Hike users can now chat without mobile data
NEWDELHI: Home-grown messaging platform Hike on Wednesday announced the launch of a new service ‘Total’ that allows Android phone users to chat, read news, book train tickets, make payments and transfer money without mobile data.
The Tencent and SoftBank-backed WhatsApp rival, which is betting on people without internet access to boost its user base beyond 100 million, has preloaded the ‘Total’ service onto inexpensive phones of Intex and Karbonn.
Total pops up as soon as the setting up of the Android device is done for the first time, Hike Messenger chief executive officer Kavin Mittal said. Explaining how the new service works, he said Total sits deep on the operating system and uses USSD tech present in every GSM phone for years to deliver content without the need for 3G/4G data.
“USSD is nothing but that *121#” that users dial on phone to check balance, recharge and get small loans, he said. “It’s actually incredible how most of the world doesn’t know about this.”
Total is built on USSD technology. “So what we do is, we have taken all our services and we put them deeply at the operating system there. So if the operating system tells us, ‘Hey we don’t have data’, what we do is, we automatically fall back to this new thing that we built, that allows our services to run on USSD,” he said.
While this service allows messaging, access to news, sports scores and astrology, it cannot transfer picture which can be done only through use of data. For this, Hike has partnered with major carriers like Airtel, Vodafone, Aircel, and BSNL to make low-cost data packs available on Total, with prices starting at Re1 for 20 MB at 4G speeds.
Mittal said buyers of certain models of Intex and Karbonn phones would get ₹200 in the Hike Wallet on signing up into Total.
This money in the Wallet, which can be replenished, can be used for purchasing mobile data plans or sending money to friends, once KYC process is completed.
The Total app will prompt users to buy data when performing data-driven functions like viewing media-rich news with photos or sending pictures or videos.
Mittal said Hike is talking to other mobile phone manufacturers for embedding Total on their operating system. Also, other carriers including Reliance Jio are being spoken to expand data recharge options, he said.
He said over the last five years, Hike has moved from a simple messaging application to a content platform and now to a payment platform.