkarni explained that this problem was surmounted by using two buffers (memory used to temporarily store output or input data at the back-end) which means that when you turn on the radio using one buffer, the application keeps buffering using the second, allowing for a constant flow of music without breaks in between.

High-end Handsets

Currently, Mundu Radio is compatible with handsets based on Symbian - Series 60, Windows Mobile (2003 and 5.0) or Palm OS (5.2 and higher). In addition, the phone needs to have GPRS, CDMA or be WiFi enabled.

Since only some handsets — the high-end Nokia handsets, for example — meet these requirements, the addressable market is currently a small percentage of mobile subscribers in the country. "About 5 to 6 per cent of mobile phones in India," admitted Mr Kulkarni.

He added that by the end of the year, the company hopes to make it available to java-enabled phones, which would increase that number to 19 per cent.

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