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Updates after a long hiatus

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It’s been a long time but I had been extremely tied up with the academic commitments. I promise to return to full time blogging once I am free from them.

Over the past few months, I have become cautious about the privacy on the net. One of the first moves was to switch over the name to Administrator.  I had already moved away from Google; but more importantly, the last vestige was Google Reader; this too was given the boot in favor of Newsblur an independent developer based in New York and an excellent news reader.

Apart from this, I strongly recommend Ghostery and Noscript add-ons for your Firefox.

I have been following the 2G and the 3G scam but unfortunately, due to political compulsions, nothing has come out of the Supreme Court order. The key players are all out of jail.  So all that drama that ensued was all for the show.  Apart from this, there is no concrete action on ground regarding anything new in the pipeline, barring the 4G that is in the air. Airtel is rumored to launch it soon in key areas and beyond the wireline, Airtel is hoping that it would be a key determinant for it’s bottom line. Of course, the restrictions for “limited broadband” remain on course. You are unlikely to see “all-you-can-eat broadband” anytime now.

Interestingly, there is a trend of co-branded handsets for bundled offers for  data. It’s not a sign of matured markets but rather a sense of desperation on part of the telecom companies to be able to sell anything. I don’t have any clue about the development of mobile apps but with overt reliance on Android to drive Google’s penetration in the heartland, mobile phones are slowly becoming ubiquitous. Well, there are more mobile phones than the toilets in this country!

Lets wait and watch for 4G.  Lets see how it works out.  I’d be back soon.

 

 

 

Site updates

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I am in the midst of transitioning facilities and been swamped by work per se. That is the reason why I have been very irregular on this blog. In addition to that, I have suffered a writer’s block as well.

There is no real update in the Telecom world; despite our shrill noises, there is no customer resolution. The companies seem to mind on their business in the customer acquistion while huge numbers are being trumped up for valuation. It’s an imperfect crappy model but that’s the way it is.

As usual, the best way is to keep yourself updated through RSS feeds; in absence of any other viable reader on line, Google Reader is recommended.

State of Mobile Web: Some numbers.

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Opera Mini‘s reports on the state of mobile web are likely to be a true reflection of the mobile access and hence a surrogate marker of what’s popular at the given point in time. I am reproducing the snapshot of the Internet traffic here:

http://imgur.com/PZwCF

If you look carefully, bulk of the developing and the underdeveloped countries utilize the mobile web to access social networking sites. US (and some other developed economies) are lower down the scale.

Interestingly, the data transferred per user is a pathetic 7 MB (averaged over the month perhaps?) which means that operators are still being generous with their limits. However,  this is a crude approximation. For once, we have a clear proof that mobile internet is definitely a part of their value added services kitty but is NOT the revenue driver for them. They are offering it because there is no alternative.

This also explains their aggressive stance to get the 3G spectrum; primarily to add more voice customers than to offer data services.

If you look at the snapshot of the popular phones, Nokia is still leading the pack but majority of them are NOT smartphones. These java based handsets are pathetic in terms of functionality and at best useful for “checking the status updates” on Facebook.

A surprise entry is that of “Micromax” handset; they have capitalized on aggressive marketing and low price entry point.

Unfortunately, this does not portend good for the broadband initiatives. A cursory glance at the top sites (Google leads the pack) is only indicative. Google has benefited from being the default search engine on the browser and hence the port of call for any search. I barely use my handset for GPRS (or EDGE) for web surfing because smartphones (and their form factor) is basically useless to transact anything useful. For me, the only reason to invest is for email.

Nevertheless, this report can again be questioned in terms of “growth of users”. It is not clear about how the methodology has been arrived at and what has constituted the “growth in real terms”. However, one thing is clear. Most of the web sites focused on Indian content don’t have mobile strategies to counter the growth in the user base. Pathetic.

Indeed, with majority of the young adults unable to read/write or even engage in meaningful conversations on Indian polity, this “dumbification” was expected.

Facebook, although shows some presence (in terms of mobile access), mobile broadband is still “not hot” in US of A. There could be myriad factors but then Opera’s state of web access is best a “snapshot” of the handsets and it’s deal with the OEM‘s to bundle the product.

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