Bharti Airtel, India's leading telco has announced of the setting up of a telecom innovation fund worth Rs.200 crores to seed telecom startups. This is a smart move by the telco viewed with the new telecom developments - 3G rollout, coming of MVNOs and entry of foreign telcos. Bharti Airtel can leverage its licenses, infrastructure assets and pan-India coverage to provide a good platform for telecom startups in turn augmenting its own revenues both organically and inorganically. This first ever telecom innovation fund would be watched closely and its success can spawn other such funds too.
What are the factors that has given this positive spin to telecom entrepreneurship? Here are at least two. Apple with its 3G iphone has left some interesting functinality out and its Appmart platform has encouraged a new industry around it. Nokia's takeover of Symbian has made the OS opensource in effect driving lots of app contenders to develop software and content for its platform. Google though late with its Android platform would not be far behind with its release and would also interest independent software developers to develop for the platform. Telecom startups can make use of such information to target their share of user's wallet
Farewell, Carlo
7 years ago
0 comments:
Post a Comment