Airtel plans to add 250 apps every month

The apps story definitely holds tremendous potential in India. Challenges to date were discovery, quality of content and pricing models. Airtel's stores and a number of other recent initiatives seem to have addressed a host of these issues.

Micro payments, micro transactions and ad based monetization in my opinion are three pegs on the biz model front. 

Economic Times

March 5, 2010

Bharti Airtel,which last month made waves in the telecom circuit by rolling out a mobile application store christened Airtel App Central,plans to add some 200-250 new applications every month.The countrys largest telco is working with a slew of both local and overseas mobile phone application developers to increase the number of applications that will be hosted in the store.

At present,the Airtel store has around 1,400 applications across 25 categories like business,games,books,entertainment and social networking.The company claims that Airtel App Central has emerged as Indias largest mobile application store in less than a month,edging out the application stores rolled out by Nokia, BlackBerry and Apple.The Airtel store is recording 1 lakh to 1.5 lakh downloads every day.

Bharti Airtel head (m-entertainment ) Saleem Mobhani told ET that the Airtel application store has recorded a million downloads in the first 13 days since its launch.While the strategy is to significantly expand the number of applications,it is a challenge to enable such applications across all the handset models.At present,we support nearly 1,800 handset models across vendors including basic handsets, he said.
 

Apart from further fortification of the application store,Bharti Airtel has plans to launch Airtel App Central in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.These are definite plans to soon roll out the application store in overseas markets,but as of now we cannot share specific details, Mr Mobhani said.
He also said mobile entertainment has emerged as the highest contributor of all VAS services for Bharti Airtel.For instance,the telco sells some 200 million songs every year as ringtone and call-back tones and has emerged as the largest seller of music in India.
 

The revenue we receive from music sales is equivalent to the consolidated revenue of the Indian music industry, Mr Mobhani said.
 

As part of its mobile entertainment game plan,Bharti Airtel on Thursday rolled out a new service Airtel Talkies.This service simulates a movie hall experience on the mobile phone by offering pre-edited fifteen minute capsule of a film that provides the listener a complete experience of the movie with dialogues,songs and background score.At present,there are movies in Hindi,Bengali,Oriya,Tamil,Telgu,Kannada and Malayalam.