$2 Bn public-private partnership for rural internet access

Naveen — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:21:41 +0000

The government announced a $2-billion public-private partnership to provide broadband and internet connectivity in India’s rural areas.

Union Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology Jyotiraditya Madhavrao Scindia, speaking at Global Telecom Summit here, said that $1.5 billion for the project would be generated from the private sector and the balance would be funded from government sources.

The minister also announced 112,000 broadband centres would be set up in rural areas across the country, within a year.

“We will also have a policy for Wi-Max so that connectivity for broadband, particularly for rural India, becomes easier and convenient. The entire countryside would be provided with this facility, largely under the public-private partnership,” Scindia disclosed.

The ministry of communication & IT is also expected to unfold its third generation of mobile phone standards and technology – 3G service – guidelines by June this year. The 3G services are expected to be rolled out by the end of current year, said the minister.

“The aim of the these policies is to provide wireless telephone and mobile telephone to every household in rural India by 2010,” the minister stated.

Source: siliconindia.com

Web Innovation 2007 – Bangalore

Naveen — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 11:14:26 +0000

Web Innovation 2007 kicked off in Grand Ashok on an unusually cold and cloudy Tuesday Morning in Bangalore with traditional candle lighting ceremony by the sponsors.

We were there early as instructed for registration, to collect a cool bag and funky Web 2.0 badges.

Once we reached the conference hall, it was amazing to see so many people from all parts of India who flew down just for the conference.

Conference started with Kiruba Shankar (who was filling in for the MC) asking the panel of speakers…. “What the hell is Web 2.0?” which, for me, sounded more like “What is Life?”.

I guess lot of people in the audience wanted to know the answer.

What’s amazing is answer to the question is same as answering what is life. Everyone knows the answer but no one can explain it to you, you will have to understand it. However the speakers handled it pretty well by various and simple definition of Web 2.0.

a) Web 2.0 = 4 C’s + P + I (Web 2.0 = Content + Commerce + Context + Community + personalization + Intelligent Search)
b) Objective approach as against Subjective
c) Institutionalizing by externalizing not internalizing.

Well, apart for sponsor’s displaying their products, there were few takeaways..

a)Nobody is still making money from Social networking!
b) Advertising or Exit are still the only two business models for a Web 2.0 company.
c) Indian Web 2.0 market is pathetic!. Coz
1) All English content hardly localized.
2) Bandwidth is expansive.
3) Only 6 Million people online and 0.2 Million broadband users.
4) And the most important, we only consume content we do not contribute.
Indian Online Advertising market is quite low.
Coz it takes an Indian user 2.6 Years from the day they start using internet, to buy anything online. Singapore is the favored online advertising market in Asia.

So is Web 2.0 really going to work for India, may be not. Can we skip and jump to Web 3.0 ? We are one of the biggest and fast growing mobile user communities, so we should go 3.0… but nop…. infrastructure problem. We do not have bandwidth… again.

Okay now ……… coming to few good 2.0 things happening in India

Business Blogging!! Yes, customer facing blogs are a winner!!. Let your customer talk about your product on your blog. Intel has used this effectively by many customer facing blogs. Kiruba explained various advantage of business blogging. Looking forward for Kiruba’s book “Audience more intelligent than panel”. Best of Luck Kiruba

Education 2.0!! Byte sized education! Companies like techTribe bringing localized career based communities.

Now for some Fun stuff…

The pleasant surprise was a cocktails (Cheers 2.0) at the end of day one, with some extremely motivating talk by Marc Canter co-founder of Macromedia.

Few more pictures….

No not Hill station!, its Bangalore!

Web Trends Stall.

Unwind time!

So that was my effort of bringing my experience from Web Innovation 2007 . If I have missed something please feel free to comment or mail me at naveen.kumar [@] webanalyticsindia.net

Web Analytics India Blog » Naveen

$2 Bn public-private partnership for rural internet access

Web Innovation 2007 – Bangalore