Telecom Roundup: Idea launches emergency talktime credit service, TRAI moves court against Loop Mobiles on MNP

Idea launches ‘Idea Lifeline’, an emergency talk time credit service.

Idea has launched ‘Idea Lifeline’, an emergency talk time credit for uninterrupted calling.  Idea Prepaid customers can now avail of this credit balance anytime, anywhere by simply dialling 53567 (Toll Free) from their mobile phones.for uninterrupted calling.  Idea Prepaid customers can now avail of this credit balance anytime, anywhere by simply dialing 53567 (Toll Free) from their mobile phones. Idea customers who run out of balance can avail of talk time by dialling 53567 (Toll Free) from their Idea number, and Rs. 3 Talktime will be instantly credited to the customers’ account. The credited amount will get adjusted along with a nominal charge whenever the customer recharges next with a range of Idea top-up or Full talk time recharges.

TRAI moves court against Loop Mobiles on number portability

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has moved a Delhi court seeking prosecution of Loop Mobiles (India) Ltd for rejecting its subscribers’ requests to switch over to another service provider in violation of TRAI regulations. It alleged Loop Mobiles rejected some requests for number portability in Mumbai circle as it was “not in consonance with the provisions of the Telecom Mobile Number Portability Regulations“. [source]

TRAI proposes models to redistribute 2G spectrum in 900-MHz band

Redistributing the 900-MHz band has been among the most controversial issues confronting the sector. Later entrants and dual-technology players, such as Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices, contend that incumbents, such as Bharti, Vodafone and BSNL, have made huge savings on their capex and opex as they were allotted the 900-MHz band, and have been demanding that this bandwidth be redistributed among all telcos. [source]

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Alipay To Invest $79 Million To Create ‘Square-like Payment Devices’

Update: We have included the Alipay COD device pictures below.

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We received news from Alipay about its plans to invest RMB500 million (US$79 million) to upgrade China’s cash-on-delivery (COD) payment infrastructure. That sounds like a hefty task but it becomes clearer after the details are explained a little.

In short, Alipay is working on a portable Square-like payment device. Yes, those awesome little devices which allow you to pay on the spot right after you receive your goods. But it doesn’t look like Square. An Alipay representative told me that the the Alipay COD devices looks very different from it. “It looks similar to an ordinary point-of-sales machine that you would see at a department store,” she added. That makes me wonder how it would be portable, but Alipay will update us with a picture soon.

Alipay states that 70 percent of the transaction volume, excluding Tmall, is paid at the time of delivery. And most of these payments are made in cash. So there is a time gap between the information received for payment and goods delivered. The new device, as explained by Dong Xiaoling, general manager of Alipay’s B2C Business Unit, will allow goods and payment to be received simultaneously. More from her:

Alipay’s COD solution will allow merchants to receive payments within 24 hours of delivery, faster than the current industry practice which can take several days.

Alipay plans to have 10,000 of these devices in the first half of 2012 in all first-tier cities — Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou etc. Second tier cities will get to see them by the end of 2012. So far, Dangdang, one of the largest e-commerce players in China, has already started implementation of the Alipay’s Square-like device. It’s a neat initiative and a smart move. And it will be a huge relief to Apple users since most e-commerce stores don’t support mac. Only Alibaba Group (which houses Alipay), has the muscles and reach to pull this through.

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Alipay COD Device

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How Xiami’s Loop Can Revolutionize China’s Music Industry

I’m a huge fan of the SNS-ification of music. Sharing playlists and niche music forums, in addition to intelligent music recommendation services such as Itune’s Genius, have colorized my life by providing channels to expand my otherwise flavorless music library.

Xiami‘s taken this SNS-ification one step further with the introduction of its Loop service, reminiscent of Turntable.fm. Users congregate in virtual rooms where up to 5 people act as DJs, called Loopers, who take turns playing tracks. Listeners interact by rating music and fan-friending Loopers, who collect Experience Points.

