"The reality is, the smartphones that I see, are not good enough. They're not good enough if I want to pay a shopkeeper, or if I want to pay a cab driver, or your maid, or if they want to pay each other. The apps that are there today do not serve the purpose. They are too big. They are made for people like us. In India, there is a digital divide, which is congruent with the class divide. That is what separates India from Bharat. Out of the 250 million people who have smartphones today, there are only 60 million who use Internet regularly. I've met people whom I wanted to pay using the Mobikwik app, and seen them struggle to download the Mobikwik app. For someone who hasn't used mobile payments, to start understanding the sophisticated world of e-wallets, and that made us think: what do we do now?", Bipin Preet Singh, co-founder of Mobikwik pointed out while launching Mobikwik Lite, the company's low bandwidth app, which allows payment transfer between users. Mobikwik lite has currently been launched only for smartphones - the company "promised" to roll out a feature phone version - and is available in English and Hindi. A version in all Indian languages is expected by the end of this week. The application is less than 1mb in size, takes very little time to download (the company said 28 seconds on a 2G connection; it took me less time on my 3G connection). It is…
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