News Roundup: Airtel Money Launched in Chennai, Sify Launches Internet Radio

Airtel earlier launched Airtel Money in Gurgaon and the service is now expanded to Chennai.

Aimed at offering customers with an efficient alternative to cash transactions, airtel money will provide airtel customers across the country with a convenient and secure way of making payments through the ubiquitous mobile platform.

Load cash: Load cash on your airtel mobile by visiting your nearest airtel retail outlet [Minimum is Rs. 10, Maximum is Rs. 5,000 and monthly limit stands at Rs. 50, 000]. Pay bills & recharge: You will be able to use this cash in your mobile for making bill payments (electricity, gas, financial services, etc.) and recharge – Limits same as above. Shop & make payments: Instead of cash, pay over-the-counter merchants such as your nearest kirana store, chemist, etc using your mobile phone. You can even sit at home and pay for services like booking movie tickets online

Airtel had recently announced a JV with State Bank of India to provide banking and financial services to millions of unbanked Indians using the mobile platform. With this launch of airtel money – airtel now offers a complete suite of financial products on mobile devices for the banked as well as unbanked population of the country.

Airtel in Chennai has partnered with around 750 prominent merchants, including Oriental Cuisines (which runs Benjarong, Zara, Cascade and French Loaf restaurants), Univercell, Poorvika, Inox, Bharti AXA and LIC.

[Read: How to Use Airtel Money]

Sify, in partnership with Radio City 91.1 FM, has launched Sify Radio. This tie-up will enable visitors to Sify.com to enjoy Bollywood, Indi-Pop and other genres of music 24×7. The content broadcast on Radio on Sify will be different from the terrestrial programming of Radio City 91.1 FM. Some of the special features of Radio on Sify are:

– Uninterrupted streaming: Visitors can listen to their favourite songs without any buffering at an internet speed as low as even 128 Kbps.
– Popular RJ’s: Visitors/audience can select songs from a given list and dedicate it to friends/loved ones. The RJ will announce the dedications during particular shows.
– Facebook apps: Users can post their comments/dedications via any mail id or their Facebook account. Comments/dedications will also be posted to their Facebook walls.
– Show Time: Show Time features the daywise list of all the shows. [Source]

India and the World Bank on Tuesday signed a loan agreement worth $150 million for the e-delivery of public services development policy under the National e-governance plan (NeGP). NeGP is a flagship e-governance initiative of the Central Government aimed at transforming the service delivery system across the country [via].

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InMobi Launches SmartPay, Global Mobile Payment Service

InMobi has launched SmartPay, a global mobile payment service that will enable app developers, game companies, and content providers in the mobile content and virtual goods space to expand their business and monetize their users quickly by providing a one-time, no setup cost, single point of integration across multiple countries.
The solution offers consumers a seamless, pure mobile checkout experience using secure, direct to carrier billing to start, but expanding to all forms of mobile payment methods including credit cards, PayPal, and local mobile wallets by the end of the year.

“Today’s mobile payment options are basic transaction pipelines and offer very little beyond providing transactional support. InMobi SmartPay™ is a ‘performance based’ payments platform that provides data and insights through an easy to use interface, which help merchants optimize conversion paths, product offering, and pricing to maximize their ROI. Developers can also track advertising performance from impression all the way through to conversion. The result is better ad targeting, higher conversion rates & better revenues.”

“InMobi SmartPay™ technology automatically recognizes the country, handset, operator and OS of the consumer and dynamically serves the buying path most likely to convert. With 4.2 million possible combinations, automating this task is a huge benefit to developers.”[blog]

InMobi’s SmartPay currently supports 7 countries (US, UK, Germany, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, and South Africa) and plans to expand to 30 countries by end of this year.
Given that InMobi has witnessed phenomenal success in non-US markets, this seems to be the logical move by being more developer friendly and hence, be the pipe that enables transactions across platforms.

The road however isn’t going to be smooth for the team, as there are multiple options (for payment plus there is quite a mafia everywhere) and integrating payment systems across different countries will entail its own friction.
Of course, if this succeeds, InMobi will be a super awesome acquisition target.
What’s your take?

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IBM Launches Virtual Desktop in India Targeted Towards SMBs [Cloud Computing]

IBM has launched Virtual Desktop in India that offers anytime/anywhere access to one’s personal desktop via multiple devices (thin clients/mobile/laptop/iPad etc).

IBM will offer its desktop via ZSL and Ingram Micro, its channel partners in India. IBM’s virtualization technology combines virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology using Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment (VERDE), technology relicensed from Virtual Bridges.

The service will be sold as a software appliance model and will allow Windows or Linux desktops to be hosted and managed centrally.



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