The technology has been launched in Gujarat on an experimental basis and a commercial roll out is expected during the festival season. During a 20-day period when the service was made available, around 6,000 chat sessions took place, says Milind Agnihotri, managing director and CEO of iSolv. What makes this technology attractive is that subscribers are charged on `per bit' basis instead of per minute basis. The average cost of one message works out to around Rs 1.50. iSolv is talking to cellular service providers for packaging of this product with their services. "We are planning to package this product as a consumer application product for the youth in partnership with cellular companies," says Agnihotri. Other youth oriented brands too, have expressed eagerness to be associated with the product. iSolv is also working with cell companies to design a pre-paid chat card exclusively to enable this kind of chat or non-voice service over the mobile network.

There will be little or no voice component on this card. Agnihotri and Sumeet Phadnis, technical director of iSolv, are planning to offer the product with its variants such as Net-to-mobile chat, mobile-to-mobile chat between users in different cellular networks in different cities, and chats which are similar to conference facility targeting the business segment. The mobile channel will be increasingly used for non-voice services and the revenue of mobile service providers from non-voice wireless services will go up with this product, says Agnihotri. But, as non-voice value-added services is not the core activity of cellular providers, they will be outsourcing their requirements. Developing wireless applications that will be time critical, location critical and personalised is the niche area iSolv will work on. We will not be selling the technology, but will go in for a revenue sharing agreement as this is a more robust revenue model, says Agnihotri. iSolv is an angel-funded company and has ambitious growthplans that include having a team of 100 by May 2001 and a positive cash-flow within the next 15 months.

"We will be approaching the market in 12 to 15 months," says Agnihotri. The company has already rolled out services through its mobile portal, WebOnMobile.com which has positioned itself as a one-stop shop, secure, high performance and scaleable solution for value-added mobile data services of cellular operators. WebOnMobile has tied up with cell companies such as Orange, Fascel and Essar together with Jet Airways for offering services such as stock prices from the NSE and BSE, flight arrival, departure and delay alerts and mobile banking services. iSolv is also building prototypes to enable the use of this technology for real-time market research and retail audit. Another prototype is for offering location-critical services for consumer application. This is aimed at big shopping malls and food chains which want to offer personalised services to their customers.