Eterno Infotech: Adding Value to the Mobile User Experience Date:   Monday , January 04, 2010 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. Challenges and Solutions The wide variety of handsets that are present in India poses a challenge for any mass market application developer in India. “However we believe that every challenge is an opportunity and we have created a significant competitive barrier by offering our applications on almost all platforms,” says Umesh. Other challenge the company faced is lack of awareness about the usage of GPRS in India where people use the phone mainly as a calling device and other Internet like features get rarely used. Despite these, Eterno was successful in developing a suit of mobile applications aimed at Indian mobile users. Today the company targets different verticals including SMS, Music and News & Classifieds. Eterno’s SMS based offerings include IndiSMS, IndiServer and IndiMate. IndiSMS is a nine Indian language SMS solution. IndiServer is a bulk SMS server being used by operators like Idea, Airtel etc for sending millions of messages every day in Indian languages. IndiMate is an SMS based ‘click-and-get’ platform, which was customized and launched as Nokia Life Tools pilot project in India. Nokia Life Tools is Nokia’s flagship rural service platform aimed at helping Indian farmers to gain access to relevant information through cost effective SMS. Eterno has a strong presence in Mobile music space as well. It has tied up with hungama.com, a mobile music aggregator for its streaming music platform. Eterno is confident that the Audio Video streaming platform, IndiTunes, will re-define how music is consumed on 3G networks. And Eterno’s News and Classifieds aggregation platform NewsHunt has been a huge success. Eterno has tied up with more than 25 leading Indian Newspapers, and since its launch five months ago. Lakhs of users every month are downloading NewsHunt! “Innovation is a way of life at Eterno. Eterno has already filed for 3 patents, and apart from these patents, day to day innovations in coding, design, user interface and customer centric approach have given Eterno the unique edge,”states Sohoni. If you visit Eterno’s Basavangudi office at Bangalore, you can see not just the excitement, but also the passion to build something great among the employees. “Eterno employees have created the unique culture of excellence and creativity clubbed with a lot of fun. Due to its unique culture, since its inception, Eterno has enjoyed almost zero attrition rate,” adds Sohoni. Today the company has over 30 employees and has its head office at Bangalore, and sales and business development offices in Mumbai and Delhi. Road Ahead After an almost complete coverage of Indian Newspapers, Eterno made its first international foray during WAN (World Association of Newspapers) expo at Vienna in 2009. Eterno announced the availability of high-end iPhone and Blackberry platform applications for international market at Vienna. Eterno is also working with leading VAS players from APAC and gulf regions for offering its solutions in those territories. Going forward, Eterno is expanding in terms of new geographies, newer applications and services, alongside key intention to focus on its NewsHunt and Music platforms. Interestingly, the company’s recent launch of iPhone version of its applications has seen thousands of downloads by NRIs within a short span. With this, Eterno is all set to become the most dynamic technology company in the mobile applications space, creating innovative solutions that set benchmarks for others to follow.