Byte-Mobile, CanvasM look to rock India

CHENNAI, INDIA: Over the last half a decade, the usage of mobile devices has been soaring with mobile value added services (VAS) becoming the order of the day.

Companies such as Google, Yahoo!, ESPN Star Sports and many more are offering mobile content that suits the demands of the consumer who wants quality content in the form of ringtones, Java Games, wallpapers, video podcasts etc.

Users are on the lookout for faster downloads, enhanced experience without any concession on quality of downloads.

Byte-Mobile and CanvasM, players in VAS technology domain, focus their offerings on VAS applications for enterprises, users and media across the orb.

Hatim Tyabji, executive chairman, Byte-Mobile and Jagdish Mitra, CEO, CanvasM Technologies spoke to Prasad Ramasubramanian of CyberMedia News on their offerings for the Indian market. Excerpts:

What brings you to India?

Tyabji: We are launching our operations in India and we have a tremendous partner to start work with. We are meeting with different carriers in India and talk about our value propositions and capitalize on the potential that this country offers.

What are the offerings that you are coming out with?

Tyabji: At a broad level, we are coming out with what is the fourth wave of computing and that is the ability of the mobile company to have an offer and to enrich the Internet experience. At the macro level that is the offering and there are many layers below that.

Who are the operators with whom you are talking?

Mitra: I can’t disclose the names but I can tell you that they are tier I operators and they are pretty advanced level of talks. I think with a couple of them, we have gone ahead with the validity and the functionality of the product.

Virgin has entered the Indian markets now, would we see consolidation in the telecom sector, as people who cannot differentiate their services would be gobbled by the biggies?

Mitra: More international players coming into India, I am a big believer in the market defining it. The fact that Virgin is tying up with Tata is because they see a unique segmentation of youth market, which typically Virgin targets. There is a value in segmenting that market as till now you can’t categorize a brand as an urban or an elderly brand.

So, Virgin is trying to position it in that manner. I think it’s a very good thing and it can only spawn competition, which can only be good for the consumer. The role that we are trying to play in this game is to enable the experience to be good for the operators to be able to drive businesses forward. While a Virgin comes in and offers its plethora of services to the youth which could be related to infotainment and entertainment, it’s for a generation which wants it now. How do you enable a platform for a technology to be in a place where you want it to be--that’s where the solution and technology which we bring to and that is where we have a role to play.

Elucidate on the areas of focus.

Mitra: There are a couple of areas which we are focusing on. We have a platform for the system integrator for service deliveries where we do tie-ups with multiple service platform vendors on which we build solutions. If you look at the simplest example, it is an operating system, which is the core of any service, you offer and the service delivery platform is very similar to that. It allows operator to launch a variety of services on that delivery platform. We start from the service delivery platform and on top of it, there are capabilities to develop content platform, application based platform, mobile commerce platform and applications on top of it and then applications that are probably delivering the utility aspect of it.

So, we offer an end-to-end platform for the operator. We do a lot of work on devices and we have a separate team, which does work on embedded application. That is a means to an end. We do a lot of work on content on device portals and we are more of enabling the whole ecosystem to be able to deliver to a mobile.

Who are your competitors in this market?

Tyabji: To our knowledge, we don’t have any.