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Get Ready For Skype Pre-Loaded Nokia Phones

Skype has announced a partnership with Nokia, the largest handset maker in the world, in which later this year Skype will be integrated into Nokia devices, starting with the Nokia Nseries. The Nokia N97 flagship device will be the first to incorporate the Skype in the 3rd quarter of 2009. Skype eventually will be available on high-end Nokia Nseries devices running the Symbian S60 operating system offering users pre-loaded out-of-the-box Skype calls, instant messages and more, via both 3G and WiFi.

The pre-loaded skype app might drastically improve it’s presence management on the mobile devices where in a user could directly tap into his contact list to see who else is online and chat with them over voice or text instantly. Currently, there are downloadable versions of Skype available for the Android and more than 100 other Java-enabled mobiles from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola and LG, as well as Windows Mobile devices. Skype reportedly had over 11 million downloads for it’s Windows Mobile version alone.

Scott Durchslag,The COO of Skype said on the company blog that the partnership with Nokia is a part of it’s larger mobile strategy, where in Skype is being made available for consumers to download on to their existing mobile devices, pre-loading skype on to newer devices and improving the skype experience by developing partnerships with device manufacturers and mobile carriers throught the world.

This move of skype is supposidly to reach large markets around the world where handsets are sold directly to consumers, the consumers who might have never used a PC to connect with the internet.The company is hoping to get most of it’s next 100 million users from these markets.

As opposed to my intuition VOIP startups are positive on this move. Tobias Kemper, Head of Communications at Nimbuzz, says the fact that Skype will come pre-installed on mobile devices is actually going to help normalize the use of VoIP applications (and particularly Skype) and thus boost their own growth. He also added that the integrated approach of Nimbuzz, which combines a variety of voice and text chat services into one app, is still in demand,as quoted on Techcrunch.

Skype the eBay-owned company had 405 million registered users in total at the end of last year.

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Facebook Privacy Controversy And Its Repercussions

Facebook made minor changes in few terms and it was enough to start a controversy across the world so much so that it was to be referred to Federal Trade Commission.

When it really started ?

On Feb 4, the day Facebook celebrated 5 years of existence they also brought a change in their terms of service agreement.

It seemed to have gone unnoticed until the Consumerist site published an article on Sunday saying the new terms allow the social network to "do anything they want with your content, forever."

Terms in question?

One issue with that version was a clause which says that Facebook owns your personal data indefinitely, even if you delete your own account.

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Another issue was a line saying that Facebook owned licensing rights to content on sites that let users share information back to Facebook.

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

End-result:

Few days of uproar by users the Facebook has reverted to their old terms of service agreement and is asking for suggestion from its users to points to be added in terms page.

The company says it plans to introduce a new new version, written in "language everyone can understand." It is also asking for user feedback in a Facebook group it has set up, accommodatingly titled the "Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities."

One thing is for sure that Facebook wants to update their terms badly and leverage the huge mine of data which it holds.

This could also have been a precursor to a deal with Microsoft in the search domain to search Facebook database or to launch a full fledge search engine on Facebook with more weightage on social search.

Bigger question it poses?

As Mark Zuckerberg pointed out in Facebook blog that Facebook today is not just a small site but a full fledge nation because if the Facebook users are added up it would be sixth most populated country in the world this tells us the sheer size of the social networks and especially the bigger ones who are getting bigger day-by-day. It even edges out the U.S television audience for Super Bowl XLIII, which drew a record-setting 152 million eyeballs.

At the same time it arouses the bigger picture of privacy concerns in today's cyberaholic world because what a user do today on social networks is archived and if used for public search could possibly create problems for that user in the future.

The social networks are trying to leverage the user generated content which they hold in terms of status updates, photos, videos and other private memorabilia of their users and many social search engines which are cropping up if tomorrow hitch up a back door deal with these social networks then the users privacy will be in jeopardy.

There are many indications that these social networks want to do away with their closed gate policy in order to gain more spectrum in their domain. In order to avoid privacy concerns government might have to make special laws for online social networks due to the size it caters to and the importance it has in people's life and privacy.

Whats your take on this privacy issue? Do you think your data is safe on these social networks? We would love to hear from you..

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Star TV Soft Launches Star Player - Online Video Site

Online Video wars seem to be ensuing between leading tv channels its seems. NDTV launched Tubaah.com recently and now Star Tv seem to have soft launched their own Video site called Star Player.

Most of Star Tv’s bouquet of channels have their online content hosted on Indya.com (a site star bought during the 1999-2000 dotcom boom). The Star Player is no different. Its url is videos.indya.com and it hosts video content from the various channels of star right from Star Plus, News, Gold, Movies, Star One and even channel V. Currently the site looks work in progress as some channels like star gold and star news have no videos in them. But this attempt by star sure does look like a serious one. Though I would have preferred a standalone domain name like NDTV created (but something better that a destructive sounding Tubaah).

