Get news on M-Paper

Bhaskar Hazarika

NEW DELHI: After the e-paper on your desktop, mobile operators will offer M-Paper or the multimedia paper for subscribers, which will not be like the traditional SMS news alerts but contain the entire content of the news story.

Cellnext Solutions Limited, a mobile value-added service provider, has introduced the M-paper application to be launched next month. Cellnext is a subsidiary of the Escorts Group.

The company has carried out a soft launch of the application with Idea Cellular across the country.

The M-paper service will be commercially launched with other telecos in a month’s time. Ajai Vaishnavi, chief operating officer, Cellnext, said that this application is unlike the news alerts, which offer only the headline of the story. It will be a full-fledged newspaper containing the entire content available in the hard copy.

“We have already contacted with some of the major media houses and content producers for offering this service through the mobile service providers. They have shown great interest in offering this service. However, the layout and the design of the M-paper would not be like the one available on the e-paper, but will contain photographs and the full story,” Vaishnavi said.

The company is in talks with all the major GSM mobile operators to launch this service. The subscriber will just have to send an SMS upon which he will receive a message for the M-paper.

“We have planned to offer this service on a monthly subscription basis. We service provider will charge a monthly subscription of Rs 50 for a single publisher. It will be even cheaper than the newspaper and will contain all the contents available in the hard copy format,” he added.

On offering this service with CDMA operators, Vaishnavi said that in the initial phase they would offer this service through the GSM operators.

The company is also planning to tie-up Hindi dailies for offering this service in Hindi as well. “We are also planning on the regional content to offer this service in different regions of the country. The M-paper apart from the news content will also have matrimonial, feature, entertainment, latest music albums and a number of other content,” Vaishnavi said.

The company is also working on delivering regional content on Marathi, Bengali and other languages for some of the regions across the country.

© CyberMedia News