Infosys mobility solutions with a strong Indian context:

1. Insurance for Rural India

One of the more significant challenges that organizations face, including those [...]]]> Taken from Gnanapriya C and Puneet Gupta’s online paper on relevance of mobile based information services in India:

Infosys mobility solutions with a strong Indian context:

1. Insurance for Rural India

One of the more significant challenges that organizations face, including those in the insurance sectors, is the ability to serve the client base in small towns and in rural areas where it is not practical to extend the company’s presence by setting up physical infrastructures. Many of these places are not well served even from an internet connectivity perspective. Surprisingly even the remotest of these areas are today being served by mobile networks. We have been working on creating technology platforms that enable creation of solutions that leverage a low cost mobile device that a local, employed by the company as its representative, can use to provide several services which were hitherto possible only when a customer were to visit the nearest office in one of the towns. The field representative can use her/his mobile phone to access services like getting customer information, receiving alerts related to due dates for renewals and updation of premium payments received, just to give a few examples. Thus by using a low cost mobile device, the field agent can provide all critical services even in areas where setting up of basic internet infrastructure can be a challenge. Advanced synchronization techniques supporting both SMS and wireless data technologies offered by GPRS as well as CDMA networks, ensure that the cost per transaction can be kept extremely low.

2. Microfinance

MicroFinance is a solution provides a finance company providing micro-loans to help their field agents to track their customers, their credit limits, loans and payments. The situation involves a credit company providing “micro” loans where the loan amounts are very small. Therefore the cost of transaction per loan sanctioned or payment made should be extremely low. With the MicroFinance application, data is available with the finance company’s agent to monitor his clients’ loans and their payments. Transactions are offline and data is synchronized with backend server at a later time or when connectivity is available.

The key attributes of the solution is the way the technology solution deals with factors like:

• Non-availability of network connection
• Cost of network connectivity (air-time) to access data
• Security of confidential data transmitted/received over the air
• Speed of transactions
• Data loss and recovery

3. Application of mobile real time data for dairy professionalsBased on TruSync, Infosys mobile synchronization platform, this solution is aimed at enabling field force of a dairy organization to enable us of mobile device like PDAs to provide nutrition, animal diet and wellness services as well as vaccination services to farmers who have no other effective mechanism to scientifically deal with animal care to increase net yields. The solution strength lays in the ability of underlying technology platform to deal with the complexities of the wireless connectivity infrastructure. The technology enables the application to work in offline situations when connectivity is not available or when the cost of connectivity is high. The technology involves opportunistic pre-fetching of data and by masking the disconnectedness from the end application by fetching the data from the local database, masking the actual state of connectedness from the end application. The solution is also aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of such mobile solutions both from technology and cost perspectives.

GupShup is an SMS based mobile application which attempts to bring social networking to the mobile world. It was introduced by Webaroo, who’s founder is Rakesh Mathur. People can create, manage or contribute to groups by either using the GupShup website or by sending an SMS to a local mobile phone short code. This application [...]]]>

GupShup is an SMS based mobile application which attempts to bring social networking to the mobile world. It was introduced by Webaroo, who’s founder is Rakesh Mathur. People can create, manage or contribute to groups by either using the GupShup website or by sending an SMS to a local mobile phone short code. This application is centered around the creation and management of groups. Basically a group SMS feature, but one that has a short code, in a country where mobile phone usage, specifically SMS, is exploding. They claim that this service has existed in India for just over a month, and has some 10,000 members already – but is doubling in size every week. They also state that the use of this social networking service is critical in a country such as India, where most people cannot use the mainstream services such as myspace because of the difficulty to gain access to a web-enabled computer.

This sort of service ignited an interesting thought in my head. i could definitely use this short code (67673434 in India) and create an Indigi-Net group which would allow to share information regarding exchange possibilities and other local initiatives for travelers. Or what about just general travel information and recommendations. Since most people travel with mobile phones anyhow, and the cost of local messages, even when roaming, is low, this tool might have very interesting implications, specifically in India. Now I just need to go there…

Their business model incorporates ads which are attached to the group messages, and (supposedly) have some contextual relevance. Not sure how that will work – especially since SMS messages are quite short already.