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Yahoo! Introduces Mobile Content Developer Platform Blueprint in India

Yahoo! has launched Blueprint a mobile content devleopment platform in India to enable mobile web development. Blueprint is a free software package to brands and content owners, which, once installed on the computer, will help them develop the mobile sites or applications and also help them to host these on the mobile network.

Yahoo has been has pinned a lot of hope in the growth of the Indian mobile niche and have invested heavily in partnerships and mobile related services in the past in India. This move seems to take the game directly to content builders and developers to make it easy for them to publish in the mobile medium. Consider it blogger sort of service on the web, just that the platform is more capable to publish more than just blogs.

For Yahoo this opens up an avenue to build revenues as publishers using this platform are likely to use their ad network to monetize their sites.

Vishal Maheshwari, senior director, connected life, Yahoo! India, says, "The content owner can decide to do the ad sales of the mobile content on his own or rope in our mobile ad network to get advertisers for it. For instance, we are responsible for the ad sales of the mobile site of Idea Cellular." If a publisher uses the Yahoo mobile ad network, then he has to share the revenue earned through the ads served by the mobile ad network with Yahoo.

Yahoo has been developing and fine tuning the Blueprint platform first used on Yahoo’s mobile application Yahoo! Go since long. What started as platform to develop widgets for Yahoo! Go can now be used by developers to build standalone applications for Java, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices, besides create mobile web sites accessible via virtually any HTML or xHTML mobile browser. Though the platform currently targets site builders for GPRS and WAP access it is also capable of helping build iPhone apps as well.

If using Blueprint is a cakewalk and can deliver good results (I am not aware of how exactly it functions) Yahoo can have winner in its hands. And this is not just because of the obvious reason of having a platform that works but it will actually help Yahoo reach out to the mobile mass in more direct manner. I don’t know of any other mobile development platform that’s available and if Yahoo enjoys a monopoly in that regards it can quickly get adopted by a lot of publishers. For one it will surely be considered more reliable and easier than using any other publishing tool given its proven track abroad.

Till then we wait for what Yahoo will say about Blueprint’s adoption and success in the coming months. If you are a mobile publisher or are keen to be one, maybe you can read the Opera Report on content consumption trends on mobile to begin with.

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Events Update For February: E-Summit, Mozilla Camp, WordCamp, SearchCamp & More..

February is an event month with most events happening in colleges as well as tech events. Its also a month of entrepreneurship with NEN’s eweek falling in february from 7th-14th february.

6th-7th - Venture Capital Private Equity Conference - IIM - Ahmedabad - Center for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship [CIIE] at IIM Ahmedabad in association with Leverage - the Student Initiative group, is organizing this conference. Part of the Conference will also be the Showcase Event on the 6th, which will witness 10 Entrepreneurs presenting their concepts to at least 10 venture capitalists.

The BPlan competition is being organised in association with a new VC fund Epiphany Ventures which is a Sector Agnostic Fund, with a size of $25 Million. This fund focusses on early stage investments, but is also looking at investing in later stages if the opportunity is suitable. Mr. Gaurav Saraf the Director of the Fund would be present at the showcase.

7th February - ESummit (IIT) - Mumbai - E- Summit is an 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 brings The Investor Pitch – an opportunity for startups to raise seed capital and Mentoring sessions for aspiring entrepreneurs. The Summit also plays host to the finals of Eureka’08 – Asia's largest B-Plan competition along with Startup Showcasing and Global Conference of Entrepreneurship Promoting Organizations.

The Summit is divided into two tracks meant for aspiring and budding entrepreneurs
Track 1 – From idea generation to a startup
Track 2 – From startup to a successful company

10th February - Mozilla Camp - New Delhi - MozillaCamp is a friendly unconference where people get-together to share,learn and talk about anything and everything related to Mozilla-Firefox..It takes place on 10th February,2009 at New Delhi.

14th-15th February - Yahoo Hack Day - Bangalore - 200-300 developers will attend this FREE event, which will begin with hack-related presentations from some of the Web's most respected developers. There shall be 24 hours of hacking on a very nice collection of tools, other APIs, and data, and end with awards from the sponsors.

21st-22nd February - WordCamp - Delhi - Delhi Bloggers Bloc and Blog Design Studio present India's first ever WordCamp. The conference is in planning phase at the moment. If you are interested in volunteering or if you want to speak on the topics realted to WordPress, feel free to contact us. Matt the founder of Wordpress shall be attending this camp.

28th Feb - 1st March - Search Camp - Chennai - It is a two day event aimed to bring together the best minds from the Search Engine Marketing space to talk about search engine advertising, including optimization and marketing issues. The event is scheduled for the 28th February & 1st March 2009.

This is the second edition of the event and the first edition happened during 6th & 7th of October 2007, at Tidel Park, Chennai. SearchCamp will feature workshops, debates and keynotes on the present state and evolution of Search Engine Marketing.

