Mobile Monday

26 May

Bangalore

The May edition of Mobile Monday, or MoMo, Bangalore, was power-packed with two start-up demos and a discussion on different topics but each having enormous possibilities for the Indian mobile industry. While the two start-ups, TringMe and Yulop, demonstrated their voice platform and location based services (LBS), the talk centred around mobile browsing usage trends in India.

TringMe is a voice platform that allows people to make calls from multiple possible sources such as a feature phone, smartphone, Web IMs such as Gtalk, Skype, or even simple Web-based widgets. End-users make intelligent choice of their source and destination to minimize cost on their international calls. Particularly impressive was founder CEO Yusuf Motiwala’s demo of being able to dial a Gtalk buddy from a regular feature phone (i.e. through a Nokia 1100 phone) by just sending an SMS.

TringMe’s real potential lies in its being a larger voice platform. The core of TringMe is flash based and thus marries telecom and Web nicely together. Such capabilities allow TringMe to compete in user interfaces, an area where operators are the weakest right now.

After the demo, the discussion shifted to mobile browsing usage in India. Sagar Chandna, country manager, Opera Software India, gave an overview of Opera Mini and trends observed here. Its growth rate is highest in India, which generates second highest Web traffic for it after Russia.

Lastly, Yulop CEO Sridhar G. presented its cool LBS application that provides location-based news, events, search, parking slots and much more. The key differentiation of Yulop from larger players in this space is in the way it gives much more meaningful results as well as the data that it can provide. All of this happened in a very friendly and trendy coffee bar with a very apt title for a mobile meet ‘BrewHaHa’.

Thiyagarajan M. is co-founder and CEO of Bangalore-based start-up Motvik Technologies Pvt. Ltd and co-founder trustee of Mobile Monday Bangalore.