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