Bharti Airtel has become the first mobile service provider to roll out 8 series mobile numbers in West Bengal. Now, Airtel West Bengal will be offering mobile numbers starting with 8, to be available in 8016 series. This will be available for new connections in both pre-paid and post-paid categories, as reported by Business Line. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) recently gave the go-ahead for 10-digit numbers starting with ‘8′. With the launch, India now joins other countries like China and the UK to have changed mobile numbers because of a swelling subscriber pool and an increasing number of service providers.

Source: EFY Times

Bharti Airtel has launched two cost-effective mobile Internet recharge vouchers, for its prepaid users in Delhi and NCR. This initiative also marks the first time that recharge for Internet usage has been launched on the ‘electronic recharge’ platform. The introduction of these value vouchers will enable customers to enjoy mobile Internet at Rs 95 per 100 MB and Rs 26 per 15 MB, resulting in savings of up to 80 per cent on current competitive tariffs.

“As an industry leader, Airtel has always led the market in ushering affordability and convenience for its customers. This initiative marks our strategic intent to drive affordability in mobile Internet connectivity and add value for our prepaid customers,” said Shashi Arora, CEO, Bharti Airtel Limited, (mobile services), Delhi and NCR.

He further added, “We are confident that our latest Internet recharge offer over electronic platform will help our customers control their Internet usage and gain better value for money.”

Source:  EFY Times

India's First Android Mobile Phones

The HTC Magic is the first Google Android phone that will become available in India through Airtel at around 30k INR. It’s the same phone that’s marketed as Android G2 or myTouch 3G by T-Mobile in America and a unlocked version of this phone was given to all attendees of the Google I/O conference.

The HTC Magic is Wi-Fi enabled and features a 3.2 Megapixel camera (that can record still photos as well as video) but unlike the Nokia N97, it has no physical keyboard. Other models like the HTC Touch and HTC Dream (or G1) feature a keyboard but none of them are in India yet at least through official channels.

The phone features a unique bar coding application so if you are shopping somewhere, you can quickly scan the barcode of any product in the shelf to get more information about that product using your Google phone.

While Airtel is the exclusively selling HTC Magic Android phones in India, the good news is that these are unlocked phones so you can buy a phone from Airtel and use the SIM of other cellular networks like Vodafone, BSNL, Reliance, etc.

The difference here is that executives can now use Airtel’s GSM network on any mobile handset to access their business-critical data like their enterprise resource planning (ERP) databases, email and intranets. Users can install a client application called the Mobile Applications Tool for Enterprises or MATE from Airtel on their handset. MATE is an integrated telecom & IT platform, and enables authorised users only to access their business data through mobile devices.

For instance, a field agent can record symptoms of a patient in a rural area, and send it to a city-based doctor for his online prescription, and deliver the medicine to the patient — all in a matter of a few minutes, since the agent is using his mobile and the GSM (and GPRS or internet) network. The device can be integrated with a bluetooth printer to get a printed prescription, too. Similarly, retail, media, logistics and courier companies too can use this solution to cut their sales cycles to a few minutes. Due to the mobility, for instance, a logistics company will not need to invest in brick and mortar branches.

“The platform promises to be a great proposition for various industries that depend on their field force like retail, media, FMCG, etc. Depending on the requirements, Airtel will deploy MATE platform to help organisations in operations and ultimately deliver better customer service,” says David Nishball – President, Enterprise Services, Bharti Airtel. Without divulging any names, Nishball says he has “received the maximum interest from segments like media, logistics, BFSI, and to some extent, from the government sector, too”

The move also makes business sense for Airtel, which derives around 22 per cent of its total revenues from the enterprise segment. MATE adds value to the proposition. The mobile VAS industry is expected to grow at 70 per cent over the next two years, to touch Rs 16,520 crore by end-June 2010. Enterprise VAS is playing a crucial part in the VAS industry, offering high-value tailor-made solutions and services to enterprises. It is expected to be about Rs 1,000 crore in about three to five years.

But the proposition is not entirely new. Enterprises today offer mobile-enabling enterprise services like capture field force data, supply chain information, sales /customer data, information from retail outlets, data about your raw material sites and more. “Field force integration is the key to business process automation, which could fill the gap effectively that PC-based internet could not address,” counters Rajiv Sehgal-Head, Enterprise Mobile Solutions.

There is an inexorable shift happening from the PC-centric world to a mobile-centric world and simultaneously, we are seeing an emergence of cloud computing architecture, concurs Alok Shende, Principal Analyst of Ascentius Consulting. Airtel’s new offerings on enterprise VAS, he adds, is contextualised to these emerging paradigms. “With the launch of one of the first mobility platforms in India,” he concludes, “Airtel has not only upped the ante on competition, but also created solutions that purport to cut layers of cost for their customers.”

‘Business on the go’ is the key word here, given that, on an average, 36 per cent of employees spend a day or more away from their primary workspace.

And as a US group study indicates, by 2011, 46.6 million corporate employees will spend at least one day a week teleworking globally and an additional 112 million will work from home at least one day a month. Solutions like these, note analysts, will only help the cause.

Source:  MSN News