The question of whether Loop can truly facilitate music sharing is still up in the air. For the average Chinese internet user, demand for music in China is still relatively generic. There may not exist enough variety for users to truly appreciate the value of music sharing.

However, this may be a step forward. The race to be the leading online music provider has 3 major contenders — Xiami, Douban, and Baidu. Douban is more like the IMDB of Chinese music, with a heavier emphasis on reviews and discussion, though they also recently launched their Douban.fm service with licensed music from major labels like Warner, Universal, SONY, EMI and so on. Baidu, on the other hand, has amassed this huge database of links to external music sources, classified them into various playlists. And it also launched ting.baidu.com to socialize its music effort.

Xiami’s move into interactive music sharing could connect users not just with shared music taste, but also those with common interests (there are virtual rooms that specifically welcome designers, computer scientists, etc). These factors, when mixed together, may incite subconscious conformation analogous to musical stereotypes found in the US — e.g. Goth kids like emo, valley girls like pop, fashionistas like trance, minorities like hip hop, and so on and so forth.

If subdivided social networks each adopted their own musical personalities via services such as Loop, this could very well revolutionize the entire Chinese music industry.

Monetization strategy currently suggests virtual goods, including clothing and accessories for avatars. For now, the selection of virtual costumes increases only as you accumulate Experience Points, though I’ll put good money these services will be offered for real money real soon.

It’s currently 9 PM in China, and there approximately 600 users currently using the Xiami service.

These past few days I’ve been tuning into the “Listen while Coding, Code while Listening” room. Frankly, it makes me warm and fuzzy inside knowing there are other programmers up at 3 or 4 in the morning slaving away together.

One last comment about Loop. The music’s mostly decent, though sometimes I wish they could introduce a “boo” button, in addition to its “mute current song” button.

Related posts:

1. Unified Communication – An opportunity for Google to be social
2. Jiepang Teams Up With Sony Ericsson
3. Check-in your achievements with Kwestr

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SMSCountry Founders Launch 360Invite

SMSCountry founders, who recently sold 160by2.com to Way2SMS have launched their next venture, 360Invite,  an online service that enables users to send event invitations across all media channels – i.e. SMS, Voice, Email and Facebook.

The freemium service was launched on March 18th and in its current form, offers free plan which encompasses 2 events (in 30 days) and 50 SMS/Voice messages/unlimited email messages.

Filing an important gap?

There are quite a few event management solutions, but they are mostly targeted towards event ticketing and not so much on marketing. 360Invite is targeted towards consumers (example: birthday invitations, marriage invitations etc) adding a personal touch, i.e. voice to the invitations.

This is a critical piece as there hardly are any known services (for consumers) that complete the 360 degree of invitations, i.e. across different mediums.

Do give 360invite a spin and share your feedback.

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Another Japanese Social Gaming Player Tries Marketing Through Baseball

Back in January we saw Japanese social mobile gaming giant DeNA (TYO:2432) finalize its deal to acquire a majority stake in Yokohama’s baseball team, now called the DeNA BayStars.

And now today we’re hearing that one of DeNA’s biggest game providers, Gloops, is also hoping that it can win more mind share in Japan by riding the coattails of the nation’s latest star pitcher, Yu Darvish.

Darvish recently made his first start for the Texas Rangers baseball club, amid a bigger-than-usual crowd thanks to visiting Japanese media. Gloops, who Serkan Toto says is a “sure IPO condidate for later this year,” announced a partnership with the Rangers on Sunday which will result in its name being made visible on press conference backdrops as well as on signage around the home stadium for the rest of spring training.

This is a part of the company’s We Are Totally Rooting for Baseball Project. Personally, I’m totally hoping that slogan sounds better in Japanese.

Gloops is also a sponsor of the 2012 MLB season opener between Seattle and Oakland, set to take place at the Tokyo Dome.

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More lesbians than straight women in Singapore and Malaysia, says Facebook?

Recently, Flocations, a travel startup in Singapore, ran some tests on targeting women with Facebook ads. Their findings were totally unexpected.

