Hyderabad based Tanla Solutions has received a letter of approval from Indias Foreign Investment Promotion Board, for establishing a 50:50 joint venture with ZED Worldwide Holdings SL, a Spanish digital content and services company. Tanla and Zed will establish the JV as a limited liability company, to develop and provision mobile content applications. Zed has tied up with Tanla as a "local expert", instead of leveraging their 130 global wireless operator partnerships. Tanla has mostly been focused on the UK market, but over the last fiscal, has increasingly begun to focus on the Indian market - providing 3G deployment to MTNL and signing messaging and billing agreements with Airtel, BSNL, Vodafone-Essar,Reliance Communications and Idea. For the Indian market, it appears that the JV is looking to go beyond Voice based services. They're eying the Mobile Internet space, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Advertising, and Interactive TV. Content Implications Zed operates in 54 countries, including USA, China and in Europe; they have agreements with 130 wireless oeprators, and clocked around $870 million in turnover in 2008. What's interesting about Zed is its partnership with premium content providers like the NBA, Lionsgate, Disney, among others. We wonder if Zed will seek independent content partnerships in India, or will they leverage some of the content partnerships that they already have, in India. The kind of content they have can open doors, and help Tanla deploy their technology for other services to ride on as well. Which is why we wonder why Zed didn't enter the market…
