In the beginning, I had little idea about the space I was blogging about. But nearly two years of blogging and working in that space, resulted in a deep understanding of collaboration and social media. It later helped in making sense of emerging phenomenon like social networks and public conversation tools like Twitter.

Knowledge El Dorado was my first blog but it was the second act of internet publishing that I had undertaken. In the year of my introduction to the internet, I had started a site called The NothinOfficial Hangout. Blogging was yet to be invented in August 1998. User generated content and publishing were championed by Tripod and Geocities.

NIIT’s software course did not teach programming for the internet at that time. So building The NothinOfficial Hangout taught me how to create websites. The goal of the hangout was to create a clique of “aam admi” (mango-men) writers who wanted to express themselves. This self-publishing capability engendered by internet was simply wonderful to a twenty-something.

Around the same time I started JainList, an email discussion list on Jainism. JainList along with companion website JainNet was my way of giving back – philanthropy through skills instead of money. JainList has grown to become the largest email discussion group on Jainism.

Nurturing JainList helped me in learning Jain philosophy and also the principles of cultivating an online community.

This blog, Mobile Pundit, was started in November 2004. Earlier that year, using Reliance’s internet capable CDMA phone as well as reading Howard Rheingold’s book Smart Mobs got me excited about the potential of mobility and the impending mobile revolution in India.

Doing Mobile Pundit not only helped in tracking a fast evolving space, but also led to founding of the Mumbai chapter of Mobile Monday.

In all of the above illustrations, the common theme is “Learning by doing”. Whether its Knowledge El Dorado or Mobile Pundit, my knowledge of the subjects increased manifold after I started blogging. Unlike authoring books, there is no need to be an authority on a subject when writing blogs. On the contrary, I find it very useful to start a blog on something I don’t know much about.

• Choose a subject that you have no clue of
• Start a blog on that subject
• End up being smart on that subject

The magic of blogging is that it instills a discipline of reading and thinking. Read-Think-Blog. Regular reading about different aspects of a subject helps in building a conceptual model. Learning-by-doing and Learning-by-Blogging are specially useful when dealing with emerging technologies, where there are no textbooks.

Last but not the least is the people and social angle of blogging. Reader’s feedback clarifies your thinking, adds bits you may not know, points out flaws in writing and often encourages to write more. Blog is also a great way to connect with like-minded people who are passionate about the same subject. Read-Think-Blog-Feedback-Connect. Blogging is a form of thinking-out-loud.

Starting today in the new year (Samvat), I have decided to get regular with blogging again. And yes, the reason is the same – learn about a new subject or two.

Going ahead the scope of this blog would not be restricted to mobility alone. Because mobility is no longer just about mobiles. It is about how Indians adopt technology (connected smartphones, tablets, smart TVs etc) and how convergence changes the personal, social and political landscapes of our great grand land.

Throw off the bowlines. Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. (Mark Twain)

• India is the 3rd fastest growing app market in world
• 12% MoM growth in app downloads in 2011
• 6 million Android & iOS devices downloaded 300 million apps in 2011
• 25 billion mobile app downloads in 2011
• Estimating 75 billion downloads in 2012
• Indian user spends 52 minutes per day using mobile apps
• Retention a challenge for apps: 38%, 29% users in 2nd & 3rd month. Games biggest losers after 1st month
• Only 5-10% of users continue to use an app after 6 months of download
• 80% usage / time spent is on Games & Social Networking apps
• Top 5 downloads categories: Games, Entertainment, Utilities, Social Networking, Lifestyle
• US users spend more time on mobile apps then on PC-Mobile web, 94 minutes versus 72 minutes per day

It’s services are used by 60,000 companies including top players like Rovio (Angry Birds), Zynga, The New York Times, Skype, MTV, Google, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Groupon, Shazam and more. The company tracks data across more than 90% of all iOS and Android devices in the market.

As a result, Flurry owns more data on how consumers use mobile apps than any other company. The company is a thought leader in the industry on mobile app trends.

