By TARO W
Indiantelevision.com Team

(24 August 2006 7:30 pm)

BANGALORE: Spice Telecom (Spice) has launched its Kannada Wap portal Kannada Kasturi.com. Times Internet (TIL) supplies content to the portal.

On offer is a collection of polytones, pruetones, singtones, MP3 Tones, videos, animations, wallpapers, videotones and theme downloads in Kannada. Value added services including WAP. IVR, SMS, USSD and MyTunes (CRBT) will also be offered on KK.

Spice CEO Navin Kaul is optimistic about doubling the existing subscriber base of 500,000 in Karnataka in the next 10 months. Spice is present in two circles - Punjab and Karnataka - with an overall subscriber base of 2 million, states an official release. Kaul also revealed Spice' Karnataka plan to increase the presence from the current 80 towns and cities to another 150.

On a national scale, Spice proposes to bid for all the circles. Spice has now moved ahead of Tata Indicom in Karnataka, up from the last place to number five with the addition of around 150,000 subscribers over the last 5 to 6 months, claimed Kaul during a discussion with this reporter on the sidelines of the press conference.

TIL Mobile Entertainment business head Neeraj Sharma claims that TIL owns rights to over 50000 picture (wall papers) and sound titles from India and around 10000 from across the world, a major portion of which is English. Times of India Director Sanjiv Sethi claims that TIL owns rights to a major portion - almost one third of the almost 2000-3000 titles of Kannada content.

Plans are afoot to create awareness of KK. Spice Karnataka spends around Rs 180-200 million towards its media campaign. National TV ads have been a recent addition in the Spice campaign. A few moths ago spice roped in Bollywood diva Priyanka Chopra as its brand ambassador. JWT looks after the creative business.