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World Gaming Day on Feb 12-Gaming is becoming a serious business too!

It looks like companies are trying to exploit consumers by propounding festive days to their commercial benefit so after daughters day by archies comes gamers day courtesy alliance by Zapak, Sony Ericsson and Microsoft.

Sony Ericsson, Zapak.com and Microsoft Xbox 360 have teamed up to celebrate ‘World Gaming Day’ on 12th February 2009 across the globe. This event will be celebrated annually from now on and all three will promote this first of its kind global initiative jointly across mediums from India. Celebrations in India will take place in Mumbai on February 12 and prizes worth over Rs.3 crores will be given out for different contests and activities.

Contests and activities include mall activities, championships at Zapak Gameplexes and an online contest. To participate, users need to log on to www.zapak.com and play amongst the top ten games on zapak.

The event would also see many bollywood stars joining the bandwagon and Aftab Shivdasani would be the brand ambassador for the event.

The top 10 high scorers will get a chance to play with bollywood stars.

Top 100 scorers of each game get a Zapak Gameplex Coupon which would provide free gaming hours and users will be able to download 1 free game with their playing of 1 game from top 10 category.

World Gaming Day is expected to pull at least 10 million gamers from across the world to be part of the celebrations.

The occasion of gaming day event announcement was also marked by the launch of – Sony Ericsson F305 mobile phone with unique motion gaming technology. The phone can follow a gamer’s actions to imitate bowling or casting a fishing line.

According to zapak they already have six million online gamers within a span of just two years of launch which speaks of the seriousness at which zapak is trying to dominate and create a niche online gaming market and to achieve that it is going for tieups to encourage users just like their recent tie up with Maruti for youngdriver09.

Is india awaking to gaming revolution?

This announcement is very positive for Indian gaming industry and looking at the scale of tie up it could encourage more outsourcing of game development to Indian shores because:

According to a pwc report the gaming industry worldwide is estimated to touch $46.5 billion by 2010 and Indian gaming industry would touch $200million which is very nascent by numbers.

Events of this scale would definitely encourage people to take gaming as full fledged entertainment and would also propel advertisers to target gamers through more spend on online gaming portals and other gaming mediums.

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A Look at Nielsen’s Foray in to Online Research in India

The Nielsen Company (formerly AC Nielsen), has launched its Nielsen Online’s services in India. The company is an independent measurement and analysis of online audiences, consumer behaviour and advertising firm. Nielsen Online will launch two of its services AdRelevance and Market Intelligence in India out of its 11 odd online research services.

AdRelevance provides information to help build effective and timely marketing campaigns and can be used by those who buy, sell and even those who make and analyse advertising online. While Market Intelligence is primarily a benchmark tool against the performance of other players in the market. However, Market Intelligence works in conjunction with Site Census, a browser toolbar for measurement of traffic and benchmarking is complied against other sites accessed by those using the toolbar - in simple blogger words another Alexa.

With regards to the launch, Mark Ottaway, vice-president, regional services, Asia-Pacific, Nielsen Online said that, "Our services are under trial right now by some clients and it would be ready with its first report and service offering in the next 3-4 months.” In essence it means that Nielsen doesn’t have any concrete numbers regarding numbers just yet, so probably we can get some word coming from them in the coming quarters to analyse and discuss. The release also says that the expansion is in line with Nielsen's global plan to set base in new and emerging markets. "The growth and internet usage patterns in India are similar to that of the UK and Australia markets 4-5 years back. We see this market at par with these advanced markets in the next 4-5 years," said Ottaway.

We have covered other traffic and online advertising measurement tools and had even complied a comparision study of the various tools available online. And of course the reports that industry and private research guys release from time to time. We have also studied the launch of measurement and research tools by advertising channels and networks earlier on WATBlog. This news it seems might have an impact on the existing players. The biggest draw in favour of Nielsen is its existing offline research expertise which forms a formidable advantage. In fact one of the other products of Nielsen Online is an online impact tool, which measures the offline impact of online campaigns. Though we have no word right now on whether these products will also find their way, there doesn’t seem any likelyhood of them not finding their way to Indian markets in the future.

I have always had my doubts on online data for a vareity of reasons, and with newer browsing habits formed with newer tools it is even more difficult to provide an accurate data. For instance, with Firefox came tabbed browsing (or was it Opera?), and now I have sites opened on various tabs since the past 4 hours, none of which I’m currently reading, now that does arise the chance of my visit being tracked as 4 hours right? Now consider me using the site for four hours (on the same page let’s say, reading a huge comment list on a blog perhaps). Have our research friends built the technology to differ between these two visits? Again it’s not just this specific point I need an answer on, but various other related browsing habits. Whether it’s Neilsen or any other measurement agency, plugging these gaps will eventually decide the winner.

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WWW: WAT Weekly WrapUp 2nd - 8th February

Last week was a week of new launches and we had google in the news with latitude and multiple inboxes feature. NDTV was in the news for a video site weirdly name tubaah (which stands for devastated in hindi). Finally there was a commercial roll out of 3G but with a steep price tag. While there was increased ad spend by the tourism ministry on one hand on the other Yatra.com started inviting advertisers to place ads on its site.

Last week was also special because we soft launched our own press release site WATPR.com. We get tonnes of press releases and not all can be covered on WATBlog.com and we sometimes overlook some of them due to time constraint but they are news you can use for sure so we thought why not make a destination and aggregate all these releases there. So came up with WATPR.com A Web, Advertising & Technology Press Release site. So whether you are a startup or a growing firm in the WAT Space you can all post press releases here for free

All this and more from last weeks action in this wrapup..

