Came across an interesting report from Portio Research which says, mobile phone users sent more than 5 trillion text messages last year, creating a $150 billion market.

RCOM has turned out to be the first operator in the telecom world to unlock a new battle field for SMS space.

Today it made a drastic stir by offering SMS’s more affordable to all mobile customers in India. The plans are open to RCom’s CDMA and GSM subscribers including both for prepaid and postpaid subscribers. Reliance Mobile customers can avail of two revolutionary SMS tariff plans:

• ONE PAISE PER SMS.
• UNLIMITED SMS’s @ Re. 1 PER DAY.

SMS continues to grow every year with more and more innovative ways of utilizing its potential coming in the forefront. Indians are using SMS as a mode of communication to keep in touch with friends and family. With select subscriber groups, SMS is a preferred communication mode over voice calls. On account of significant tariff disparity in the recent months, it has lost its due share of attention.

Like  Simply Reliance offerings of Local, STD and Roaming calls at 50p/min and 1p/sec from any Reliance mobile to any phone on any network, yet to be matched by any competitive offering.  With this best in the industry initiative, RCOM offers significant value not only to the existing 9 Crore CDMA and GSM customers, but are also aimed at gaining new acquisitions from high SMS usage groups of the GSM community such as young professionals and the youth across India.

RCom subscribers irrespective of their current plan can subscribe to the one paisa per SMS plan through a voucher of Rs 11 per month and for the unlimited plan Re.1 will be deducted from their prepaid balance.

The company is also taking measures to ensure that telemarketers and bulk SMS service providers do not misuse these plans for commercial gains. For this it has put a cap of 15,000 SMSes per month under the unlimited plan.

Source: CellBharat

Ergonomics researchers are starting to wonder whether text messaging is putting the younger generation at risk for some overuse injuries — once reserved for older adults who have spent years in front of a computer. Science Daily reports.

At this year’s annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, Judith Gold, an assistant professor of Epidemiology at the College of Health Professions and Social Work presented preliminary research which suggested that among college students, the more they texted, the more pain they had in their neck and shoulders.

Text messaging is a fairly new technology, Gold says, so this is a new area of research among ergonomists. “But given the similarities in body position, findings from research on overuse injuries from computers could be applicable here,” she said.

Source: Science Daily

Samsung Electronics announced the launch of BADA, a new open mobile platform promising developers the tools to create applications optimized for millions of devices across the handset maker’s smartphone portfolio. According to Samsung, bada–which translates to “ocean” in Korean–draws on the company’s experience in building proprietary platforms, guaranteeing a developer-friendly environment emphasizing the creation of web-based applications. Samsung also touts bada’s user interface, which it says can be transferred into a sophisticated UI design for developers.

Samsung offered few additional specifics on bada, but said the new platform will tie directly to its Samsung Application Store, which opened in September. Samsung said it will release the bada software development kit in December in conjunction with an official launch event taking place in London.

Source: Fierce Wireless

Twitter will be available in India on SMS only on the Airtel network. There is exclusivity for the same for 4 weeks, in which only Airtel consumers will be able to use the service on SMS across the nation. This period of exclusivity is something that we want to take advantage of and make sure that Brand Airtel can own the property Twitter in consumer mind space.

For details on how to use Twitter on Airtel visit this page on Airtel site.

How to use Twitter ?

How does one register for Twitter?

New User
• SMS Signup to 53000 @ Re 1 per SMS
• Follow instructions to go ahead and complete the registration

Existing User – Wanting to link their device to the Twitter A/c
• SMS Start to 53000 @ Re 1 per SMS
• Follow instructions to complete linking your Airtel phone to your Twitter A/c

General Guidelines & Keywords to Twitter Use
http://help.twitter.com/forums/59008/entries/14020

Adobe Systems, the developer of software for PCs and mobile phones that allows devices to create, display and interact with rich-media content, has revealed that development of its Flash Player software for mobile phones is well underway, in partnership with a growing number of hardware and software firms, including most of the leading handset manufacturers.

