Imaging: Santanu Mallick

Whatdo you use your mobile phone for? To make and receive calls? Send SMSs to friends? Listen to music? This may sound awful, but that is SO last year, my dear. Why don’t you try paying your bills through your mobile phone? Searching for the right restaurant? Sending SMSs to your group of friends and paying for just one? Not paying for your SMSs at all? Using your mobile phone as a web cam? Sending emails through your mobile — using not a high-end Blackberry but your basic handset?

All this may sound way too far-fetched to you, but to a bunch of young entrepreneurs it’s time the mobile phone’s real powers were harnessed. They believe the technology is out there and it only needs to be tweaked to create cool applications. And given that India is the largest growing mobile market in the world, adding about 8 million phones every month, there’s a compelling reason to do this. The number of people with a mobile phone in India — touching 269 million — is way ahead of the number of people with Internet connectivity, around 40 million.

With starry-eyed start-ups kicking off regularly, who will survive in the long run? “Services essential for niche segments. It depends on the type of application, the ease of usage, the need for it and the marketing muscle behind it,” says digital media analyst Nikhil Pahwa.

Here we list a few applications developed by passionate young entrepreneurs that are designed to make your mobile go that extra mile:

mChek Mobile Wallet Sanjay Swamy assures that mCheck transactions are absolutely secure

mChek

Why not use your mobile to pay your mobile bill and a host of others too? After all, it’s only a matter of using the power of your credit card/debit card/ bank account and integrating it with the mobile phone, the way it’s integrated with online payment gateways when you buy something on the Internet, be it airline tickets or books.

It’s a fairly simple idea, really. In fact, entrepreneur Sanjay Swamy who has 12 years experience in Silicon Valley start-ups behind him, believes all good ideas that work make people sit up and think ‘why didn’t I think of this’?

Mchek entered into a strategic partnership with India’s biggest cellular operator Airtel recently, enabling you to pay your Airtel bills by registering with mChek and sending an SMS to the company sharing your credit card/debit card number.

The transaction is absolutely secure, assures Swamy. In fact, he believes this is the safest way of doing business since ALL information is encrypted and none is shared with the merchant in a manner where it could be used maliciously. Also, transactions can be done from the most basic phones in the market. The ‘mChek on Airtel’ mobile payments service today has more than 1 lakh transacting customers with 90 per cent repeat usage pattern and has processed more than Rs 100 million of mobile payments since its launch in September 2007.

mChek has also tied up with banks and credit card merchants such as HDFC Bank, Citi India, ICICI Bank, Corporation Bank and VISA and e-commerce merchants like MakeMyTrip, Yatra, Indiatimes, FutureBazaar and SifyMall to enable safe and smart mobile payments.

But what Swamy dreams of is even bigger than this. He wants you to step out of your house carrying nothing but your mobile phone and using it to pay for the taxi and at the supermarket. In fact, this is already on the ground in Sri Lanka, where mChek has tied up with Dialog Telekom and almost 500 merchants enabling secure payments ranging from utility bills/pre-paid top-ups to over-the-counter and remote commerce.

WWIGO

WWIGO8 Mobile Webcam From left: TVS Deepak, M Thiyagarajan, P Naveen and K C Ramu are co-founders of Motvik Technologies

You may be forgiven for thinking WWIGO to be an acronym standing for tech jargon but it simply expands into ‘WebCam Wherever I Go’. And that pretty much explains the function of this nifty little software.

With WWIGO, a camera phone can be used as a webcam with your PC or laptop using Bluetooth as the transmission medium. It consists of two software components: a mobile component that resides on the phone and streams video to the PC and a PC component that receives the video. By downloading this software (go to www.wwigo.com), you can use your camera phone as a wireless webcam. Also, you can record videos, use along with Skype, Windows Messenger and Yahoo Messenger to do video chat and upload to video-hosting websites such as YouTube.

“We did not expect so many people to be interested,” says M Thiyagarajan, part of the four-member founding team of Motvik Technologies that is behind this product. Today, they see around 500-600 downloads every day and the total number of downloads is touching 2 lakh.

All four members of the team, Thiyagarajan and TVS Deepak , Ramu KC and P Naveen were co-workers at a mobile multimedia startup called Emuzed. “We were developing some of the first applications for smart phones, which came into the Indian market years after they were developed. We wanted to use our expertise to build something for the Indian market and have it available immediately,” says Thiyagarajan, popularly known as Rajan in the Bangalore/Hyderabad start-up circuit as the convener of the Bangalore chapter of Mobile Monday or MoMo, a global community of wireless industry professionals which awarded WWIGO the peer award at its Global Summit in Malaysia in May 2008.

TringMe Mobile VOIP service Yusuf Motiwala believes that he needs to cater to a wider base

TringMe Mobile

TringMe is a successful VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) service enabling users to make international calls using their PCs (Internet telephony) at a fraction of the cost of an ISD call. Developed by Yusuf Motiwala, a techie who has worked with companies like Texas Instruments and Lucent Technologies, it allows people to call or leave a voicemail from the web.

TringMe Mobile was born because Motiwala felt extending his service to the ubiquitous mobile phone was imperative. He believes, firstly, that PC penetration in our country is still low. “Secondly, the average Indian population isn’t tech-savvy,” he says. “Most people can’t configure VoIP clients or change settings. We soon realised that to enable the masses, we need to make TringMe accessible from the mobile which everyone can use,” says Motiwala.

Currently, the service is available only on smart phones such as the Nokia E and N series phones and uses the inbuilt cellular internet/data connection (e.g. GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA, EVDO, Wi-Fi) for free. But Motiwala believes that to be successful, TringMe needs to cater to the entire spectrum of phones and is developing an SMS callback-based capability for emerging markets. Using TringMe’s patent pending technology, this allows someone with a cheap, non-data capable phone to make Mobile VoIP calls.

