Mobile Innovation in Business & Commerce/Banking
This session was chaired by Mr. Peter Bruck, Chairman – World Summit Awards & co-chaired by Mr. Sachin Kapoor, National Business Development manager, Yahoo India.
In the opening remarks, Mr. Bruck emphasized on the fact that much of the interest in mobile industry and apps has aroused because of their contribution to business people. There are 3 types of services that people use through mobile technology: services inside the company, services that are used to transact between companies and services used to serve the public customer base. There is no doubt that mobile innovation will develop new businesses and new revenuemodels but they would also sustain the existing structure customer development and employee development.
Mr. Kapoor then brought out the Indian story as a story of bringing opportunity to each and every one in same size and quantity. Mobiles have acted as a great leveler in Indian scenario and that today they have gathered to discuss how this technology can be used to provide basic banking commerce facilities to the unbanked. Innovations that were to be discussed would bring reasons and means to these people to start using banking services and stay in the mainstream.
First speaker on the dice for this session was Mr. Ankit Chhajer, Chennai Labs Pvt. Ltd., Tamil Nadu. He started off by taking some practical examples to demonstrate that how tedious and mind boggling task is to choose the right mobile plan for oneself. Inappropriate mobile not only crash your pocket but they actually make you burn inside. And this led to the birth of their product known as PlanHound. This is an application that lets you choose the best plan for yourself out of over a million combinations that are possible.
Once you download the app, you need to make a few settings as to which area youare in and your services provider. Then the app presents before you a whole calculation of the different services you used such as STD, local, text messages, roaming calls etc. It then uses this data to find the right plan for you. You can find plans for almost all networks and also find the right top ups for yourself. You can even use this app to track your usage over time.
Our next speaker came from across the border, from Dhaka. He was Mr. Rashad Kamal from Databiz Software Ltd. Dhaka. He had come to present his product Dhaka iAtm Explorer. The product came into existence because of the fact that the banks in Bangladesh don’t provide geographical locations of their ATMs. They provide a list of ATM addresses that might not be that easy to locate. The app helps you to not only locate the banks/braches near you but also helps you to locate ATMs near you, search ATM/branch by categorized search, shows the route to desired position and also helps in bank wise/ area wise search.
The search option of the app helps you to find the exact location of the bank/ ATM near you. It gives you real time navigation for the route which is highly precise. He further highlighted various features of app using screenshots. He also told that his team has pointed as many as 1800 locations for banks and ATMs in Dhaka. He added that this app can be further extended to uses more and more locations like restaurants, mosques etc.
The next speaker on the dice was Mr. Sumanta Paul, SREI SAHAJ e-Village Ltd. It is a very unique organization that runs over 28000+ internet kiosks in remote areas across 6 states. It aims to reduce the digital divide that exists between the rural and urban India. Sahaj is a for-profit organization and is essentially a combination of human, digital and physical network driving internet access to villager. These kiosks are being run by village level entrepreneurs and the company has 50% profit sharing stakes with them.
The company has received huge response from these common service centres in all the states. It is the only player in the field with a dedicated web portal and data centre. These centres act in a dual mode that is they provide to access to the outer world for villages while at the same time allow the clients for Sahaj to do the market research and get feedback. Sahaj is currently looking at developing a mobile technology that can leverage the access of cell phones to people. It would be used for data collection for doing market research and can surely be scaled up to a huge level.
Next speaker was the humble gentleman from the Kanpur electric supply board who in the morning gave a presentation on his project Urjamitra. Mr. G D Dwivedi, M-Drishti, Kanpur Electricity Supply Corporationwas now here for his project mDrishti or the management eye. Mr. Dwivedi mentioned some statistics, the most interesting of them being the fact that Kanpur electricity board is suffering a cash loss ofINR 10 crores every month. He explained the reasons for this problem as theft of electricity, faulty lines and meters etc. Thus mDrishti was thought of as a solution.Possible solutions for this problem are disconnection of payment defaulters, changing faulty meters and theft control. But usually there are a lot of hiccups in the process, as we all know.
