Emails as voice mails - another thought

The idea is to develop a voice application that delivers e-mails as voice calls. The voice application converts text e-mail to voice. It doesn't end here, it will call the user on his mobile and inform the user that there is a mail in his inbox. The difference from conventional applications is that the user receives a call from the voice application. He does NOT have to download his email, he does NOT have to pay for the connection. Even to read a big e-mail, all that is required is a voice call to the user's mobile at standard call rates.

Working of the voice application

1) The user(say an employee of NOKIA) registers with the NOKIA mail server.

2) The voice application resides in the NOKIA mail server side.

3) Whenever a new mail is received, the voice application retrieves the employee's mobile number and will make a voice call to the mobile user (NOKIA employee) at standard voice call rate.

4) The NOKIA employee can do the following
a) Accept the call and listen to the mail message. The mail message will first read out the subject of the mail and will pop-up a message asking the user to choose if he wants to listen the complete mail or just the subject of the mail.

For security reasons, the employee will have to key in a password from his mobile before the message is read out.

b) Deny the voice call. Either because the employee is busy to take the voice call or he doesn't want the entire message to be read

c) The employee will have other options to customize, for e.g. a read message can be marked as unread so that he can re-read the message when he is available online and connected to NOKIA mail server.

NOKIA has already come up with an e-mail system comparable to the one in blackberry www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/ptech/09/13/nokia.email.reut/.
Good...But It would be great if the voice application (as explained above) would be attached to this service. This will take the e-mail system steps ahead of Blackberry and can penetrate easily to corporate offices....

Advantages:
1. Provide value add to employees around the world
2. Users don't have to pay for downloading the content. There can be a minimal subscription charge (to cover the voice call rate).
3. For low-end phones, that cannot handle huge data or formats like pdf etc, e-mail though voice is the answer. No other infrastructure is needed.

NConnect..simple thought

Some thoughts on NConnect.. I have been thinking about this for sometime now here it goes..

This application can be used to connect friends or in general by anybody for voting/polling.

Use Case: Invite friends
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Suppose I want to invite my friends for a movie - I will invite the friends through this software. My friends can in turn accept/deny the invitation (similar to what u have in outlook). I can visually see a consolidated view (Whenever I select this view - a synchronisation protocol will run in the background) which shows the name of my
1) Friend,
2) Status of invitation (accept/deny/tentative)

Variation 'A' for this use case: The software can be linked to calendar application. Suppose I invite 5 of my friends for a movie on 2nd October - I will set for a recurrence alarm on 3pm Oct 1st and 3pm Oct 2nd. My friends will get these alarm alerts from the software.

Variation 'B' for this use case: The software can also be linked to the Contacts application. This way through the software I can select my friends list who will receive the invitation from my phone book.

Variation 'C' for this use case: This can be combined with location services. Now my friends have got the invitation, arrived at the venue (shopping complex or movie hall). Now, as soon as they arrive, I will also get an alert that they have reached the movie theatre and are quite near to where I am.

Variation 'D' for this use case: Since I have invited, I will also be on the attendee list and I can cancel the invitation through cancel option. In this case, all entries on the attendee list will get an alert (let the others who have accepted, go ahead and watch the movie)

Advantage: I don't have to make repeated calls/message to remind my friends.
I get to see the consolidated attendee list with their decisions. My friends do not have to give any lame excuses, they simply have to accept or deny or use the custom buttons. Any time my friends can change their decision and they don't have to call me or message me of their decision.

Use Case: For voting
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Suppose a TV serial producer wants to know the opinion of its viewers, all it has to do is to create voting buttons through the application. This can be custom buttons too. For e.g. say The Friends TV Serial producer wants to know from its viewers which actor/actress they like best. There will be four buttons with the names of actors, the viewer selects one of the options.

The options entered by all viewers will now go a central server and consolidated opinion list is delivered(through synchronization) to the TV serial operator.

Variations : Can be used for any voting/polling applications.

Mobile billing...

I was just pondering on how much money would an mobile application developer get for a decent application...It depends on quite a few factors..

The mobile network infrastructure - 2.5G, 3G and 4G...
GPRS, W-CDMA and 4G (future)are all packet based, so u can monitor the packets...also content based billing (CISCO was the first one to propose it - this means a if u r downloading a richer content to u'r mobile, u could be charged more) could fetch more
CISCO billing model

On operator - for a 6Rs SMS, Airtel gets a small pie, KBC will also get its share..and don't forget Siddarth.. it depends on how much revenue an application developer can project to Airtel and convince the operator to get a larger pie of the revenue. Operators are powerful (look at vodapone and DOCOMO- they dictate so much - I wish this reduces more and more as we progress...it should be the retailers and not operators who should have so much say...who knows..the shop next to u probably understands what the user needs better and dictates the features in a phone..)

Quite a few billing models - edge pricing and paris-metro charging, market based reservation charging etc ... i am not interested in any of them..
Other billing models

Coming to original point on how the application developer gets the money ...
Say I am dowloading a page from server. The network infrastructure consists of mobile(client), WAP gateway(which does the encoding/decoding), and the server. Now the payment gateway can be at the operator or the operator can re-direct the payment request to the application developer's payment gateway. If this redirection happens (oh already quite a few follow this model - paypal, paypaisa, many banks - banks have their own payment gateways for security reasons. It's like having an account with paypal or the bank. One disadvantage, the user has to switch profile since now the gateway is changed and maybe will have to bear with a subscription charge as well..), its gr8...but operator wants it all..so its a difficult proposition to convice the operator..

One last way...at the server, the number of hits can always be monitored(number of times the user is downloading the content), so we can make a predictive model of how much revenue it generates. This way the operator cannot give u a vague sum when it comes to revenue sharing.

Last option- sell the application to the operator...combine this option with the two options explained above..

With so many standards, not so good and costly network infrastructure there are not many options to break the operator supremacy...but given a chance, consider all the options and break it..This is to all those application developers...