Airtel Blocks MyToday Longcode; This Time, It’s The Do Not Call Registry

How this issue is settled is of great importance, and it impacts the future of push SMS services from SMS GupShup and Google, apart from every single service provider who sends a push SMS to consumers.

Airtel has blocked MyToday SMS longcode, writes Netcore MD Rajesh Jain, citing complaints made by MyToday subscribers to Airtel about unsolicited SMS. (Update: this means that new users cannot sign up, and existing users cannot unsubscribe.) At the core of the debate, writes Jain, is whether an SMS Opt-in by a subscriber overrides a National Do Not Call (NDNC) registration or not.

The fact remains that Airtel cannot arbitrarily cite the NDNC and block access, unless subscribers have complained; there are obviously some subscribers who want to unsubscribe from the service, but because they don’t know how to, they’ve complained.

At the same time, I do believe that Jain is in the right - those consumers have chosen to opt-in. However, the onus is on MyToday to prove that they’ve opted in, and maintain records to that effect.

Airtel has blocked the long codes 9845398453 and 9845298452, and is being rather unrealistic by asking MyToday to get its subscribers to give in writing that they’ve subscribed, and quite ridiculous by asking MyToday to scrub its database clean of 10% of its subscribers who have signed up for the NDNC.

This includes me. I’m an Airtel subscriber and have signed up for MyToday services. I have solicited MyToday’s SMS services, so I want to receive those SMS’. At the same time, I don’t want to receive SMS’ from “Mr. Deal” and the “Hard Rock Café”. I did not sign up for those.

This is not MyToday’s first run-in with a mobile operator, or indeed Airtel. At the TRAI Open House discussion on MVAS (a must read if you’re in the Mobile business), Jain had called for transparency and the definition of a clear mechanism for settlement of disputes. 

“Rajesh Jain, MD of Netcore (MyToday) called for clear guidelines and a mechanism for settling disputes, saying that there is only a perception of a fairplay environment (which operators kept hinting at). Netcore’s MyToday services were curtailed for no apparent reason, and there was no way of dispute resolution then.”

Sadly, the TRAI has passed the buck, in this case, to Airtel.

(Updates: Confirmed from Netcore - updates are available, but users on Airtel cannot subscribe or unsubscribe, and edited post accordingly)

MyToday Launches Breaking News Updates; Whose Content Is It Anyway?

Update:

Rajesh Jain, not surprisingly, disagrees with our opinion that NayaNaya and MyToday.mobi are publishing content. What matters is not how we interpret what MyToday is doing, but how publishers view it. Let’s see how they react to how ads are removed from their content.

Jain says that Transcoding (which we’ve explained below) is an intermediate solution, and the problem with RSS feeds is that they provide links to pages which are not mobile friendly. He suggests that sites create a separate RSS feed with breaking news that link to their mobile versions, or if they “want RSS feeds dropped from the NayaNaya sources, we will do that also.”

Original story: Rajesh Jain’s MyToday, better known for its editorialised push SMS services, has launched a series of WAP based portals, focused on the breaking news genre. NayaNaya features separate mobile-ready sites, covering News, Business, Cricket, Technology, Movies etc, writes Jain. The content on NayaNaya.mobi is being aggregated from various sites, apparently using RSS feeds.

What I found most interesting about MyToday.mobi and NayaNaya.mobi, is that they’re displaying the entire content from a particular article, within the MyToday ecosystem. Take a look at content from Rediff, Afaqs, and Glamsham. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if entire articles (not excerpts) are stored within the MyToday ecosystem, then it is essentially publishing the content.

Repurposing content for the mobile and hosting it at MyToday is a one-size-fits-all strategy - it’s a platform role like the one being played by YouTube. This aggregation also reminds me of Google News, and the court case with Belgian newspapers. A problem arises from the fact that some media companies would prefer that the links redirect to their mobile sites, so they can monetize that traffic. Rediff and IBNLive are possible examples.

While some media organizations might be fine with their content being made available on the mobile, others will not, particularly if MyToday mobile gets monetized. NayaNaya has space for an advertisement - see this CNBC story, and the “Top Ad” space.

Possible Solutions:
– MyToday can offer to just host the content, much like YouTube, and offer a revenue share to publishers.
– Or, as a value add, MyToday can actually help power branded mobile versions for some of these publishers, for a revenue share deal, and a monthly maintenance fee. At present July Systems is providing mobile website solutions to media companies like HT Media, NDTV and Network18.
– Redirect to those sites which have a mobile version

Note for MyToday: the following pages for Business Standard and IBNLive did not load.

