Emergic: Rajesh Jain's Blog

I took four flights within the US on this trip: JetBlue from JFK to Dulles (Washington), United from Dulles to San Francisco, Air Tran from San Francisco to Atlanta (red eye), and finally Delta from Atlanta to Newark (New Jersey). Each one of the flights was absolutely on time, and the experience quite pleasant.I booked [...]

[Read more →]

I took Air India’s Mumbai-New York Non-Stop flight for the fourth time in two years. I was on one of the first flights when they launched the service in August 2007. I have to say it is the best way to travel to the US, and would recommend it highly. By way of disclosure, I [...]

[Read more →]

I made a business visit to the US recently for about a week. It was almost a year since I visited the US. I had meetings in Dulles, Bay Area and Philadelphia, and visited friends in Atlanta and New Jersey. Every time I land at JFK, the memory of my first arrival into the US [...]

[Read more →]

I wrote this post on “invited advertising” a year ago: As we look ahead and address the limitations of today’s marketing methods, the mobile will emerge as the fulcrum for the new options. Companies which recognise and adopt mobile marketing are likely to see significant early benefits – and lock their competitors out in the [...]

[Read more →]

This week’s links: Clay Shirky Speech:  On the future of accountability journalism in a world of declining newspapers. “We are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.” US Net Neutrality Speech: by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. [...]

[Read more →]

Over the years, I have realised the importance of being able to tell a story of what one is doing in a manner that is simple and compact. It doesn’t always start that way. On my recent US trip, I had a slide deck talking about NetCore, what we want to do, and discussing the [...]

[Read more →]

It was the most eagerly awaited book of recent times. Dan Brown’s next after “The Da Vinci Code” was expected to be something special. And it is. Even though it follows the same time-tested formula that worked so well in the previous book, it is a page-turner and very illuminating about history (especially, the founding [...]

[Read more →]

I am posting this flying from Atlanta to Newark 33,000 feet in the air. When I found out that the Delta flight had WiFi, I had to try it out. The price is $9.95 for the full flight (about 2 hours). The speed is quite good. This is my first inflight wireless experience.  I always [...]

[Read more →]

My friend, Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, wrote to me requesting assistance on an innovative idea. Perhaps you can give some suggestions. Here is Dr. Malpani’s post. HELP is a free consumer health library we have been running for over 10 years now. The website is at www.helpforhealth.org. While I am happy to fund the library ( [...]

[Read more →]

A related issue that also needs is the issue of SMS Spam that has grown rapidly in the past few months. TRAI already has a mechanism in place – the Do Not Call Registry. About 10% of Indian mobile numbers are on this list. Telemarketers are not supposed to call or SMS those on this [...]

[Read more →]

This week’s links: Post-Medium Publishing: by Paul Graham. “Economically, the print media are in the business of marking up paper.” Now: by Will Price. “There is a real challenge in being present – that is enjoying right now, this moment.” The Science ofSocial Contagion: from the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Flipping Abundance and Scarcity: [...]

[Read more →]

In the ideal world, there need be no SMS interconnect charges, leaving each operator to make a decision whether it wanted to enter the A2P business or not. But, if there has to be a charge, it needs to be based on costs, and not a randomly high figure like Airtel has chosen to apply. [...]

[Read more →]

What does this mean for end customers? If other large operators followed Airtel with SMS interconnects, businesses would end up paying substantially higher prices for A2P SMS capacity. Given that SMS is becoming a necessity across many lines of business in various industries, this is an unfair penalty being imposed on enterprises and therefore on [...]

[Read more →]

Cut to 2008. Tata Teleservices Limited (TTSL) got aggressively into the A2P SMS business. They invested in SMS capacity and offered aggregators significant SMS capacity and aggressive pricing. This helped grow usage dramatically. Airtel lost market share in the A2P SMS business. With Airtel having more than a quarter of the mobile subscribers, it still [...]

[Read more →]

To understand the dynamics of the A2P space, we will now need to stop being general and actually take names. The idea is not to offend or malign anyone, but lay out the facts so there can be a sensible debate about the issues involved. All of this is fairly common knowledge to everyone associated [...]

[Read more →]

Description: Some operators have started initiating action to do bilateral agreements on SMS interconnect (P2P and A2P) The current situation is that of bill-and-keep – the operator through which the SMS is initiated does the billing and retains the revenue thus generated The current regime of no inter-connect charges payable between operators on SMS should [...]

[Read more →]

This is what I wrote 12 years ago about the state of the Internet in India. Amazingly, little has changed about the government inaction in boosting broadband in India. India needs change on the Internet. Desperately. The pace of decision-making about the Internet is too slow for the rate of change and innovation on the [...]

[Read more →]

This week’s links: Indian Education’s Five Fault Lines: by Manish Sabharwal. “The five fault lines in Indian education don’t have a one right answer but are questions of balance: Quantity vs Quality; Repair vs Prepare; Price vs Cost; Funding vs Delivery; and Excellence vs Inclusion.” Drought Puts Focus on a Side of India Left Out [...]

[Read more →]

In short, while a P2P SMS could cost 2p or so, an A2P SMS costs much lower (probably under 1 paisa) for the mobile operator. As an aside, P2P SMS pricing varies dramatically – we could pay as little as 5p as part of an SMS pack or as high as Re 1 or more. [...]

[Read more →]

As many of us have noticed, SMS is not carried on the same channel as Voice. What this means is that we can send and receive SMS even as we are speaking. SMS is actually carried on the SS7 signalling channel which is otherwise used for call set-up. As we all know, a single SMS [...]

[Read more →]