Many readers will know him as the force behind a ton of phenomenally well produced and informative mobile events such as Droidcon, Future of Mobile and Heroes of the Mobile Screen.

I’ve packed Dominic off to India (Delhi) next week to investigate the burgeoning and astonishing mobile marketplace. He’s got a hugely packed schedule — but he’s kept a few spots free.

If you know some smart folk in India that Dominic should be meeting and profiling, will you let me know? Drop me a mail  – ewan@mobileindustryreview.com — and I’ll connect you.

Standby for a barrage of posts from Dominic.

India, one of the largest telecom industries in the world with almost 300 million mobile users is reported to be housing as many as 25 million mobile phones with an IMEI number. The IMEI number, a unique 15-digit code for every mobile manufactured, is an integral part of any mobile handset as it is used to monitor the activities from the phone.

The department gave the operators 3 months to arrange for the equipments if the hardware wasn’t in place. In a letter to all the mobile service providers in the country, DoT said

In the interest of national security, all cellular mobile service providers in unified access service licences (UASL) are hereby directed to make provisions for EIR so that calls without IMEI or with IMEI consisting of all zeroes are not processed or rejected,

India is a tremendously huge marker for grey market phones, most of which originate in China. Lately, there has been a surge in the demand for ‘almost-real’ fake phones in the marker, with the introduction of many high-end phones from companies such as Apple, Nokia and HTC.

The department, today, announced that it has extended the deadline to April 15th after the previous deadline of January 6th was blatantly ignored by the telecom companies. However, DoT this time has put its foot down and made it very clear that if the telcos fail to comply with these guidelines will not be allowed to take on any new subscribers after the expiry of the deadline. The telcos are already paying a daily fine to DoT.

The fate of these 25 million handset users now clearly lies on the livewire, as the very reason most of these handsets were purchased because their original counterparts were too expensive for them, or there was a lack of awareness in the market. Eventually, the Chinese handsets still serve as a very cheap alternative and you can grab a very basic color – screen handset with a decent 3 mega pixel camera for as Rs. 3000.

One British MEP, Sajjad Karim, has been frequently quoted – here’s an example from The Guardian:

“I was in the lobby of the hotel when gunmen came in and people started running.”

“There were about 25 or 30 of us,” said the Tory MEP, speaking by mobile phone from a barricaded basement room.

“Some of us split one way and some another. A gunman just stood there spraying bullets around, right next to me. I managed to turn away and I ran into the hotel kitchen and then we were shunted into a restaurant in the basement.

The widespread availability of mobiles is making both the reporting far more electric — I really can perceive the sense of panic and concern from the words of Sajjad — I can imagine him talking into his handset telling the world what’s going on as events unfold in front of him.

It sadly takes events such as this to really underline just how connected we all are. This was, after all, thousands of miles away. 15 years ago this would have been a lead story — one item — on the front page of the newspapers. Today, we’re getting imagery, commentary and immediate viewpoints right-away from people on the scene.

We haven’t had to wait for the news anchors to get on the scene. We haven’t had to listen to oodles of speculation. We can get the quotes and the experiences live.

A slight concern I have — quite apart from the human tragedy — is that we appear to be moving to an experiential entertainment form of news.

It is shocking to experience Sajjad’s more-or-less immediate recollection of events. Shocking. But then again I’m sat in a house on a quiet street in the middle of nowhereville, South East of London, where the biggest danger is the ever-present but rare possibility of the aging King Charles Spaniel getting done-in by a Badger at the end of garden whilst she’s out relieving herself.

All the big news sites are touting their ‘eye witness’ services. Reuters, for example, is advertising this service at the bottom of their Mumbai coverage:

Did you witness the attacks? We are inviting citizen photojournalists to send in their best images. If you think your picture captures the moment, please send it to pics@reuters.com.

I haven’t seen any ‘user generated’ footage — video or pictures — on news sites as yet.

But there’s a Wikipedia page up and fully populated — complete with maps of locations. Found this via a ‘twitter Mumbai’ search and hit on Global Dashboard — a site that had breaking links updated already. From there I learnt that there’s a live and dedicated Twitter feed for news and discussion on the attacks here (and another here) with roughly 5 tweets a second being added to each as I write:

Wikipedia is — as one chap comments — crediting Twitter as one of the sources for beraking news on attacks in Mumbai.

