We want to redefine V in the VAS: mCarbon

NEW DELHI, INDIA: mCarbon, a mobile VAS company with interests in the music, community and care verticals, recently launched its offering of interactive short messaging service – SpeedSMS.

Part of the US engineering services conglomerate, MobileComm, has created unique user-centric, multimodal, technology agonistic content delivery and customer experience eco-system for telecom and media companies.

In an exclusive interaction, Rajesh Razdan, cofounder and Director at mCarbon shared his company’s plans to go global after redefining the ‘value’ in Value Added Services (VAS) segment in the Indian market, with R. Jai Krishna of CyberMedia News. Excerpts:

CMN: What is the addressable VAS market size for mCarbon?

Rajesh Razdan: mCarbon is targeting its products and services initially for India and South Asia, and then looking at immediate expansion at Americas, followed by Europe. The R&D is being headquartered out of India and we are looking at the immense VAS potential.

We would like to deliver our products and services in messaging, music delivery and naturally evolved communities. We are looking at garnering approximately 15 percent share of the consumer VAS market in the next two to three years.

CMN: What are the products / applications to be launched in India, and what are its features?

RR: Our offerings are primarily in music, community and care verticals. We have developed a cutting edge VAS services enabler, called GreenRoom, which has modules like search, personalisation and recommendation as key attributes. The offerings will be available through all types of access modes like voice, text, WAP/GPRS and handset/handhelds.

We have also specifically chosen customer care portfolio in our offerings in order to bring the end customer closer to the type of service that he/she wants and not what someone pushes. One of the major technologies getting popular world over is the ODP (on-device portals) and mCarbon today has one of the best ODP development environment in the world for rendering handset client application services over variety of mobile phones and devices.

One of the key Greenroom offering called SpeedSMS, which is a interactive session based SMS, is being launched for the first time here with all of the features mentioned above. We feel this would be the defacto way of communicating with customers as far as service offerings on SMS is concerned.

CMN: What is the rationale behind launching such products, is the Indian market ready for it?

RR: The chosen themes of our offerings are already very popular with Indian masses. Music is already a big rage and so are the social networking concepts. Our offerings are targeted at empowering the end users to discover , share (user generated content) and consume such popular services at their convenience and control, rather than someone pushing it for their own interests.

The mobile handset has become the most ubiquitous gadget today and the idea is to empower the user with service choice and ease of use.

CMN: Can you brief us about UMTS and when do you plan to launch in the Indian market?

RR: Our promoters and strategic investors, MobileComm Professionals, is one of the largest company focussed on wireless engineering services in the US and has done lot of engineering and deployment work in UMTS there. We also plan to launch similar engineering services here for Indian operators and OEMs.

CMN: What will be the go-to-market strategy, are you in talks with mobile service providers, retail outlets etc.?

RR: Operators today are the biggest facilitators for launching VAS as the end customers are hooked through them. We are engaging with all the major wireless operators in India towards this. We shall also be talking to large media companies, which have become huge content and service repositories and have a direct bearing on the customers.

Retail, is a big customer footfall channel and we already having definitive plans in our strategy to tap it at subsequent stages.