1. 12/3/11 Music and lyrics - Technology - livemint.com Enter KeywordSA T UR DA Y, DE CE MB E R 03, 2011 3:57 PM ISTLivemint Home | e-Paper | Todays Newspaper | mint CODETravel TechnologyPosted: Thu, Dec 30 2010. 9:02 PM ISTBooksCultureMusic and lyrics It cost Hexolabs 10-member team six months, and around Rs30-40 lakhStyleto create Mobile AntakshariPlay Akshai JainSlideshowsInsiderParentingLivemint HomeVideosPodcastsMint ReportsBlogsMint on Facebook The song sounds familiar, but the words are 0Webcast Archive0 0 missing. The listener thinks for a minute, trying Like 3,869Partners to fit lyrics to the tune; she decides to hazard aWall Street Journal Like guess. Her voice quivers as she sings into herTools cellphone; then, suddenly, a smile spreads across her face. The words are right.Mint MobileRSS FeedsThats one reward point earned. The hills have wi-fimint e-paper A Tweet and a poke from the CEOFestival Contest The ultimate home officeFollow us on TwitterFollow us on FacebookGrowing wired up ADVERTISEMENT Mukherjee puts number to slowdo Finance minister sees economy expandin at over 7.5%; Kaushik Basu expects The prompt at the end of the line gives her a few seconds to recover before revival in the final quarter launching into the next song. The exercise is repeated with redoubled Coal ministry considers royalty sha enthusiasm. It makes for an odd sight; it also seems to be immense fun. The change relates to the way benefits a to be passed on to the local community In the crowded world of mobile phone apps, Mobile Antakshari stands out. Theminers game, created by Hexolabs, a Chennai-based firm, is one of Indias most popular 2G scam | Delhi HC stays Chandoli apps, having attracted 110,000 customers within the first three months of its bail launch in May 2009. Justice V.K. Shali took the view that Chandolias release might have an impa Since then the apps user base has been growing at 10% every quarter. And the on... game is, clearly, addictiveapproximately 40% of its players are repeat K.P. Singh | Gurgaon was envisage customers. Mobile Antakshari, says Vijay Shekhar Sharma, chairman of One97as another Chandigarh Communications, one of Indias largest mobile value-added services (VAS)Real estate baron K.P. Singh speaks abo companies, is an excellent incarnation of the game and makes optimum use ofhis dreams, property development and DLFs debt resources.www.livemint.com/2010/12/30210322/Music-and-lyrics.html1/4

2. 12/3/11Music and lyrics - Technology - livemint.com In a country where the Daniel Lalonde | Champagne wasn Internet user base isalways a bubblyThe president-CEO of Mot & Chandon sa growing sluggishly, even asheritage is the brands strongest suit the mobile user base has exploded, mobile apps may serve as the best bridge between the two. In rural India, VAS and apps are fast taking the space of the Internet, access to which remains limited, Sharma explains. Theyre easier to use, and theyre oftenMass appeal: Raja Manohar, managing director ofavailable in vernacularHexolabs Interactive, which created MobileAntakshari, at his Chennai office. M. languages. The success ofLakshman/Mint Mobile Antakshari is only oneof the cases in point. Incredible as it may sound, Mobile Antakshari happened largely by chance. It wasnt what Raja Manohar, Hexolabs managing director, had in mind when he started his company in 2006, when he was still a student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. At the time, Manohar had been focusing on creating educational apps, to help children spell or recognize prime numbers, for example. Those apps were successful, but only moderately; Manohar knew that hed need to create an app with a much wider appeal. What that would be, he wasnt sure. Then, one day, a maid working in the Hexolabs office asked Manohar what exactly was it that his firm did. This woman, who had studied till class V, spoke only a smattering of Tamil, and she needed her daughters help to make calls on her cellphone. Also Read The Future of the Internet (Complete Series) That blunt question set off a train of thought in Manohars mind. Her only access to information seemed to be voice, he says. Thats when I realized that More videosSitesto reach out to the bulk of people, Id need to venture into voice-based services.Hindustan TimesMost ReadMost E-mailed Editors PicksHindustanThe choice, he claims, was narrow. Mass appeal in apps was limited to astrology,Online Classifieds Bollywood and cricket. Astrology was not quite his area of expertise, and heThat Eighties showFever 104wasnt clear what kind of cricket app he could create. Bollywood, though: that Discounts, new launches lift NovemberShine: Jobs in India might work.salesMovie