Mobile Innovation in Entertainment
One of the most interesting parallel discussions of the day was that on m-Entertainment. The session witnessed some very innovative & inspiring works in the mobile entertainment industry. This session was chaired by Mr. Anuraj Gambhir and co-chaired and presided over by Ms. Anisha Singh. The pre-session address by Mr. Gambhir revolved around the development of mobile from an instrument of communication to a medium of entertainment, rather edutainment and the manner in which it has impacted our lives.
The first speaker on the dice was Mr. Rajiv Kumar from Rocket Talk India Pvt. Ltd. He introduced Rocket Talk as a social app for Java based phones.
He added that Rocket Talk organizes various contests, games and entertainment events for its consumers though cloud based technology. The mass appeal of the Application can be ascertained from the fact that a competition called Antakshri on the app has already received as many as 78000 hits in just 7 days of its launch. Mr. Kumar shared that the user-generated rich content is the USP of his product.
He added that in Rocket Talk one could take pictures and upload them with a description in his own voice, through GPRS. One can share media with your friends, groups or with the Rocket Talk community. This user engagement has influenced a number of brands and these brands are now coming forward to support it. In short Rocket Talk can be termed as an ecosphere of user generated entertainment in communities.
Second presenter to take dice was Mr. Abdul Saboor Mobariz, Paywast from Afghanistan. Paywast is a system of text based messaging and is connected with all the mobile operators in Afghanistan. Paywast aims to cater to those with no access to traditional Internet services. He shared that from group messages to creation of profile, Paywast has also launched a web service that has most of the features of the SMS service.
He added that in the very first year, Paywast has seen 1 million unique users in which 25% traffic came from SMS. He further added that they have now connected T.V. shows for their promotional messaging schemes and other advertisers too. The future looks bright for Paywast.
The next speaker on the dice was Ms. Sumi Dhody from Spice Technologies. A rather crafty speaker, Ms. Sumi started off by telling how badly we love music. Being Indians we have a song for each and every occasion. And that’s how the people at Spice Technologies thought of developing an application that can provide any normal user with songs related to the particular occasion instantly. For example take the case of Rajesh Khanna’s demise, where immediately songs of the legend went live. And when we talk about word “immediately”, it means the service goes online within an hour across all networks, 23 cities and even internationally. Thus, it is this dynamic and fresh nature of Spice music that makes it stand out in the category of such service providers.
She shared that they at Spice believe that innovation is a process and not merely an end point. She also shared as to what company exactly thinks about bringing innovation in their products and how they brainstorm to achieve the end result. She described her product as one that has a simple user interface that an illiterate would understand and a sophisticated person would enjoy using and still has a monetization model attached to it. Clubbing features like SMS based search, Facebook post, and blogging links and downloading options, Spice has developed a product that has certainly brought the music community very close.
Coke Studio, the very unique music show that took its fans amassed all over Pakistan and world launched its Indian edition last year. In order to popularize the show, organizers were looking for a unique program. But Coca Cola being only the sponsors and not the content creator, Coca Cola had its own challenges in spreading the idea of Coke Studio. Enters Telibrahma, and the story after that goes this way: over 10 million downloads in 45 days (including songs, wallpapers etc. from Coke Studio) and 45% of consumer came back.
Telibrahma was able to do so with the help of its Bluefi technology, which is essentially a combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technology. The main objective of Coca Cola was to get higher ROI for their investments along with reaching more and more consumers and getting the essential brand recall. Providing people with link to download tracks was one possible solution, but it was highly restricted to those who had a GPRS connection. Telibrahma then provided them with a solution so unique that it had a mass effect in even tier II and tier III cities. For this 1000 of Telibrahma centers, across 25 cities, were made permanently Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled. Every time a person would walk in the center, he could get hooked upon this network and download the content he wanted. Also strategic partners for Coke, such as McDonalds and Dominoes were converted into Bluefi zones.
The final presenter for the session, Mr. Narayan Babu from Dexetra, said that it was very logical as to why voice based interface for mobile phones was getting popular. People started with text based interface, moved on to graphics based and touch based interface. And thus it was no wonder why voice based interface was getting popular with smart phones these days. He shared that Dexetra started with Iris in November 2011 and since then it has over 2.5 million unique users in the android market and has answered almost 160 million queries till date.
Starting as a competitor to Siri, Iris has now evolved a lot and has many features that even Siri does not have. Some of them include posting direct messages to Facebook, getting instant movie reviews, recipes, anything and everything. Due to its association with Chacha.com, Iris can answer queries from a variety of fields ranging from philosophy to geography. He added that with its compatibility of Indian accent, Iris stands out in the crowd of voice search apps. Iris also has an API that enables other developers to build apps based on Iris. No doubt that Dexetra has become the largest private voice search company worldwide.