Mobile magazine

Coruscant offers digitised content to cellphone users

Unique ring tones, wallpapers, screen-savers, games and caller tunes are passe. It is now time to access reading material of your choice on your mobile hand set.

"There has been a growing need to provide entertainment as well as education through handsets," points out Ajay Adiseshan, managing director, Coruscant Tec, a mobile solutions company offering content to consumers across the world.

Set up in 2003, with offices in Mumbai, Chennai and Palo Alto (USA), the company has tied up with several leading Indian and international aggregators, telecom operators (telcos), financial networks and banks to bring mobile content and commerce to mobile subscribers.

With a view to turning mobile phones into virtual PCs for its users, Coruscant has acquired the rights to articlescontent from a couple of English language magazines.

The content from, say, Man's World, the metrosexual male magazine, is converted into 'Mbooks' that people can download through their mobile service providers. Coruscant's other tie-up is with Rave magazine.

Here, consumers can download music related content, both Indian as well as western, so that a subscriber not only gets to listen to his favourite numbers, but also read, say, biographies or interviews of his favourite musicians.

The company is in the process of digitising the content which would be available on CDMA, Reliance and current aggregators like Rediff.com in another 15 days time.

Coruscant has forged another alliance with Siddharth Kak's Surabhi Foundation which gives it access to one of the largest repositories of rare Indian footages on nature, monuments, festivals and Indian culture.

"We're in the final stages of converting them into digitised content," points out Adiseshan who is also a faculty member at the Xavier's Institute of Communication for Internet related subjects.

The company is also digitising M F Husain's paintings for consumers to flaunt on their handsets. "Not everyone can afford a Husain. So we digitised some of his works in our effort to make the artist accessible to the masses," says Adiseshan who set up Webresource, a web applications and design company before he launched Coruscant.

Coruscant claims that with its commitment to innovations in terms of value additions like graphics, applications and literary content, it has been growing by 100 per cent a year.

"The mobile entertainment industry is only in the nascent stage. By 2010, we're looking at a tenfold increase and hope to cater to a Rs 4,000 crore market," maintains the young entrepreneur.

Needless to say, the Rs 350 crore mobile entertainment industry in India is on a roll. The extent of potential growth can be gauged from the fact that mobile penetration is only 6.2 per though there are nearly 51 million mobile phone subscribers in India.