POWER TO THE CELL

New mobile functions and services will bring a world of information at your fingertips

Despite a deluge of cell phones in the Indian market, their applications have been limited to traditional telephony or multimedia. But as India emerges as the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world, bigwigs of the information economy are sitting up and taking notice. So as hardware gets more powerful, costs crash and the Internet sharing phenomena enters the Indian consciousness, a host of exciting new functionalities are being thrown open to the cell phone user.

One such service is being introduced by TELiBRAHMA, an organisation trying to bring Blue-toothed consumer smiles. 8220;The concept is simple. You walk into a mall and switch on the Bluetooth in your phone. As you walk past a shop, the phone will tell you about all the offers and discounts available in that particular shop,8221; says Narsimha Suresh, head of TELiBRAHMA. 8220;You can click the product8217;s picture and send it to the Bluetooth server housed in the mall. It will let you know about the shops it is available at, price, discounts, everything,8221; he adds.

What makes the service even more powerful is that it8217;s totally free. 8220;You don8217;t even have to pay any local SMS charges,8221; says Suresh. The model is already gaining ground, with malls in Bangalore signing up to offer these services and Delhi malls waiting for their turn.

Don8217;t fret if your mobile phone doesn8217;t have Bluetooth; even the simple SMS is now going through an upgrade. Internet search giant Google has started offering its search engine to Indian users through SMS. 8220;If you want the phone number of Pizza Hut at Vasant Kunj, you just need to type it out as a query and send it to 54664 5goog. We will send the reply through SMS,8221; says Vinay Goel, Products Manager at Google.

The service is like the yellow pages, giving phone numbers, film timings and theatres, currency conversion with latest exchange rates, even the local weather. The search engine will also keep a track of your queries, so after a while it knows what you like looking for and only send you the most relevant answers. The price of these messages will be decided by the mobile phone carriers.

Google isn8217;t the only one offering such information. Sulekha.com, another Internet portal, has jumped into the mobile fray. 8220;The search service will have the ability to 8216;read8217; the users8217; search need and provide results on the basis of a category-based search, business name search and businesses in a specific area,8221; says Satya Prabhakar, CEO of the site. A local business will also be registered with the site and yellow pages, and this information will be available on phone, but only through WAP.