Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Only the smarter race qualifies!

Telecom players in India are flocking to the ‘app store’ band wagon. But it’s an idea much before its time, as masses don’t even know the ‘app’ from the ‘store’ says b&e’s Surbhi Chawla

3G and 4G are still delusions for companies and numbers for the layman. Meanwhile, the latest trend that is picking up in the Indian telecom sector is the trend of application (app) stores. The trend was started by Aircel, which announced its partnership with Infosys to launch its application store in January 2010.

Without much ado, Bharti Airtel launched its app store by the name of Airtel App Central on February 10, 2010. For starters, around 1250 applications have been made available on this platform to support over 550 device. (Atul Bindal, President, Mobile Services, Bharti Airtel, said, “With the Airtel App Central, we are offering a one-stop shop open 24x7 to meet all our customer’s personal device needs. We are empowering our mobile customers to transform their phones into smart devices.”)

The company has attempted an assortment of free and paid content, which is currently divided into 25 separate categories (like books, games, entertainment, social networking, heath & fitness and weather to name a few). As of now, the paid content starts for as low as Rs. 5 and the cost of a particular application would be either added to the monthly bill in the case of post paid subscriber or deducted from the talktime of the pre paid ones. Airtel is trying to cater to even its non-smart phone customers, but unlike Aircel, there are no applications for now that would be accessible with voice commands or SMS.

Reliance Communications (RCOM) has also announced that it would be soon entering this sphere through its RWorld. Mahesh Prasad, President, Reliance Communications, tells B&E, “It is our constant effort to offer our customers a ‘wow experience’ and with the launch of the Reliance Applications Store, we will be taking a giant leap in that direction. Application Stores have benchmarked the overall VAS experience of customers globally, and the launch of Reliance Applications Store in India will provide consumers with a broad selection of relevant, fun and exciting applications to choose from in the easiest possible way.”
 

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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