Everyone is socializing these days. If it’s not social networking on the Internet then it’s social networking in real life. More recently the social networking bug has started to catch on in the mobile world. A crop of new and not-so-knew services have entered the market and most have been slowly circulating by word of mouth. I guess since this technology is so new - many of the entrants on the mobile social networking scene are still in "beta" test mode and treading causiously with a limited audience to test the waters, so to speak.

I wanted to write about the onset of mobile social networking as I believe it will have a huge impact on the Indian mobile user base. It’s a well known fact that in India there are now more mobile subscribers then land line subscribers and the uptake of mobile phones is sky rocketing on a monthly basis. The pervasive nature of the mobile is far greater than the Internet which still has not reached the large majority of the India population. Even within the middle classes in India, the Internet is a luxury and for those who do have "broadband" services in India, the speed and reliability is not a patch on international services in Europe, USA and parts of south east Asia you’ll find faster, more reliable braodband services and less confusing tariff structures and options. However, where India does have a very robust user base, with good service support is in the mobile phone market. Nokia is by far the dominant hand set manufacturer in the Indian. GSM rules the roost, so most people are still on what’s known as 2G (80% of userbase). There is a growing number of subscribers signing up to the CDMA packages which are on offer as they provide a faster experience on the mobile,. This technology is commonly referred to as 2.5G but this is primarily being used by business users right now in India - especially by those with laptop data cards from the likes of Reliance, Vodafone and Tata Indicomm. The advent of third generation (3G) networks in India has yet to arrive although there has been recent consensus in the Indian parliament on how to carve up the 3G spectrum (as recently as March 2008) although there is hot debate on right now about whether or foreign mobile networks should be allowed to buy up 3G spectrum licenses in the Indian market place. The next few months will prove very interesting for all those who are watching the developments with 3G in India.

How can we, as a social entrepreneurship venture, utilise the mobile social network given that it penetrates the Indian population to such a great (and growing) degree? More specifically, I am really interested to know how we, as an organisaiton, can exploit the mobile services in India to build a mobile community that will glu together our ever growing network of supporters and build a truly awsome mobile social network. Allow me to highlight a number of interesting technologies which almost anyone in India with a modern mobile phone can take advantage of right now.

If you are in India, in possession of a mobile phone and reading this blog entry, then there is one pre-requisite you must know about. Everything I’m about to write about requires that you have a data plan for your mobile. Most Indian mobile networks offer this at a flat fee rate. If you don’t have a data plan then contact your mobile providers customer services and ask them what your options are. You should tell them that you want to access the internet from your mobile. It also helps if you have a modern mobile phone. If you have a Nokia, Sony Ericson, LG, Moto or Blackberry that’s less than 2 years old (as of March 2008) then you’ll probably be able to utlise everything I’m about to tell you about.

First up is Twitter. If any of you have been using Facebook you’ll know what I mean when I say that Twitter is simply the status field of Facebook. You can Twitters away from your computer or even your mobile phone. If you have a Blackberry you can get a great bit of software (free) called Twitterberry which allows you to tweet on the move. Twitter, put another way, allows you to post short 140 character messages to an open or closed group (or groups) of friends and acquaintances. Should you wish to keep your messages within a closed group of friends you can do so, or alternaively you might feel that your dialy life is so immense that the whole twitter community needs to know about it. The option is yours and your privacy is in your own hands. Lets say you get to go to an amazing conference, fully paid up by your employer, but your colleagues and your friend outside your company are so lucky and don’t get to go. Well get them all on your Twitter list and you can send them all regular, brief updates from your conference and make them feel a part of the event. It might sound frivolous but once you get on to Twitter it can become highly addictive!

Next up is Trutap. This is a very young company. They’ve been in business for under a year (as of March 2008) and recently secured some more funding to expand their business. They have a user base in over 100 terriories world wide and have a strong and growing user base in India already. The idea behind Trutap is to unite a number of existing technologies in to one application. Many of you reading this may already have your own blog, a lot of you will have camera phones on which you takes photos and vidoes and post them up to your blogs. Others may like to chat on Instant Messenger platforms such as Yahoo Chat, MSN Live Chat, AOL Instant Messenger and Google Talk. Trutap unifies all their seperated plaforms in one Java application which you can download for free to your mobile. On your mobile just go to http://m.trutap.com to get an over the air download of the application.  Once you’re signed up you can form groups of friends and message them en-mass without incurring the cost of SMS’ing them all individually. You can chat to them all on their own respective favourite IM that they’re logged in to because in Trutap you’re logged in to all of them all at once. Your IMs will go from your mobile to their laptop screens and back to your mobile. You can even use Trutap to write your blog, take photos and post them all up to your blog.  Trutap is in the process of upgrading their current software and when the new version is out you’ll be able to do a whole lot more. You can already download a Facebook application that suppors Trutap and show your IMs and messages from Trutap in your Facebook page. Keep an eye on them as they’re a hot start up with a lot of growth ahead of them.

