What’s going to be the magic lamp in our lives and what will it take to unleash the Genie? Speaking at a keynote titled ‘The magic lamp in our lives’ on day one at Interop, Rajesh Jain, MD, Netcore Solutions said the next big opportunity for India is value added services (VAS). It may be recalled that Jain sold his Indiaworld portal to Sify for a whopping USD 115 million in 1999, setting off the dot com wave in India.

“The growth of the Internet in India has been slow in the last 15 years. There are just 50 million Internet users and 30 million PCs. The mobile subscriber base has not grown quickly yet mobile services have not grown as fast. Mobile VAS is a USD 600 million (Rs 3,000 crore) opportunity,” said Jain.

The ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) is Rs 200. Voice accounts for 90 percent of that. Five percent is from person-to-person services such as SMS and the remaining five percent is from VAS. That presents a huge opportunity for VAS providers.

Jain said operators are just pushing bottom of the pyramid services and have not taken advantage of the huge potential for data services. But the emergence of 3G is set to change all this. He also cited challenges like too many operators and regulatory issues.

“The change will happen through Digital Service Operators (DSOs) who create teleco independent ecosystems. The DSOs will piggyback on the operators and will set up their own payment collection facilities,” said Jain.

Jain expects this change to take place in about 2 – 3 years. He said people will find the services really useful and will be willing to pay for them.

If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then one just has to take a look at the Apple iPhone and the services created around it. The iTunes App Store has enjoyed huge successes with a catalog of thousands of apps and millions of downloads. Another example is Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, its Whispernet cellular network and the Kindle store with thousands of e-books. Both services ride on existing telco networks.

“We can create innovative solutions for the realities of India, like SMS-based services. Can we persuade the Kirana stores to have (SMS) services for their customers? They can inform their customers about discounts and new offers, for instance,” said Jain.

Jain, whose organization already offers innovative SMS services under the ‘My Today’ brand, cited five key actionable areas:

• Invertising (Permission Marketing)
• Profile database marketing
• Transactional alerts
• Promotional messages to customers
• Email2SMS services