RCom is launching three initiatives — BharatNet plan, Grameen VAS and M2M (Machine to Machine) solutions — under its rural drive. BharatNet plan is a high-speed wireless Internet service in over 20,000 rural locations across India and will address four million PC users in rural India. A high-speed variant of the Reliance NetConnect service specifically designed for rural and sub-urban markets, it will offer speeds of about 153 Kbps, which is 4 to 8 times the current dial-up speed of wire-line services. BharatNet is being offer at Rs. 98 a week with downloads up to 350 MB.

With this sachet pricing, RCom plans to create for all users across rural India.

Grameen VAS services cater to specific needs of rural mobile consumers in over five lakh villages tapping into the vast potential of the Rural VAS services. Priced at Rs. 15 a month, it will cover several specialised services including Mandi Bhav, agriculture and animal husbandry updates, weather forecast and samachar in 10 Indian languages. The services can be accessed via different modes, that is, voice portals, SMS, USSD and Data .

Machine to Machine applications are mobile applications that aid automation, surveillance, remote monitoring, and data gathering. The M2M opportunity includes automation of agro and irrigation services, water level monitoring, and data gathering for milk and agri-cooperatives, fisheries, poultry and soil analysis.

THE special cellphone, set on vibrate, begins to whir. Throughout North Carolina, anonymous teenagers are texting questions to it about sex.

“If you take a shower before you have sex, are you less likely to get pregnant?” asks one.

Another: “Does a normal penis have wrinkles?”

A young girl types: “If my BF doesn’t like me to be loud during sex but I can’t help it, what am I supposed to do?”

Within 24 hours, each will receive a cautious, nonjudgmental reply, texted directly to their cellphones, from a nameless, faceless adult at the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, based in Durham.

Apparently two percent of all web searches are health related. Given the massive number of searches devoted to Brittany Spears, Paris Hilton and other luminaries, this is a very significant number. Of the people who search the web for health matters, many want to know about symptoms they are experiencing. And, according to the researchers, a significant number take the first few hits way too seriously and in addition jump to extreme conclusions like thinking that their head ache is caused by a brain tumor and not by caffeine withdrawal or a blocked sinus (that’s my explanation for everything!).

They found that Web searches for things like headache and chest pain were just as likely or more likely to lead people to pages describing serious conditions as benign ones, even though the serious illnesses are much more rare.

For example, there were just as many results that linked headaches with brain tumors as with caffeine withdrawal, although the chance of having a brain tumor is infinitesimally small.

The researchers said they had not intended their work to send the message that people should ignore symptoms. But their examination of search records indicated that researching particular symptoms often led quickly to anxiousness.

Mr. Horvitz, an artificial intelligence researcher at Microsoft Research, said many people treated search engines as if they could answer questions like a human expert. Now Microsoft’s solution is to redesign the interface. In places where not everyone has a computer at home, why not get an actual health professional to sit near a computer and interpret the search results? While Microsoft is tweaking the human-machine interface, we just plop a human next to the machine.

I know, I know. It’s much better to have the health professionals in places where they actually give treatment, preferably for free. One would obviously have to charge for this value added service, which would desecrate the free ethos of the telecenter.

But you know, innovation never came from thinking what you were supposed to think.