原创 Can India rise to the mobile challenge?

The world’s largest mobile phone industry conference just took place in Barcelona, Spain, and one announcement aimed towards an introduction in India in coming months was the launch of the ‘world’s cheapest phone’ – a handset from Vodafone expected to be selling for under US$15. Judging by the discussion forums in India following this announcement, it appears to many Indians that this is just a gimmick since cheap handsets with better features have been available in India for a while.

One thing is for sure though: the underlying themes of this year’s conference coupled with other announcements from the ISA Vision Summit earlier in the month mean there are likely to be even greater opportunities for Indian companies in the mobile phone and wireless networks ecosystem. 

What should give even more impetus to developers in the mobile industry in India is the recent talk of India leapfrogging 3G to go straight to 4G wireless networks, as the roll-out of 3G has been delayed for nearly three years now.

India has definitely puts its stake firmly in the ground as a key global player in the mobile phone industry. While most of the western world struggles with generating adequate revenue from subscribers, India’s service providers have proved that it is possible to generate significant profits from the smallest of margins due to the high volumes of subscribers that they can attract.

This provides the backdrop to what’s possible in the future and how India’s hardware and software system designers in mobile and wireless might capitalize on the current global scenario. 

At Mobile World Congress 2010, the main themes of discussion and new developments were around operating systems for mobile (eg. Windows, Android), user interfaces, and mobile health.  Indian engineers have significant experience with global companies in the development of OS’s and user interfaces for both mobile devices and infrastructure as well as other consumer and enterprise products. On top of this, India’s vast rural community is a natural environment both as a test-bed as well as for roll-out of diagnosis and delivery of healthcare related activities – in terms of wirelessly or network-connected handheld devices and products.

The announcement at the ISA Vision summit of Karnataka’s semiconductor policy links very well with this opportunity in the mobile space. With the incentives given to Karnataka-based semiconductor start-ups, those entrepreneurs with ideas of how to use mobile and wireless networks to improve the healthcare delivery processes for what is a very young and tech-savvy population could see their ideas 50 percent funded by the state government to get off the ground.

One of the challenges for Indian start-ups in this sector could be lack of confidence. While Indian electronics design engineers have historically been good at working to a specification or brief given by their multi-national companies’ headquarters (or customer if it is simply an off-shoring design centre), the new era in design requires a creative mindset rather than simply a subservient mindset.

In a recent talk in London, S. Gopalakrishnan (Kris), chief executive officer and managing director, Infosys Technologies, said that the opportunity for global companies was to test their product in emerging countries before taking the product to market in their own or other developed economies. Taking this argument the other way, the opportunity for Indian companies in the mobile space is in developing products for the home market (in India) and then taking the product to market globally.

Indian entrepreneurs therefore need to rise to the challenge in the mobile sector, and create opportunities, products and services that can quickly address the home market in the emerging sub-sectors of mobile and wireless networks, and then take these products to the global stage.