Posts from WATBlog.com

Jobs & Industry Movements via WATJob.com

Gaming via WATGame.com

Videos via WATShow.com

Kiran Gopinath - Ozone Media Talks About Ad Network Opportunity During Slowdown

Press Releases via WATPR.com

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Event Review: E-Summit 2009 @ IIT MUMBAI - Insights & Analysis

What is enterprise e-summit:

E- Summit is a unique initiative by The Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Bombay which serves as a common platform for aspiring, budding and successful entrepreneurs to interact and help build successful enterprises.

E-Summit 09, also celebrating the Golden Jubilee celebrations of IIT Bombay had an overlying theme of Empowering entrepreneurs.

Morning address:

The welcome address was delivered by Prof. Devang Khakkar, Director IIT Bombay though full half an hour behind schedule but it provide insights into the initiatives of enterprise cell and the past hurdles faced by them.It was also pointed out that they are looking for gaining more tract in the area of entrepreneurship awareness programmes.

The keynote address was delivered by Mr.kanwal rekhi , MD Inventus capital.

He talked at length about how Japan and U.S has entrepreneurs in large numbers and the society at large supports entrepreneurs there but entrepreneurs in India just consists of 1-2 % of the entire population.

He also pointed the fact that how his former student student who turned entrepreneur made him so jealous at the same time inspired him to turn entrepreneur.The main underlying was always have some role models who were commoner few years ago and turned their fortunes which would always inspire you to believe that if those people can do it then you are no exception.

1st panel discussion:

Kanwal Rekhi, MD Inventus capital.
Aravind Singhal, Chairman Technopak.
Vishal Gondal, CEO Indiagames
Vinnie Vyas, CEO Crossover advisors who was also mentoring the panel discussions.

Main takeaways:

To be a successful entrepreneur either invent a pain killer or a product which is better, faster or cheaper than the other available products in the market.

An entrepreneur does not need to change the field of his interest for business purpose he can continue chasing his interest with business motive too,e.g just how vishal gondal made a muti-million dollar empire by just concentrating on his favourite hobby i.e gaming.

Being an entrepreneur is like being pregnant because in the end you have to deliver.

When you aim for the sky you reach moon when you aim for the moon you reach nowhere.

Entrepreneurs in these turbulent days need to be flexible in whatever they do beacause the journey is similar to that of the road on a mountain you have to take turn whenever needed else you loose you life.

Networking lunch:

All the penalist were seen chatting with aspiring entrepreneurs and giving them a verbal piece of advice and were answering the question posed by them.

Through the lunch I caught up an informal conversation with vishal gondal, indiagames which seemed to suggest that they are very bullish on their games on demand platform and are not worried about reliance foraying with zapak gameplexes and even their future venture through reliance broadband.

His take was that the main subscribers for indiagames are not coming from metro cities but instead are people from tier-1 and tier-2 cities and he quoted figure as high as 90%-something to really think about.

2nd panel discussions:

Kiruba Shankar of Kiruba.com
Alok Kejriwal ,CEO and co founder, games2win
Jay Gupta ,MD the loot store.
Rajeev Mantri ,ED Navam Capital

Key takeaways:

Observe your customer they might just provide you with next big opportunity.

Get a good team without a team you can't do much yourself.

Get an experience of the industry before venturing into that field.

If you want to be an entrepreneur always defy conventional wisdom.

Never be too greedy while taking funding because the funding is very much required for your companies future growth and hence take as much you need.

A session by david wittenberg on brand ideation:

Make your idea as simple as possible because many muti-billion companies are made on that idealogy.

Always observe your consumer never go by herd mentality.

Always go for prototype or alpha launch which is way better than spending a fortune and realising a mistake later on.

If your product offers Value of more than 1 then your product has a potential to become success:

V=B/P where B stands for benefit the consumer derives from that product and p being price benefit.

Networking tea:

I caught up with Rusell Stamets, JCSS Consulting Pvt. Ltd

One thing I must point out is that never underestimate foreign nationals of venture capital industry beacuse they have a very deep understanding of Indian markets so dont try to fool them that was also the viewpoint of rusell stamets.

His take was that the presentation of Indian companies are very lengthy and it should be no more than 20 mins and if its PPT presentation than it should be no more than 10 slides.

His another viewpoint suggested that even venture capital industry works on herd menatlity.

If you want to get an insight into vc world than start following guy kawasaki because many of these Industry people are big fan of him.

3rd panel dicussions:

Farzana Haque, Global Decision Manager,TCS.
Mohanjit jolly, DFJ Venture Capital.

Key takeaways:

Venture capitalist are getting bullish on sectors like cleantech ,education and healthcare related sector due to laggardness of these sectors in India and future potential is just enormous.

Almost every people from private equity industry is heard saying that the next big thing in mobile would be from india though it has to be seen how much of it holds flake in future.

On showcase:

Microsoft biz spark:

Microsoft is doling out free production licenses for application hosting and management servers, including Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server, BizTalk Server and Systems Center and soon, Microsoft Dynamics CRM.This is seen as a strategy to get familiar with companies at nascent stage and become their main I.T software vendor.

The results for eureka –Asia's largest business plan competition was also announced and there was Venture pitch and other mentoring -parallel sessions held for attendees who were selected prior to the event.

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