Netcore Revenues Lower Than Expected, Costs Same, Says Rajesh Jain; Thoughts On Advertising

Rajesh Jain, MD of Netcore, of which Push SMS service MyToday is a part, has written that the company is facing a “crucible moment” - a defining experience moment which “transforms us, and shakes and shapes our lives”.

For Netcore, “…costs are as per projections, and revenues are lower than the ambitious targets we had set at the start of the year. Which means, cash burn is higher than anticipated. We have two choices: either we can reign in costs to account for the slower revenue growth, or keep on the accelerator and search out new revenue streams to bridge the gap. Of course, we need to do both! But which are the areas which get my attention more than others — that is the key question. We are in a blue ocean, in unchartered waters. We are pioneering many facets of mobile marketing. And I know that the multi-monetisation streams that we have planned out can be done. Which of these should we focus more than others is the thing I need to ponder on. The decisions we make now will make a big difference to our growth. In a way, this is our own crucible moment.”

Keep in mind that Jain had earlier written that Netcore’s funding had fallen through owing to differences over valuation, among other disagreements. The word is that even in case of Webaroo (SMS GupShup), there were differences over valuation, and they used the leaked story to their advantage.

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In case of a downturn, the first spend that gets cut is advertising; a part of that cut will also be the the experimental spend, of which Mobile Marketing is a part. This is also going to be a testing time for Digital Advertising spends as a whole - whether Online, Mobile or OOH.

Over the past 6 months or so, there has been a significant effort by online advertising agencies in India to wean Advertisers away from a lead generation or ‘pay for performance’ model, to a brand building effort. As advertisers will now expect more bang for their buck, they’ll be faced with two choices - either take the digital medium as a relatively cheaper means for brand building (in comparison with TV and Print), or use the medium mainly for lead generation.

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Do take a look at Sequoia Capitals now (in)famous presentation to their portfolio companies (here):

Related:

- Netcore Funding Falls Through; MD Rajesh Jain On Raising Venture Capital
- MediaNama Launch Discussion: In Case Of A Downturn - Reduce Spending On Technology, Double Your Sales Team, Merge To Scale
- Teething Troubles For Google’s SMS Channels In India; Battle At The SMSC
- Google Gets Into The Push SMS Business In India, Takes On MyToday, SMS Gupshup
– Why Push SMS Services Would Need As Much As $10 Million In Funding
– Your Take On The Cost Issues Of Push SMS Services In India

Google Gets Into The Push SMS Business In India, Takes On MyToday, SMS Gupshup

(To subscribe to the MediaNama channel, use this subscription form or SMS ON MEDIANAMA to +919870807070)

Google is making a habit of entering market segments in India that others have spent time and effort and money evangelizing: they did that to local language search and local business listings search, and now are trying to grab a piece of the Push SMS subscription pie. Via an email from a kind reader, we were informed about the launch of Google SMS Channels. Digital Inspiration had also written about it.

At the time of posting this, there are already 242 channels live on the site, many of them user created. As a publisher, or a sender, it’s a fairly simple process for creating an alert - just choose an available keyword, verify your mobile number, add an RSS feed as a content source, and you’re good to go.

The numbers, the numbers, the numbers
As we’ve mentioned earlier, the Push SMS business suffers from a problem of plenty - the more the number of users, the higher the cost. We’ve heard that bulk SMS rates have been coming down, and though none of the publishers or bulk SMS providers have confirmed this, we’re told that they’re now lower than Rs. 0.05 per SMS, or around $0.00108 (at Rs. 46.31 to the dollar).

If Google were to send as many as 10 million SMS per day, it amounts to a cost of Rs. 18.25 crores per year, which at the current conversaion rate is around $3.96 million. If the Rupee strengthens, then at around Rs. 40 to the dollar, it is around $4.56 million.

Do note that MyToday and SMS Gupshup claim that they’re sending more than 10 million SMS’ per day.

