India is the third-largest telecoms market in the world and the second-largest wireless market. India’s Economic Survey for 2008-2009 counted 414 million fixed and mobile connections as of February – on target to reach 500 million by 2010. Broadband subscribers increased to 5.69 million in February, up from 180,000 in March 2005.

Informa, the research firm, forecasts mobile broadband revenues will reach $3.9 billion in India in 2013. HyperOffice president Farzin Arsanjani believes Tata Communications is just the ticket for putting cloud computing tools into the hands of business users in emerging markets. The company’s international expansion started last year when it delivered a Spanish edition of HyperOffice as well as smartphone and iPhone support.

HyperOffice operates as an integrated Microsoft Exchange alternative as well as a SharePoint alternative with all the functionality but developed and priced for small to mid-sized companies. Its solutions include document management, calendar, contact management, task manager, discussion forums, opinion polls and announcements. It’s browser-agnostic.

A new collaboration network has been setup for such freelancers to productivily put together teams and increase their opportunites for contracts in the UK. freelanceadvisor.co.uk allows freelancers to search for people with similar skillsets and create a virtual team online, greatly increasing the scope of projects that they can bid on.

Freelanceadvisor.co.uk Advisor, Darren Fell:

We have created an online collaborative network that allows individual contractors and freelancers to build a virtual team online. Its tough enough out there for freelancers and contractors and there is no need, with the technology tools we have available now, for communication to be a barrier

The site provides tools for the team to stay in touch as if they shared an physical office, ensuring that the entire team knows where they are on the project and enabling everyone to stay on the same page. While the “Network” as it’s more commonly known by won’t fit every style of contractor, for many it has become a way to broaden its offerings in contract bids.

The webconferencing tool allows users to host or attend online meetings. It allows desktop sharing and a host of online collaboration tools between users, and is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux systems.

Skype Relations Manager, Antoine Bertout:

Yugma is one of the most popular web conferencing and online collaboration tools available for use with Skype. We are delighted that Yugma has enhanced its popular Yugma SE application to support simpler sign-on for our users who can now simply use their existing Skype Name to collaborate online using Skype.”

The new plugin will be available to the millions of Skype users worldwide and is free to use for online meetings of up to 20 people.

Gartner Research Analyst, Bianca Granetto:

This is the fifth consecutive year that the market has exhibited greater than 20 per cent growth year-on-year as more organizations have moved from an experimental phase to a richer experience and engagement phase of use

In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the total market for web conferencing and collaboration technologies is set also on pace for record growth with a 2008 jump of 28.6 percent to reach $500.3 million in 2008. Western Europe, which holds 90 per cent market share of the web conference and collaboration market in the Europe/Middle East and Africa market, is expected to grow 26.5 percent while the Middle East and Africa will increase 45 percent over last year

Over the last couple of years, there has been a strong trend in growth among web conferencing, video conferencing and collaboration technologies. Gartner anticipates that instant messaging will become as popular as email by 2010, and videoconferencing will evolve to the desktop to support ad hoc conversations and become more cleanly integrated with web conferencing, IM and voice over IP systems.

Collaboration tools usually find a niche in a specific category. Online presentation applications include big names like GoToMeeting and WebEx. There are whiteboarding applications like Twiddla’s brainstorming solution and Adobe’s Connect Now which lets you whiteboard and web conference at the same time. Or there’s Vyew which lets you whiteboard and screen share. OpenACircle contains a set of these tools, all in one convenient package. The suite however, does not include a dedicated white boarding feature.

There aren’t many applications that combine all these functions into one. OpenACircle, however, makes a good effort at at the complete package. The only feature that they seem to be missing is a dedicated whiteboarding tool, but considering the support for everything else from file sharing to screen sharing, it’s not worth dismissing the app solely due to that one missing feature, however it is puzzling why they didn’t include it. Apparently they’re looking to include this feature in a future release.

There are applications out there that do include all of the features including dedicated white boarding and online powerpoint uploads and presentation such as InstantPresenter. Instantpresenter has a complete set of web conferencing, video conferencing, webinar and collaboration tools at competitive pricing.

The Wainhouse Research study reviewed six local markets including existing usage by county, local employment data by title, and current telecommunication company penetration rates. Local markets profiled include Australia & New Zealand, Japan, China, Southeast Asia’s group of countries, India, and Korea. While each local market has varying degrees of market penetration, overall region data for the reviewed areas were as follows:

• 1.4B employed labor force, of which 84M would be addressable for collaboration & video conferencing service use
• 76.5B audio conferencing minute opportunity versus a forecasted 4.3B minutes for 2008
• $6B audio conferencing revenue opportunity
• $1.3B web conferencing revenue opportunity
• $53M video bridging services opportunity
• China & India hold the most opportunity, but each of the six markets profiled typically exceed an opportunity for over 1B more audio conferencing minutes than forecast for 2008