Communities to be induced in India
By Annie Turner
The Cellular Operators’ Association of India (COAI) has chosen fastmobile and Jataayu Software to provide mobile community services. The COAI’s members are Airtel, Hutch, IDEA Cellular, BPL Mobile, Aircel, MTNL, BSNL, Reliance Mobile and Spice Telecom. These nine will have almost 200 million subscribers between them by the end of 2007, in the world’s fastest growing mobile market.
The deal will be the first major deployment of IM services that adhere to the principles of the GSM Association’s Personal IM initiative launched at the 2006 3GSM World Congress – that IM should become as commonplace as SMS and replicate the GSM principles of ease-of-use, security, reliability, interoperability and initiating party pays.
TV Ramachandran, Director General of the COAI, says, “COAI members will soon be able to provide subscribers with extra features such as presence-based address books, email, instant messaging and content-sharing IM buddies for events like ICC World Cup Cricket. We will also be able to create new kinds of commercial opportunities, such as person-to-person commerce and contextual advertising services.”
As part of the project, fastmobile will deploy its StandardsPLUS fmX1.5
(fastmobile eXperience) client with IMPS functionality provided by
Jataayu.
It’ll be interesting to see if the Indian market can finally give birth to real, active mobile communities – they’ve already had a gestation period far longer than an Indian elephant.
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