An enterprising and helpful person has setup the user, Mumbaiattack, on Twitter — to give a sanitised set of updates free from unnecessary commentary. This, I have subscribed to:

Mahalo is in on the action too with it’s own dedicated page and interactive Google Map and some ‘possible imagery’ of the terrorists — plus links to relevant Twitter users:

The challenge the ‘real’ news sites have got, one imagines, is that you’ve now got access to hundreds of thousands of conversations and experiences. Real. Live. Now.

Which ones are accurate?

If there’s a chap Tweeting from the top floor of the Taj Mahal Hotel balcony — is that genuine or is it an arse sat somewhere in Baltimore having a bit of fun with social media, trying to get on CNN?

I suppose you turn to the likes of Mahalo and Wikipedia who are sourcing from ‘credible’ sources. Mahalo, for example, includes Twitter user, BombayAddcit, as a top source. That’s, I suppose, because he’s got a relevant website attached to his Twitter profile and his Tweet feed looks decent.

I thought I’d try out a bit of mobilising. BombayAddict’s iPhone is at location 18.995453,72.819473 according to his Twitter profile. That’s a Google Maps reference. I stuck that into Google Maps and found that he’s 8.3km away from the Taj Mahal Hotel.

The more communications technology spreads, the more ‘real’ and immediate it all becomes for so many people.

This is both good and bad news.

Now the results are in:

NEW DELHI (AFP) – A media campaign featuring a mobile phone ringtone that sings “condom condom” has pushed up sale of the contraceptive by 85 million in six months, India’s AIDS control body said Friday.
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The campaign, which included television and radio advertisements, reached 150 million men, especially migrant workers who frequent sex workers.

Excellent!

Telenor has been eyeing a stake in the company for quite a while now and has been in talks with the company ever since. Italy’s Telecom Italia too was rumored to have bought a 49% stake in the company, but the claims soon died down. However, it has been confirmed that it is infact Telenor which now controls a whopping 60% stake in the company.

Why so much interest in the company?

India’s Mobile subscriber base is growing at an alarming rate and there’s already enough competition in the market. Unitech Wireless recently won license to operate in the 13 telecom circles of India from the Indian government, something which increased the demand of the company. 

With a pan Indian license, the company was looking for strategic partners to do business with and they’ve finally settled with Telenor here.

The country added almost 10 million new mobile subscribers last month, taking the total figure to 310.62 million. Now, if my maths knowledge serves me right, that’s about 4 new subscribers every single second. However, the penetration rate still lags at 27.5%, leaving out enough room for further growth.

The country’s market is large dominated by the GSM technology, contributing about 75.2% of the total subscriber base. 7.65 million new GSM subscribers were added last month while the CDMA base contributing 2.34 million.

Bharti Airtel continued to be the country’s largest cellular operator, adding 2.7 million subscribers out of the 9.9 million. Vodafone, which ranks third added 1.86 million subscribers. Airtel currently services 77.48 million subscribers in the country, while its closest rival, Reliance Communications serves about 56 million.

It would be interesting to take a look at the market share for the mobile handsets and the manufacturers that carry these new subscribers.

[Via Cellular-News, Photo: Sirensongs]

However, what’s surprising is the fact that a major portion of the new mobile subscribers being added today come from the rural parts of the country. According to the recent statistical data, mobile carriers are getting more than 30 percent of new users from villages. 

As per the data, of the 25 million new mobile subscribers added during April 2008 to June 2008, 8 million were from the villages, taking the total to 70 million now. This is a substantial increase over last year’s total of 40 million.

Another interesting fact that the statistics tell us is that nearly 75 percent of all the mobile users in the villages use services offered by private telecom operators and not by the state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL). This could be largely due to the aggressive marketing campaigns undertaken by the operators and the at par rates being offered by them.

Today, most mobile carriers are investing in infrastructure build ups in the sub-metro states, since they show better growth rates compared to the metros. 

According to a recent study by US based Yankee group, 62 percent of all the handsets imported costed less than $50. That’s less than what I pay monthly for my mobile bill.

Credit crunch? What credit crunch?

SMSGupShup, India’s equivalent of Twitter, has just taken $11m from Helion Ventures and Charles River Ventures, to help grow and develop the business (reports Silicon India).

