Voice-based IVR Solutions Help Increase VAS Revenues of Telecom Operators: MoMo Mumbai

[Link]

The Mumbai chapter of Mobile Monday organised a meet-up on 28th April 2008 in the city where the participants discussed issues related with ‘Voice-based VAS’. The discussion was moderated by VeerChand Bothra, founder, MobilePundit.com. The other members of the panel were Mitul Limbani, CEO, Enterux Solutions and Aditya Mhatre, co-founder, Indicast.com.

According to Limbani, “one can use open-source software like Asterisk to build an interactive IVR system for approximately Rs. 1.2 lakh”. He also said that telecom operators like Reliance and Airtel (in Tamil Nadu) have started using voice-based IVR solutions to increase VAS revenues by using regional languages. Due to this localised content, operators have started generating revenues even from the smaller cities and towns by selling VAS services like ringtones, jokes, astro predictions, etc in the local language. When asked about the scalability of Asterisk, Limbani answered that it is very scalable and he is using the software to develop a back-end for an Indonesian telecom provider. He concluded by saying that voice-based IVRs allow multilingual content to be accessed on inexpensive phones and are the way to go for the Indian market.

Mhatre spoke of 022-67339733, an IVR being created for Indiacast.com, a popular Indian podcasting website. When asked about what features could be added to the IVR, Mhatre mentioned that in the future, users will be able to browse podcast episodes, personalise the IVR based on their preferences and enable resume support if the call drops mid-way.

Mobile Monday, is an open networking event for mobile industry professionals to share and discuss ideas. It is normally held on a selected Monday evening every month. It has chapters in Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai apart from other cities around the world.

j j j

How Do You Sleep? – John Lennon.

Holy Whackalicious! I was going through the log of my feed subscribers for this blog and I found one subscriber using Lynx!!! For those who don’t know, Lynx is a completely text based browser and runs primarily on Linux. It does have ports for Windows and Mac though. You can find more info for it on http://lynx.browser.org.

In other news, I went home late last night – very late, didn’t sleep well and now I feel completely out of sync. It’s like my mind is working faster than my body. It feels weird. You take a step and you realise that your feet is not there yet but your brain has already decided to take another step – am I making any sense?

The replies didn’t come in yesterday also. I feel like a telephone operator. I have called the dude up so many times that I think I know his number by heart now (and if you know me remotely, you will realise that this is a BIG achievement). I hope to end this by today, one way or the other.

Pownce is said to go public by afternoon today and I want to be onto it. When I first joined there, it looked like another Twitter clone with the only USP being the ability to send files to friends, like you can’t do that with email or the messengers already, I thought, and happily abstained from using the service. I was reading up on all the planned upgrades to the service today and it seems quite interesting. I particularly like the option of being able to import friends from FB, Twitter and a few other social networks. That should help. I also like their client, which runs on Adobe AIR.

I want to play with KDE 4.0, I have been reading about it, and I know it’s far from stable but I like to get my kicks from time to time. I am planning to run it on OpenSUSE or Fedora. Definitely not on Ubuntu. I wonder why people like Ubuntu… it’s so non Linux-like, so much like Windows, very rigid and hard to truly customise.

I uploaded the snaps I took in the mosque and others onto Picasa, so you can look em up in the random pics album.

Looking to play with the HCL UMPCs. The Y-Series catches my fancy. I hope the finishing is not as bad as it looks in the snaps – cheap plastic type with wobbly keys. I hope to get my hands on the ASUS EEE PC too… been reading so much about it that it feels like I know everything there is to know about it and all I have to do is feel the PC (no pun intended).

Am I the only one who is starting to find these HDFC system upgrade messages irritating. I know its going down on the 25th and I have it marked on my Google calander, my desktop notes, my calander in the cubicle, tattooed on my hand and what not! Gimmie a break people and stop spamming my email, my phone and the annoying popups when I use netbanking… Sheesh.

Time to read His Dark Materials till the replies come in… adios people!

j j j