And now, a sports ticker on your cellphone

If your television blacks out during the Indo-Pak cricket series, which looks possible given the fight between Ten Sports and some cable operators, cellular service provider Airtel has some pretty good substitutes lined up for cricket fans.

For one, there is going to be a continuous ticker giving you ball-by-ball scores, something on the lines of the tickers that come on television news channels.

There is also a whole series of Sachin-related games, which will have you batting with Sachin when 9 wickets are down, 15 balls are left and you need to score 30 runs.

Can you rotate the strike well enough or will you get Sachin run out? The possibilities are endless. Only this time around, you have only yourself, and not poor Irfan Pathan, to blame if India lose the match!

The catch, however, is that all these Java-run applets will be available only on expensive Java-enabled cellphones and not on the ordinary handsets most users have. Some Java-enabled phones include the Sony Ericsson T610 and the Nokia 6600 and 7200 series.

While Airtel's Masala Portal has managed to earn only around Rs 30 lakh per annum, based on the last 2-3 weeks' performance since the portal was launched, the company projects this will rise to Rs 30 crore within a year.

Since quality and prices of handsets will be critical for customers to shift to the portal, Airtel is trying to collaborate with manufacturers on both features and handset pricing.

One such feature could be 'push2talk', where you press a button on your mobile and automatically get to talk to a pre-selected group of people.

Airtel's 'Lapu Lapu' easy-charge project, company executives say, is a runaway success, and within a month of its launch, around 20 per cent of all pre-paid recharges in the country are taking place electronically.

Easy charge allows shopkeepers (like your neighbourhood kirana) to buy any amount of recharge capacity and then just SMS the exact recharge you want, anywhere, anytime, through a special SIM card.

Since the idea came from Filipino associate Globe (Bharti Tele-Ventures' principal shareholder Singtel owns part of Globe), it is called Lapu Lapu, a legendary Filipino hero.

Since such mobile recharging involves complex security aspects like unique triple encrypted passwords of the type banks use, Airtel is negotiating with a leading public sector firm to use Airtel cards as a means to transact business.

So the next time you go to buy petrol, for instance, you could well be doing this on your Airtel card! In the Philippines, Globe is currently working on pilot trials with McDonald's on the same project.

Another module that is doing well--Airtel has sold this already to two leading consumer durables manufacturers--is the Mobile Sales Force Automation System. This allows companies to remotely customise the SIM cards of their sales force.

For instance, salesmen can simply scroll down pre-set menus to access the company's main database to figure out the current stock position of a 165 litre, mushroom-coloured refrigerator.

Other innovations Airtel is working on include voice recognition in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, besides English.

So if you dial 646 and say 'astrology' in Hindi, you will be guided to various sub-menus on tarot cards, Bejan Daruwala's forecasts and so on, and you can ask for them by name.