IBM Unveils India Led Mobile Web Initiative; Overview Of Apps And Services

IBM’s India research lab has announced an initiative to bring mobile web services to mobile handsets, which they see as rivaling the PC as primary tools of business and communication. Daniel Dias, Director, IBM India is quoted in the press release stating number of Mobile devices outnumber PCs by three to one, credit cards by two to one and TVs by two to one. The research project will be led out of India, the youngest of the labs, and incubated in IBM’s eight global labs in six countries.

So what are these services. The ‘Spoken Web’ project aims to allow people to create e-commerce sites using the spoken word, simulating the web on a telco network where people can host and browse ‘VoiceSites’, navigate through ‘VoiceLinks’ and conduct business transactions over telco networks.

Other solutions are the Universal Mobile Translator, which facilitates speech between individuals that speak different languages. In a nutshell, imagine babelfish facilitated through your handset.

Next is ‘SoulPad‘, essentially a virtualization kit for all your data. The press release is more evocative in elaborating it, but at the core of it, its data you can plug-n-play in its own environment regardless of hardware. Think Mac Mini for the PC.

Up next is BuddyComm, an application IBM has developed in collaboration with Vodafone (NYSE: VOD). Its a service which consumers can use to communicate with their social networks through voice, SMS or via PC. The product is a mashup of social networks with added functionality. Instead of scrapping your buddies on Orkut or writing on their wall, you can click to call or SMS regardless of a PC or mobile.

Good Samaritan is a nifty healthcare application that aims to supply information on how to aid people in critical situations. The service seems to be in direct competitions to Google’s (NSDQ: GOOG) Health project, although more critical situation oriented. Your health data is stored and in case of emergency, shared with the concerned Emergency center which then notifies a medic around the area and beams details on medical status.

The project concept notes are of a recent date and there has been no comment by Dias on the investment figures. Bloomberg reports the Spoken Web project has been piloted in India where Hindi speakers have surfed the net using voice, the tests are expected to end in three months with a large scale rollout scheduled by end of this year. How well does it work? Big Blue had shipped 1000 translator kits called MASTOR (Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator) to the US Army for their Iraqi expedition, couldn’t find any reviews though, which could possibly be a bad thing.

This is a big announcement for the Big Blue, the firm has had a chequered, but nevertheless, very consequential effect on computing and history. The company aims to generate half of its profit from software by 2010 and its acknowledgment of Mobiles leapfrogging over PC’s as the de-facto device for web connectivity marks a paradigm shift. IBM’s Institute for Business Value predicts the number of mobile Web users will grow by 191 percent from 2006 to 2011 to reach one billion. The market treated the announcement with elation, IBM fell 5 cents to $124.35 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have climbed 15 percent this year.

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