This session will cover the Mobile App phenomenon with a special focus on the Indian market.

• The Mobile App market globally
• Emerging patterns in Mobile App Usage
• App Usage in India
• User acquisition and monetization strategies

Agenda:

• 10.15 am: Registrations
• 10.30 am: Presentation by Aakrit Vaish
• 11.30 am: Group Discussion
• 12.30 pm: Networking Lunch

About the Speaker:

Aakrit Vaish is the Director, Business Operations at Flurry Inc. Flurry has recently established an office in India and Aakrit runs its operations from Mumbai.

When:

Saturday, Februrary 18th, 2012

Where:

Club Peninsula, Peninsula Corporate Park, Lower Parel West, Mumbai.

RSVP:

http://momomum201202.eventbrite.com/

• 40% of search queries for Google India comes from mobile phones as against US (14), UK (6) and Russia (11)
• 67% of ecommerce in India happens in mobile and consumer appliances
• 50 million mobile Internet users in India
• $500 million worth mobile phones will be brought in India this year
• Smartphones growth in India is currently at 56% CAGR
• In 2011, 21 million smartphones are being sold in India

Source: Alootechie

The announcement that was made in this regard last week:

Digital real-time communications company Netcore Solutions today said that it has acquired Ravience, a Mumbai-based mobile marketing services provider, for an undisclosed sum. Ravience is focused on helping brands engage with their customers using its multi-modal response management suite ‘Responage’.

Since its incorporation in 2008, Ravience has achieved several customer wins at leading brands and digital agencies, helping Brand Managers in analysing and optimizing campaign responses generated through various mediums like Mobile Web, PC Web, SMS, Email and Voice.

The platform integrates various stages of digital campaigns – starting from media, visitor management, response management and finally lead management, thus filtering higher quality leads and identifying their sources.

Responage also allows rapid creation of mobile websites which are compatible across handsets, visitor analytics and validation of responses. Veerchand Bothra, founder of Ravience, said, “Usage of mobile-web is exploding with increasing penetration of smartphones, launch of 3G and aggressive pricing of data plans by mobile operators. Ravience’s platform helps enterprise customers convert clicks and responses into consumers on the mobile platform.”

This is Netcore’s second acquisition in 18 months after it acquired a majority interest in internet portal company, Greynium, which operates OneIndia, India’s largest collection of local language portals. Netcore’s Chief Executive Officer, Girish Nair, said. “Ravience complements Netcore’s offerings across SMS, Email and Web channels, and its closed loop digital campaign management platform. Upon integration, the Netcore-Ravience platform will be a unique end-to-end offering for enterprises to create, manage and enhance digital campaigns.”

Netcore Solutions is one of India’s largest digital real-time communications companies, with its email and SMS solutions being used by over 2,000 enterprises.

TIP #1

If a user (customer) is registered under DND, and wants to receive messages from your company, he/she can be instructed to opt-in for the Partially Blocked Category i.e. stoppage of all commercial Calls/SMS except SMS from one of the opted preferences mentioned below.

For ‘partially blocked category’, user can send sms START with one or multiple options from the list of seven categories.

There are at present following preferences to choose from:

1. Banking/Insurance/Financial Products/Credit Cards
2. Real Estate
3. Education
4. Health
5. Consumer goods and automobiles
6. Communication/Broadcasting/Entertainment/IT
7. Tourism & Leisure

For example: To receive messages relating to only Health products, then send sms START 4 to 1909. Similarly, for receiving messages relating to Education, send sms START 3 to 1909.

On successful registration, user will receive an SMS confirming exercised options and a Unique Registration Number within 24 hrs. The registration will be effective within 7 days of placing the request with the service provider.

TIP #2

Now that a Sender-ID cannot be used for branding, here is one idea to help the user identify the company/brand which has sent the message.
The first word of the message can be of the company’s/brand’s name. Most of phones show a preview panel in the inbox screen, in which first few characters of the message are visible to the user without opening the message.