Note: WATBlog shall be announcing its events for February soon.. So stay tuned!

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It was just recently when future group started E-tailing for their white labeled products.

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Tough Economic Conditions - A Boon For E-tailing?

The economic conditions across the world are becoming harsh day-by-day and it is making it tougher for companies to increase their franchisee sales or shop sales but it is definitely making headway into their online E-tailing footprint.

This could be again confirmed with companies reporting impressive growth in their E-tailing businesses.

Nike reported growth in their e-tailing venture in a time where even e-commerce business is headed southwards. Online retail sales in the UK are predicted to go up 15% in Q4 2008.

The E-tailing refers to direct retailing by a company of its own products.

Why does it make sense for companies to expand their E-tailing footprint:

The main cost for a company in retailing business are floor space,human resources,and other floor maintenance cost but in E-tailing companies do not incur other severe cost rather than warehouse cost and transportation cost.

The investment required in E-tailing is very low and do not incur subsequent heavy investments and could be up in very short period of time.

The bargain hunting consumers can be brought forward with more discounts as the companies save huge cost in their operations.

The consumers today spend way too much time online and according to a survey 50% consumers do their research online and then go out to buy, the E-tailing could be just the way to connect with them and initiate action from their side. The company can showcase more products online and thus offer variety of options and can part away with inventories easily by offering discounts.

The major benefits for consumers is that E-tailing saves them time and money as more discounts pour in plus they get to choose from wide variety of choices.

E-tailing scenario in india:

According to the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB report, the E-tailing market was worth Rs 850 crore for 2006-07 and went on to achieve 30% growth by registering a turnover of Rs 1,105 crore in 2007-08 and is expected to show impressive growth in future too.

Although E-tailing has lagged in india just like E-commerce but hopefully in future it would see a lot more actions as internet habit of indian online users are on a rise and low sales and higher overhead cost makes it tougher for companies to expand their retailing footprint in india.

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BSNL To Roll Out 3G In Orissa

The 3G is finally set to arrive in India, BSNL, the telecom major is doing it’s initial rollout in Orissa. The 3G services would be first launched in Bhubaneswar and later in the district headquarters of the state and for that BSNL is investing Rs 300cr for the infrastructure.

As BSNL is moving ahead the race though the 3G auction is yet to see light of the day. Recently the cabinet has referred the 3G auction issue to a group of ministers (GoM). Issues regarding the 3G auction include setting the base price for the auction and finalizing the number of slots firms can bid for in the 20 of India’s 22 service areas to be covered by the sale.

In an earlier panel held by FICCI and BDA on Demystifying 3G and BWA, Randeep Raina, Head, 3G Business(Sub region India), Nokia Siemens Networks had pointed out that it is difficult to plan out the infrastructure for 3G in the country unless there is clear decision on the 3G auction. If the 3G rollout is done soon enough, the subscriber base is estimated to grow to 89.9mn by 2013 and will represent 12% of the overall subscriber base contributing USD 15.8bn in service revenues.

For the sake of the thousands who bought a 3G handset in expectation of using broadband like speed on mobile lets hope 3G comes sooner rather than later.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zj45rmDXWI

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YouTube Link Embed Feature Gets an Unexpected Dimension - New Photo Hunt Game

A YouTube user who goes by the name Copyrighthater has made a series of photo-videos and made an interesting game on the video sharing site. Copyrighthater alias Joe Sabia claims this to be the first interactive photo hunt game on YouTube and is already garnering a lot of publicity (including this one for that matter). Joe has basically used the newly introduced URL embed feature of YouTube to display not only some innovative creativity but garner a truckload of views for this videos, with the first of the videos already getting over 100,000 views in under 3 days.

The game has around 33 levels, with a new video being the next level. The theme of the game is to spot the difference between two similar photographs and click on the the difference. The right spot is linked to the next video which in this case is the next question. The photographs have been tactfully chosen with the Oscar buzz in the air and involves all Oscar nominees. (I crossed 12th level Yay! before deciding I need to blog this first). You can catch the first of the levels below.

As I mentioned before, the first of the videos has already crossed 100,000 and the videos that follow are also raking in high views but slightly lesser of course given that not all people can get their answers right and move on. Sabia runs a celebrity gossip blog and has promoted the site from the introduction of the game itself.

I am sure this isn’t something YouTube was expecting when Youtube introduced its URL embed feature, nor any of the top YouTube strategists around, but then that’s the beauty of social media anyway. There are a number of lessons that media sharing strategists can learn from this video, and also perhaps open a new wave of innovative use competitions (oneupmanships), which is good for the niche which is still pricking its (..what do people prick?) when it comes monetizing themselves. The game shows a new way of interaction and engagement besides some excellent scope for brand placements and advertising. Straightaway, it opens a lot of opportunities for online media planners and buyers to pursue and make use of. I expect to see a lot more clones coming up soon vying for their share of attention and buzz.

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