Buyers registered with teauction.com, who are also users of Spice Telecom will be able to monitor auction prices, strike deals and browse through a whole lot of useful information provided their handsets are compatible with WAP, or wireless application protocol.

Announcing the strategic tieup, Mr R Mahesh, Spice Telecom's general manager for marketing, said the new service will be niche product but "extremely useful".

Mr Mahesh said Spice expects a good response from the new WAP service, pointing out that there are around 800 tea buyers in Calcutta and 200 sellers. Plus, there are around 3000 to 4000 people interested in the business.

Teauction.com's vice-president, Mr Sanjeev Sinha, said the mobile bidding procedure will be activated after the Durga Puja festival next month. At present, Spice users can get catalogue and quotes, garden-specific weather and tea news.

Spice Telecom, a brand owned by Modicorp subsidiary Spice Cell Ltd, will not charge anything extra for the facility, apart from the WAP rental of Rs 250 per month and call charge of 42 paise per minute for post-paid users and Rs 5 a day and Re 1 per minute respectively for prepaid users.

Customers will have to register at teauction.com, the seventh authorised auction centre in India and the only one that is an online portal. The B2B exchange, has been promoted by tea majors Williamson Magor, Apeejay group and Hanuman Tea among others.

Teauction.com's Mr Sinha said his portal is also the only auction centre that is licensed to conduct deals all over India. The brick and mortar ones at Calcutta, Siliguri, Guwahati, Kochi, Coimbatore and Coonoor are regional bodies.

As for foreign buyers, Indian law does not allow them to operate directly at the auction centres but teauction.com and its Spice tieup will allow them to check out the auction prices by category, garden and other details. "The buyer will get an alert on his phone when the price hits his range, and will be able to bid," Mr Sinha of teauctio.com said.

Teauction.com has also tied up with a US satellite imagery firm to provide detailed weather reports of all north Indian tea gardens. For this, teauction.com gave the US company the geographical coordinates of the 600-odd gardens in Assam and 200 in Dooars.

Spice to roll out intelligent network by year-end
Spice Telecom Ltd is going all out to upgrade to intelligent network or IN service by December this year, according to chief operating officer S Venkatraman.

He said Spice has got an unexpectedly good response to the WAP service since it was launched in August. WAP is third-generation or 3G in mobilespeak.

"Against our expectation of 3-4000 users by the year end, we have snared 3000 users in a month," Mr Venkatraman said. Of these, around 2000 are regular users.

Recently, Spice began providing stock market information via a tieup with stockmarkit.com and has around 18 "content" providers for the WAP service.

He said Spice may consider a closed user group for the tea community, once it gets the volumes via the deal with teauction.com.