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Friday, February 13, 2009

WATBlog Update "Going Beyond the Blog: 5 Powerful Wordpress Plugins" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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"Going Beyond the Blog: 5 Powerful Wordpress Plugins" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Going Beyond the Blog: 5 Powerful Wordpress Plugins

I am one among the breed who think that every website should have some Wordpress love. I have seen the WPs ability to move beyond just a blog platform to quite a capable content management system. Now thanks to its growing and mighty talented developer community there are plugins and themes that are slowly taking WP beyond the 2 column restraints of a blog. In this post, I would like to introduce a few plugins that help make your wordpress blog a little bigger than a blog.

WP E-commerce

When I first started using wordpress, its abilities as a CMS were just beginning to be tested. So plugins like WP sticky, and having multiple columns in your blog, etc. were impressive things happening on a blog. And I used to wonder whether it can ever support e-commerce.. after quite a bit of time passed I stumbled on this plugin and e-commerce came to a blog.

Headspace

The mightiest WP plugin to my mind. It just changes the way you manage the blog and its meta data. Headspace 2 was considered the one word solution for everything SEO on wordpress. However, with version 3 its taken customization and management of wp blogs to different level with Per-page themes, Per-page plugins, Custom page titles, RSS titles & description and a lot of other features.

WP Invoice

WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients. The plugin ties into WP's user management database to keep track of your clients and their information. Once an invoice is created from the WP admin section, an email with a brief description and a unique link is sent to your client. Clients follow the link to your blog's special invoice page, view their invoice, and pay their bill using their credit card. How wonderful!

NextGen Gallery

NextGen helps create an image gallery on your website, rather your wordpress blog. It provides a comprehensive interface for managing photos and images through a set of admin pages and helps display quite a nifty image gallery online. fGallery is another interesting plugin to make your own gallery.

WP Contact Form / CForms II

I consider them to be the most underrated wp plugins. Almost all wp blogs use them these days, perhaps the reason they don’t get enough credit. Back in the days when HTML seemed the only thing needed to know to make a website and php was something that would have got you funded, I used to wonder how can people mail me directly from my website. And all I could come up with was the mailto tag on HTML. WP contact form let’s my visitors get in touch with just one line of code in a WP page. I think it is super cool.

With the hundreds of plugins that come up everyday, there are chances that some of you might find this list dissapoitning because none of these are actually very new plugins. However, considering WATblog hasn’t convered WP plugins specifically before, I thought this might be a good starting point for this field. Hopefully, we can talk about a lot more on wordpress plugins and other CMS in the future.

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WATBlog Update There are 3 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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Will You Pay to Download YouTube Videos?
Funding Updates: Valuefirst raises $6mn From NEA, Canaan Invests in mCarbon While VC’s Start To Disappear..
Merger & Acquistion Updates: Mobile2win - Altruist / ApnaCircle - Viadeo
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Will You Pay to Download YouTube Videos?

Sometime between yesterday and today Google announced paid downloads of YouTube videos. Yes, YouTube’s partners can now offer their videos for paid downloads.

The help section of YouTube speaks about this feature, thus -

Learn More: Video downloads

You have the option of downloading and storing your favorite Partner videos and watching these videos even without an internet connection. To download Partner video:

Find the video you’d like to download.
Below the video’s play bar in the lower left hand corner, you’ll see a ‘Download‘ button.
Click the ‘Download‘ button to indicate that you’d like to download the video.

Purchasing a video download

Some videos require purchasing before you can download them to your computer. Once you’ve opted to download the video you will be directed to Google Checkout to finalize your purchase:

As mentioned in the help page and it’s announcement, Google is offering this service as a test to a few of its partners. So not all partner videos would have this feature enabled. However, the team asks potential partners who are interested in participating, to touch base here. Downloads will only be available as MP4 files and reports regarding this feature suggests that most paid downloads currently hover around $1 (sounds like iTune yes).

