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.

The movies site - NDTVMovies.com also features a new look. We also noticed a couple of other partnerships that the company has inked, though we’re not sure of how old these are - a commodities site powered by commodityonline.com, and an astrology section powered by Astroyogi.com. Interestingly, there’s also an environment site called Green.NDTV.com, sponsored by Toyota, with Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, Director General of TERI as their expert advisor. There’s an environmental anthem for you to sing along to (you may download it here)
Quick take on NDTVs strategy

All in all, NDTV has 17 websites operational, some of which feature their own content, some run by affiliates, and some that are just lying fallow. We would classify them as follows:
Channel Related Sites: NDTV.com, NDTVProfit, NDTVImagine, NDTV GoodTimes, NDTVKhabar, NDTVArabia and NDTV Active (Mobile)
Affiliate Sites: NDTVtravel, NDTVJobs, NDTV Shopping, NDTVTutor
Gets-In-The-Traffic-Sites: NDTVCricket, NDTVMovies, NDTVGadgets
We’re-Not-Sure-Why-We-Need-These-But-Lets-Try-Anyway-Sites: NDTVCooks, NDTVMusic, DoctorNDTV, NDTVBooks, NoGyan

– Much like in the case of Web18, we do feel that the company has too many properties live. This is more of a legacy issue, since many of these sites were live before NDTV Convergence was formed. The current management of NDTV Convergence has focused on developing channel related properties, re-launching some of the old properties, and also launching a site for getting in the traffic - NDTV Cricket. Niche sites like NDTV Music, NDTVCooks, DoctorNDTV, NDTVBooks and NoGyan could be integrated into NDTV.com, as sections, rather than separate websites.
– The launch of affiliate sites - for example, the one with TutorVista - appears to be more of a business call than a content call, but it’s also a means of adding utility services around NDTVs content. The company doesn’t appear to be keen on expanding their own business beyond the content domain to utility services, unlike competitors HT Media which has Shine.com (jobs) and Network18, which has sites like Bookmyshow.com for ticketing, Yatra.com for travel, Shop.in.com (formerly Storeguru) for shopping, and Jobstreet.com for jobs.
Related:
– NDTV Q2-09 Revenues At Rs. 128 Crores; NDTV Convergence FY08 Loss At Rs. 5.5 Crores

Nautanki.tv has a strategic investment from Hungama (Virtual Marketing India Ltd), and claims that around 20% of their publishers are bloggers covering news, analysis, finance etc. Nautanki.tv also has content available from another BCCL TV channel - Zoom TV, as well as STAR TVs Channel [V]. 

Thoughts On Online Video Content In India, and Advertising

– Content Owners And Platforms Are Working Together To Create A Market

Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen many channels tie up with platforms/publishers like of YouTube, Rajshri.com, Rediff’s iShare, BIG Flix and Nautanki.tv. Most of these deals are on a revenue sharing basis, largely because the revenue - mostly from advertising - is limited. The Channels seem to understand the fact that it is going to take time for advertisers to come on board, so they need to work with the networks to first establish a large user base, and then bring the advertisers on board. They realize that it is not feasible, in most instances, for platforms to pay a minimum guarantee. Thus, as an advertiser or a media planner, if you hear a representative of a channel talk about the number of views they’re receiving - there’s a vested interest in promoting the network. Saurabh Kanwar, VP (Content & Communication) for Channel V, spoke at the IAMAI Digital Entertainment conference, about how they’re receiving 4 million views a day for their shows on the Nautanki.tv network.

– User Generated Content And The Idea Behind Creating Channels

Do advertisers really want to associate with content that they can’t be sure of? While YouTube and user created videos are popular, the idea behind creating channels is to offer some kind of security to advertisers that their ads will not be associated with unreliable content. So you’ll see specific verticals on YouTube, and platforms like BigFlix, iShare, Rajshri and Nautanki with more professional content from TV channels, and even professional content creators.

– Ad Networks To The Rescue?

