India recently finalized its 3G policy and although we are way behind many countries, it is expected that 3G subscribers will cross the 100 million mark - that's more than the total population of many countries - within 5 years. With one of the lowest rates in the world (20 paise a minute or about 0.5 cents for a 3G video call) and innovations such as the $35 tablet, I don't doubt that estimate at all.  3G will reach where wired broadband could not.

What concerns me though are some of the other challenges that remain largely unaddressed:

1. I don't think the content providers and app developers have understood local pricing yet.  Many of them have their global pricing strucutures applicable here. In fact, many of them have actually priced their offerings higher in India. I am no economist but I also understand that the incremental cost of producing a digital product is miniscule as compared to that of a physical product. A small blog post is not enough to discuss all the intricacies of pricing but the content providers (and also the vendors) should keep their options open for differential pricing as well as pricing which is in line with cost of other things. After all, a customer who pays 0.5 Cents for a 3G video call is hardly likely to pay $20 for a social networking client
2. It is just not sufficient to have iPhone or Blackberry versions of your site if you want your content to be consumed more broadly. You need to be able to have much more fine-grained support for different types of handsets, and not just a few types of smart-phones. We detail why this is important and how this can be implemented in an advisory paper, "Adapting Your Content Management Platform for Mobile Delivery"  for our subscribers.
3. Localization is very important. There are 22 official languages and many more dialects as well as unofficial languages spoken in India. So your content systems should make it easier for users to interact in local languages.  Having a Unicode compliant WCM system is not enough; you also need to have local language interfaces to enter content in users' language of choice. I'm not suggesting that there should be a version of TweetDeck in all 22 languages, but you get the idea.
4. Apart from the language, there are many other unique aspects that these systems should support or enable. As an example, if some of the vendors were to come up with an out-of-the-box accelerator for building Matrimony or Astrology sites -- the two most popular type of web content in India -- I am sure they would have a big customer base
5. And finally, for  app developers, there is a serious lack of support in terms of SDKs, APIs, policies, and documentation for them to be able to create language-specific, localized applications.  As an example, some app stores do not allow you to submit applications that are ad supported. So you can only submit apps that are either free or paid but not that are supported by any alternative business model. If someone wants to develop a highly unique application such as the one that allows tobacco farmers in rural India to participate in tobacco auctions, the only way to make money would be by way of ads (example courtesy @pranshuj)

In one of the conference keynotes, a speaker explained how mobile apps are going to be big. He gave his own example of how he starts his day by checking his Facebook account, prepares for a music concert, books movie tickets, and does a lot of other stuff all using his "smart" handset. While I don't subscribe to this hype - in this case, our friend probably doesn't have a laptop or life - I do believe that there is a huge opportunity waiting to be tapped, and  some of these challenges will need to get addressed sooner than later.

On a related note, I will be speaking about how to manage content for the mobile world in my session at the J. Boye conference in Aarhus. Please feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail if you'd like me to cover anything specific.

In our recently released advisory paper, we explain the key considerations when delivering content and services to mobile visitors. Based on these considerations, we've also proposed three broad alternative approaches, depending on how finely-grained targeting your require.

Here's the table of contents of the advisory paper Adapting Your Content Management Platform for Mobile Delivery:

• Key Takeaways
• Introduction
• Key Considerations
  • Adapting Your Publishing Model: Pages vs. Components
  • Adapting for Device-Specific Capabilities and Limitations
  • Adapting Your Content to a Specific Device
  • Adapting Your Templates for Mobile
  • Adapting to Place, with Location-Based Services (LBS)
  • Adapting Your Services
  • Adapting Your Media Assets with Proper Formats
  • Content Aggregation
  • Adapting Your Content Production for Mobile Contributors
  • Setting Policies
• Conclusion

The advisory briefing is available to subscribers of our Web CMS, Collaboration & Community, Portals, and Web Analytics streams.

On the surface, this is a run-of-the-mill strategic acquisition. Dassault has built a business around its 3D technology, and now has a software suite to accommodate the whole conceive, design, realize, and service PLM process. It's become one of the most major vendors in that business (with revenues of €1,251m in 2009) and has enough cash to move from a recently announced OEM partnership to a full-blown acquisition in less than a month. Exalead has been pushing "SBAs" ("search based applications") built on top of its CloudView search infrastructure. There should be plenty of opportunities to integrate that search technology into the PLM cycle.

But there's a little bit more to it than that. The press release struggles to pithily convey it, quoting Yvan Proteau of Yellow Pages: "The combination of these entities will help organizations like ours create better user experiences based on the delivery of information and data in an innovative manner that leverages the latest in 3D technology that consumers have long demanded."

Wait... what? Are we going to see a Yellow Pages iPhone app that uses Exalead to understand what mood you're in, and then uses Dassault technology to display suggested restaurants in 3D?

Actually, they're already halfway there. Yellow Pages recently launched the Urbanizer app, which uses Exalead to recommend places based on your mood. And Dassault has created 3dvia, where users can build 3D environments on-line.

Both companies have a history of generating revenue out of their core technology, and then branching out in all directions from that. For Dassault, the bread-and-butter is 3D and PLM; but it also created 3dvia, and invested in community & collaboration vendor blueKiwi. Exalead's main business is enterprise search; a few years ago, mostly indexing Lotus repositories, and more recently, building larger (and more custom) enterprise integrations. But Exalead also built a large public web search engine, indexed the French President's speeches, and powered an iPhone app.

Normally, with an acquisition like this, I would caution any current or potential customer to think carefully whether the priorities of new owners will still be with their scenarios. However, both Dassault and Exalead have shown they're strongly engineering-driven, and unafraid to trod off the beaten path. With a new wealthy parent, Exalead is not likely to shut down its more exotic projects as irrelevant extravagances. There will be plenty of search applications for Dassault's PLM, and I'm fairly certain Exalead will hold on to its current customers. But don't be surprised to also see an animated, 3d, mood-sensing Yellow Pages search on an iPhone 4 next year.

The launch of Apple's iPad last week has caught the imagination of armchair critics worldwide:

"What's it for?"

"What a funny name (snigger snigger)"

"It's just a big iPhone"

And so on.  But whether the Apple device itself is a success or not, we seem to be approaching a tipping point for improved user interfaces to manage documents.

Be it the Kindle, Tablet, Nook, or iPad, keyboardless document reader devices are on the verge of becoming mainstream -- at least for consumers. For browsing and reading through large volumes of files, or large documents containing multiple pages (books and libraries), such devices are infinitely more user friendly than the current desktop or laptop paradigm.

Take that one step further and it is logical to reach the conclusion that such devices might work well for reading through airliner maintenance manuals, consulting documentary evidence in court,  searching archives, or accessing a patient's medical records and images?  So while the pundits mock the iPad, I see real potential here for the world of case, document and records management.  That said, I already own too many Apple devices, and may have just drunk too much Apple-flavored Kool Aid. But surely it can only be time before some enterprising vendor starts to deliver secure organizational and access applications for these devices.

I for one wish them luck, for as somebody who has spent his career digging through virtual crates, accessing electronic files that I then need to print to actually read, I know for sure that there has to be a better way.