Bengaluru ,Feb. 7: The burgeoning growth of the mobile phone subscriber base, which has crossed the 500 million mark has spawned a new set of mobile internet users in the country. And this small mobile internet user base is growing at a much faster rate than the online internet user base, spurred by the availability of cheap mobile devices and affordable data plans offered by telcos.

Cashing in on this trend, Google has recently launched its free Google Mobile App, an application that offers access to Google Search and other Google properties like Gmail, Maps,YouTube and Orkut on mobile devices. The application is powered with speech recognition technology designed to understand Indian accents, including thousands of Indian words like names of people, places, movies and songs. Users can now speak into their phones and search for anything without having to physically type the query. “We estimate that around 80 per cent of the 25 million mobile internet users in India search on their mobiles. And Google Search on the mobile has seen a 4X growth in 2009, compared to the last 2 years combined. Flat data plans of Rs 99 per month and more recently, Rs 48 per month are increasing users’ access to data via the mobile” said Rutvik Doshi, Product Manager, Google India. Google mobile app aims to add value to these users throughout the day — “Starting in the morning when he wakes up to read the news on his mobile, catching up with emails while commuting to work, locating nearby businesses during the day, sending directions to a friend who he is meeting for lunch, quickly looking up sensex results/cricket scores during the day and winding up by staying in touch with friends on Orkut and watching videos on YouTube, as the sun sets” said Doshi. While Google Mobile App was available for iPhone and Blackberry users, Google India R&D has innovated to make it available to Nokia’s basic handset users as well. Mobile phone users who do not subscribe to a data plan can also opt to subscribe to a variety of exciting mobile apps through their service providers at rates ranging from Rs 30-Rs 49 per month. For instance, Bollywood-based game, Antakshari which was made available to users of Idea last year has over 1.5 lakh subscribers, which is expected to grow four-fold this year. “We are offering antakshari in Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil where the user is pitted against the computer in 3 rounds. We are currently in the process of tying up with a leading Telco to launch our multi-player antakshari application this month, wherein groups of 10 across the country can compete with each other” said Rajamanohar, Head-Products, Hexolabs Media and Technology Pvt Ltd.Simmortel Voice Technologies has provided the Indian Railways with a solution that incorporates an acoustic model which takes care of multiple regional accents to provide voice-based, railway information services. Just call 139 from your mobile phone and speak out your train number  to receive a response on whether your waitlisted ticket has been confirmed. “Our voice-based music on demand solution which was also launched last year, has become very popular. Here, if the user wants a particular song as his ring tone, he just has to sing the first few words of the song into the phone and the whole song will be thrown up, instead of going through the entire range of options first. Additionally, we offer location-based voice services where the user calls out the name of the place he wants to locate, after which he promptly receives the information” said Abhishek Singh, Director, Business Development, Simmortel. Aims Migital Technovations has a mobile application that helps users tackle calls/messages, where they can automatically send back a busy status with text messages or personalised voice-cum-text messages to the caller. Another application helps to hide and encrypt personal user information, such as photos, messages and contacts, said Rishi Dawar, GM, Aims Migital.

Sangeetha Chengappa