[asterisk-biz] Asterisk developers in India...

[John West]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm travelling to India next week and would love to meet an Asterisk
development company to discuss a project. We're a non-profit based in France
(www.internews.eu) but are funded to set up a pilot project to launch
business news services aimed at the SME sector and microfinance borrowers.
The mobile phone is going to be the biggest single (though not only)
platform to distribute these news services, and we aim to set up 50
autonomous mini-news agencies in a franchise arrangement with a wholesaler -
each with the ability to populate their own IVR menus, SMS in-out etc.

 

A Delhi or Kolkota meeting would be ideal as I will be there anyway. But I
could probably also make Chennai, or Bangalore.

 

Please note: we're *not* talking here about providing a full-service call
center, rather the tech development and support to allow a bunch of small
businesses run their own phone apps. 

 

Please contact me off list. I paste a fuller description of the project
below...

 

Thanks

 

John West

 

***

 

MYSMENEWS - A NEWS AGENCY FOR SMALL BUSINESS 

 

Over two years, Internews Europe and its partners in India will innovate
business news services in print, radio and mobile phone for some 300,000
recipients of microfinance loans, and for small and medium enterprises in
the Indian state of West Bengal. The project comprises three elements:
first, a series of personalised and customisable news services called My SME
News that keep small businesses abreast of their existing and potential
future markets; second, broadcast  programs that will reach
microentrepreneurs and SME owners with business information and spread
awareness of small business services and the microfinance movement in the
broad population; third, detailed research, from a baseline through the life
of a pilot, and dissemination across the microfinance sector in India,
Nepal, and other Asian countries.

 

It has long been recognised that information improves markets. Business news
companies such as Reuters, Boomberg, and Dow Jones are multi-billion dollar
enterprises which shape the flow of international capital and commodities.
The microfinance sector is growing rapidly across Asia in part due to the
increasing availability of information that allows even the relatively poor
and isolated to identify markets for their goods and services, and negotiate
with wholesalers and middlemen.

 

But so far, this increase in information flows has happened largely as a
by-product of a growth in infrastructure of the Internet and the mobile
phone . My SME News will be the first service to target specifically
microfinance borrowers and SMEs in developing countries as a natural market
for business news and information. It will explicitly exploit falling
barriers to entry to media and information systems to target the tens of
millions of small businesses which represent the single biggest sector
contributing to the reduction of poverty across India and the rest of Asia.

 

The news services will dovetail with a microfinance institution that runs a
network of 204 branches across West Bengal. An editing operation in Calcutta
will create a bank of news relevant to small business, then create
individually customised versions for each of 15,000 self-help groups,
available both on paper and by mobile phone. Subsidised in a promotion
period, the services will gradually be converted to fee-paying.

 

Radio programming over state and commercial radio in West Bengal and Nepal
will reach the wider microenterprise and SME community with  broad issues of
small business development, cross-marketing the customised services. A
baseline study of information use among the target demographic will be
constantly updated through the two year pilot. The publishing platform will
be developed with open source software, and all editorial and business
methodologies explained for possible wider adoption.The editing service will
be structured to facilitate full commercialisation at the end of the
project.

 

Different models will be examined for replication elsewhere in India both as
product differentiation offered by microfinance NGOs, and as standalone
businesses, either as start-ups or by existing media groups, and also as
franchises at the micro-level affiliated to regional networks. 

 

 

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