The August event of Mobile Monday Mumbai is on the topic “Location Based Services” and will be held on 27th August.

Thanks to Qualcomm for sponsoring the event and supporting the community.

Topic:
Location Based Services

• What are the trends in Location Based Services globally?
• Relevance of Location Based Services for India
• Location Based Services and mobile advertising

Agenda:

• Panel Discussion

- Rakesh Godhwani, Manager Content & Services, Qualcomm (Moderator)
- Gopal Krishnan, Founder, Mobile2Win
- Geetanjali Deeghe, Sr Manager - VAS, Tata Teleservices
- Rohit Kapoor, Sr Manager - Business Development, Qualcomm
- Amit Balani, Head - India Carrier Support Group, LG Soft India

• Group Discussion
• Dinner

When:
Monday, 27th August
6.30pm - 9.30pm

Where:
Plateau Hall
Club Peninsula,
Peninsula Corporate Park,
GR Kadam Marg,
Lower Parel,
Mumbai - 400 013.

Sponsors:

Click here to register.

Jacob Cherian writes in Economic Times on Sideloading and its potential to hit revenues of Indian mobile VAS industry.

Sideloading involves users downloading mobile content (ringtones, wallpapers, music, games) onto the PC and transferring it to the mobile. Since the content does not pass through the mobile operator’s network, it cannot be charged for and there is a revenue loss to the operator.

Reliance Communications head of product development Anil Pande, recently said at Mobile Monday, a monthly industry event for mobile content developers and operators, that: “Side-loading of content is eating into VAS revenues.”

The article also quotes me:

According to Veer Chand Bothra, who heads the Mumbai chapter of Mobile Monday, VAS contributes to about 3-4% of an operator’s revenue, excluding SMS.

Mr Bothra points out that as PC-penetration in India is limited the number of people who currently load content from their computer to phone is still low.

CDMA operators are relatively safe from the threat of Sideloading.

Mr Pande is referring to Reliance’s experience in the GSM space and adds that this eating away of revenues will not happen to a CDMA operator. This is because CDMA operators sell their own handsets at their outlets. Mr Pande says: “The operators order phones that have the function (side-loading) disabled. There is no such control over this for GSM phones as they are open-market phones.”

Rajiv Hiranandani of Mobile2win says that phone-to-phone Sideloading is not a threat because of DRM protection content.

He also argues that side-loading cannot be much of a threat to the industry as he points out that downloading a value-added service is a very impulse based decision.

IAMAI president Subho Ray, talks about Sideloading as an alternative business model.

“What is a loss to the operators, may not be a loss to the VAS players as they can now sell it straight to the customer in CDs, thereby totally by-passing the cellular operators.” This therefore turns the content developer, who has been a B2B business till now, into a B2C business.

Telecom operators added a record 7.34 million subscribers in June, the highest ever subscriber growth in a month.

The total number of telephone subscribers have reached 225.21 million (22.5 crore), taking the overall tele-density to 19.86 at the end of June 2007

• 7.34 million wireless (GSM, CDMA, WLL-F) subscribers were added in June.
• GSM additions = 5.2 million
• CDMA additions = 2.1 million
• Total wireless subscriber base = 185.13 million
• Total wireline subscriber base = 40.09 million

Here’s a fun way to look at the growth in the month of June 2007.

• 73.4 lakh additions in the month
• 2.44 lakh additions per day
• 10,000 additions every hour
• 166 additions every minute
• Nearly 3 additions every second

Nokia is India’s largest MNC with sales of over 15,000 crore. The company has a share of about 74% in the Indian GSM handset market.

The ET article, which gives out the above figures, is about Nokia India Sales Head - Sunil Dutt - quitting the company.