Business Standard Launches Instant Messenger - BS Buddy

Financial daily Business Standard has launched a branded Instant Messenger called BS Buddy, which appears to be a customized version of Mundu IM from Geodesic Ltd. The Instant Messenger allows access via a single messenger, to MSN Messenger, Yahoo IM, AOL Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk and Jabber Talk. That’s nothing new - Pidgin already allow access to multiple IMs.

What’s noteworthy is the access to content that the IM allows - when you click on the yellow blob (seriously - what were they thinking?) in the IM that represents BS Buddy, it opens up a pane as shown below, called BS Dashboard.

The BS Dashboard provides current news, stock market information, stories from the days Business Standard, content from BS Motoring, and a merchandise from BSshopping (powered by IndiaPlaza). Details of the features available here. They appear to have a couple of advertisers already on board in Nokia, HP and Oracle.

As a product, I quite like the BS Buddy, but I don’t really see the point for Business Standard to launch somethng like this. Even though they have, they aren’t really communicating the key feature of the IM is the interoperability between various IMs, and they haven’t communicated that on the main page for the service - http://bsbuddy.business-standard.com/ . Without that being communicated, it appears to be a Business Standard IM, and hence there’s no incentive for a user to download it - that fact that users are also getting BS content is just an add-on.

Business Standard Launches Live Markets

Business Standard, a financial daily, has launched “Business Standard Live Markets” a market information segment that provides stock market information, information on key indices, top market performers, and interestingly - information on broker calls. The site features its fair share of news, segmented according as Market News, Commodities, IPO Information, as well as views in a segment called The Smart Investor. The site also has BSE notices. Overall, it’s just a quicker, more segmented way of providing news that is already available publicly. Google Finance follows a similar model, though it aggregates news from across publications, and doesn’t have an India specific site, unlike Yahoo, which has Yahoo Finance India.

Whether there is enough in the site to make someone switch from market heavyweights like Moneycontrol, only time will tell. Remember, BS has a content partnership with UTV, and a similar segment is also there at UTVi.com. Livemint, the website for HT Media’s financial daily also has a MarketInfo segment, though there still are issues with the charts display (a screencap). Here’s a list of publications with stock market information:

Disclosure: I own an inconsequential number of shares of Network18