The dependency on advertising is a little unnerving, but the audience for the video content space is what appears to have attracted the likes of ad networks Jivox and VDOPIA to India. Both the channels and the publishers appear to be keen on the networks - they’ll take what they can get. From an advertisers perspective, it means they don’t need to create separate creatives for the Internet - the 30 seconder will do. The 30 seconder has been tried before - NDTV Media and MSN tried out “Desktop TV”, in an attempt to sell prime time, and 30 second ads on the Internet. Thankfully, they included a “stop” button.

I spoke to Satish Jha, President & CEO of OLPC India, who said that for shipping to begin in India, they need to hit the magic number of 1 million XO laptops, and they’re counting on support from corporates. “If a country can take 8 million cellular phones a month, they can take 3 million laptops in a year.” If only…

The OLPC foundation has launched the G1G1 (Give One Get One) initiative in India, as per which, a customer can purchase one laptop, and the OLPC foundation will gift another laptop to a child in a developing country. The XO costs around $210 to produce, so you’ll be paying for two (around $400) under the G1G1 initiative. What’s not palpable, is that the Indian government is charging an import duty of 10.2% on the laptops.

Some readers might remember that a couple of years ago, India had rejected the OLPC at a national level. Consequently, the OLPC foundation is talking to governments at the state level in India - Jha said that they’re currently talking to 9 state governments, who are interested in the project. “Education is a state subject anyway. It’s a leap of faith for them, but I’ll talk about them only once we close a deal.” But how do they intend to reach the target of 1 million laptops? “I have my strategy and we’re moving in that direction. One industrialist said we’re looking at 700,000 students, another says 200,000, yet another says 10,000. We’re looking at the aggregation of those numbers. We have 120 million children who need it. To get the one person we have to prove to them at every step of the way - with support and responses.”

The OLPC has been doing pilots in India, covering 5 schools and 150 students across the country right now, in UP. The laptops connect to each other without WiFi, and only needs a service provider for Internet connectivity.
More on distribution, competition and what needs to be done

Distribution
OLPC is not setting up a distribution channel yet - Jha said they’ll start worrying about it once they get the scale, though they’ll be dealing with institutions. “We look at the most cost-effective way of reaching out.” In case corporates want to donate the laptops as a part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative, they’ll be delivered the laptops, and they will have to take it forward.

On Competition from Intel’s Classmate, Reliance’s Free Laptops, Novatiums Thin Client
When I asked about competition from Intel’s classmate laptop, Jha said that Intel is targeting middle and higher schools, while the OLPC is targeting primary schools - “they treat the child as a small adult, while we’re treating a child as somebody who will become an adult. Many Intel executives still support us, they like our machine.” He said that they’re not competing with Novatium and Reliance’s offer of free laptops with wireless connections. “The world is too large for us to compete.”  The OLPC had tied up with Reliance around a year ago for a pilot project, with a rather high target of covering 25,000 towns and 60,000 villages. After the pilot project at Khairat, nothing happened. I asked Jha about why the project hasn’t taken off, and Jha said that Reliance had approached them for the pilot, and the onus was on them to take it forward from there.

What the OLPC Needs
For the OLPC project to succeed in India, they need a number of pieces to come together -  first and foremost, they need buyers - for corporates, schools and governments to buy laptops. They need content providers for providing localised educational content, and in my opinion, they need to tie up with an telecom operator for Internet connectivity.

The real trouble for Yahoo began when Microsoft made a public, and almost boisterous $44.6 Billion, $31 per share bid for Yahoo in February this year. At that time, Yahoo was trading at around $19 per share. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, blasted Yang for being hostile towards the Microsoft deal, as Yahoo declined the offer. After the deadline for negotiations to be concluded lapsed, Microsoft withdrew the offer in May. Icahn, who owned almost 5% of Yahoo, tried to garner support for renegotiations with Microsoft, despite the announcement of an advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo, around Yahoo Search.  Eventually, Icahn settled for three board seats at Yahoo - including one for himself. 

However, a recent threat of an anti-trust lawsuit against the Google-Yahoo deal made Google withdraw. Read their blog post on the same here. That’s when Yang again sent out feelers to Microsoft, saying Yahoo willing to re-negotiate the deal though this time, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer declined.

BoomTown reported that Yang was stepping down - they published an internal mail sent out by Yang to Yahoo employees, here. Yang will return to his previous role as Chief Yahoo.

