Digital magazine store and newsstand Magzter has raised $10 million in investment as a part of a Series B round of funding from publisher Singapore Press Holdings and Kalaari Capital. Magzter claims 16 million users from 200 countries, and a catalog of thousands of magazines in 30 global languages. They have tie-ups with Hearst, Conde Nast, Newsweek, Bloomberg, Haymarket, Edipresse and Singapore Press Holdings. In India, they have Handygo's app Rockstand as competition, which has similar Indian publishers on board. Magzter is based in New York, and was founded by Girish Ramdas and Vijayakumar Radhakrishnan. In India, Magzter competes with the likes of Handygo's Rockstand, while at a global level, it will compete with the likes of Googles Newsstand and Apple Newsstand. Our Take This is possibly a defensive move from Singapore Press Holdings: it helps keeping another mode of distribution alive. For Kalaari Capital, this is probably a case of good money chasing bad: they had invested in Magzter in 2012. Here's how we see the space that Magzter is in: 1. Magzter will face massive competition from Google and Apple's own apps for magazine distribution, which will always have a potentially larger distribution by virtue of being native to the operating systems that they're embedded on. Think Flyte versus iTunes. 2. Ask yourself: do you read a story or do you read a magazine? A magazine is read because it's a habit or an impulse. The decline in the magazine ecosystem and the fragmentation of content online has…
