www.channel99.in is a complete magazine on mobile, which gives information on almost everything. The travel section has information about railways, airlines and bus timings as well as special deals for people who travel frequently. We have seen an even hit rate on these sections, which indicates that there is a need for providing quality content to users without charging them a packet.

 

mCarbon has solid product offerings in network VAS like call manager, which enables operators to launch various services, call scheduler, anti-voice and SMS spam, call control, missed call notifications, dynamic pricing based on network usage, etc. It has equally good offerings in entertainment VAS verticals like a music delivery platform, which enables operators to launch all forms of music and rich media content through a single platform. We have exhibited our prowess by launching a complex service like VAS manager, which was launched by Airtel as START/STOP where it entailed dynamic menu presentation to every request by interfacing in real time with the various VAS services live on Airtel.

Have you tied up with operators for your apps or do you have a portal from where users can download them directly?

Our products are deployed with all leading operators like Airtel, Idea, Reliance and MTS to name a few. Besides that users can access www.channel99.in through WAP browsers on their mobiles.

Please brief us about Channel99.

Channel99 is the only product in its category that is available on all popular access channels like WAP, voice and On Device Portal (ODP). The idea is to give a differentiated value to the type of user that could be a savvy urban guy and also a common man who still needs the same set of services but lacks ease of use to consume such services. The ODP version is a rich multimedia client that lets you preview music/rich media, search for songs, set CRBT for the same and share it with its users.

Which app has been the most successful so far?

Our call manager platform is already live with Airtel and Idea and is getting implemented by some other telcos. Channel99 has also been received very well and will go commercial soon. The START/STOP platform was a huge success with Airtel within the first few months of its launch as users got a very easy and transparent way of getting to know what they were paying for.

 

Technically all our core products are 3G ready and are already supporting network handlers (either sigtran on signaling), differential charging on various 3G interfaces and also H324M on video or rich media. The day operators are commercially ready to beam 3G waves across a broader coverage area, we shall be among the first ones to launch applications across the areas of utility, entertainment and network. We feel, 3G will only do an incremental value add on the current levels of data and usage and the pricing patterns chosen will be one of the key drivers for its uptake.

 

Rich media and all bandwidth hungry applications will be popular. 3G will certainly popularise community apps where a target set of people will push User Generated Content (UGC) to a great extent. I see an uptake on mobisodic content as well where Bollywood and Hollywood content could be made available with a much easier user experience. Anything, which is short and compressed will be popular as however fast the data rate might be it is still tiring to watch a very long programme on the form factor we are talking about.