By IANS,
New Delhi : The mobile phone number may become an individual’s identity number (ID) on account of its uniqueness if Alcatel-Lucent’s plans materialise, the company said Tuesday.
“We are working with the government of India so that mobile number can be used as ID number of a person,” said Alcatel-Lucent India president Vivek Mohan. The company is a global provider of telecommunications solutions to service providers, enterprises and governments.
“It is significant since the number is unique and we already have around half a billion mobile customers in the country. It has the potential to touch the basis of human life, which is what an application should do,” Mohan said at ongoing EmTech India seminar organised by media house CyberMedia here.
“However, it is still at a conceptual stage,” he added.
According to Mohan, the situation was expected to change with telecom operators focusing on new technologies and applications that cater to the specific needs of consumers.
“People in the hinterland are not used to laptops but they find it easier to use mobiles. Post-3G, we can use mobiles to impart education. It is important to remember that technology can be an enabler and not just an end-to-end solution to the people.”
Maintaining that the next wave of growth is likely to come from the rural India, Mohan said: “It is certainly not charity. It makes good business. It is the right time to develop such technologies and applications. India can actually become a hub for these applications.”
Talking about information extraction (IE), the technology to collect search results, Yahoo! Labs Bangalore vice-president and head, Rajeev Rastogi, said: “IE makes search more convenient so that users don’t have to click on multiple URLs”.
What IE does at the very basic level is to extract information from millions of websites and store it in a massive database. It then organizes the information and gives a comparative analysis, he said.
The technique used for information extraction, though working on a simple process, isn’t without limitations; for instance, it doesn’t work across all websites due to different page layouts. Moreover, scaling of thousands of sites is also a problem.