Three months ago, I blogged about Airtel not coming up with anything new, and wondered if they’d been left behind in the innovation race. Very embarassing, considering all that they’ve been doing the past month.
First up, there’s the Songcatcher service. The technology was invented in Europe a year or two ago, if I recall correctly. At that time, the application being talked about was to identify a song on the radio you liked. The service would identify it and send you an SMS with the names of the song and the artist. Not really a great business model.
But along comes Airtel, and uses it to selll ringback tones, allowing customers to skip all that painful SMSing or navigating through menus. Bam! You’ve got a commercially viable business model, and the technology finally meets the publilc. Awesome. And Airtel is so good at this- looking for existing technology. adapting it to the local environment, and bringing it to market.
Next, there’s this Business Standard report about Airtel tying up with SBI to turn mobile phones into virtual Kisaan Credit Cards. Lovely again. They’ve had a tieup with ICICI bank to implement credit card on/ through mobile for some time now, but that has just been a test project in Mumbai and Delhi. This takes it to the next level. Of course, it would really explode if the RBI regulation that restricts mobiles from being used as debit cards was removed.
And finally, today’s Business Standard article has more on the payments front. Airtel’s entered a global alliance to develop a platform for remittances over mobile phones.
The (mobile) payments business is so exciting these days that it deserves a blogpost to itself. Heck, I’d love to make a presentation on it the next time there’s a BarCamp in South India. But until then, this will have to do.