ActivMobs Group sms service Akshat Choudhary with Sidu Ponappa (middle) and Vidit Choudhary launched ActivMobs in Bangalore last year

ActivMobs

Imagine planning a movie date with five friends. You send an SMS suggesting going for Jodha Akbar. Friend A says he would rather go for Iron Man, Friend B weighs in saying she wants to go for the new Narnia film and Friend C calls saying he wants to drop the movie plan altogether, and let’s go eat out! Soon, after typing out dozens of SMSs, you have wished them all to hell and are sitting at home watching Stepmom on HBO for the seventeenth time.

With a group SMS service such as ActivMobs, this situation could be much simpler. Developed by three young software guys in Bangalore, ActivMobs provides group chat via SMS by placing an application between you and the people receiving your message.

“To send a message to a group, you send it to Activ and it is forwarded. The cool part is that when someone replies, it again reaches everyone in the group,” explains Akshat Choudhary, who along with friend Sidu Ponappa and brother Vidit Choudhary launched ActivMobs in Bangalore last year. They have around 50,000 users now. While the service is currently available only in Karnataka, the trio plan to do a nationwide launch very soon.

All three hold day jobs, working on ActivMobs in spare time. They plan to generate revenue from advertisers, who will tag their text ads on to the SMS. As their target consumers are primarily young college students and IT professionals, they are pretty confident clients will bite.

160by2 Free sms service Satya Yerramsetti (extreme left) with the sales team of SMS Country

160by2

Sounds like ordering soup in a Chinese restaurant, doesn’t it? Actually, it refers to a service offered by SMS Country, a Hyderabad-based start-up founded by techies Satya Yerramsetti and Raju Kalluri five years ago. The flagship product of this company is ‘160 by 2’ — and there really is a simple explanation behind that intriguing name.

The maximum length of an SMS is 160 characters as per global standards. Satya and Raju came up with the idea of splitting this up into two between the mobile user and an advertiser, allowing users to send free SMSs up to 80 characters long as long as they agreed to append a text ad, again up to 80 characters long, from an advertiser. For this, users have to register themselves with SMS Country and provide their mobile phone numbers.

The tagging of the advertisement is done by the software automatically based on the time the SMS is sent or the location of the receiver or keywords in the message. Sometimes the advertisers ask for parameters like age, gender and marital status of the message receiver. For example, an SMS with the words ‘Congratulations’ or ‘Love’ in it might carry a text ad for Cadbury’s as the tagline. Messages being delivered at lunch time might have a Mc Donald’s ad promoting their delivery number.

“We borrowed the idea from e-mail ads,” says Satya, referring to programs such as Google Ad-Sense which reads the text of the e-mail or blog and appends suitable ads. “We see that lot of functions that were once on the computer are now moving on to the mobile,” says Satya, adding that 160by2 is a business innovation rather than a tech innovation but one that is primarily driven by technology.

Zook Mobile social answer service Ajay Sethi is the CEO of Ziva Software

Zook

If you’ve ever been stuck in a city on a business trip, not knowing where to head for a meal or which movies are playing in the theatres, you will appreciate this solution from Bangalore-based start-up Ziva Software. It’s the world’s first mobile social answer service.

“Say you’re ‘out there’,” explains Ziva co-founder Sameer Shisodia, “and need the number of a cab service, or want to know when a monument was made, or what movies are playing in town, just send an SMS to 57575665 with your query or point the mobile browser to http://zook.in.”

Typical queries would look like the keywords you fire on a web search engine, “but the answers are more relevant and crisp,” says Shisodia who runs Ziva along with Ajay Sethi, the CEO. Both were co-workers at Oracle and have years of tech experience. They are also integrating groups into the search system for people with common interests, so in a way this also works as a social networking tool. Similarly, the community pitches in with answers to specific queries if the search engine cannot provide relevant answers.

Zook started out in Bangalore but now provides answers across six cities including Calcutta. The founders firmly believe mobile search is the next big thing, a belief that was vindicated recently when Ziva got VC funding to the tune of Rs 7.5 crore from Ojas Partners (a Nadathur Ventures’ effort).

Why the mobile and not the web? “The mobile reaches many more people and is a tool that’s plugged in to people’s lives 24x7. Also, you don’t have to ‘sit down’ to do a search on the mobile, it’s all on the go,” says Shisodia.

MyDuniya Web on the go Kesava Reddy M, K G Subramanian and P Iyengar are part of MyDuniya’s core team

MyDuniya

MyDuniya is a Just-by-SMS service supporting a variety of simple tasks that may otherwise need reaching out to a PC or the Web. MyDuniya performs a pre-defined process based on the SMS request which could range from sending an e-mail to looking up something in Wikipedia or writing notes to oneself — digital versions of Post-Its. You can even upload your files and e-mail them using simple SMS requests (for details check http://www.myduniya.in/login/-helpful_tips).

It basically works like this: you send the request preceded by certain pre-determined keywords to the MyDuniya number (53695 in Karnataka and 99801-53695 for the rest of India) and the company executes it. In Karnataka, where MyDuniya has a tie-up with Airtel, you pay just for your SMS. Elsewhere, you need to create an account with MyDuniya and buy credit from them in the form of points, which are later used up as and when you send in your requests.

This idea is the brainchild of K. Ganapathy Subramanian, another Bangalore-based IT guy who spent a number of years as a Venture Capitalist at ICICI Venture and JumpStartUp. “This idea developed from my conviction that the utility of mobile phones was not stretched beyond voice. This is true even today… there’s tons of technology, but harnessing them into useful applications is still lagging behind,” says Subramanian.