Digital Dreamers » Mobile Web

Access Facebook On Airtel Mobile For Free

praveen — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:01:36 +0000

Being the largest mobile operator in India, Airtel has offered free access to the world’s largest social networking website. Yes, as per the announcement today, Airtel customers can access the mobile version of the Facebook site without any data charges. If you have a limited GPRS Internet plan, then all fun that you gonna have on FaceBook from your Airtel mobile will not be counted in. Even any new mobile internet user can access the FaceBook site alone without any charges. Currently the Facebook site will be available in English and Hindi language. They have planned to launch Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam version of Facebook site from July 15. But all these free access is only till August 31st of 2010. So what? full two months are ahead. Go..Make use of it.

Here are some information that you would need to activate and access this free Facebook service on your Airtel mobile.

SMS ‘FACEBOOK’ to 54321
Visit m.facebook.com from your mobile browser
Enter your facebook login email and password
Update your status as “Accessing Facebook for free from Airtel” (lol not necessarily – Update anything you like)

Airtel Withdraws Unlimited GPRS Internet

praveen — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:21:31 +0000

I remember around four years back, Airtel Tamilnadu was offering free unlimited gprs with the service name ”Net On Phone” (NOP). It was said that airtel allowed free GPRS only to make awareness of GPRS among the subscribers and try it. The idea was to get more customers for GPRS service and monetize it after sometime. Later when the GPRS usage grown as expected, they stopped the free ”Net On Phone” GPRS connection and started selling the ”Airtel Mobile Office” service.

Although Airtel started charging for mobile internet, still it did not lose the GPRS customers. Rather kept growing. This was because Airtel allowed unlimited bandwidth plan for all the packages they offered. It was quite popular among the customers because other competitors like Vodofone (Formerly Hutch) was charging their customers with pay per internet usage and with additional monthly rent for the service. Airtel was standing alone to offer unlimited internet for cheap prices with out any fixed rent.

The Airtel GPRS package in the Tamilnadu circle was(Yes it ”was”) as follows,

Daily Pack – Rs 20/Day/Unlimited
Weekly Pack – Rs 75/Week/Unlimited
Monthly Pack – Rs 375/Month/Unlimited

Today I received a SMS from Airtel that it withdraws the unlimited GPRS packs. Below is that SMS.

Pl note, Unlimited GPRS packs will be withdrawn effective 06-April. Enjoy GPRS service with the pay as you use facility only @30p/50KB browsing charges. Call 17134.

So there is no more unlimited GPRS internet stuff where slowly & slowly the word ”Unlimited” will vanish from Indian mobile and internet industry very soon. Already airtel started to cap their unlimited broadband usage under fair usage policy where customers internet speed will be reduced drastically after reaching certain bandwidth for the month.

So now what should we do due to this unlimited GPRS withdrawal by Airtel?

Since Airtel GPRS pack comes with zero rental, it may be activated by default on the all sim which already using GPRS. You should deactivate GPRS to avoid the data usage charges. OR
There are few mobile applications like Email, Google latitude, messengers which will automatically attempt tomake GPRS connection when ever required. So you may need to change the settings on the apps or be ready to pay the additional data usage charges.

160by2.com an innvoative free sms service

praveen — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:37:03 +0000

160by2.com offers free sms to India and seems to be having big potential growth. I am a member of that site and was using for a long time. I just wanted here now to share my insights and understandings on 160by2 on longer vision. From my experience I never come across with the concept like 160by2.com and its new. Not even on international sms sites. The reason they give sms for free is, on the total 160 character in a sms, they give half to us and half for them. i.e, 60 character for us to type and send and remaining 60 character reserved for their advertisers. Cool concept na? It’s an innovative thinking. The concept of monetizing from the free user end products are the only way to get internet business. This is what Google does from free search to free email.

Features on 160by2:

You can send sms to any Indian mobiles for free.

Web – Import your mobile contacts to their site and send sms easier than sending from mobile.
Email – send sms to any Indian mobile right from email
Mobile App – Send sms over GPRS from the mobile application
SMS – Group your friends and send one regular sms from your mobile to reach all of your friends.
Blog widget – Add the widget on your site and blog and your visitors send you sms.

I already see from their blog that they are trying to reach customers by location targeting ads. Hope you may know Adwords (Seen their content targeted Google ads on some sites) and how Google does Geo targeting. An advertiser need to reach his business only to certain area can also benefit from adwords. On countries like US we can target up to few miles around the areas like New York though google ads. How is this? The concept behind that is by tracking the IP of the visitor and show the ads according to his residing area.

Same way here 160by2.com have the targeting option from the mobile number series. Since they have tie up with mobile operators they can get the location information of the mobile numbers. But this is limited to state wise and cannot do exact city targets like what Google does using IP. The alternative is, they could get the visitor location through the membership profile of 160by2.com. For example my home town is Salem and If I work in chennai, how can they know that? Need to have two options for location as orkut have.. Home town and current location… This should be most valuable data for their business. The thing is I wanted to compare the concept of Google ad and 160by2 for Geo targeting and the potential value.

The only thing which I am not interested is they use 160by2.com as sms sender. Why do not they use senders actual number since they register and verify the mobile number. For branding they can add 160by2.com on below of each sms. Removing the mobile number from the sms will give out space for this signature. This is really a great Idea for the customers as the sms looks as if sent from their mobile.. Also one more thing, I am wondering why still Google does not get in to these type of business. They are keen about making innovations in mobile. From my understanding the next target is capturing the mobile marketing industry..

Recently they have extended the mobile text ads to image ads. Their acquisition of Android, an open source mobile operating systems competing symbian OS, Windows Mobile and Iphone Like that. This is the sign of conquering the mobile industry since they become giant in internet. They give free email and many free stuffs but did not look in to free sms which may reach the customers who may not even use internet. How potential it has…. !!! I think one day Google will look in to free sms service… That time 160by2.com should have attained the goal. They started this project as experiment and now have become 7th most popular mobile site (Opera report). Need to extend this globally before some body follow this potential concept. If 160by2.com get the global business then Google may acquire 160by2.com in near future… WHO KNOWS!!!!

Mobile Web – TOP SITES AND TRENDS

praveen — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:18:04 +0000

Opera a leading web browser company has given a report on the usage of their Opera Mobile Browser.

Opera Mini has become the world’s most popular mobile browser. Since its worldwide launch in 2006, more than 44 million people have downloaded and used Opera Mini. More than 11.9 million people used Opera Mini in March 2008.

According to their report

Social networking is popular worldwide and is the leading source of Web traffic for mobile devices.
Successful sites on the Web find users on mobile phones, further underscoring the emergence of One Web.
Consumers desire a rich Web experience regardless of the device they use to access the Web. WAP continues to diminish as more-capable Web browsers are able to display full Web content on mobile phones.
Nearly a quarter of all traffic is headed to content portals or search engines.

Snapshot: India

India favors social networking, with nearly half (48.9%) of all traffic going to social networks.