Happy Birthday Mobiles

10 years ago today, on August 22, 1995 the first commercial call on a mobile phone was made in India. The call was made from Kolkata on Modi Telstra networks. It was under the then Telecom Minister Sukhram that mobiles were introduced in India. And things would never be the same again. Along with the [...]

New Path to invest $250m in India

New Path Ventures, a fund focused on startups developing chips and embedded software, is raising $250 million for early stage funding in Indian companies. It has so far invested in Telsima Communications, inSilica, Montalvo and Nevis Networks. “We are now looking at investing in hardware oriented companies. We would be looking at product companies in [...]

Sony Ericsson W800i Walkman

Sony Ericsson has launched in India the first musicphone in its Walkman series – the W800i. It is priced at Rs 24,995 and ships with a 512 MB Memory Stick, upgradable to 2 GB, allowing it to hold approximately 125 music tracks. The W800i has a 30 hours of music playback battery life and comes [...]

Mobilising life-saving support

Indian Express story from on mobilisation of support through SMS by Airtel and Spice from their wide subscriber base for people in medical distress and needing urgent help. In recent months, there have been a number of instances where most mobile users in Punjab telecom circle, which includes Chandigarh, have received SMS messeges telling them [...]

Huawei’s expansion in India faces hurdles

Indian government has pulled the plug on a planned expansion into India by the Chinese telecom company saying that Huawei attracted “adverse notice” from India’s security agencies which expressed “reservations regarding the company’s links with the Chinese military.” About a 1,000 people work for the company in India, making it Huawei’s largest software development center [...]

Airtel to offer mobile payments

Business Standard has a story on Airtel’s plans to get into mobile payments. The company is in discussions with a few banks and technology partners to support this system. Speaking on the sidelines of a press conference, Atul Bindal, group chief marketing officer and director (mobility), Bharti Cellular Limited, said, “We are currently conducting in-house [...]

DoT may restrict fixed telephony to wireline

Department of Telecom (DoT) is considering a proposal to restrict fixed telephone services to only wireline, the way it was before the CDMA-based fixed wireless technology (FWT) came into the picture. Mobile operators had earlier complained that subscribers of fixed wireless phones were moving around the telephone terminal almost making it a mobile service. DoT [...]

Six times in Seven years

According to the latest data compiled by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, the telecom subscriber base increased to 108 million in July 2005, from just 18.68 million in March 1998. That is an increase of nearly six times in the last seven years. For the period between 1998-2005, the annual growth rate of subscribers [...]

HutchMail

Last week Hutch announced the launch of its GPRS-based push email solution called HutchMail. It allows corporate users realtime access to their email and calendar. This puts it in direct competition with BlackBerry, launched by Airtel in October ’04. HutchMail’s pitch is that it can be deployed across all levels of an organisation, because unlike [...]

Happy Independence Day

India is celebrating its 59th Independence Day today. Wishing all of you a great 15th August. Jai Hind! Text of President’s and Prime Minister’s Independence day speech.

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