Mansi Tiwari, New Delhi, March 8, 2009
The Economic Times (Delhi edition)
Reliance Communication has tied-up with Chennai-based Satnav Technologies and Altruist Technologies to provide a voice based direction service called LCU (Lost? Need Directions, Call Us) to the subscribers. This is the first ever-live voice-based location based services (LBS) and the technology is dubbed as live direction offering ‘from and to’ service with human interface.
“It is the IVR version of just dial service. There will be trained people to answer your queries which can also be sent you the caller through SMS,” said Anil Pande, head - product, mobile data and content services, Reliance Communication.
SatNav has filed a patent for LCU, which is an integrated solution to the yellow pages and directory services. “We already had a huge database of maps. We were providing hardware that could be installed in cars to get directions. Then we decided to develop a software and through mobile phones, reach to over 300 million subscribers,” said Amit Prasad MD & CEO SatNav Technologies.
At present, this service is available only in Andhra Pradesh but will cover the entire country by March 2009. SatNav is in discussions with other telecom operators. “We are in talks with top three telecom operators in the country and in another two months will be finalising deals with them. Our aim is to provide this service to not only cellular subscribers but also for landline users,” said Prasad.
Each call is being charged at Rs 3/min. The company also plans to come up with cash vouchers against which payments can be made for making these calls. RCom is also planning to rollout LBS using the in-house data from Digimaps, an ADAG company. “While traveling, a subscriber can enter ‘from and to’ and get the details of the route before starting the journey. We want to provide LBS to even those phones that do not support GPS,” said Pande.
GPS and LBS are being seen as the next big thing in the cell phone market. According to industry estimates, there will be about 42 million navigation-enabled phones in use by 2012. These figures show that navigation, as a value added application will set the benchmark for every telecom provider..
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