@ITIS 2006: On M-Payments, Digital Content & Low Cost Mfg

At the 12th India Telecommunications International Summit 2006 on November 1st, I attended the session on new technologies, services and content that can contribute to the growth of mobile penetration and usage in India. Some comments on m-payments, digital content and low cost manufacturing:
Prasad Yalamanchi, Chairman Teleonto Technologies said that mobile applications elsewhere in the world have contributed to ARPU and there’s a need right now among marketers for mobile marketing since it has analytics which people are willing to engage. DRM is critical since it helps control leakages in ARPU. The value chain for m-payments is just being established in India. However, there are variations in mobile payments across geographies that will be critical to ARPU. VoIP needs to be enabled for the mobile. Digitization has a direct impact on usage, and in developed countries, a majority of the content is digitized. In India, there is lots of Bollywood content yet to be digitized, so there is scope for growth there.
According to Tanuj Raja, VP Business Development, Sandbridge Technologies Inc, in the US, m-payment is a dirty word because the credit card companies have a stronghold and control the last mile of payment. Not so in India, so the opportunity is greater here, and the mobile can make up for the lack of credit card penetration. Digital content is great, but content with context is most important.
Anders Kager, Director Regional Marketing, Nokia believes that if manufacturing of handsets can be moved to India, then India can become an export hub. Handsets should not be taxed here since they are an important part of a nations infrastructure, and we have to look for ways to micro-finance handsets.
I think it will take time for first m-payment to be accepted as a mode of payment, then for many companies to jump on to the bandwagon, and finally – consolidation. The role and impact of the operators should be interesting to track since it’s their distribution channel. Establishing consumer confidence will be difficult: the biggest issue that I think consumers can have is of whether or not a particular retailer/restaurant will accept m-payment from a particular company. Once that is taken care of, user adoption will increase. But what comes first- the alliances or the user adoption?

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