Read through the press releases I’ve linked to here and you’ll see that beta versions of Flash Player 10.1 are on track for release by the end of the year for the Windows Mobile and Palm webOS operating systems. Versions that will work with Symbian and Android are expected early in 2010, with BlackBerry likely to follow soon afterwards now that Research In Motion joined Adobe’s Open Screen Project at the weekend.

The aim of this initiative is to create a common media platform for mobile phones, computers and TVs, which should facilitate interoperability but, most importantly, should significantly cut development time for rich media content and applications thanks to the use of a single standard. There are now almost 50 companies involved in the project, up from 16 at its inception last year.

In turn, it will become quicker and, therefore, more cost-effective to develop a broader range of applications and content for the mobile environment – such as social networking, gaming, video and music, advertising, and location-based services, to name but a few.

Although some incompatibility hurdles will remain – particularly the issue of screen sizes and processor capacities which vary from one device to another – Juniper Research welcomes this exciting development, which will go a long way towards encouraging the usage and consumption of rich media services and, by default, should then encourage more consumers to take up smartphones.

A Juniper report published earlier this year found that around 13% of all mobile phones shipped in 2008 were smartphones. We believe that such devices will account for an increased percentage of shipments this year, despite the recession, to almost 16% of the total. By 2014, smartphones will account for more than a quarter of all new phones sold.

There is one key industry player that has yet to participate in the project, however. Apple has, so far, declined to involve itself in the project (perhaps preferring to time any such announcement for a moment that best suits its own marketing and publicity machine: its quarterly results are due on October 19th!), but with RIM – its main rival in the smartphone arena – now having signed up, it does seem inevitable.

The industry’s warm welcome to Adobe’s news also chimes with another finding in our smartphone report: the hardware race is over and, going forward, innovation and development is mostly being focused on advancing software that underpins the performance of these devices. And, as we’ve seen in our recent report on Operating Systems, increased use of ‘open’ platforms with common functionality will help keep development costs – and therefore overall handset and service costs – down.

Nokia announced its app development competition for Arabic application calling it -Bil3arabi (which means “in Arabic”) contest, in a bid to draw developers to submit Arabic and other relevant apps to its Ovi Store, a smart move to bring pioneering local and relevant apps to the Arab world on Nokia devices, which would put Nokia in a leading position before its mobile competitors specially the iPhone. As the Mobile OS apps game of today is no different than the PC app OS game of the 80s, the Mobile OS that draws more developers would emerge as a winner.

Though Bil3arabi is a smart move by Nokia, it had a major shortfall: it was not open to individuals and students!! But now Nokia corrected its mistake with an announcement that it is now allowing additional submissions for its Arabic-language mobile applications competition, Calling All Innovators – Bil3arabi, by welcoming individuals as well as companies, and accepting direct submissions from those developers whose apps can not currently be uploaded to Ovi Store!!!

Nokia is also giving developers more time, by extending the deadline to 15 November 2009

Source : Arab Crunch

The developers will be happy to find this info which I bumped into today. Hand Interactive has published an article on how to detect a mobile device using PHP.
“Don’t you wish there were an easy way to detect whether your web site visitor is connecting with a desktop PC or a mobile device of some sort?

The good news is that using PHP (or another server-based scripting language), it’s sort of easy to detect some devices by parsing the UserAgent string. Because the code is run on the server rather than in the browser itself (such as JavaScript), these PHP-based techniques yield better reliability in detecting mobile devices. Just remember that there are lots of important caveats, including:

• These technqniques depend on the contents of the UserAgent string. As a result, these techniques may not work if the browser is emulating a different one (e.g., some mobile browsers can be set to emulate Internet Explorer).
• Mobile operators can also change the UserAgent contents when the device is customized for their networks and added to their stock device portfolio. Operators also sometimes change the UserAgent value as the page request passes through their networks.
• UserAgent strings are moving targets. Once implemented, you’ll need to monitor the effectiveness of your code against the list of your high priority devices or platforms. “

