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Preethi J

Industry players on what might click in this direction.

HELPING the Net to go places - S. Gopakumar

Challenges, both technical and otherwise, abound when it comes to bringing rural India onto the mobile Web. Companies like Google, Infosys and Motorola are working to make Internet over the mobile an effective tool to improve the economic condition of villages.

For, as V.N. Shukla of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Noida, says, "India is but a cluster of villages."

While Infosys has put its research team to work to develop products such as TruSync and m-Connect, which will bring about a better experience for the user, Google believes that online content in local languages is just growing. The search engine is planning to take a drastic move — let users generate their content (like Wikipedia does) to enable it to offer relevant local information to mobile users in their language.

Currently, a cellular operator makes only 10 per cent of its revenue from mobile Internet (GPRS).

Yet industry experts converging at a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) seminar on Mobile Web in Developing Countries organised recently by Jataayu Software in Bangalore claim that the mobile will be the single most popular device to access the Internet in the years to come.

"The focus of Web browsers needs to shift to feature phones, which will see sales of more than a billion by 2010," said Arun Tanksali, CTO, Jataayu Software.

With the right `middleware', the mobile Internet experience, even in the face of poor connectivity, can be made to look seamless, said Puneet Gupta, Head, Convergence Labs, Software Engineering & Technology Labs, Infosys Technologies.

Some of the challenges ahead are managing device diversity, context sensitivity (applications need to adapt to network, user's priorities, storage and battery life), and minimising cost and complexity.

Localisation

PC-based Internet is not very useful as most of the population is not engaged in white-collar jobs. `English infrastructure' is appropriate only to the top 5 per cent of the population in India, said K. Gopinath, IISc, Bangalore.

To make the mobile a viable business tool in the hands of the illiterate, such people will have to be trained to learn simple visuals and some English words.

While C-DAC and W3C work on localisation, other companies feel interim solutions may still be able to offer villagers an economic proposition. Infosys is planning to start local language applications. The company has started pilots for simpler user interfaces too.

Another key factor is the challenge of designing a simpler, yet rich interface to bring the Web onto the mobile.

"Browser rendering is currently inefficient and hence will put off users from using the Internet via the mobile," said a Motorola representative. A mobile-specific syntax for re-designing a Web site for the mobile is not a good idea as it will need training, a different toolset and will also mean that mobile users will be unable to access data that already resides on the Internet.

search on mobile

Research shows that users are more likely to make purchases when the Web site is in their native language and they spend more time on it too, according to C-DAC.

Google is also working on various ways to bring the right data to mobile users. The company believes that "mobile will define our business in the future." The difference in offering searched data on the mobile is that while PC users are satisfied with the results of a search on the Web, mobile users are looking for `actionable information.'

So while a search for a movie on a PC will reveal plain-vanilla information on the movie, and its Web site, the same search using a mobile will have to offer the theatre where it is being screened, books on it, and other such filtered information, said Prasenjith Phukan, Product Manager, Google India.

Hence cell tower information could be used to zero in and offer users the most relevant information.

A suggestion by the firm was to have a common repository of research studies on user and network data in the country.

preethij@thehindu.co.in

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