Star would directly compete with the likes of ZoomTV which also could add Timesnow and ETNow content in the future. There is ofcourse NDTV’s Tubaah in the general video portal category and CNNIBN’s ibnlive in the news category.

As of now there is no official word on the plans that Star has with this new video portal. Will it add a UGC element? By the looks of the site that looks unlikely. Currently it seems like an attempt to create an online destination of all of Star TV’s various channels Video inventory. Just by aggregating all its video content star could have enough content to last them a lifetime.

A word on the video platform execution - The video platform Star Players is very nicely executed with some great features like adjusting color, sharpness etc. It also has a very clean and is less cluttered compared to some other sites.

One will have to wait and watch how this foray into online video by theseTV giants evolve with time. One thing is for sure online video advertising will get the required thrust as these players do have the advertisers access and can get the big advertisers to spend on online video.

Thanks Saurav for the tip off

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WATBlog Panel Bangalore (Video) - Lessons from Failure for Startups

The WATBlog Panel Bangalore took place on 23rd Jan 2009 on the topic 'Lessons from Failure for Startups'. One can view the Pics & Analysis here and here. We had promised a video of the same and here we are with a video snippet of the panel discussion. Its tough to justify a 2 hour panel discussion in a 10 minute video but we try are best!

Hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed the panel discussion.

Check out this and more such videos on WATShow.com

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Yahoo To Power ICC Website For 3 Years - Probably The Biggest Cricket Deal For Online Content!

Yahoo! has struck a deal with the ICC which could be termed as a ‘huge six’ in cricketing terms. As per the official release the International Cricket Council has announced a partnership with Yahoo according to with ICC shall host its corporate site with yahoo.com.

The deal is a three-year partnership and will provide Yahoo access to exclusive images, videos, interviews and player chats around all major ICC events. The major icc events include ICC world cup, ICC T20 world cup and ICC Champions trophy.

The online destination which shall have all the content hosted would be iccevents.yahoo.com.

Given the scale of cricket and the sheer madness around tournamnents like the world cup one can safely say that this is the Biggest deal yet for Yahoo from an India perspective. Yahoo has also launched its own cricket site at cricket.yahoo.com to complement the ICC presence.

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Rediff Launches Local Ads - Replaces Pay4Clicks - Why Has Rediff Never Succeeded At The Adwords Model?

Rediff.com India's leading online portal has replaced launched an advertising service for small and local advertisers called localads. If one would recollect rediff had launched Pay4Clicks advertising model way back in 2006. But for some reason the same could not scale. Though Pay4clicks was an attempt at creating an Indian version of adwords of sorts it somehow just managed to be a pay per click classified. Rediff had offered free listings at the time of Pay4clicks launch. I remember using pay4clicks and was pretty happy with the result of the free version. Its a pity that they could never scale the technology behind P4C to add features that would help it to scale both from an advertiser and a publisher perspective.

The current offering of local ads is more in the classifieds than in the adwords mold. Local ads is designed for small and home businesses such as travel agents, tuition classes, insurance agents, matrimony services, estate agents, pre-owned car sellers, maintenance contractors and others. Currently local ads is free to use and anyone can post any ads that they feel like. Given this model Rediff local ads is a direct competitor to the likes of quikr.com (ebay & Matrix partners backed local classifieds.).

Why couldn’t rediff create an adwords?

One wonders why couldn’t create an adwords like model given its scale and reach to advertisers. I mean as far as the Indian online advertising is concerned Rediff is one of the giants that has built its business on this model. So a longtail model of online advertising given that Rediff has every concievable vertical right from entertainment to cricket and access to large and small advertisers would have made so much sense.

Well one could have the following two answers to that question..

1) They never had a product/technology centric model as a company - Lets face it.. Rediff is a media company and not one that creates beta releases and feature updates and product roadmaps through out the life cycle of the product. Even if they do have all this they still focus on content and ad sales as their forte unlike Google which creates products (and has a blog for each product) that users use and they wrap around ads on it which again is driven by a product adwords and not a classifieds engine which is more media like.

2) They never wanted to create an adwords - One of the thoughts could be the fact that Rediff never wanted to create an adwords model. Adwords is one of the more cost effective and efficient ways of advertising which means advertisers spend less and get more. Rediff which primarily sells its inventory on CPM would kill its own revenues to some extent if it went the adwords model. Yes there was Pay4Clicks but the customization and value was so limited (it was using vacant inventory spots on rediff) that it would attract only small advertisers where as the big advertisers would continue to spend on rediff at the CPM or any other deal negotiated. So in effect it makes sense for rediff to not create a sophisticated ad management and reporting tool which lowers overall spend per inventory but may increase volumes.

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