Rahul Nandi

D. Murali

Sample these observations: Out of 200 students, only one of them did not have a mobile phone, and he too was planning to buy one during Durga Puja. Over 60 per cent of the students currently use Nokia phones. More than 75 per cent use feature-rich phones — the colour ones with GPRS. And with most of them willing to spend in excess of Rs 15,000 on a handset, over 80 per cent want to purchase an N-Series Nokia phone as their next stop.

These are among the findings of Tunespray’s ‘College Road Show – Trip Report – September 2008’ from a mix of engineering, business, marketing and computer science students in Durgapur, Kolkata, Jadavpur, Siliguri, Kharagpur and Asansol.

“You should plan a trip to Kolkata and stop by our incubation centre,” invites Rahul Nandi, Founder and CEO of Tunespray. “I can also take you to Durgapur, past the remains of the Singur factory,” he offers, during a recent interaction with eWorld.

“This is what I normally do with students. It’s a give-and-take process,” explains Nandi, about his road shows. “I get their help doing beta testing and in return I spend a day talking to them about mobile value added services (MVAS).”

We continue our conversation over e-mail.

Excerpts from the interview.

What was the trigger to start Tunespray?

The company was formed because my partner and I share a passion for nascent technologies in the mobile area.

In India, there is still an absence of rich, interactive options for mobile communications. Largely driven by the operators, most current content is just wallpapers or ring tones.

We wanted to create a platform that has mass market appeal and allows common users to leverage their creativity to create and send graphic-rich content, pictures, music via mobiles to communicate. I want users to become content creators, not just consumers.

Why Kolkata as the location for incubating the company?

Although not a native of Kolkata, I decided to move and incubate our company here for several reasons. First, the Government of West Bengal and the Ekta incubation centre were very supportive and efficient from the time we first presented a proposal — they continue to support us.

Bengalis are passionate about technology; we want to show that a successful product company can be launched in West Bengal. Talent is plentiful and the cost of running a business is much less than other parts of India.

Additionally, there’s lots of room to grow in Kolkata, whereas other major metros seem to be saturated. Despite the headlines and obvious recent setbacks, companies in Kolkata are thriving and we are just one of the many up-and-coming firms in West Bengal.

Tell us about your talent hunt – how you go about it, and what the surprises have been?

Hiring was initially challenging for us, since we could not find experienced professionals who wanted to work for start-up companies.

Driven by necessity, we decided to extend our talent search to the engineering colleges in Kolkata, and in the neighbouring towns such as Durgapur and Asansol. It would often take us a whole day to get to some of these places.

The experience has been an eye-opener for me. The handful of graduate students I hired were motivated and very receptive. Moreover, they believe in the product we’re launching and feel like part of our team. We’ve found working with students to be a good method of doing beta testing.

Durgapur, in particular, has tech-savvy students who have been excellent sources of ideas and constructive feedback.

You previously worked in South America for a global telecom player. What do you see as parallels between that market and India, in the telecom space? And, the differences?

I lived in Mexico for four years and had the opportunity to work for the largest telecom operator in Latin America.

During my time there, Mexico witnessed a huge growth in wireless subscribers, much like what India is undergoing today. Like India, localisation of content is key because most of Latin America speaks Spanish.

In terms of differences, there are two-three global operators that dominate the wireless market in Latin America and as a result keep the call prices high.

In India, the call prices are among the lowest in the world; and in two years I predict that voice calls will be virtually free.

This is where data and value-added services play a very important role, not just for consumers but also for operators who will need to be creative with their business models.

Can you explain what your product/service offers to users? What are the differentiators? Also, what is your revenue model?

Tunespray can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection. Our service makes it possible for non-technical users to create and deliver mobile applications and rich content containing pictures, text, audio and links to the Internet, in a matter of minutes rather than weeks.

No programming knowledge is required and our service works across all the main operators in India and abroad.

It offers endless possibilities for a wide range of applications for both consumers and enterprises — downloadable movie or city guides, event promotions or simply generate user-created content to share private interactions such as mobile birthday card.

The basic access to our Web-based application is free and is supported by advertisements. A user has to pay a subscription fee to access some of the advanced features.

We are also working with some of the leading musicians and artistes in Kolkata and Chennai to create and promote music though customised mobile applications on a revenue-share basis.

On the technology behind Tunespray solution.

Our solution is based on open standards. It consists of front-end clients for both Web and mobile phone that have been developed using Internet technologies that make it faster and more responsive than a standard Web browser.

Underneath the front end, we have a clever technology that creates, transforms and delivers mobile content in real time to mobile phones.

For example, when a user requests a mobile application containing pictures and sounds from his handset, we figure out the characteristics of that handset (screen size, operating system) in real time and deliver content that is optimised for that handset.

What do you see as the coming trends in mobile phone use?

Let me highlight a few trends that come to my mind. General consumers all around the world have started using data-enabled smart-phones in a big way because prices have come down and they are easily available.

Our prediction is that in the future these phones will replace computers as the de-facto communication device and a significantly larger number will be connected to the Internet.

Hence, like the Web 2.0 transformation of the Internet, where one can easily publish content in the form of blogs or Web sites without any technical knowledge, an ecosystem around phones has already started developing, which puts the power of content creation in the hands of consumers and not mobile operators.

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

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