Production house Balaji Telefilms has revealed its plans to develop new mobile applications. Speaking to Telecom Yatra, Uday Sodhi, chief executive officer, new media, Balaji Telefilms said, “Mobile entertainment will be the key area of focus for us and we will be developing new applications in fiction and non-fiction space.”
However, Sodhi did not share the timeline of launching the apps. The company is in talks with all operators for the launch. Some of the popular shows of this media house include Pavitra Rishta on Zee TV, Koi Aane ko Hai on Colors, and Bandini and Kitni Mohobbat Hai on NDTV imagine. Balaji is also planning to launch a non-fiction show soon, according to unofficial reports.
The company has also launched its first ever iPhone application named Ganesha Stories under its mobile initiative. The application gives access to aartis and stories of Ganesha and is available in the voices of various Bollywood playback singers.
“We will launch this App on all other stores such as Blackberry, Nokia’s Ovi and Android as they mature gradually,’ adds Sodhi. He also said that the company plans to develop more devotional applications in the future.
Balaji Telefilms was started in 1994 by Ekta Kapoor and is listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange of India.

Merger and acquisition deals in the Indian telecom industry will see a sea change in this year, said panelists of a session on the telecom industry gathered at the Apex ’10 private equity conference organised by Chennai-based Venture Intelligence, a research firm. The panel was chaired by Gautam Gandhi, head of new business development, India, Google.
“Currently the telecom industry has going through a tremendous growth phase – after achieving the 500 million subscriber mark, we are now looking at attaining 1 billion mark by 2013,” said Umang Das, president, Quippo Telecom Infrastructure. He also discussed Quippo’s model of cost optimisation. The company is an independent telecom tower provider having 30, 000 towers in its portfolio.
Telecom tower companies generally do not set up towers in less populated areas due to its huge investment cost. However, to achieve the billion figure the telecos will have to install more towers in less populated areas and highways. Das urged the telcos to adopt the shared network infrastructure platform in order to minimise the cost and get mutual benefits. “The operators should think of sharing towers instead of installing individual towers, this gives them the opportunity to reduce their costs,” he said.
Interestingly, the tower business has been witnessing huge merger and acquisition activity since the past few years. Investors feel it is a profitable business in the long-term, considering its high need in the future. The biggest acquisition in the M&A space in the last one year took place in the last month when GTL Infrastructure acquired Aircel Cellular tower arm for Rs 8,400 crore.
Manik Arora, founder and managing director, IDG Ventures India, said that his firm is interested in investing mobile value added services – an area where he feels returns will be profitable. “We are interested to invest in ventures into video and data LED applications. Gaming, which has again come back on the scene after a long time is also a key area of focus for us,” Arora added.
Agreeing with Arora, Probir Roy, co-founder and executive director, Paymate said, “Value added services will drive new business models.” On the operators perspective he felt that consolidation is round the corner for telcos.

GSM and CDMA service providers Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices have separately announced SMS-based email services for their subscribers. Through this platform users will be able to check all their mails on any type of handset.
This service enables subscribers to receive check, download and retrieve email messages using the SMS. The email-to-SMS technology is being provided to both operators by Canada’s iseemedia, provider of low cost wireless email services to operators in the country. iseemail supports all types of email Messaging systems in India.
The technology is expected bridge the gap between smartphones and other handsets where accessing internet was not possible. Moreover, the platform will also propel operators to provide text-based information services The launch will also become a new source of garnering revenues for the operators since this will be in addition to the data plans that they offer.
For availing the service, Tata Indicom and Tata Docomo subscribers will have to pay Rs 15 per month and 50 paise for every SMS sent to the short code.
Reliance Communications is offering the service at Rs 30 and a usage tariff of 50 paise per SMS sent. iseemedia receives a percentage of revenue for every user transaction.

Two weeks after Nokia made its new version of Ovi Maps with walking and driving navigation free for users globally, 1.4 million downloads have been made. Nokia said this in a press statement, adding that the one million mark was reached within a week since the announcement on January 21.
The new version of Ovi Maps included car and pedestrian navigation with turn-by-turn voice guidance for 74 countries, in 46 languages, and traffic information for more than 10 countries, and detailed maps for 180 countries.
Interestingly, Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice-president, Nokia, stated, “We’re averaging a download a second, 24 hours a day.”
“When we announced free walk and drive navigation we knew it would be a game-changer. The number of people now using their Nokia for navigation, and as a result looking for more location-aware software, is growing faster than even we predicted,” he added.
“For the operators too there is a growing opportunity to sell more data-plans and a complete navigation package to existing and new customers,” added Vanjoki.
According to research firm Canalys, the number of people worldwide using GPS navigation on their mobile phones was 27 million at the end of 2009. Nokia claims that with the availability of its free navigation, the market size has increased by 50 million given the original number of users who had installed Ovi Maps. The report also estimated that the installed base of smartphones with integrated GPS (global positioning system, which does not require an operator network) was 163 million units worldwide, of which Nokia accounted for 51 per cent, having shipped 83 million GPS devices.
“There is a huge appetite for GPS navigation on mobile phones. We estimate there were already 25.9 million people actively using GPS navigation on their mobile phones at the end of 2009,” added Chris Jones, vice-president and principal analyst at Canalys.
According to Nokia, as on January 31, the top five countries downloading the new version of Ovi Maps were China, Italy, UK, Germany and Spain. The top five most popular Nokia devices installing the service were Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia N97 mini, Nokia N97, Nokia 5230 and Nokia E72. The application is only compatible with 11 Nokia smartphones as of now.
March onwards, Nokia will be shipping all its Nokia GPS-enabled smartphones with Ovi Maps with local country map data, walk and drive navigation and access to Lonely Planet and Michelin travel guides for free. Google had also launched driving directions for Indian mobile users in December 2009.