Yahoo Picks Up 30% Stake In Local Info Company INMC

Yahoo has picked up appoximately 30% stake in Info Network Management Company, a Chennai headquartered phone directory search service. Yahoo will appoint one director to INMCs board. The amount invested has not been disclosed, nor has Yahoo mentioned whether it is a cash deal, or a stock deal. [Via release]

About 
According to their website, INMC was set up in 1998, and launched a portal Indiastudentinfo.com. The tele information business, Call Chennai, was established in 2005. The company is a part of the Unicard Group of Companies, which consists of Unicard Marketing, Unique Farms and Holidays, apart from INMC. 

Revenues and Targets
INMS claims to have generated revenues of Rs. 4 crores in 2007-08, and plans to achieve double that revenue by the end of the 2008-09 fiscal, and Rs. 24 crores by 2009-10. The company employs around 450-500 people, and plans to increase headcount to 2000 by the end of next year.

Operations
Call Ezee is present in 14 cities in India, and plans to expand its network to 26 cities by 2010. They claim to generate 10,000 calls per day, which appears to be very low - an average of 715 calls day per city, or just around 60 calls per hour per city if you assume a 12 hour call center.

More on synergy, business model and competition

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TinselVision’s Closure Should Serve As A Warning For Video Content Portals

South Asian content site TinselVision has shut shop, reports PaidContent. Tinselvision had signed numberous deals, including with Zee TV, STAR India, Zoom TV, NDTV, UTV and even Yash Raj Films. Tinselvision began with offering Bollywood videos on download for $1.99, with membership priced at $9.99. Movies were priced at $3 each, with $10 for 5 movies. 

Eventually, the company took some content outside the paid subscription wall, and made some available for advertising supported free streaming. Remember that earlier this year, niche TV content site Jump TV had decided change focus from regional content to sports content.

The shutting down of TinselVision should also serve as a warning for other content streaming sites like Saavn, Big Flicks, Rajshri Media, Erosondem, Rediff iShare, among others. Most content owners may be giving them content for free, though some may be accepting a minimum guarantee, but bandwidth is a significant cost. Monetization via advertising hasn’t yet quite arrived, despite claims of significant paid downloads, and some projections for video advertising networks. The launch of video advertising networks like Jivox and VDOPIA should help, but given the current advertising market scenario, are advertisers biting?

Users are forever willing to view free content, but growth in viewership should be supported by the growth in revenues. Saying that the world will figure out a business model doesn’t really inspire confidence.

More on Tinselvision:

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7Seas Ties Up With GreyStripe; What GreyStripe And Hovr Need…

Hyderabad based gaming co 7Seas Technologies has inked a two-way deal with games distributor GreyStripe. To begin with, 7Seas will provide seven games to Greystrip to distribute alongwith its catalog of games - Neetu-The Alien Killer, Kraze, Derby 3D, Treasure Trove, Great Elude, 3D SuDoKu, Planets of SuDoKu 3D. 7Seas will also distribute Greystripes games through 7Seas’ mobile web portal Mobzill.com. Reliance Entertainment company Zapak had earlier tied up with Greystripe for a similar offering…how is what 7Seas is offering to its users any different from what Zapak is offering?

Greystripe competes with Hovr, which has a similar business model.

How GreyStripe And Hovr Operate…

Greystripe and its competitor Hovr are essentially building a GPRS based advertising network around free mobile games. They’re allowing users access to free mobile games, and the network delivers advertisements to the the handset. These ads are served up before and after the game. Some thoughts on their business model:

– Quality matters more than quantity: whether Greystripe has 900 games or 300, the quality of the games matters more than the quantity. The quantity should be a means of aggregating the long tail, but having 5 versions of street fighter doesn’t help. Also, the more the number of games, the more difficult it becomes to discover quality content. Even if the games are free, what brings a user back to try out more games? Quality. 

