While the US (the home base of the Net and all things techie) continues to dominate the Internet innovation charts, I will confine myself to the possibilities that are present in India for today’s Internet entrepreneurs. These are the possibilities unleashed by the new forces of the Internet revolution in our country that promise to help us overcome the access hurdle—the mobile phone and broadband.
With over 120 million mobile phones in March 2007 (and growing by around 5 million every month), India is definitely the mobile market that the world is watching. This is mostly being driven by the ruthless slashing of airtime cost and handset prices. What’s interesting is how this can turn out to be an equally big Internet story as our networks roll out 3G and 4G services.
This promises to make the country’s workforce increasingly data-enabled on the move. Imagine if you could check in to your flight before you checked out from your hotel. Imagine being able to get stop loss (or book profit) alerts on your stock portfolio while you are on tour, and confirming trade orders to your broker through chat. Better still, what if you could trade online from the touch screen of your hand-helds, so that there was no chance of human error or miscommunication?
Well, here’s the good news: you already can, and at prices which are going the same way as airtime is! The big constraint of the mobile Internet is the price of the handset. Here’s an opportunity: can anyone design and deliver an Internet ready 3G/4G mobile handset for under Rs 5,000 to the end user? I’m willing to let go of the in-built camera or music player.
Next, imagine this working-life Internet getting into your home-life as well.
For under Rs 300 a month, I can get broadband access almost anywhere in India. The problem here is that PCs are still notoriously costly, around Rs 18,000 for a base config. So here’s a second opportunity: with more television sets in Indian homes than telephone landlines, the next big device can be a TV add-on that morphs into a network device on plugging into the Internet. I believe something like this exists already. The trick is in making it home-friendly, sturdy and cheap enough to make the value burst out of the packing.
With e-mail, disk space, spreadsheets, word processors, music, video, games and other apps available over a browser, there is every reason that this device (ideal price: Rs 5,000 again) would find takers among Indian households.
It seems ironic that both opportunities I am propounding are hardware oriented. The reason is simple: it is on the hardware front that the constraints of the Internet revolution seem to lie today. The Net will extend real world business opportunities into the virtual world once these devices get the Internet to touch ordinary people’s lives at an affordable cost. The software and application opportunities will of course follow.
What you can do online will then be limited only by your imagination, and that of the software wizards whose genius will be harnessed by the businesses who want to service your needs.
dipen@wealthmanager.ws
(By Dipen Sheth, Head of Research, Wealth Management Advisory Services)