YouTube has been the problem child for Google for monetary reasons, that despite having as huge a user base as it has, it still hasn’t become the cash cow it was meant to be. This paid download feature certainly seems a new way to add monetization options to the video sharing site and look beyond advertising.

However, as most reader’s of WATBlog would know better than me, a variety of download tools and hacks are available for YouTube videos already. How will Google tackle such a menace? Will you pay for a video you can get for free? Will you pay to download a YouTube video even if there is no other way to have it on your computer?

While you decide, don’t forget to watch our WATShows .. for free of course.

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Funding Updates: Valuefirst raises $6mn From NEA, Canaan Invests in mCarbon While VC’s Start To Disappear..

Mobile VAS space is lately getting a lot of traction and it is an obvious move from the indurstry as the VAS revenues are huge estimated at Rs 5780 crore and growing rapidly at a rate of 70% year-on-year estimated to be Rs16520 crores by June 2010. The same is evident in the latest funding news of Valuefirst and mCarbon.

ValueFirst messaging. a Delhi based SMS services provider has raised series B funding of $6 million from venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA). In 2006, the company raised its first round of funding of $250,000 from Emergic Ventures of Rajesh Jain. ValueFirst plans to increase its workforce by double from the current 200, and enhance its presence in 35 cities in India. ValueFirst also has plans for international expansion, especially in East Africa and Middle East. Valuefirst claims to have more than 1,300 corporate clients such as ICICI Bank, Standard Chartered, Bajaj Allianz, HCL, Nicholas Piramal, Nortel, Proctor & Gamble, among others.

Reportedly mCarbon another Delhi-based mobile value-added services company, has raised an undisclosed amount of series-A funding from Canaan Partners. mCarbon is in the utility and services space and was founded in late 2007. It has a product that helps manage VAS services, along with other products mcarbon has two products in it flagship platform called Greenroom awaiting patent grant.Impressive enough mcarbon already has Airtel,Idea and MTNL as their clients.This is Canaan’s second investment in the mobile VAS space. It has also invested $5.25 million in mobile TV firm Cellcast Asia.

VC’s Disappearing Act!
Amid this funding news,Venture funding has already taken a downturn in India. Reportedly over ten India-focused venture capital funds withdrew their registration applications with SEBI, during 2008. The total investment proposed by these funds is estimated at Rs 1,000-1,200 crore. Besides liquidity crisis the new guidelines issued by the Reserve Bank of India have supposedly discouraged foreign VC funds from investing in India.

Experts are not optimistic about the venture capital fundings in India in the current quarter….”At the moment, there is a significant gap between the valuation that promoters are seeking and the amount that funds are willing to give. We can expect VC investment to pick up only when the valuations demanded by promoters come to a rational level, in line with the reality” said K Srinivas, vice chairman and managing partner, BTS Investment Advisors as quoted in financial express.

VC funds invested Rs 33,939 crore in Indian markets for the quarter ending December 31, 2008, against Rs 34,772 crore during the previous quarter.

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Merger & Acquistion Updates: Mobile2win - Altruist / ApnaCircle - Viadeo

Consolidation seems to be the name of the game with mergers and acquisitions being announced this week. One in the mobile space which one in the social networking space.

Altruist Acquires Mobile2win India

Mobile2win India a VC backed VAS company in the SMS and mobile marketing space has been acquired by Altruist Group, a wireless voice services provider based out of Chandigarh. Altruist Group currently has a company in Altruist Technologies which operates a Mobile Social Networking Service and JobsOnPhone, a phone based recruitment service provider.

Mobile2win India had raised funding from Nexus India Capital and Norwest Venture Partners who had invested $15 million in 2006.

What will be the impact of this deal?

According to the release with this consolidation, the Group turnover will exceed Rs 200 Crores (~USD 40 mn) this fiscal. The companies shall continue to operate independently but they will take advantage of their complementary Voice, SMS, WAP solutions and offer it to all the leading mobile operators, media companies and brands.

