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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

January - 2010 - issue > Top 25 Most Promising Mobile App Companies

Eterno Infotech: Adding Value to the Mobile User Experience

Jayakishore Bayadi
Monday, January 4, 2010
Jayakishore Bayadi
With India all set to become a country with highest number of mobile users with all signs of surpassing China within a year or two, telecom in the country created a vast opportunity. However, despite an explosive growth of the subscriber base, the mounting competition has significantly reduced the profit margins of the mobile operators, making them to look beyond the voice-based service. Whether it is a landline or mobile, VAS, which includes a bundle of non-voice based data services, act as enablers that boost the plummeting Average Revenue per User (ARPU) of operators. The ARPU, which was Rs.1, 000 plus per month in the year 2000, had plunged to less than Rs. 150 in 2009, which is creating immense opportunity for mobile application developers.

Bangalore based Eterno Infotech is one such company who’s leveraging the opportunity. Today it has transformed into one of the pioneers in innovative mobile applications that promise to provide Internet like services to Mobile users in a way they can understand and use. Eterno received its first round funding in Sep 2008 from rediff.com (NASDAQ REDF) India’s leading Internet portal. “Eterno is all about Providing truly localized Internet services on Mobile phones in the language people understand!,” says Chandu Sohoni, Founder and Director, Eterno Infotech.

Chandu Sohoni and Umesh Kulkarni, the Co-founders of Eterno InfoTech, have over 15 years of experience in the Internet, telecom, hardware and application software development. They were working for Nokia’s Bangalore Software Development Centre when they decided to start Eterno. The duo had prior experience of running a startup, which they had co-founded Curis Networks in 1999, later acquired by a US start-up Amber Networks, which was eventually acquired by Nokia. After working for Nokia for a few years they founded Eterno in 2005. At that time, Indian mobile market had already started taking off. Umesh and Chandu realized that even large manufacturers were not offering Indian language based solutions in their handsets due to various issues like fonts, entry mechanism and more.

The duo found that Indian mobile market is a huge opportunity as language plays a key role in reaching Indian consumers. That is how Eterno’s first product IndiSMS was born. It allowed people to send and receive messages in nine popular Indian languages. This was a first of its kind achievement through a small downloadable mobile application. Nokia liked the concept and IndiSMS was launched with Hutch (now Vodafone) and Nokia. IndiSMS continues to be one of the most popular mobile application ever developed in India, it is being pre-installed in a few Nokia handsets with over a million users using it. “Eterno’s technology addresses the crucial need of consumers, local infotainment in local language,” explains Sohoni.

Indeed “Offering the internet like services to everyone through mobile” has been Eterno’s strength. Now Eterno has signed up almost all the leading Indian newspapers for its NewsHunt mobile newspaper platform, making it a very unique offering. Eterno’s skills in developing applications for a wide variety of platforms from Nokia’s low/mid range S40, S60, touch screen phones, Blackberry, iPhone makes sure that entire user base is covered by each of its applications. “Till date Eterno hasn’t faced serious competition in terms of its language based mobile applications development technology on wide variety of handsets. However we are aware that larger corporations and handset manufacturers can launch competing products and hence we always intend to keep a step ahead with new innovations,” explains Umesh Kulkarni, Co-founder, Eterno Infotech.


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