WatBlog Newsletter Archive

• Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • View comments • Track comments •

•

Rate 'In.com Integrates Cricketnext, Tech2, Josh18 & Buzz18 - Launches Shopping, Photo Sharing & Mobile Version'

Interview With Rajesh Jain on NayaNaya.mobi & Its Business Model

We reported on Nayanaya.mobi being launched today morning and there being a confusion on the business model and monetization of third party content on Nayanaya sites. So we got in touch with Mr.Rajesh Jain as promised and questioned him about the details of the Nayanaya launch.

Here is the interview

1) What is the objective/business case behind launching nayanaya breaking new mobile sites when you already have mytoday?

The business case is to fulfill the need for information on the move. The latest updates on the mobile every minute – using the power of RSS technology. MyToday brings a wider range of information – while NayaNaya offers the latest updates by aggregating the information from various sources.

2) What would be the monetization model for these sites?

That’s not the focus right now. It is an interesting concept, and a service I personally found very useful. I think many others will. Our goal is to popularise the mobile Internet, because once that happens all of us benefit.

3) How many gprs users are there currently in India? how many do you see using this service?

IAMAI report on MVAS – (Aug2008) - When the subs base was 286 million, 65 million were GPRS enabled, 15-16 million were activated while the actual users are sub-10 million. We hope about 10% use the service in a year.

4) How many gprs users do you expect in 3 years time?

We are expecting the traffic to Naya naya portals combined to move reach 10 million page views per day in next year — a million mobile users with 10 page views per day.

5) Are you going to launch sms alert service for these nayanaya portals as well?

We definitely see a need for sms integration – where the user gets an alert whenever a new update on the topic/phrase of his choice comes in one of the stories at NayaNaya.

6) How do the nayanaya portals complement your existing mytoday business?

We are trying to bring the latest information to mobile users – our MyToday Dailies & NayaNaya offer 2 different mechanisms for the similar kind of information. For those who wish to receive crisp/latest information on SMS – our dailies cater to this audience. While for those who are on the mobile Internet – our NayaNaya verticals offer the latest on a whole set of topics to users who have access to mobile Internet.

Also Check Out:

• Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • View comments • Track comments •

•

Rate 'Interview With Rajesh Jain on NayaNaya.mobi & Its Business Model'

3G Auction Delayed To Jan 15 - Roll Out May Take A Whole Year..

Well we had blogged about the fact that 3G auction could be delayed and delayed it is but not by much its scheduled to be two weeks later than the earlier scheduled date due to requests by operators and bankers. The premise is that most global fund start a new financial year by January and hence would be willing to invest in operators in bidding of the 3G spectrum allocation.

3g india

The timeline according to this Hindu article is as follows:

November 30th: Auction design, bid document to be prepared

December 15th: Inviting operators to bid

December 31th: Pre-qualification of bidders

January 15th: Auction to be completed

January 25th: Signing of contracts with successful bidders

January 31th: Depositing of first tranch of auction money

3G is surely seeing a lot of traction as our visit to the recently held 3G conference showed us that there are a line of telecom content providers who are currently servicing the international markets are eagerly awaiting to launch their services in India.

On talking to one of the 3G content providers at the 3G conference I was told that though the spectrum may be auctioned by December (now Jan) the actual roll out of services would take atleast a year as the operators would take time to build servicing capability.

Also Check Out:

• Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • View comments • Track comments •

•

Rate '3G Auction Delayed To Jan 15 - Roll Out May Take A Whole Year..'

Admob Raises 15.7 Million From Accel Partners - India is 3rd Largest Traffic Source For AdMob

Admob a global mobile advertising player which recently announced the launch of its services in India has raised its 3rd round of funding from Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners (Yes the same guys who acquired Erasmic in India). Admob raised 15.7 million $ which ofcourse which wil be utilized to futher its expansion plans in emerging markets like India.

India currently ranks 3rd in the overall contribution of traffic to the sites that are monetized by Admob. Check the chart below.

More metrics on Admob can be found here

Admob recently presented a case study at the mobile conversations conference done on the AdMob network for Range Rover Sports, Land Rover's mid size sports utility vehicle (SUV).

