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Friday, October 10, 2008

WATBlog Update There are 4 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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There are 4 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

RBI Doubles Cap On Mobile Banking.. 70% Growth In E-Payments Expected While 30% New Mobile Subs Are Rural

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RBI doubles Cap on mobile transactions

So we had blogged recently on the RBI guidelines for mobile payments and also mentioned that it wasn’t the final guidelines but was subject to review. So RBI has gone ahead and doubled the cap its had earlier put on the transactions via mobile. It has increased the per transaction limit from Rs.2500 to Rs.5000 and the daily transaction limit from Rs.5000 to Rs.10000.

Epayments to grow by 70%

Now this must come as a great news to all the mobile payment companies. But what will be even greater news is that E-payments i.e. payments through electronic modes is set for a 70% YOY growth in the next 2 years. As per this article which quotes a research done by  Boston-based financial research and consulting firm Celent at present, only 17-20 per cent of bill payments occur electronically, and the majority of these transactions are in urban areas. Customers still prefer to pay standing "in line" rather than "online". Which points out the huge opportunity both in mobile payments and mobile payments in rural areas.

30% of new mobile subscribers are from Rural Areas

Add to the above the fact that 30% of all new mobile subscribers are from rural areas. The rural market would become a huge opportunity for these mobile payment companies. Infact at the last Mobile monday which we attended we saw an interesting product by atom technologies IVR based payment system Paybuzz which was targetted at the rural folks. And from all that we heard it did sound like this payment method was much more need there than in the Urban areas where payment facilities are widely available both online and via drop boxes at every nook and corner.

What does all this mean? - The emerging rural opportunity for mobile payments

I see a tremendous opportunity for mobile payment companies in rural areas especially the ones using basic sms payments and IVR payments. Also as the RBI gets more and more liberal with its guidelines this would become the biggest for companies in this space. Even the current cap by RBI is best for rural folk whose payments are more likely to be the few thousands at max anyways.

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Tie Ups Update: RelianceMoney - ApnaLoan & ICICI - DishTv

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Tie ups are the flavour of the season here are two updates on interesting tie ups in the digital space:

Reliance Money & Apna Loan in Content Tie up

reliancemoney-apnaloanAs per this tie up content on the Easy Loan, EMI Calculators and FAQ sections on the Reliance Money website will be provided and powered exclusively by Apnaloan.com. Apnaloan has enlightened over 1.0 million consumers about Personal Loans, Home Loans, Car Loans, Credit Cards and Education Loans through its well-researched and vast data bank.

Apnaloan had renamed its parent company and launched Apnapaisa.com which for all practical purposes looked like a blog attempting at attracting relevant audiences online via financial content. This tie up also seems like a way for Apnaloan to distribute its content on the web and drive traction.

DishTv ties up with ICICI For Accessing banking information via DTH

Through this tie up ICICIACTIVE is launched on Dish TV for Dish tv viewers who will now be able to access information on various types of ICICI Bank accounts and deposits that suits their need.

Earlier we had reported matrimony wars on DTH whereby shaadi had tied up with DIsh tv and bharatmatrimony with Tatasky to compete with each other on the DTH platform. Im excpecting this tie up to kind of kick off a banking information on DTH battle after all there are now 4 national DTH players with the entry of reliance’s Big Tv and Bharti’s Airtel TV.

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Orkut Launches iPhone Compatible Mobile Site.. Over A Year Later Than Facebook!

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Orkut.com which still ranks as the top social networking site in India has launched its iPhone compatible mobile site. No no.. Dont confuse this as an orkut application for mobile because it isn’t that. Infact it is an iphone compatible mobile site which can be accessed from the same url from which you access to their mobile version i.e. m.orkut.com.

Now one might wonder why would orkut not launch an orkut app but instead go for a iPhone OS optimized mobile website instead? After all all its competitors Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn have applications available for the iPhone OS installed via the App Store.

Infact facebook launched its application with the opening of the apps in itunes stores way back in July and had launched an iPhone optimized website more than a year back in august 2007! Now why is orkut slacking? Doesn’t google have enough engineers to build these things on the fly?

Well if you ask me I dont think its about the ability or engineers I think the audience both these cater to are very different. Orkut is strong force in emerging countries like India and Brazil where the tech savviness and the market of the iPhone user is limited compared to US. Infact in India orkut has penetrated to Tier 2 and 3 cities. So given almost 80% of their audience coming from India and Brazil makes their launch seem perfect given that iPhone has just been launched in India probably their highest growth oriented market.

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Google Launches Adsense For Gaming.. Impact On India?

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So what is Google adsense for games?

The buzz about google launching adsense for online gaming has been around for a while but now google has gone ahead and launched as well as invited prospective game publishers and developers to join the adsense for gaming list of publishers.

Check out the video below to know how the ads might look:

Who have they signed up?

Though it has just been announced given the fact that its google it has already signed up a list of publishers including Konami, Playfish, Zynga, Demand Media, and games network Mochi Media and beta advertisers such as Esurance, Sprint, and Sony Pictures.

How does this impact India?

Well from a publisher perspective it doesn’t as this service is currently only open to publishers with minimum gameplays of 500,000 per day having a traffic of atleast 80% or more from US & UK.
So clearly this adsense isn’t targetted at the long tail of publishers or developers. But this move by google does affect Inviziads.com an ad network for online gaming launched by Indian company Games2win.com and which is targetted primarily at the international markets.

Inviziads Vs Google Adsense for Gaming

Well Inviziads wont be that affected on a publisher front as by the looks of it they are effectively looking at the long tail of publishers given the guidelines in the faqs section. But Inviziads will surely be affected on the advertiser acquisition front as a lot of their current traction from both games2win and addictinggames.com (which is a big publisher for them) comes from outside of India and given the slowdown in the US and entry of google adsense for gaming inviziads would find it tougher to crack the international advertiser market.

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