– Scale is key: it’s important for Hovr and Greystripe to get as many users on board as possible. The media tie-ups with the likes of NDTV, Indiatimes and even 7Seas are just a means of expanding the user base, and reducing marketing spends for an advertising revenue share. Ideally, you’d expect quality content to be viral, particularly if it is free…

– Operator tie-ups? Perhaps it’s a better idea for Hovr or Greystripe to tie-up with mobile operators…who can offer them the scale that media houses cannot. The problem is that mobile operators are not likely to be interested, because free games would compete with their own mobile game decks, with paid games. It is unlikely that operators would enter into such a deal without a minimum guarantee, since the advertising revenue stream is not guaranteed. 

Do you think advertisers would be interested in advertising on a platform provided by Greystripe or Hovr? 

Related: 
– Zapak Adds Single Player Mobile Games From Greystripe
– NDTV Active Gets Mobile Games From Hovr 

Komli Launches Vizisense Audience Measurement System; Targets A Panel Of 50-100k

Updated Below

If Rediff Is Number 5 on Komli’s Vizisense, Will They Validate It?

Komli Media has launched Vizisense, an online audience measurement system. Comscore, despite its reported inaccuracy and lack trasparency of its methodology, is an accepted audience measurement system in India, and IMRB International is also planning to launch their own audience measurement system in the next few months. Both of these systems are likely to be paid, so what’s really interesting is the fact that Komli has decided to make Vizisense available for free. 

We spoke to Amar Goel, CEO of Komli, who told us that Vizisense is using three levels of data sources:
– Panel: they’re tracking the Internet usage of over 10,000 users
– Analytics: statistics from the websites which install the analytics
– Census Data: from the Indian census, in order to help triangulate findings

Now this data can be mutually exclusive, since not all publishers may be using Komli’s data tracker - but Goel said that they can still make valuable conclusions about websites based on consumer behaviour - for example, “Lets’s say you go to a site that is 90% male, and another site which is 90% male…we can conclude with some probability that you’re male.”

The data is available publically as well…search for a site here for its audience data.

The Differentiator: Demographic Data

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News Corp To Launch .FoxNetworks In India; Differentiation?

News Corp has launched its ad network .FoxNetworks in India, with Pooja Puri as Head of Sales, reports Afaqs. Puri, who moved from HindustanTimes.com, has told Afaqs that they will initially do display and lead generation campaigns, and roll out other services later. 

Which other services?

1.  Going through the .FoxNetworks site, we came across a differentiated positioning for the network: Brandformance. It appears that .FoxNetworks aggregates the long tail of high value sites…how many such sites exist in India, and will the company put feet on the ground to aggregate the long tail in India?

2. Rich Media apps - widget ads, social media ad applications and viral apps. 

3. Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing

They also have two other ad networks:

1. Worthnet.fox: is a vertical ad network for the financial and investment community, and it may just be worthless now, given the financial segment turmoil.

2. Utarget.FOX creates video inventory: two video ad networks are already in operation in India, namely, Jivox and VDOPIA.

How the Digital Advertising Space Has Changed

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IMRB Plans Internet Audience Measurement System For India

IMRB International is planning to launch an Audience Measurement service for the Internet industry in India, MediaNama has learned from multiple sources. A part of the plan was to distribute USB drives with software that will track users Internet habits. IMRB already collaborates for Industry research with the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). While sources told us that this is an IAMAI-IMRB project, on being contacted IAMAI President Subho Ray told us that it’s an independent initiative of the IMRB. The project is being led by Balendu Srivastava, and was expected to be launched in December. We’ve contacted Srivastava, and are awaiting a response.

On why this is needed, and the opportunity for IMRB (more…)

Times Now On Nautanki.tv; Thoughts On Video Content Online

Times Now, the English news channel from the BCCL (Times of India) Group will be going live on Nautanki.tv’s network, Nautanki CEO Sunil Nair informs us. Nautanki.tv is an online video network, with widgets spread across more than 6000 sites. Available online will be Times Now’s prime time show The Newshour, and feature shows No Full Stops (health) and The Foodie (a food and travel show). Times Now intends to eventually expand its offering on the network. 

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

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