The numbers derived from that campaign were as follows:

2,70,30,393 impressions
1,54,476 clicks
2,48,000 visitors to the mobile site out of which 1,80,709 visitors were generated from the AdMob network.
45,000 videos viewed
1,28,000 views to photo gallery with close to 23,000 wallpaper downloads.
5,000 requests for dealer details
800 visitors asked for brochures
1,106 calls were made to register for a test drive of the SUV.

The above numbers though very impressive are still US centric numbers. Now that Admob opens and office in India and launches its services in India it will be interesting to see how advertisers and publishers alike take to this service. Also it will be interesting to see how local player MKhoj which is also into mobile advertising takes on competition from Admob. Mkhoj has recieved funding to the tune of 7.1 M $ from Sherpalo Ventures earlier this year.

Also Check Out:

• Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • View comments • Track comments •

•

Rate 'Admob Raises 15.7 Million From Accel Partners - India is 3rd Largest Traffic Source For AdMob'

Zimbra Co-Founder Funds DimDim.com - Possible Zimbra - Dimdim Collaboration?

Satish Dharmaraj the Co-founder and CEO of Zimbra the open source messaging and collaboration services which was sold to yahoo for 350 million $ has invested an undisclosed sum in dimdim.com the open source webex competitor which was earlier funded for 5 M $ by Nexus India Capital in 2007 and then in July 2008 for 6 M $ by Index Ventures, Nexus India Capital, and Draper Richards, from the US, Europe, and Asia.

According to venturebeat Satish Dharmaraj sees synergies between what dimdim has to offer and what zimbra is offering and hence the investment. Zimbra already offers a product that provides email, task management and documents management to corporates by funding dimdim the same could be scaled to offering web conferencing as well.

Also dimdim could easily exit to Yahoo/Zimbra which already boasts of fortune 1000 companies as clients and a estimated revenue between 10-20 million $ last year.

Dimdim on the other hand follows a Free-mium model via three products: Dimdim Free, Dimdim Pro and Dimdim Enterprise. Dimdim Free has two editions, open source community and free hosting.

Dimdim Pro has been priced at $99 a year and is highly scalable, while the Enterprise version starts at $2,000 a year. Though the Free version is free for front-end customers, Dimdim gets a share in the revenue from the service providers. The company is also exploring the possibility of revenue from advertisements in the free version. (source)

We have contacted Dimdim Cofounder on the possible strategies and synergies with this new funding and the road ahead for Dimdim. Shall update this post with his answers so stay tuned.

Also Check Out:

• Email to a friend • Article Search • Related • View comments • Track comments •

•

Rate 'Zimbra Co-Founder Funds DimDim.com - Possible Zimbra - Dimdim Collaboration?'

Mytoday Launches Breaking New Mobile Portal - Nayanaya.mobi

Mytoday which is an sms group site by Netcore has launched a series of mobile portals by the brand name Nayanaya.mobi. These portals are aggregators which aggregate content from various sites and repurpose the same for mobile viewing. The Nayanaya concept is based on the breaking news premise in which the latest news updates via various sites are shown on the mobile.

The verticals that Nayanaya.mobi is covering is news, business, cricket, sports, tech, world and movies.

Some blogs have wrongly reported that MyToday plans to monetize the modified content by other publishers by placing ads on them. Which is clearly not the case. The content of the site is modified for mobile viewing which is stripping images and even the banners and showing text in its place like top banner or frame etc. Essentially the model that Nayanaya is following is no different from what In.com is following i.e. aggregation but for the fact that In.com shows the entire page of the content providers (including ads) in an iframe. Check example of DNA via in.com while Nayanaya is modifying content to be viewable on mobile and hence the banner images are stripped away.

Does that mean that the traffic isn’t reaching the publishers? Or one is using entire content from publishers? Not really.. Each time a user clicks go to article the nayanaya website pings the original content site i.e. traffic and modifies the content to be viewable on mobile. Same is done by In.com as well.

The issue that publishers may have with Nayanaya is the fact that they earn no ad revenue as the ads are stripped in the modification. This is where Nayanaya could form a business model by tying up with publishers to offer text ads to their advertisers on the nayanaya platform.

Hence nayanaya plays a platform role while content publishers get an alternative revenue stream on mobile and nayanaya earns a % of the same. Though it sounds easy it wont be that easy to execute this.

We have contacted Rajesh Jain of Netcore who announced this service via his blog for more clarification on the business model of nayanaya.

Also Check Out: