One 97 – A mobile software company

One97 Communications Pvt. Ltd., operates in the Telecom Value Added Service space, creating applications for domestic and international market.

Founded by Vijay Shekhar Sharma in 2000, One97 currently comprises a staff of 125 people with offices in Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Bangalore. It recently (end-2006) acquired another SMS and Mobile data service company Positive Comsol.

Vijay finished school when he was just 14 and was the youngest engineer to graduate out of the Delhi College of Engineering. He set up a business at 19 which was sold to a New Jersey-based telecom software company. Vijay comes form a family of educators from Bihar and his dream was that he wanted to own a billion dollar company by the time he was 30 years old.

He then went about to set up One97, a company into the mobile VAS market. Starting as just a astrology content and rightone content provider, One97 has moved up to provide entire technology services. They started with a revenue share business model (first of its kind arrangement) whereby they offered telcos the option of paying One97 only if the VAS makes money.

One97 offers the entire range of services from SMS and WAP transaction to USSD, which could be used for services such as alerts and reminders, transaction execution, data surfing, etc. With the introduction of 3G in the future, VAS companies are expected to increase revenues by leveraging bandwidth leading to better business applications and improved user experience .

His future could be moving towards video and are soon to launch video SMSs, video portals and videogames. One97 would also be focussing on more network-based value added services like spam-call block. They are also looking at next generation applications like fax applications and next-gen USSD applications.

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