Image example showing how the user (receiver) sees it:

TIP #3

To check whether a number is DND registered or not go to this site.
http://nccptrai.gov.in/nccpregistry/search.misc

Note:

Regarding the 100 SMS / day limit: It is only applicable for P2P i.e limit of sending 100 SMS from one phone to another. It is not applicable for A2P i.e Application to Person.

More than 2.1 billion mobile devices will have HTML5 browsers by 2016, up from 109 million in 2010. Much of this growth will be thanks to Apple’s and Android’s massive support for the HTML5.

HTML5 provides mobile device users richer web applications and improved usability. The new features of HTML5 standardize the use cases and technologies that are common in smartphone-optimized mobile web applications. HTML5 adds many new syntactical features, which are designed to make it easy to include and handle multimedia and graphical content on the web without having to resort to proprietary plugins and APIs.

In this Mobile Monday Mumbai event, we will explore the potential opportunities with HTML5 and learn about developing HTML 5 mobile web apps.

Agenda:

• 10.15 am: Registrations
• 10.45 am: Presentation by Asif Ali
• 12.00 pm: Group Discussion
• 12.30 pm: Networking Lunch

Where:

Komli Media
Crystal Plaza, 158, CST Road,
Kalina, Santacruz East,
Mumbai – 400098.

When:
10.30 am – 1 pm
Saturday, 24th September 2011

RSVP:
http://momomum201109.eventbrite.com/

About the Speaker:

Asif Ali, Komli Mobile

Asif Ali heads Mobile Products at Komli after Komli’s acquisition of ZestADZ. Previously, he has been CEO of ZestADZ since early 2010. In addition, Asif Ali was one of the founders of ZestADZ, along with Nat Natraj and Terry Uppal, in 2007. In his initial role at ZestADZ, Asif served as the co-Founder and CTO of the company, eventually transitioning into the role of CEO leading sales and strategy in 2010.

Asif is a technology entrepreneur with more than 13 years of experience in mobile and enterprise solutions. Previously, Asif co-founded a Malaysia based enterprise and wireless services company (ThreeSixty Technologies). He lead the team that built and launched Malaysia’s first m-commerce platform powering SMS Top-up solutions for leading banks and telcos such as Public Bank, Maxis & Celcom.

About the Sponsor:

Komli Media is Asia Pacific’s leading digital media technology platform. Komli Media provides marketers with innovative solutions across brand marketing, performance marketing, mobile, search, social media, and video. ViziSense, India’s leading online audience and ad measurement platform is powered by Komli Media technology.

ZestADZ is a leading global mobile advertising marketplace, delivering 5 billion mobile ad impressions each month with active operations in over 20 key markets. ZestADZ delivers value through mobile analytics, highly targeted advertising and local advertising in key markets.

MoMo Mumbai invites you for launch of mig33 Developer Program in India.

This means great things for game developers! So join us as we unlock virtual power with you, as we show you how to connect and monetize your social games and apps with mig33, one of the world’s largest mobile-first communities and a mobile audience of more than 50 million committed users on its platform.

Agenda:

• 6.30 pm: Registrations
• 7.00 pm: Presentation by Chris Chandler
• 7.45 pm: Group Discussion
• 8.15 pm: Networking Dinner

Where:
Plateau Hall
Club Peninsula,
Peninsula Corporate Park
Lower Parel West, Mumbai.

When:
6.30 pm – 9 pm
Tuesday, 23rd August 2011

RSVP:
http://momomum201108.eventbrite.com/

About the Speaker:

Chris Chandler, VP – Business Development, spearheads mig33’s expansion across mobile-first markets worldwide, including India, South Africa and Indonesia. He is responsible for growing mig33′s customer base and further aligns mig33 with industry partners. He joined mig33 from Microsoft Corporation’s Consumer & Online Division. Chris also heads the MoMo Singapore Chapter and is deeply involved with the mobile community across the globe.