Read the full article at Hand Interactive and download the PHP codeSource & Link : Hand Interactive

The most essential requirement of an IVRS is that it has to work 24 hours a day, 364 days a year! It is not an application like your MS Word or Outlook Express that you run them when you need! Also IVRS does not have any User Interface. The reason for not having User Interface is obvious! It interacts with human through voice and telephone instrument keypad. (These are actually DTMF Digits. I will explain about DTMF, Pulse dialing in another post.) So, a typical IVRS application does not require to be executed manually, it starts as a service in Windows Operating System as soon as it boots up. ( Or same way in Linux)So, in order build an IVRS Application, the following are essential

1. How many channels to be used? How many calls it should handle simultaneously?
2. How should it be connected to PSTN Lines? Connection may be in two modes, analog and digital.
3. Type of Hardware used. It requires two kind of hardware – a. A PC or a Server b. CTI hardware.
4. Voice prompts Recording or TTS (text-To-Speech) Engine.
5. IVRS Software.
6. Power supply and wiring arrangement.

Number of channels greatly depends on number of calls the user is expecting. For example, if it is public utility (Like 100, 101, Railway enquiry etc), the number of calls will be high. If it has to handle large number of calls (more than 16 numbers), it should be connected using DIGITAL technology. And you will have to use a digital CTI cards too. Digital Cards are more expensive than analog CTI cards and they start with minimum channel count of 30. If you are going to use a Digital card, use a Server. There are many CTI cards, both analog and digital, available in various configurations.

Then the voice prompts! These are voices you hear as soon as you dial the IVRS telephone numbers! These are pre-recorded voices which are played as soon as your call is established. Normally one should get recorded the voice prompts and for any dynamic content or data, TTS may be used. But the voice quality of TTS is still poor specially it may be difficult to understand to people whose mother tongue is not English.

Once you finalized the above, it is time to develop your IVRS Software or find a IVRS Software development company! There are many IVRS Software development companies in the world. Many IVRS Software are developed on various platforms, using different languages. The best IVRS (in terms of robustness, features, easy to configure and maintain) are the IVRS software which are developed in C++. If you intend to develop a IVRS Software on your own, buy the CTI hardware, and read the APIs. Also you need to have thorough knowledge of PSTN exchange. Specially to configure DIGITAL CTI card using SS7, MTP3 ISUP, R2MF, ISDN PRI etc are time consuming and let me warn you, they are not easy! Also you have to have these infrastructure to your testing purpose! ( How many of you have an exhange with SS7 ?) So, best advice is, attempt build your own IVRS if you have to use analog CTI cards, and for DIGITAL CTI Cards, better contact some IVRS Companies!

Keep reading this for CTI cards, IVRS Software, IVRS Companies and most importantly, how you can make money through IVRS! It’s a hot thing!

Contributed by :
Uttam Pegu
Director Technology
Niche Tech Services Pvt Ltd

Came accross a wonderful opportunity for developers and small set ups who have come up with really innovative Mobile content and applications on 2.5G as well as 3G. Ericsson Mobility World intends to launch a Developers’ program in India.

Throughout the world, application and content providers rely on Ericsson Mobility World’s competence and channels to reach the mobile market. It assists them in creating and selling innovative and marketable applications that support Ericsson’s multimedia solutions.

The Ericsson Mobility World Developer Program shortens industry lead times by helping developers plan, create, verify and market applications that work on Ericsson’s multimedia solutions and service-layer products. The program offers the technical, business and sales support that developers need to transform ideas into reality.

Through the program, developers’ applications and content can be included in the Ericsson Mobility World application portfolio and presented to Ericsson customers around the world. Other benefits include development tools, application verification, and advice and support. The focus is on real-world applications and services that telecom operators can sell today.
 
Its a brilliant opportunity for all you developers or entreprenuers with such a set of developers to reach out to the world. Please get in touch for queries related to the program at priyanka.rajwar@ericsson.com