Finally, there’s a combination which packs a punch. A lot of you may have heard of the photo sharing community called Flickr. It’s popular with the prosumer and professional photography crowd and is arguably one of the best photo sharing web sites in existance today, although there are many alternatives which offer a similar experience. Those of you who own Nokia N-Series mobiles may not know that your phone has the ability to directly upload photos you take on it to Flickr. So if you have a Flickr account check out the Flcikr upload option on your handset. The built in uploader is rather basic so you what you might want to consider is using a free download Java application called Shozu. It is a nifty piece of software which makes the process of taking and loading photos to Flickr (and other places on the web) a hole lot easier and more fun. Using Shozu you can post your pictures up, view the comments people have left on your photos, reply to those comments, tag, title and describe your photos and even manipulate your images.  The other great feature of Shozu is that you can subscribe to feeds which allows your phone to download photos and video in the background and automatically with no user intervention. I ususually have my phone do this over night so that in the morning I have a collection of short news bulletin videos and tech news updates ready to watch or listen to on the train in to work. It’s a really great sevrice and I do encourage you to check it out.

What all this mobile social network enables us as an organisation and you as participants to do is form social networks online and on your mobiles. It allows for the exchange of ideas, photos, videos, opinions and a host of other things. It is what’s known as user generated content. Just image if you’re one of the selected Yatri’s or a registered participant and you’re on the Jagriti Yatra train with all this mobile technology at your fingers tips. You can Twitter about what you’re currently doing and let every one know that you’ve just shaken hands with the CEO of a huge company. You could snap photos on your mobile during the Yatra at every stop, of all the people you are meeting and immediately post it up to Flickr so that everyone can see what you’re going through during the Yatra. How about doing a short video interview on your mobile phone with your travelling buddies and talking about the excitment and discoveries you’ve made and then  posting them up immediately to your blog so that TV, radio and newspaper journalists can get an almost real time picture of what’s going on? How about Trutapping with all your buddies whilst you’re on the train? You don’t need a laptop anymore to send instant messages to your friends on Google talk, Yahoo or MSN. The mobile opens all these doors to you and much more.

We’d like to hear from you about your experiences with the above mentioned mobile social networking services. Download them and play around. Check out the features and report back your findings here on this blog. Perhaps you’ve already been using a lot of this stuff and you know of other exciting services you want to share with us? Go ahead and post your suggestion here.  I look forward to reading your comment.

Kaustav Bhattacharya

Before I met the inspiring Jagriti Yatra team, I was your average “bindaas” girl who was caught up in a busy schedule that revolved around work and friends. My friend introduced me to the concept of Jagriti Yatra after attending the Yatra launch on the eve of India’s Independence Day. After hearing about the concept and meeting the team, I was tremendously inspired by their vision of empowering the youth of India by awakening their spirit of entrepreneurship and urging them to define their own destiny and the future of India through their entrepreneurial efforts.

I am inspired by this effort to make a difference to the society we live in. It has changed my entire perspective and lead me to staunchly believe that I as an individual can make a difference. The positivism of the team as well as their belief that each individual has the capacity to bring about change instigated me to think positively and find ways that I can contribute to this great effort. Imagine the potential of being on a 16 day train journey with 400 likeminded individuals who are fired by the same zeal and enthusiasm- I see limitless potential ahead of us.   Together, we can define the future of our nation.

Frankly speaking, I would never have gathered courage on my own to even dream of such an ambitious journey for youth to bring about positive change through a train yatra across India to meet real heroes and learn from bottom-up innovators and entrepreneurs who are changing, challenging and redefining India today. Today, I am inspired to dream big and have the wings to dream and aspire towards contributing to India’s future.

Before getting involved in Jagriti yatra, my thinking was limited much like that of the common man battling the everyday urdles of life. Like the majority of youth, I admired the Tata’s and Ambani’s from afar for their long hard journey to success. Films of a patriotic nature such as Rang De Basanti and Lagaan had a fleeting impression on me rather than inspire me to think about how I could contribute towards the building of my nation. We are so caught up in our daily schedules that we ignore the greater mission of our life – to achieve something that touches the lives of others and make a lasting impact long after we are gone rather than remain caught up in a net of day to day personal issues. Life is too short, if seen in limited focus of living from day to day.

As the population grows, an economy has to provide more jobs, more goods and services for the growing population. Copying others won’t help. People these days are so afraid of taking risks, of taking an innovative approach to beating competition because we are unwilling to give it a shot for fear of failure. One forgets the dictum that “if there is a will that is a way”. We need to acknowledge risk and yet dare to dream big. We can find answers to the challenges of today if we have self-confidence and are willing to think of innovative and creative solutions. I believe that if have confidence in our ability to innovate, no power can stop us from achieving our dreams.

 Jagriti Yatra boosts the confidence of budding young yatris to innovate, to think out of the box and dare to take calculated risks. Innovation is fundamental to being a successful entrepreneur. I think Jagriti Yatra will cultivate entrepreneurs amongst the participants by empowering them with a vision, self belief and the freedom to dream.  India needs entrepreneurs to create wealth and sustain the current level of growth. Entrepreneurs have the power to drive the future development of this country at a pace that has not been seen before.

 Learning a subject in a classroom setting has little impact. Jagriti Yatra gives us the opportunity to meet and learn in a practical manner from entrepreneurs in their “karma bhoomi”- those who have made a difference. Each Yatri will explore their own ideas, and develop their latent potential for innovation by meeting real entrepreneurs face-to-face and learning from the experience of the real heroes when they started out in their incarnation as an entrepreneur. The main aim of the journey is to get Yatri’s to think in a systematic way pertaining to all the aspects of innovation and in turn entrepreneurship.

Through this yatra I feel each participant will get to discover the entrepreneur in themselves by learning to explore their passion, dream big, innovate upon their ideas for change, explore opportunities within risks, the role of leadership and team work and the ability to think outside the box. This is a key life skill and I recommend it highly to each one of you. Come, be a part of a new generation of change makers.