Now, to stop this process, GPS enabled handsets have been given to employees. Whenever the officers go for disconnection, meter change or theft control, they have to input the real time information of this activity into the apps installed on their phones. The real time data is then transferred to the higher authorities who find it easier to monitor the data.
Next presenter was Mr. Amit Chheda, Mobango limited. Mobango is an app market and has free applications for all sorts of platforms. Mr. Chheda started by giving a brief background of mobile ad industry. He mentioned that with increased handsets and increased app downloads, the mobile ad industry is also expected to go leaps and bounds. Then he introduced the challenges faced by the users in finding the right app for them. He explained as to when a consumer changes devices and in turn platforms, he generally finds it difficult to get the right app for him. And the chances are there he might end paying for an app that he might end up not using. Similar are the challenges for app developers who not only need to manage a variety of platforms but also struggle to find a customer base for their app.
Mobango is a global, social, cross-platform app store that provides best apps to users for free and helps developers monetize their apps. Mobango has currently gathered 8 million plus registered users. Mobango user community has received a lot of active participation and over 1 million users have uploaded their content. Mobango also allows you to port your app to new devices through cloud technology. Mobango is a low CPA (consumer per acquisition) model that charges developers for on the PPD (pay per download) basis. Finally he concluded with some vital numbers about Mobango, most important of it being that Mobango gets roughly 1 million downloads everyday thatis very encouraging for the company.
Next speaker on the dice was Mr. Chandan Gupta, founder of Phone Warrior. It’s a global community to fight mobile spam. Heshared some interesting stats; according to recent Bloomberg reports, 4.5 billion SMS spam are being sent annually in us. Also, an average Indian loses 5+ minutes due to spams. Given the magnitude of the problem and inability of authorities in curbing it, some solution was to be thought and as result we have Phone Warrior.
Phone warrior is a mobile application, which automatically filters spam calls/ SMS right at the time when they are delivered to your phone. It is pre trained for most of the regions around the globe about the identification of spam messages. And as you mark spam messages on your phones, it also learns your preferences. The app is available on Android, Blackberry and Nokia. In past six months or so, 18000+ users have already downloaded the app. This response come has been received without any marketing/PR efforts.
Next speaker on the dice was Mr. Amitabh, Mobileware Technologies, Maharashtra. Mobileware is a leading developer of baking, finance and insurance apps for mobile phones. He was here to discuss one of his recently developed products for mobile insurance. Mr. Amitabh mentioned some vital stats to demonstrate as to how India is going digital and what has urged the insurance companies to launch mobile apps. This is also important as by using mobile app, the additional costs of agents and distribution channels gets reduced and policies can be offered at a discounting rate.
He then demonstrated the salient features of his app. The APP can be used to purchase or renew policies. The app basically deals with auto, travel and health insurance. It also provides you alerts regarding various transactions that are being done. It helps in claim process by helping you register a claim, tracking your claim and finding the authorized garage/ hospital in case of emergency. With its customer feedback information, the app gives an almost complete solution for insurance agencies. Based on almost all major platforms, the app is committed to provide a 360 degree solution for insurance companies, agents and users.
The final speaker was Mr. Pritesh Vohra ,1000lookz, VDime Innovative works, Tamil Nadu. The young fellow instantly put a question in front of audience that even the most intelligent peopleon earth dare not answer: what do actually women want. Apart from the laughter that arouse, a curiosity developed in everyone’s mind regarding the product for sure. And with this the speaker introduced his product known as 1000lookz, developed and incubated at IIT Madras. It is a beauty solution for salons, cosmetic shops, jeweler showrooms etc.
This app is installed on tablets or mobile platforms. The presenter showed a live demo for hid product. As and when a lady enters a salon or cosmetic showroom, they can use the application to click a photo of themselves. Then the application finds all the facial coordinates including the skin tone. After this the lady can actually try our all the products present in the marketplace directly on her face (the picture of course) without actually buying it. This app has certainly empowered women to go ahead and try all the stuff that is there in the world without having to pay for it.
The co-chair gave the closing remarks by saying that he was amazed by the diversity of presentations and ideas that were presented here. Also he wanted presenters to think how they can scale up their ideas and earn money from it.