None of this is good for Yahoo - such an uncertain environment for a company impacts growth as potential partners may defer deals, and employees may look for more secure environs.

Both companies have priced the service at Rs. 0.75 per minute, and it is available to both Prepaid and Postpaid subscribers. Details of how Vodafones service works:

– Does not require any special handsets, or handset settings
– Vodafone subscribers have to dial* and the mobile number of the person for sending the message.
– If the recipient is a Vodafone subscriber, he will receive a text SMS notification and can dial *0* to hear the Voice SMS.
– Old Voice SMS can be retrieved by dialing *1*.
– Users can replying, forwarding, saving or deleting the Voice SMS messages.
– Subscribers not on the Vodafone network will get a text SMS notification with an embedded DirectListen number

An issue for Airtel: Twice in the last 30 minutes, I’ve been unable to send a voice SMS since “All lines are currently busy”. Looks like they don’t have enough capacity for the service.

Some thoughts on Voice SMS
1. Cross Operator Service: What’s key about the Voice SMS service is that it is available across a few mobile operators (Idea Cellular, Airtel, BPL, MTNL and Vodafone) and service providers (Bubble Motion and Kirusa).
2. Inter-operability - one of the issues with MMS was the lack of interoperability. Because Voice SMS is a hosted service and not handset dependent, it doesn’t have such issues. Also, by integrating with SMS and a voice portal (example: Kirusa’s DirectListen), users can still send messages to those who are not on their network.
3. Ease of usage - Both Airtel and Vodafone have made it incredibly simple to send a voice message - by just adding a * before sending a message. It actually requires less thumbing of the keypad than sending an SMS
4. VoiceMail? Answering machies and voice mail never really took off in India, and with the massive marketing push behind Voice SMS from the operators, this just might be the voice mail for this market.
5. The pricing: is quite low at Rs. 0.75 per minute. I pay more for sending an SMS.

Just a thought: It’s interesting that Bubble Motion is deployed with Vodafone in Egypt. I wonder if, as a consequence of deployment with Vodafone India, Egypt will also go the Kirusa way.

Funding status:
Bubble Motion raised $14 million in a second round of funding in March 2008, from Sequoia Capital, Comcast Interactive Capital and NCD Investors.
Kirusa raised $13.3 million from Qualcomm, Accel India (Erasmic), Eastven Partners, Helion Ventures and Nexus India Capital.

Startup acquires startup
What, really, is Infibeam? According to an old release, Infibeam was launched as an automobile portal in 2007, by a software development firm of the same name. It featured car reviews, industry news, finance options, EMI calculator, used car listings and a car rental service. It then expanded its portfolio to include a mobile section, and followed up with segments on watches, fitness equipment section, Jewellery, Apparels, Books etc…it diversified. Photo Printing and the customised gift printing knowhow that Picsquare brings, will be another addition to the portfolio.

Nevertheless, sale is rather unusual, since in August, Picsquare had announced an investment from offline player Bhola Digital Lab, whose printing services Picsquare had been using. Picsquare has been in the business for over 2 years now, having raised an initial amount of investment of $75,000 from MChek CEO Sanjay Swami, Snapfish founder Shripati Acharya and Vijay Iyer, VP (Marketing) of Portal Systems. 

This is also the second sale from among the photo sharing portals in recent times - MeraSnap’s userbase was acquired by HP owned Snapfish (ironically, Snapfish founder Shripati Acharya was an investor in Picsquare).

Other companies in the online photo and personalised products space include Printo (funding from Sequoia Capital and Seed Fund), iTasveer (has a deal with Windows Vista), KPCB and Sherpalo funded ZoomIn, Canvera (funding from Footprint Ventures, Mumbai Angels and DFJ), Myntra ($5 Million from NEA-Indo US Ventures, IDG Ventures and Accel India) , eYantra ($3.1 million from VentureEast and Argonaut) and others like eYaadein and PhotoMasti.

Update: VCCircle reported the possibility of the deal yesterday, which probably resulted in the announcement from Picsquare.

