Aadhaar to drive technology adoption at grassroots: Zinnov

Says growth in mobile Internet usage has been accelerated by rise in smartphone penetration, which expected to reach about 150 million by 2015

Aadhaar, government's unique identification (UID) project, is expected to drive technology adoption at the grassroots level next year, spurred by card- less transactions and e-health, says market research firm Zinnov.

Growth in mobile Internet usage has been accelerated by rise in smartphone penetration, which expected to reach about 150 million by 2015, it said.

Besides, the enterprise mobility market is projected to increase almost 5-fold to touch $1 billion by mid-2015.

"UID will drive large scale technology adoption at the grassroots level. Registrations of UID are expected to reach 600 million by end-2014, almost 50% of India's population, which will mark the second wave in terms of leveraging the platform for delivering citizen centric services," Zinnov said.

Large banks and telecom companies may only leverage it as another KYC (know your customer) model, it added.

But, nimble players will leverage the ecosystem to deliver innovations such as card-less transactions, automating employee verification/tracking, e-health (remote diagnosis and disease management), Zinnov said.

This will drive large scale technology adoption at the grassroots levels. Making these devices light weight and low power and connected to smartphones can be a potential game changer in the technology adoption, it added.

Besides, the enterprise mobility will take a large share of transformational IT focus of Indian enterprises and is expected to touch $1 billion by mid-2015, up from $244 million in 2011.

"Enterprises are excited by the possibility of bringing in better operational and process efficiencies, opening up new business opportunities and providing better customer service through a connected, agile workforce in 2014," Zinnov added.

The firm projected that India will become the second largest technology start-up ecosystem in the world.

Over the last 2 years more than 20 privately run accelerators and funding groups have been launched with most of them supporting 5-10 start-ups annually on an average.

"With a large numbers of stakeholders coming forward in support of the start-ups, India is all set to experience a new age for technology entrepreneurs. India is expected to take less than half the time it took Silicon Valley to be where it is today," it added.

Social media will drive monetisation opportunities in 2014. Social media in India today accounts for 25% of total online minutes and 83% of India's online population uses Facebook.

Zinnov said many organisations have already started measuring social media efforts through leads, sentiment and brand visibility etc consequently attributing significant revenue uplift to social media efforts.