We all are aware about the growing popularity of internet in India. And these days Indian Entrepreneurs are busy exploiting it. Back in December 2007 SITG (Smile Interactive Technology Group) had declared its plan of setting up 97,000 e-commerce kiosk within 3 years across the India. Providing with music downloads, airline and railway tickets and various other products available online.

That’s not all. Recently Thomas John an entrepreneur and CEO of Ooha Services India Private Limited is providing free internet access using kiosk infrastructure in Chennai. In case you all are wondering why free? This is what John has to say:

“The Internet is so powerful that everybody needs to use it to the fullest extent. Which is where Ooha comes in, by making the machines an organic platform available in the public domain.” Further stating “We plan to deploy about 100 kiosks in Chennai in the next six months and then expand the service slowly to other metros (Mumbai and Bangalore) and tier-two cities (Pune, Kochi, Hyderabad, etc) in the South.”

So how does he benefits from this? Well.. though he plans to provide free internet access yet he wont be running into loss. Right now he is dependent upon the ads for the revenue. It is a smart way to make money and provide free service.

Such projects need a huge investment or funding from a potential investor. Regarding this John says:

We found an investor whom we did not have to convince much. We met him in Coimbatore in his office and in the course of the presentation he pulled out his calculator and did the math and said he is in. We did not finish the presentation. As far as VCs (venture capitalists) are concerned, they are more focused on traditional portal/core technology business and are not too keen on an idea like ours.

I personally feel that such facilities should not be limited to malls or departmental stores, etc. Schools, Colleges and other Educational Institutional too should be benefited from this. So does John. He revealed his future plans of introducing Ooha kiosks in schools/colleges and other educational institutions very soon.

“At this moment we are experimenting with a few concepts and once we are certain about it we will approach schools and colleges. We would like to make sure that our platform is completely secure in every respect before we introduce it in educational institutions” said John.

This concept will surely be appealing to the youths. But what concern me more are the security and privacy measures. I wonder how safe will it be for people accessing their private data on net from such malls. Time will tell us the story about Ooha being successful or failure concept.

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