Music streaming site Dhingana has tied-up with General Mobile, a Cayman-based company which offers a proprietary mobile content management and application store hosting platform, to preload its music app on 1-million devices. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Dhingana Android app will be pre-installed on five OEMs in a two-month period, including Intex, Zen, Hitech, m-Tech and Maxx as part of this deal. With this move, Dhingana hopes to acquire new users, however it is surprising it has not struck a deal yet with the bigger Indian brands such as Micromax, Karbonn and Xolo. The company had entered into a carrier billing tie-up with Idea to let its users download unlimited tracks from the service for free and without subscribing to a data plan. Lot of companies are adopting the pre-install strategy to get the attention of smartphone users, most of whom are using a smartphone for the first time. Many of these users do not download apps as they might not have a data plan, but are tempted to try these out since they are already available on the device. However, Dev Khare of Lightspeed Venture Partners in India had written in a post on user acquisition hacks that most OEMs are now looking at apps/services as revenue streams, perhaps through a revenue share model. He also pointed out that pre-loading the apps alone does not drive activations. -- it has to be on the homescreen and accompanied by an above-the-line marketing campaign (e.g. advertising or logo on device box) preferably paid for…
