‘Hike becomes the topdown strategy and Total becomes the bottomup’
NEWDELHI: Kavin Mittal, founder and CEO of instant messaging service Hike, on Wednesday unveiled Total, a version of Android that will allow smartphone users to access messaging services, news, horoscope, rail information and phone recharges without a data connection. This works through Universal Transfer Protocol, a technology developed in-house, by essentially ‘supercharging’ USSD protocol (unstructured supplementary service data) to make the bytes smaller. The bundled phones starting at ₹3,000 aim to get users comfortable with internet using sachet data packs which would start at ₹1 . The devices are to hit the shelves starting March 1. Edited excerpts from an interview:
This seems a very different offering from Hike?
This is not an app. This is like taking an operating system and modifying it. So, this is a second product that we are building now inside the company. To get a billion people online, an app is not enough. That (Hike) is for the top of the pyramid, those who have come on to the data. The next step is what does the app sit on. It sits on the OS. You have the device and you have the telco. So we just brought the entire experience together and stitched it to make it simple. Hike app becomes the top down strategy and Total becomes the bottom up.
Who does USSD globally? No one does. This is our second product and don’t be surprised if you see us launching a third product a year from now. Our goal is collectively through different means, can we bring India online.
Is the technology (USSD) sustainable in the long run? Do you see yourself doing this five years from now?
Yeah, we do. Because the billion people, my guess is, you can divide into 10 pieces. Every 100 million there is some different issue. So we will use Total as a way to get to those people and (then) potentially (bring) different products that we may not have thought of today. But the simple idea is data growth is slowing. Not everybody who has a smartphone has data. There are 100 million smartphones being sold every year and a lot of them are not on data. This is the first version of Total. We will have more versions and the end goal is to get customers on data. The one rupee packs are not for lifetime.
This is also the target audience that Jio is looking at through its feature phone?
Sure. We are not the only ones trying to do this. Google is coming with AndroidGo. And Total will work on AndroidGo. When Intex and Karbonn ship AndroidGo devices, Total will be on it. We believe one person cannot do this. Very complicated. There is Hike, there is Airtel, Aircel, BSNL. Intex, Karbonn... We all have to work together to bring each part of the cost of our ecosystem down so that we can overall lower the cost of access. And you will have companies like Jio, who want to go at it alone. Do it... Feature phone is a closed ecosystem. It is old technology. What we have done is we have built this on Android. So we have taken old technology and re-purposed it in the smartphone ecosystem.