MoMo talk for April

This month's Mobile Monday talk was held on 28th April at Nokia premises and was sponsored by Nokia. Ashish Thomas from Singtel group talked on "Steady Innovation for Future Mobile Services". And then Ganapathy Subramaniam from MyDuniya showed some demo of their service platform and the various services available. To conclude, a Forum Nokia representative explained the various developer activities that Forum Nokia was participating in.

To start off, Ashish explained the various services that Singtel had started off or was trialing in the various Asian markets where they operate like Singapore and Australia. Three of the services he mentioned were Location Based service, Next Bus arrival service using GPS and webmail service. I am not sure if I got it right, but the talk fell short of the expectations since Ashish was talking more from an operator's view than services in general. Or probably I had a different picture going into the talk.

Ganapathy showed various services myduniya offers. They are currently in public beta which they launched just a couple of days back. MyDuniya seems to be a platform that tries to bring a lot of the services (which could be taken for granted if one had internet connectivity on their phone) to the consumers via a SMS based service. Once you register with the service by sending an SMS, you can avail many services like sending group SMS, setting and getting reminder notes, sharing of files, sending of mail just by sending SMS etc. And a lot more utility services are supposed to be in pipeline as per Ganapathy, but all driven by SMS. The suite of services does have some traction but I think they should move away from services that are ubiquitous like sending of SMS to group and move into areas that are still not unexplored. Most of the rural and semi-urban folks are unlikely to opt for data based plans or might not have a browser/internet enabled handsets, hence services that are targeted towards them would make the service more meaningful. My 2 cents :)