They discovered that in Singapore and Malaysia, the number of “women interested in women” far outnumber those who are “interested in men”. In Singapore, that’s 14,800 to 6,100. The difference is even greater in Malaysia, at 65,160 to 8,480 (with several other parameters added in).

However, the figures in the United States seem pretty normal, with 1.6 million showing an interest in men, while a tenth of that indicating an interest in women:

While there’s not enough information to prove decisively why the figures are what they are, one possible reason is that Western and Eastern audiences perceive the phrase “interested in” differently.

While Americans might perceive it as a declaration of sexual orientation, Singaporeans and Malaysians might construe it differently.

This has obvious implications for how advertisers and companies conduct social media marketing, and how the lack of localization, taking into account cultural differences, may affect their ability to reach out to the right audience.

For example, if I run a dating agency and I want to target straight women on Facebook, the estimated reach I’d get would be far less than the actual number. I am therefore unnecessarily limiting myself to a specific group, missing out on people who might be interested in my services.

More generally, it raises the question of just how accurate Facebook’s profiling system is. For instance, I know of many under-18s who sign up on Facebook anyway, faking their age just so they could get onto the social network.

This is a topic marketers and researchers might want to explore further.

Special thanks to Zane Kripe for her input.

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China Mobile Growth Slows, 3G Mostly to Blame

China Mobile (NYSE:CHL, HKG:0941) used to be the king of China’s telecommunications industry. Sure, Unicom and Telecom existed, but why would anyone use them when China Mobile’s coverage was so much better? That was what my Chinese friends told me when I first came to China in 2007. But oh, how a few years can change things! China Mobile remains China’s largest player in the mobile arena, but the advent of 3G and the increasing popularity of internet-based apps has slowed its growth significantly. Behold some charts:

So what the heck is going on here? Obviously, it’s complicated, but the number one reason for the slowing of China Mobile’s growth is that thanks to the increasing popularity of 3G, China Unicom and China Telecom are eating China Mobile’s lunch. China Mobile’s 3G is on a TD-SCDMA network, which is widely considered to be inferior to other 3G technologies. As a result, when previous China Mobile 2G customers choose to make the jump to 3G, they tend to switch carriers, too. So China Mobile is picking up new customers more slowly, and those new customers tend to be paying it less, too, because they generally just want regular — not 3G — service.

China Mobile hopes to escape its 3G funk by leading the way with a 4G-LTE network, which it is already testing in several cities across China. But it has thus far had difficulty landing the permits — it appears the government wants to allow 3G networks to develop for a while before letting 4G into the country — and the implementation of 4G may still be years away.

[via Sina Tech]

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Twitter expands local trends to 6 cities in India, Misspells Ahmedabad as Ahmadabad

Twitter has expanded local trends service to 6 cities in India (earlier it was available only for Mumbai). The cities supported include Ahmedabad, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Delhi, and Mumbai.

Twitter Trending Locations in India

I found it amusing that a service which has been focusing so much on localization has got the city name wrong (fyi: Ahmadabad is a city in Iran as well as Pakistan and the Indian city name is Ahmedabad). Small issue, but given how Indians are emotional about regional/local stuff, international brands need to be extra careful in India (read: BCG report on Local Companies vs. MNCs in the Emerging Market).

Twitter in India

Twitter hasn’t shown a massive jump in usage over the last few years. While the service is consumed mostly via APIs, take a look at India traffic (from Comscore) and importantly, Google search trends that gives a better idea of a (consumer) service’ popularity.

Twitter: Trend Traffic

Twitter hasn’t even managed to beat Orkut, which has been on a massive traffic decline since 2009.

So why has Twitter not taken off, after showing a super-perfect hockey stick curve in the start? One of the reasons could be that the service is mostly limited (in usage) to celebrities, early adopters and unlike Facebook, brands do not market their Twitter handle.

So unless Twitter markets the service in India, the common man is happy being on Facebook and doesn’t really have a strong use-case to get on to Twitter.

What’s your take?

» Follow @pluggdin on Twitter.

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