The monetization?
MyToday and SMS GupShup have tried to monetize the service with advertising. Netcore (MyToday) MD Rajesh Jain, in particular, has been evangelizing mobile marketing quite aggressively over the past couple of months, at several conferences. He’s coined a phrase called “Invertising”, or Invited Advertising. According to his calculartions, the Mobile Marketing business can be Rs. 1000 crores (around $215 Million) per year in 2 years - with Rs. 600 crores ($130 Million) from Invertising, Rs. 300 crores ($65 Million) from SMS advertising and Rs. 100 crores ($20 Million) from WAP advertising. Of course, there are a number of assumptions involved with the estimation:

Click on the image for an expanded view, or take a look at his presentation here (PDF). What I’d like to know is - what are the current CPM and fill rates for MyToday and GupShup?

The Search-Alert Opportunity
Mobile content and search startup Zook has already implemented alerts around their local search results. Sameer Shisodia, founder of Zook informs us that they are enabling SMS alerts related to local business search results. For example: for a query “Shoes Deals”, one  can select a city (Bangalore), and set up alerts for those. Google provides a similar service with RSS feeds for Google News Search results; They can monetize by incorporating SMS alerts for local business search, like Zook. However, Zook doesn’t appear to have an option for publishers.

MediaNama Channel
We’ve created a channel for MediaNama, which you may subscribe to:
– via this subscription form
– Or, via SMS: send ON MEDIANAMA to +919870807070

As and when we post updates, you will receive a WAP push as an alert, via SMS.  We already have a WAP site up - just visit medianama.com from your mobile handset.

Related:
– Analysis of the Cost of Push SMS Services

Netcore Funding Falls Through; MD Rajesh Jain On Raising Venture Capital

A little over a month ago, we’d heard murmurs of Rajesh Jain’s company Netcore raising a round of VC Funding. Netcore runs the Push SMS Service MyToday, with around 3.6 million subscribers, sending around 12 million SMS’ a day. Some sources put the funding amount at $10 million, others at $25 million; neither was confirmed by company sources. In fact, I was a little surprised that Netcore was raising funds, since Jain, as we know, has reserves from the famous IndiaWorld deal with Sify. Now it appears that appears that Netcore’s funding has fallen through, and here’s what Jain has to say about it:

VCs and Me
by Rajesh Jain

In my fifteen years as an entrepreneur, I have never managed to raise venture capital for my own company. (Some of the companies I have invested in over the past three years have been very successful with their own fund-raising efforts.) Very recently, a deal that I was negotiating with for Netcore fell through as it neared its closing. And that made me think through the years since I started IndiaWorld about the ten failed efforts to raise venture capital. Most of these endeavours were from 1995-99 while I was growing IndiaWorld. In Netcore, I said No a couple years to an investment offer, and this time around, a set of cascading efforts led the prospective investors to withdraw. Given the string of fruitless efforts, I can only conclude that VCs and I are not made-for-each-other!While the reasons for these aborted attempts to raise funding are many, I can distill them into two key areas: valuation not being right, and deep disagreement on issues on which neither of us would compromise. A relationship with a VC is like a marriage - and one in which divorce is not a possibility. So, both sides have to be absolutely sure before entering into the relationship. It is better not to enter into a relationship if either party has doubts.

In my case, two things have helped me be more choosy. In IndiaWorld, we were profitable from the early days so I was never in a situation where I had to take capital for survival. In Netcore, I have the ability to invest my own capital - which I have done over the past 5+ years. Maybe, this makes us a most unlikely target for venture capital going ahead!

There have been more than a few VCs whom I would have liked to have got on board - and in all cases, it was for the person at the firm who I believed could add tremendous value (beyond money) to help build the business. At the end, this is perhaps the most important criteria. If the value is not in the person (VC), then it becomes a pure financial investment - which, depending on the situation, may or may not be the right thing to do.

In the past 15 years, I have always found discussions with VCs helpful. They bring in an objectivity as outsiders which every business needs. At times, we as entrepreneurs and managers are so closely involved in the thick of the trees that it becomes easy to lose sight of the wider forest one is navigating through.

So, back to Netcore. We are at an exciting stage in our evolution. The foundation has been laid, much of the management team is in place. It will still require great execution from here on to realise the dreams we have in the coming years. Capital is only one of the raw materials. As I look back, I can only speculate on what life would have been with a VC.

© Rajesh Jain. Reproduced with permission from Emergic.org

Also see:
– Why Push SMS Services Would Need As Much As $10 Million In Funding
– Your Take On The Cost Issues Of Push SMS Services In India