ReviewsADVERTISEMENT An insomniacs guide to photography Manohar recalls that it took a 10-member teamgraduates of IIT and the Flying in the face of profitability National Institute of Design5,500 lines of code, six months of work, andTheres more to a name than you know between R 30 lakh and R 40 lakh to create the app. Jets patent challenge against Virgindismissed The heart of the gamethe very first stumbling blockwas the automatic What St Stephens means to me speech recognition (ASR) technology to decode the players voices. Licences for these advanced technologies were prohibitively expensive, so Hexolabs tied up with OnMobile to use one of its ASR technologies. Next came the exhausting and funny process of creating a database of songs for four languagesHindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. Each language would have 1,500 songs, every one of which needed to have a grammar written for it, which would give the system points of comparison with what players were singing. The complexities only increased. Wed noticed, Manohar says, that when players werent sure of the song, theyd start in a wavering, slightly husky voice. The ASR would have to compensate for these vocal quirks. Then came the testing, for which, says Manohar, friends and a few freelancers were roped in. Mobile Antakshari can be played either against the computer or against friends. In the former, a player is presented with four modes of play. All four modes expect players to recognize a song and sing it back, although the clues in each differ. The mutliplayer mode, for Antakshari Ustads, allows players to key in the telephone numbers of their friends, inviting them to join in. These friends- turned-competitors now buzz in every time they recognize the song, to get first shot at singing the lyrics. Winners redeem their points for prizes such as callerwww.livemint.com/2010/12/30210322/Music-and-lyrics.html 2/4 3. 12/3/11Music and lyrics - Technology - livemint.com tunes or more apps. The work on Mobile Antakshari continues apace. Every quarter, around 100-150 new songs are added in each language. A massive back-end system logs every single song a particular player has heard, so that songs arent repeated. The system also logs language preferences: A player who plays in Hindi three times is taken directly to the Hindi version the fourth time around. The success of the app, however, hasnt translated into financial returns, which leaves Manohar a little bitter. The irony in app development is that the creator gets 10% of the revenue while everyone else, including mobile service providers, get 90%, he says. There really isnt very much money to be made from content. Part of the problem, he thinks, is the fragmented nature of the Indian market. In countries like the US, where handset markets are a lot more homogenous, its possible to survive by creating apps for phones like the iPhone, he says. But here, we have to customize apps for a range of handsets, a time-consuming and expensive process. Sharma agrees that the initial marketing for any app is tricky, especially for small companies, but the initial struggle, he believes, will pay off. The silver lining for Hexolabs is that two more domestic mobile operators will soon offer Mobile Antakshari; operators in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Singapore have also shown interest, although song copyrights make those tie-ups more complicated. Manohar is cautious, but he agrees that Mobile Antakshari was a great learning experience. What kind of apps does Manohar see in the future? I want to reach out to rural markets directly through healthcare and educational apps, he says. Its time, he thinks, to start singing a slightly different tune. akshai.j@livemint.com Tags - Find More Articles On:India Internet Mobile Antakshari HexolabsVijay Shekhar SharmaBollywoodVideo story READ MORE ARTICLES BY: Akshai Jain Add New Comment Login Showing 2 comments Sort by newest firstRahul7star can i use my iphone to play this app 11 months agoLikeReply!"#$ %&, A pundit of "Computer and Communications Futuwww.livemint.com/2010/12/30210322/Music-and-lyrics.html3/4 4. 12/3/11Music and lyrics - Technology - livemint.com Go for an ad supported version which is free for end users just like Rovios Angry Birds for Android. If the above does not work, change what you do, finally it all boils down to the bottom line. 11 months ago Like ReplyM Subscribe by emailS RSS Reactions blog comments powered by DISQUSSubscribe Log In Contact Us Customer Service Privacy Policy Terms of Use AdvertisingAbout HT Media Browse Jobs Site Map Copyright 2011 HT Media All Rights Reservedwww.livemint.com/2010/12/30210322/Music-and-lyrics.html 4/4