This good news for the SMSGupShup team and for the mobile industry as a whole. The growth of mobile in the emerging markets is simply staggering. The intent with GupShup is to capitalise on contextual mobile advertising demand.

We’ll keep an eye on them. Meanwhile, congratulations to the company’s co-founders Rakesh Mathur and Beerud Sheth.

If it’s any consolation to you, the Meizu M8, one of the very first and more popular iPhone clone out there is scheduled to be launched in both the countries around December. The phone’s bears a striking resemblance to the Apple iPhone and has been dubbed as “the” iPhone clone by many.

Come December and GeekITStores are all set to launch the phone, first in China and then in India. According to their press release, the phone will be launched with complete ‘fanfare’ in the Chinese markets and will soon follow with a launch in India through the channel partners.

According to BGR, one of their loyal readers received a friendly email from AT&T, which goes like this.

Subject: Important information regarding your iPhone 3G

The new AT&T – Your world. Delivered.

Our service records indicate that you are using an iPhone 3G with a data plan designed for other devices.

To avoid unexpected data overage charges and enable Visual Voicemail, please contact your telecom manager, or an AT&T representative at 1-800-331-0500.

Thank you for choosing wireless from AT&T. We appreciate your business.

Sincerely,
AT&T Customer Service

BGR suspects that pretty soon, AT&T will make sure that all users who are using the iPhone with non-iPhone plans will need to pay as much as the iPhone-specific plan subscribers do.

Now, the quality of the 3G service provided by AT&T is a totally different story, but this story does seem to raise a lot of concerns.

If AT&T starts doing this in the USA, other carriers in the other countries won’t wait too long to crackdown on the iPhones being used on their networks. I’m not sure if Apple is/will participate in this, but if the carriers get hold of the IMEI numbers of all the iPhone in the market, it shouldn’t be difficult to find those defaulters.

I doubt this will result in a crackdown of the unlocked iPhones, but carriers can definitely stop servicing those who are not on the iPhone specific plans. Luckily, a few markets where the iPhone has been launched, such as India, the users are free to use any available plans on their iPhone, but provided that the iPhone has been purchased officially from the carrier itself.

Is this the beginning of the end?

Ever since the official carriers for iPhone 3G announced the pricing, there has been widespread disappointment among the people, thanks to the high prices set for phone. Hoping to cash in on this phenomenon, Nokia India had announced the launch of the Nokia N96 for the Indian Markets. People immediately started calling it the iPhone Killer, owing to the high feature set that it comes along. Compared to the other phones in its category, the Nokia N96 is so far the most powerful handset in the market and wins hands down over other through its fancy looks.

However, today’s announcement might come as a dampener to the public. According to Nokia, the phone will be available in retail outlets from September 15th, 2008 and will be priced at Rs. 34,999 (around 440 GBP).

Mr. Devinder Kishore, MD of Nokia India, said:

In the Web 2.0 era, the new Nokia N96 places the power to shape in internet in your hands. Nokia N96 offers the most personalised mobile internet experience to date and it defines convergence by blending phone and multimedia options seamlessly.

Nokia is the most popular handset manufacturer in the country and their N-series phones are becoming a popular trend among the youth.

India, a country of over 350 million mobile subscribers has long waited for the launch of the iPhone in India. However, everyone who was eagerly anticipating the launch was in for a rude shock when the two operators announced the pricing of the iPhone. According to the official press-releases from both the operators, the 8GB model of the iPhone 3G has been priced at Rs. 31,00 (GBP 382) while the 16GB model (both Black and White versions) have been priced at Rs. 36,100 (GBP 445). Even though the iPhone 3G is being offered without any contract in the country, it will still be locked to the respective carrier.

However, the users do not seem to have taken the pricing announcements well. They seem to left everyone in a tussle as to why a device that was touted to be ‘half the price’ actually turned out to be four times more. People from all walks of life are voicing their opinions on Twitter and other online discussion forums. As it turns out, every one was expecting the iPhone 3G to be priced at par with the price that was announced for the US market – $199.

Now, I do not blame the carriers for the pricing. The Indian telecom market behaves very distinctively, where the subsidized system or yearly contracts do not work. A majority a subscribers in the country are prepaid subscribers. A large portion of the 350 million people use handsets from the entry-level segments. This leaves only a select few people who use smartphones. Other than the Blackberry phones in the country, almost all phones sold in the country are no-contract, unlocked phones. Thus, there was no way the Indian carriers could have chosen Apple’s preferred system of subsidizing the phone.