About the Sponsor:

mig33 is the world’s largest mobile-first social entertainment service, connecting over 50 million registered members around the world with chat and entertainment every day, and hosting a fast-growing virtual economy. Launched in late 2005, mig33 is backed by Silicon Valley venture firms Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and DCM, GREE, Inc. and many others.

Ramdev Baba’s anti-corruption drive was the first public campaign which used a landline number (02233081122) to garner support for their cause. As per one of their SMS updates, they received tens of lakh hits on that number.

Today’s DNA has a front-page story on use of Missed Call Enquiry by Anna Hazare’s India Against Corruption (IAC) campaign. Anna’s campaign number (02261550789) received over 1 crore hits out of which 76.83 lakh were unique numbers. The missed call enquiry for this campaign was powered by my professional alma-mater Netcore Solutions.

On April 5, when Hazare started his fast-unto-death at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, organisers requested the public to give a missed call on 022-61550789 to register their support. “By June 28, we got over one crore missed calls of which 76.83 lakh were unique missed calls, all different numbers and no repetition,” said Kunal Dixit of Netcore Solutions Private Limited, who is handling this scheme for the IAC…

According to data, the highest number of missed calls came from the 2G scam-embroiled Tamil Nadu (including Puducherry) region with 16.41 lakh calls followed by Maharashtra-Goa region (including Mumbai) with 15.15 lakh.

A 5 year old post on mobilepundit.com says that around 25% of all calls on telco networks were missed calls. These missed calls are used as signals for P2P communication.

Many companies are beginning to offer Missed Call Enquiry as a P2A (Person-to-Application) tool. My company Ravience Digital also offers such a tool, not only as an out of the box enquiry tool but also as a programmable platform through APIs. To demonstrate this, today morning we integrated Twitter with Missed Calls. India Against Corruption’s Twitter channel @janlokpal can now be followed using Missed Calls.

Give a missed call to 022-39386812 and in return you will receive the latest post from @janlokpal. All this at no cost to the user, even while roaming.

His recent podcast discusses whether “Arts” subjects like Pyschology and History are practical career investments or not.

Utility of Psychology is not difficult to explain; especially to HR and Sales people.

Psychology is certainly a practical skill-based class. Like it or not you’re going to spend the rest of your life dealing with people, and being a person, so you might as well know what makes humans go.

One of my interest areas is History. How did we get to the present and what can we learn from the past in order to build our future.

History? That’s the study of macro-level psychology. Why do humans, collectively, do the crazy things we do. The most tragic thing we do, btw, is to repeat mistakes of the past. So if you think you’re not at an advantage if you understand history, it’s actually a way to get a head start on life. But only if you plan to be partly responsible for what your generation does. If all you want to do is watch TV, play video games, eat and breed, I guess you can skip history.

Business History is particularly fascinating. For example, corporation as a business entity is accepted as a natural part of our life today. But it was not that way, as recently as 150 years ago. An incredible documentary called The Corporation traces the origin of the moden corporation.

150 years ago, the business corporation was a relatively insignificant institution. Today, it is all-pervasive. Like the Church, the Monarchy and the Communist Party in other times and places, the corporation is today’s dominant institution. This documentary examines the nature, evolution, impacts, and possible futures of the modern business corporation. Initially given a narrow legal mandate, what has allowed today’s corporation to achieve such extraordinary power and influence over our lives?

Dave reminds social media junkies that there’s more to read than Facebook and Twitter status updates. But with over thousand “friends and followers” sending hazaar updates, tweets, sms – where’s the time to read meaningful long literary texts.

And it helps to have a common base of literature that we’ve all read, so we can tell each other stories and have some idea of what we’re all talking about. Maybe these days all you need to know you can get from watching YouTube videos and reading your friends Facebook updates. But if that’s what you’re into, you’re not going to be very interesting to converse with. So the people who have something to say probably won’t seek you out.

Would add Sociology to the list of must-learn subjects in college. Read The Tipping Point to appreciate why.

It would help in creating an all-round understanding of the world, if elementary knowledge of subjects like Sociology, Economics and Pyschology is provided to college students of all streams.