NEWS & VIEWS: GSM India 2005: Revelry in Goa

Goa hosted the eighth annual GSM World Series India in January 2005 where the
event host Indian GSM operators. The event was dominated by content on mobile
and how there can be an increase in market share. The potential for operators to
capitalize on film and television industry in the mobile space ws highlighted
with Anil Garg, CTO, Sony Entertainment Television India, talking about the
power of television's convergence with mobile. He cited Indian Idol, a program
on TV, which provides for SMS interaction with the audience. It gets around two
lakh SMS hits in one hour of the program relay. He pegged the Indian SMS-TV
interactive market at Rs 24 crore in 2004.

TV
Ramachandran, director general, COAI highlighting the growth prospects and the
impact of low tariffs on operations explained that they could not achieve the
targets with their current ways of operation and needed a paradigm shift in the
approach. He said the need of the hour was to reach the huge mass of not-served
and addressable population through 'coopetiton'.

GSM India 2005 also served as a platform for VAS providers to share with the
industry the future and the growth prospective of VAS in not only data-based
applications but also around voice, such as voice SMS and ringtones which seem
to be very poplar in India.

CIT 2005: ICT for Development

The annual Conference on Communications and IT (CIT) will be held from 4—6
February in Ahmedabad. The theme of this year's conference will be: harnessing
CIT for enterprise and social-economic development.

The conference will deal with: exploiting emerging technologies for
enterprises, trends in communication technologies, e-governance, and CIT in
bioinformatics and health care. It will also look at technologies beyond
tomorrow and showcasing SMEs that have promising products or services.

The session on e-governance is expected to be led by Narendra Modi, chief
minister of Gujarat. Ministers, senior bureaucrats, corporate leaders, and
academicians will also be a part of this sesison.

The conference will also feature an open competition for SMEs with novel
products and services.