Virgin Mobile Ties Up With MySpace; Who Benefits More?

Well, it looks like a marriage of convenience - Virgin Mobile has tied up with MySpace for making MySpace available on WAP enabled handsets. This appears to be a move by MySpace to incease signups on their fledgling India site, since users can register via Virgin Mobile. For Virgin, it’s one way of promoting their WAP enabled handsets - vKewl and vSleek - and perhaps getting Rs. 5/day if anyone does sign up to use their WAP portal vBytes. It’s been six months since MySpace launched its mobile version in India - http://m.myspace.com

If one goes by the press release, MySpace India now has 1.2 million registered users. This means they have added 700,000 users since their launch last April - that’s around 77,000 users added per month. The real question is - how many of these are active users? MySpace’s attempt at city specific communities appears to have failed miserably, and looks like they didn’t put in enough effort into it - the Delhi Hub page hasn’t been updated in months, and the Indihub also needs updating. It’s one thing to launch a service, but quite another to keep it going. A poll:

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Xing Acquires SocialMedian For $7.5M; Payday For Pune’s True Sparrow Systems

Update #2: Jason Goldberg, founder of Social Median, in an emailed response to MediaNama has said that “Truesparrow has been a tremendous partner for socialmedian. They have had a considerable equity stake in socialmedian and will be a Xing shareholder as part of this transaction. As a shareholder they are a party to all aspects of the deal.” Which means True Sparrow gets both cash and equity.

Update #1: Nishith Shah of True Sparrow Systems has confirmed to MediaNama that they did have stake in Social Median; he declined to comment on how much stake, though. Shah said that they don’t have any concrete plans yet, but they will continue to work on Social Median, and will explore doing other things as well.  Almost the entire TrueSparrow team was working on Social Median

Original Story: European professional networking site Xing has acquired SocialMedian, a social news aggregator founded by Jason Goldberg. Goldberg will be joining Xing in Germany, as VP for Xing Applications Platform. SocialMedian services will be launched within Xing as well.

Techcrunch reports that Xing is paying $7.5 Million for acquisition - $4 million in cash and EUR 0.5-2.5 million payable over three years.

SocialMedian was developed entirely in India, by Pune based True Sparrow Systems, which also had a stake in the venture. According to what Goldberg wrote in August “…we have made our Indian team shareholders in socialmedian, so we are one company building one product. It’s an offshore situation, not an outsourcing relationship.”

The entire social median team (Goldberg was apparently the only US employee) will be joining Xing. Social Median is Goldbergs second startup: he had earlier founded Jobster in 2004, only to step down as its CEO last year.

It’s a fairly early exit for Goldberg. The site was launched a few months ago: I signed up for SocialMedian on July 21st, while it was still in closed alpha, and frankly, never got around to using it extensively because it was too cumbersome to navigate. Hopefully, it will be made more user friendly now. 

P.s.: Thanks for the headsup Shyam: XING’s SocialMedian acquistion: Thoughts, conclusions

Film Based Content Portal Chakpak Raises Funding From Canaan Partners

Chakpak.com, a film based content portal has raised an undisclosed amount of money from VC firm Cannan Partners, according to Pluggd.in, a Yahoo employees blog. We contacted Alok Mittal of Canaan Partners about the investment, who, on being asked for a denial of the investment, said “I’m not confirming it.” Independent sources have confirmed the investment to MediaNama. We have not been able to ascertain the amount of investment.

Chakpak is essentially a content portal around films, covering Bollywood, Tamil and Telugu films., with movie timing, movie information, film reviews, a stars directory, video clips, wallpapers, film news etc. It has social features, but its focus appears to be more on content, though there are social features as well.

Chakpak will compete with the likes of Bollywood Hungama (formerly IndiaFM), Buzz18, ZoomTV, E24Bollywood, MyPopKorn, and 45 million other many other Bollywood and celebrity focused sites. Remember, the ABC of Indian content - Astrology, Bollywood and Cricket - are all rather crowded domains. Among the monetization opportunities that Chakpak has, is a tie-up with a ticketing service. 