Mobile aficionados and the elite mobile users in the country, however, would not be as surprised or as disappointed as the general public. This is because Apple products in the country are known for their flaunt value, not use. Apple is pre-dominantly known because of the range of iPods sold in the country. So popular are the iPods, that pretty-much all music players have come to be regarded as ‘iPods’, even if they are the cheap, chinese make. With all the hype surrounding the iPhone, people had comfortably set in to the fact that it would become another gadget with very high flaunt value. Thus, users looking to buy the phone for this sole purpose would buy it, no matter what price it came for. Speaking to one of the dealers in the gray-markets, I was told that the iPhone 3G was available for Rs. 65,000 (GBP 800) and he had already sold over 10 such pieces. This could well give you an indication of the craziness for the iPhone that had dwelled upon the people.

So how would the iPhone fare in the Indian Market? Not so well, if you ask me.

1. The iPhone has been launched in a market where individuals think twice before spending anything over Rs. 15,000 (GBP 185) for their handsets. Again, he does not wish to be bound in a contract by the carrier, and is free to change carriers everyday if he wishes to. It is only the elite individuals that spend upwards of Rs. 15K on their phones, though they comprise only a small portion of the total population.

2. The market is predominantly ruled by Nokia and Sony-Ericsson phones, with Samsung or Motorola not too far behind. These companies are known to add much of the high-end features into all their phone. Hence, features such as High-Megapixeled cameras, video recordings, ability to forward text messages, memory expansion slots are seen as a necessity by everyone, something that lacks in the iPhone.

3. Absence of 3G network. It may be hard to believe, but a country of 350 million mobile subscribers does not have 3G networks. This makes one of the best feature of the iPhone to be rendered useless in the country. Not just that, the GPRS and EDGE services offered my many operators are pathetic to say the least. This again makes browsing on iPhone a not-so-enjoyable task. Finding WiFi spots in the country is as easy as finding a water fountain in the desert.

4. No iTunes Store makes a lot less enjoyable. Yes, Apple did launch the iTunes Store for India and other surrounding countries, but the only things available there are the Apps from the App Store. This, again, requires the user to have a user account by signing up with a credit card, something which is not easy to find among a majority of the mobile subscribers. And the lack of media content via the iTunes Store is not acceptable either.

The iPhone competes head on with the likes of Nokia N-series and E-series phones like the N95, N82, E71 and the K and W series phones from Sony-Ericsson. To counter-attack the iPhone launch, Nokia announced the launch of the much anticipated N96 in the Indian Market, a whole month before its launch in the US. Although it will be priced around the same price as the 16GB version of iPhone 3G, it carries a much wider feature-set and a brand name that the Indians are accustomed to. Obviously, it would be the preferred choice.

Bharti Airtel has decided to have a launch event at the stroke of midnight tonight, opening the gates to three of its many stores in the country. The phones will be provided on a first come-first serve basis. However, I fail to see people lining up outside the stores for the gadget. The only people who’d turn up for the event would be news reporters and a few fanboys.

Vodafone India customers will be able to hunt for a partner by checking Shaadi members’ profiles and details using via voice calls and texts, as well as through Vodafone’s portal. Those using the service will be able to send messages to their would-be love interests and accept or decline expressions of interest sent by other members.

Makes an interesting change from the usual fake flirting services for £1.50 a text that dog late night TV channels.

Now if an individual on the country’s ‘do not call’ register finds themselves on the end of a sales call, the service provider will be fined 5,000 rupees for the first call and 20,000 rupees for any subsequent ones – that’s the not-to-be-sniffed at equivalent of £62 and £247 respectively. And the individual telemarketer will have to pay 500 rupees for the first call and 1,000 for any others.

Sounds like a great idea. Ofcom take note.

Reuters add that Indian security agencies want RIM to provide the government with all the necessary algorithms to break the encryption used by the BlackBerry, while The Business Standard suggests that if the algorithms aren’t delivered, RIM could find itself cut off from the end of March.

It’s not the first time RIM has found itself under the microscope over security concerns and even threatened with a ban, but this is thought to be the first time that it’s been asked to hand over its encryption keys. It’ll be interesting to see whether RIM would rather hand over the goods or keep its crown jewels safe and face being locked out of a massive market.