In the financial space patents are very hard to get and enforce unless they are for physical things. Business methods are very tough in India. That said please do not assume what Eko will do ( SMS etc.) . We hope to be able to add a little more meat to our website in a week or two.

What about patent ? Found that couple of companies has the same SMS payment process.

Thank you for your good wishes and perceptive comments. We are working hard on our beta launch. One of my aims has always been to help develop the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India so will keep posting things from our experience that may help startups.( we may do things well or badly but either way there is learning)

We plan to have our first board meeting soon and one of the agenda items is to decide on a few company goals till March 2008. If our board agrees we may post our company goals on VW.

Anyway congrats for your venture and best of luck for your team. Well as some one who was formerly been working on a mobile payment platform, I think Eko is a mobile payment product , but would differentiate it from the market would be it’s B2B model. So i guess rather than trying to compete with say a paymate or an NGPAY or an Obopay it will help service providers launch their own mobile payment solution under their brand name ( Read SBI Pay - powered by Eko) . Anyway i had always believed that there is enough market in India for a b2b service because it can bet on existing customer base and brand value of the service provider ( say an Idea or an SBI). Further the payment company can fully concentrate on the product development and improving the product while the marketing & promotion will be done by the service provider.

Also from a customer’s perspective , using a mobile payment service for a service provider (say an SBI or an IDEA Cellular) adds crediblity when compared with a mobile payment company like NGPAY or PAYMATE ( For example if a customer recieves an SMS from the customer care of his mobile service provider like ” Dear customer, now you can pay your utility bills and pay at resturants using your Airtel phone. to regsiter log on to Airtel.com” , the customers are more likely to use the service.

One critical factor for mobile payment solution providers is the platform they choose to operate their service ..USSD, SMS , GPRS or Voice. While USSD can be the most preferred option from a customers point of view as it works on any mobile phone with out the difficulty of typing keywords for an SMS service which is one reason why many of the SMS based application was a failure in market. ( Well at the time when my startup was running the SMS service for a leading TV network, our biggest problem was the keyword typing errors most of the users were doing..). When it comes to GPRS, it would works well if you are targeting the premium end of your subscriber base, becuase i think it would take atleast 2-3 years for GPRS to catch up in India due to bandwidth constraints of many networks.

Also i believe service providers rather than concentrating on services like restaurant bills and online shopping should cater to the basic needs of the average cell phone user like providing a facility to pay electricity bills, water bills and other utility bills ( remember bill desk and bill junction are really doing well on the utility bill sector and now they have started talking about mobile..though bill junction all ready has a mobile payment option), then railway ticket booking etc ( remember ITZ cash which is really doing well on this space).
Once again i wish Sanjay good luck on his way to creating an elephant that will cater to over more than a million customers with an ARPU of Rs 400/year as he always wanted to be!

All the best.
Shashank