Exclusive Interview: Sanjay Swamy of mChek
By kamla bhatt • Feb 7th, 2007Category: Bangalore, Diaspora, Ideas, Internet & Telecom, VC & Private Equity Funding
This is an exclusive interview with Sanjay Swamy, CEO of mChek, a mobile commerce company that wants to turn your cell phone into an ewallet. That is right use your mobile to pay for your groceries, or order for that favorite pizza of yours. And Sanjay demonstrates how to use your mobile phone as a payment system in this video clip.
The mobile phone is the new networked smart card says Sanjay.
Recently the company rolled out its mobile payment service for Airtel users in Delhi and it plans to roll out the service to the rest of the country shortly. The company also plans to expand its offerings outside of India sometime in the future says Sanjay.
We caught up with Sanjay on a Sunday morning at mChek’s Bangalore office, where he gave us a demo of how mChek payment works, and shopping on the phone. We asked him about the security concerns of using a mobile phone, and the challenges they faced in rolling out the product. Building a mobile product might seem deceptively simple, but working with the mobile operators and finally have the service available to end users is quite a challenging process. We talked about the company, its future plans and its revenue model. mChek payment is their first service and they have more mobile offerings in their pipeline.
mChek received funding from Draper, Fisher and Jurvetson and Rajesh Jain. The funding amount remains undisclosed.
Sanjay moved from USA to India three years ago. He has degrees in aeronautical engineering from universities in Bangalore and Seattle, which was once the headquarters for Boeing.
Technorati tags: mChek, Sanjay Swamy, mobile payment, mobile commerce, video blog
Kamla Bhatt is the host and producer of an Internet Radio show where listeners can find stories about the new and emerging India and the global Indian community. As a pioneer of 'internet radio' format in India Kamla started her first show News about India, followed by TalkNewsIndia in 2005. In 2006 she premiered her new show: The Kamla Bhatt Show: Life, People and Ideas. 
That was a very good one. Insights on the “mobile enabled business” very well presented by Sanjay.It sounds very interesting and promising too.
It shouldv’e been a bit more longer i guess.
Cheers!
Mani
Thanks Mani for your comments.
How long should the interview be is fast turning to be a subjective preferance. Some listners want short 10 minute clips, while others like you would prefer longer. I hope you got to see the video clip…that makes the interview longer.
Thanks for listening and sharing your comments.
Kamla