The STAR-Jupiter deal had been reported by the Economic Times in August, around the time when Rupert Murdoch had visited India. One sensed that the deal had been done, when it was reported a few days ago that Asianet was looking to buy an English news channel, and a vernacular paper. During his visit to India, Murdoch had expressed an interest in the regional television space in India, saying that STAR will invest $100 million, and set up 6 channels.

Examples of what their service can do
– Delivery of context specific ads on television channels during the “ad insert period”, based on selection of a bunch of advertisements.
– Location based advertising, for specific Distribution Areas, also based on demographic information and/or proximity to advertiser.

The idea is to provide better targeting on Television - provide ads to consumers closer to the advertisers place of business, as well as target neighbourhoods where the psychographics favour the advertisers services - thus allowing an advertiser wants to advertise to and only pay for advertising that reaches subscribers who are likely potential customers.

Challenges: Television spots normally range from 15 seconds to 90 seconds, with 30 seconds being the usual length. One challenge for the service will be to maintain a standard length of an ad break (say 3-5 minutes), and yet ensure that the dynamically placed ads all total up to the same length of the ad break. The bigger challenge, however, is selling the concept to media planners and channels. 

Company: Alcatel Lucent 
Patent Number (International): PCT/US2006/062081
Filing Date (India): 17th June 2008 (Details)
Download: PDF

Notes from the Rediff.com Earnings Call garnered maximum interest from our readers last week - for the first time, Rediff (REDF) CEO Ajit Balakrishnan shared the Advertising revenue split1 between key segments CPC and CPM, as well as Financial Services, Jobs and Travel. Much more here.

Our first ever guest post on Saving the Internet Media by Shyam Somanadh was the subject of much debate. Somanadh believes companies need to cut content costs, set clear Return on Investment for Traffic Acquisition Costs, Engage users better, know how to read data and know their technology. To share your views with us as a Guest Post, please mail nikhil AT medianama DOT com.

This week, Rajshri Media intends to begin publishing 100 full length movies on YouTube, starting with those from the Rajshri Films portfolio. 17 percent of viewers on Rajshri.com watch full length movies in one go - a substantial number, says Rajshri MD Rajjat Barjatya. Meanwhile YouTube continues to have pirated content on its site, and is the middle of a battle over piracy on YouTube with T-Series.

Mobile VAS company IMI Mobile finally announced its European acquisition - of Music Distributor DX3. It appears that they’ll use DX3s network primarily for marketing content. 

Quite a few readers were interested in my notes from a discussion I had with students doing MBA (Tech) at NMIMS, Mumbai - some follow up questions on whether the students are on LinkedIn and blog have subsequently been answered in the comments. All of them use the Mobile Interent, mostly to check mail and Cricket scores.

Other Industry News:

– At IAMAI-DE08, Navin Shah, CEO of Percept Pictures blamed digitalization of content for encouraging piracy, saying that over the last 5-6 years, “the music industry has grown by 2%, while digital is growing by 40%” and digital has made piracy cool. PS Saminathan, Group Chairman, Pyramid Saimira launched into a tirade against the star system in film-making - and wondered if they’ll get better control through digital distribution, by aggregating the long tail. 

– Bharti Telesoft will provide deploy SMSC, MMSC and WAP Gateway for all 21 of MTNs companies

– TV Ramachandran of COAI ”In plain terms, we only provide the pipeline for a value added service. What goes through the networks is neither a concern nor a responsibility of the telecom operator. Mobile Operators are flexible…more than just a pipe when it suits them, just a pipe when it doesn’t.

–  Satyam Buys Motorola’s Malaysian Software Development Center

– Thin PC co Novatium has tied up with BSNL for deployment. The reason - at the end of June 2008, BSNL and MTNL combined had around 34.5 million wireline connections, of the total 38.92 million wireline connections - around 88% of the market. BSNL, in fact, has 99.78% of the rural market wireline connections, and 70.91% of urban.

– MovieBeam, which was bought by UFO Moviez earlier this year will be launched in India within 6 months, targeting consumers in India and the “Hospitality Sector” In USA. “This model can earn as much as Rs. 5 crores for 1 show.” The MovieBeam box in India may also come with a number of additional features - like DVD storage and Internet connectivity, though UFO will have to establish a return path for Internet.