What kind of deal is this?
As part of this deal existing investors in M2W will get shares in the Altruist Group and Rajat Jain, who is currently the MD and CEO of Mobile2Win will now join the Altruist Group board.

Apnacircle.com Merges With France Business Networking Site Viadeo

ApnaCircle.com the Sabeer Bhatia backed social networking website has announced its merger with Viadeo the france based business networking site.

What will be the impact of this merger?

This merger would help in expanding the horizon of Apnacircle which till now has been pretty much under the radar as far as Indian Social networks are concerned and will also help the registered users of ApnaCircle to be linked to more than 6.5 million members of Viadeo.

ApnaCircle has a current membership of more than 300K from all over India and with this merger Apnacircle hopes to get this number to 1 million by the mid of 2010. As per this deal Viadeo will retain the name of ApnaCirlce.com.

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Bebo launches Bebo Open Mobile:

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Thursday, February 12, 2009

WATBlog Update "Social networks Gung Ho On Mobile - Facebook-Nokia Alliance In The Making.." from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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"Social networks Gung Ho On Mobile - Facebook-Nokia Alliance In The Making.." from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Social networks Gung Ho On Mobile - Facebook-Nokia Alliance In The Making..

Many big social networks are seriously pitching for their entry into mobile platform as mobile advertisement market sees huge growth and with entry of google in mobile adspace arena it would lead to more participation of companies into mobile advertisement space.

This also comes at a time when online social networking is nearing saturation points and to enter thenext leap of growth it is becoming important for these social networks to focus on mobile arena at the same time handset manufacturers are finding it difficult to attract buyers with just better hardware specifications.

FACEBOOK-Mobile handset makers in tie-up:

FACEBOOK is seriously considering a tie up with NOKIA, the world's biggest maker of mobile phones to include Facebook features in its devices. On the contrary NOKIA is also considering options ranging from creating its own service or application for use of social networking on handsets.

FACEBOOK is said to be working to offer more services on mobile phones from manufacturers such as motorola, Apple Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd(blackberry maker).

It is also looking for partnerships with wireless service providers to deliver social network features efficiently

According to company reports 13 percent of Facebook customers access the sites from their phone which comes to some 30 million odd users. This is also confirmed with Opera report on mobile usage patterns which leads to the fact that there is heavy usage of social networks from mobile.

Features to be offered through the alliance:

To integrate social networks closely to mobile devices, allowing users to merge their phone contacts with their Facebook friends.

To combine Facebook profile pictures with users' address books and a whole host of features including photo and video upload options are also being considered.

Recent announcements:

Developers will be able to create applications dedicated to mobile platform using the new open platform from bebo, of the leading social networks.

Entry into mobile platform really makes sense for social networks as they have now various ways to monetise their sites and leverage the power of mobile advertising market which was worth more than $2.7 Billion in 2008.This would also put a question mark on mobile only social networks because now they would be facing more competition with big social networks and would deprecate their chances of survival.

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WATBlog Update There are 2 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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US Social Networking Stats
5 Things I Learnt In My Last 4 Years As A Digital Media Entrepreneur..
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US Social Networking Stats

Compete.com served up some new numbers about Social-Networking stats some days back.

They have put Facebook in the lead with about 68 million unique visitors, while MySpace is at 58 million.

Total Visits: Facebook recorded a massive 1.1 billion total visits, while MySpace is at 810 millon.
i.e. approximately an average of 17 visits per visitor for Facebook and 14 visits per visitor for MySpace.

Visits per visitor are not be mistaken with pageviews (Caroline McCarthy @ cnet seems to have equated monthly visits with pageviews).

Pageviews will be a far greater number! 10 times the number of total monthly visits would be a safe assumption.

Orkut (Which is still #1 in India) is not even in the Top 20 in the US.

Note: These are numbers recorded only for US visitors. Another thing to note is that this is entirely based on Web browser data in the U.S. So something like Twitter which is highly accessed via 3rd party applications might actually have a far bigger reach!

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