For Canaan’s sake, I hope Chakpak has a miracle (or a dozen) up its sleeve. On a brighter note, based on this deal, and the one in VDOPIA that we reported last week, it appears that investments haven’t completely dried up.

Disclosure: I own an inconsequential number of shares of Network18; Buzz18 is a Network18 property 

Indian Media Takes To Twitter

Following the siege in Mumbai which brought the Twitter and its usage by citizens to share and spread information into the limelight, media publications including Mint and DNA have signed up for Twitter. While media publications on Twitter are not new - New York Times, Wired, The Economist and the Wall Street Journal have their own twitter feeds.

What’s interesting is the difference in the approach being adopted by Mint and DNA:

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MySpace Hires India Country Manager; Official Nach Baliye Community

MySpace India has appointed Hari V Krishnan as Country Manager, reports Exchange4media. Krishnan joins from TravelGuru, an Online Travel Agent, where he was VP - Corporate Planning and Marketing. He’ll be based out of Mumbai, and report to Sung Lee, VP (Asian Operations) for MySpace. MySpace India went live sometime early in January, and was formally launched with a music event in April, with Tarun Tripathi as Director of Marketing and Content, and Deep Malhotra as Director of Sales.

More on MySpace

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Midcourse Correction For Minglebox: Now A Career Focused Social Network

Sequoia Capital funded website Minglebox.com appears to have gone in for a mid-course correction, writes Pluggd.in. Minglebox was built as an online alternative to a “college hangout” (more on that here) featuring college events but now is being positioned as a “College, Education and Career” site.

The site now features:

– Educational content for preparation for MBA
– Country specific information for studying in UK, USA, Canada, Australia and Singapore
– Counlelling: They’ve also added a segment for counselling from the head of test preparation from IMS, an MBA training institute. 
– Courses Database: for MBA and IT courses

Advertisers on the site include colleges like the Asian Institute of Gaming and Animation, and foreign education counselling agencies like “The Chopras“. 

With this, Minglebox will be competing head-on with other sites in the education space like Pagalguy.com, and Info Edge’s Shiksha.com. 

Minglebox isn’t the first social networking site to go in for a mid-course correction - early last year, People Group owned Fropper.com repositioned itself as a social networking site. It had been launched as a dating site. What’s interesting is that Sequoia Capital India has invested in both People Interactive and Minglebox.com

Social Networking App RockeTalk To Be Pre-Loaded On LG Handsets

RockeTalk, a mobile application, has inked a deal with LG Electronics to pre-load the app on their KT610 (Rs. 14,990) and KF750 (Rs. 18,990) mobile phones. The pre-loaded handsets are already available in India, and as per the deal, the LG will preload the app on other handset models throughout 2008 and 2009. However, by the looks of it, the phone with the pre-loaded app was launched last month.

RockeTalk was founded in November 2004 Rajiv Kumar, who had previously co-founded bluetooth company Widcomm (subsequently bought by Broadcom), and raised $7.1 million in funding in 2007 from iSherpa Ventures, EDF Ventures and Mission Ventures. Jim Greiner, former SVP and general manager of MapQuest came on board as CEO.

The latest version of RockeTalk integrates Instant messengers - Yahoo, Google Talk, MSN, AOL, ICQ, apart from making mobile downloads like ringtones, wallpapers, themes, games and other content available. What’s perhaps a little tricky, is that RockeTalk allows users to create their own galleries, share content and also upload content to sites like YouTube. RockeTalk’s public galleries can be a rather risky - India doesn’t have a safe harbor law, and as a platform, RockeTalk may be held accountable for the content its users upload. I checked a few pages of their Bollywood gallery (which took almost 30 seconds to load a single page with six thumbnails), and…there were no Bollywood images, whatsoever.

At the same time, I really do like how simple it is to upload content - both images, and a voice recording, with the application initializing the camera and the voice recorder.

Another IM app which quite a few people I know use in India is Fring.