Nokia, in partnership with RockeTalk – India’s largest mobile social network – presents an audio reality show called ‘Nokia Antakshari’. Based on the traditional Antakshari format, it allows allows mobile users from anywhere in India to participate simultaneously on their mobile phones: singing, answering questions and accumulating points, and get shortlisted to compete for a grand prize.
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The game show is hosted within RockeTalk’s mobile application, which has over 16 million registered users, and 8.8 million monthly active users. The app allows people to share audio, video and images instantly, with one click of a button.
One of its most popular features is Live Communities – over 140,000 interest-based communities, where users are actively involved in sharing and participating in discussions.
Since the launch of ‘Nokia Antakshari’, the game has seen about 2.5 million views in a week, and over 50,000 new downloads. The game sees an average of 23 minutes of game play per use.
We spoke with Mr. Sameer Agarwal, Chief Marketing Officer, RockeTalk Inc. who said:
“These are early days. As the market for mobile grows, the whole category will grow. One of RockeTalk’s advantages is that it is language-agnostic. You use your own voice, no typing is needed. There is no need to localise for different languages.”
On the subject of mobile development in the country, he talked about the importance of the mobile-first areas, Tier II and III cities, where smartphone penetration and mobile internet is still low, but growing rapidly.
“The major challenge to mobile is the non-formalisation of mobile structure. With so many different screen sizes and functionalities, it is very difficult for application developers to build to non-standardised specifications.”
The other challenge to mobile, namely monetisation, is one that various platform-owners and marketers are coming up with different ways to overcome. RockeTalk has launched a system to virtual goods that users can buy. For instance, in a section called ‘What’s Hot’, there is a gallery of featured users, and people can pay on a weekely or monthly basis to buy slots to become featured. Currently in its test phase, it is very popular, and RockeTalk receives 175-200 requests from users per day to be featured.
Nokia and RockeTalk have pioneered this campaign, and with India’s mobile internet expected to grow 58 fold by 2016, we are bound to see more and more mobile-centric developments and initiatives. Do you agree? Share your thoughts with us.
