Airtel partners with Nokia for Regional Language Fonts Keyboard

June 4, 2008
By sinha

If you look at the mobile VAS industry, rural services stand to constitute the major pie of VAS in the coming years [read this report on Mobile VAS in India]

Airtel has big plans to penetrate deep into rural India and the first step to do that is by offering handsets with regional fonts.

IKSL’s ‘Grameena Mobile Kranthi’ campaign (IKSL, i.e. IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Ltd is a JV between IFFCO and Airtel) is aimed at penetrating deeper into the Karnataka state’s rural market plans to make mobile telephony more accessible and affordable for rural consumers. Subscribers to the service will get five free voice messages including agriculture market information over the mobile handset [via]

The keyboard will enable subscribers to send text messages in Kannada as well (do other handsets support UTF?)

Regional language keyboards can bring whole lot of VAS monetization options in the rural areas and will be a classic "BoP" story.

What do you think?

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3 Responses to “ Airtel partners with Nokia for Regional Language Fonts Keyboard ”

  1. TCI-Tidbits « ThinkChange India on June 5, 2008 at 3:43 am

    [...] Airtel and Nokia are working together to develop a regional language fonts keyboard. This will allow greater linkages with rural [...]

  2. aatif on July 28, 2008 at 2:49 pm

    Mobile VAS is indeed the next big thing. The market value is soaring for products which are regionalized

  3. planet on July 28, 2008 at 2:51 pm

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