Boonies may be the next big opportunity

Om Malik wrote a few months back: Indian Telcos head to the Boonies:

“Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of India’s second-biggest mobile-phone network, says fishermen on the nation’s southern coast are using their cell phones while at sea to call traders and find out who’s paying the most for lobsters. He’s planning to stop that. Instead, Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd will offer the fishermen a wireless Internet service that would provide up-to-date prices for their catch and even allow them to book orders from their boats. Doing that, the fishermen ‘will significantly increase their earnings’, he says. Fishermen aren’t the only ones on Mr Mittal’s radar screen. In the next 12 to 24 months, he plans to introduce technology that will enable farmers to monitor weather conditions in real time on their mobile phones.”

SME. SME. SME. Those Farms and Fisheries in India are mostly SMEs. How big are these segments? Large enough to tip the market share war in Wireless OS that today is dominated by the Symbian OS, with its largescale support from Nokia, in favor of some lesser players like Microsoft and PalmSource? Could these grassroots applications for the bottom of the pyramid become killer apps in the quest for seducing the next billion computer / telecom users?