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There are 4 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India" Happy Birthday Facebook, But Where's the Beef?Facebook turned 5 years old a couple of days ago and the hottest topic that everyone's been discussing is how are they going to make money. With funding of over 500 million USD which includes Internet giant Microsoft and nearly 70 billion page views per month, Facebook does have the numbers to keep more and more people interested to put their money in it, but where are the numbers when it comes to the revenues? The last we heard from Facebook regarding the money they're making ( which is generally very secretive), was when Mark Zuckerberg announced last year that their 2007 revenues was 150 Million USD and that they were expecting 350 Million USD by the end of 2008 as their projected revenue. The question everyone is asking is what will Facebook's core source of revenue be? Fred Wilson over at A VC has a brilliant summary of various business models that an online venture can employ. Now that you've checked that out. What's it going to be for Facebook? True, Google, the biggest success story of our times took nearly 3-4 years before they discovered Adwords and they too had developed a huge community of loyal Googlers before they started making some real money. But now after half a decade, people all over are starting to wonder where does Facebook go from here? It has to take care of their thriving developer community too who as of now aren't really being paid by Facebook yet are growing everyday. They need to be sure that Facebook is going to be around for a long time with a real business model. What I mean to say is that the really popular application makers do make money from third party networks, but what about the lesser popular app developers. They need an incentive too right? True, Facebook has the advantage, being one of the most popular website on the internet, but it has to find a way to capitalize on it. Most Commented Posts Also Check Out: Tieups Update: Moviemart - HDFC and Indiatimes - Flora2000Moviemart has tied up with HDFC bank to provide benefits of upto 50% discount to the bank's credit card users. The discounts would range as follows: 10%off on monthly, 20% on quarterly, 30% on half yearly and 50% discount on yearly subscriptions. Updates on Moviemart: They recently tied up with leading logistics company TNT to improve their logistics strength. They were recently nominated as one of the hottest startups by TATA NEN Due to their impeccable service records and looking at the fact they started the online DVD rental revolution in India as they were the first company to enter into the market. Our take: This comes on the heels of similar or more discounts from Bigflix to ICICI bank credit/debit card holders which suggest that these companies are finding it hard to make many subscribers at their current prices and thus taking the route of tie to improve their subscriber base. This again hints at a possibility of serious price cuts across the chain of online DVD rental companies because doling discounts to only few would definitely discourage other users. Indiatimes Shopping partners Flora 2000 :It seems upcoming valentine day provided an opportunity for Indiatimes shopping to hitch a tie-up with flora2000, a leading flower services provider across the globe in as many as 150 countries. This deal would help Indiatimes Shopping to expand its product base in the flower category and would even allow them to provide delivery of international destination within 24 hours. A few thing about flora2000 and indiatimes shopping: Flora 2000 has been a key player in the flower industry for the past 10 years, and has a strong network of over 3,000 vendors and florists in over 150 countries where it deliver flowers. Indiatimes shopping offers the widest range of fresh flower arrangements at the most competitive prices in the online shopping space. The services includes order of flowers online by customers and payment options ranges from a wide array of payment options, like net-banking, credit cards, flying miles, pre-paid cards and mobile banking. The flowers are delivered on the desired date. The customer also has the option to personalize by including a message for the recipient. Our take: More tie-ups could soon follow because Indian e-commerce portals find it difficult to grow on their own and the turbulent economic growth is just adding salt to their wounds. Related PostsAlso Check Out: MTNL rolls out 3G Commercially In New Delhi, IndiaYesterday we reported MTNL introducing voice email service for both of it’s wireless and landline subscribers, now MTNL has become the first telecom operator in the country to commercially launch third generation mobile services. The state owned company has invested Rs 4Bn to rollout 3G and are hoping to have 200,000 subscribers within a time span of two years. Though the private operators have hit a bummer with the governement delaying the auction for spectrum, MTNL has been allotted the spectrum on the condition that it will pay the fee quoted by the highest bidder when the auction takes place. Though the MTNL customers are finnaly getting to use their 3G handsets,the service is very expensive. A 3G user has to pay a one-time fee of Rs 500 as activation charges and a monthly rental of Rs 599. In addition, customers will have to pay for the calls they make and also for data downloads. For making calls to another operator's network, MTNL users will have to pay Re 1 a minute. For calls within MTNL's own network charges will be levied at 60 paise a minute. For applications such as Live TV and movie downloads Subscribers will have to pay Rs 5 for each MB download. For video calls, MTNL charges vary between Rs 3 and Rs 1.80 a minute. The MTNL customer can make an internation call using VOIP for as low as Rs 3/minute to more than 100 countries including Europe,US and Canada. The service is currently available in the New Delhi Municipal Corporation area in Delhi. However, the company is investing Rs 500 crore to roll out a network across Delhi and Mumbai with an aim to get 2 lakh subscribers over the next 2 years. Because the initial rollout of 3G in India is voice centric, we can specifically see improved quality of voice calls, more and more people using VOIP services, especially we can see people increasingly use the services like SKYPE, which let users talk freely with good voice clarity. Related PostsAlso Check Out: NDTV Launches A Youtube Like Platform - Calls It Tubaah.comNDTV Convergence has launched a video aggregation site called Tubaah.com which in look and feel looks like a complete Youtube clone with features like users creating their own tube (i.e. channel on youtube), ratings for video by users and embedding and sharing options. In short a full fledged video sharing site. But just to make sure they don’t run before they can start to walk with the new age user generated content Web NDTV has restricted uploads. So no user can upload any video to this platform though he can tube (favourite) his video and create his own personal collection of favourites. This launch marks NDTV entry into product creation of sorts. As earlier they taken the partner route to launching verticals be it NDTVAnswers (which not defunct), NDTVTravel or NDTVJobs is now getting serious about creating its own platforms where users can engage with their own properties rather than benefit partners for revenue share and see them walk away with the database after the alliance is terminated. Case in point being NDTVJobs and Yellojobs partnership. They also ventured into non news content when they launched NoGyan a weird/whacky news portal. The Tubaah platform currently has 50,000 short-duration video clips, sourced from six NDTV channels, including NDTV 24X7, NDTV India, Metro Nation and NDTV Good Times.
Afaqs also reports that NDTV Convergence will launch the mobile version of Tubaah in 3-4 months time. All in all this does look like NDTV’s biggest foray into mainstream product internet beyond their existing news verticals. The success of this platform alongwith NoGyan would pretty much define NDTV Convergence’s fortunes in the Internet space. Related PostsAlso Check Out: More Recent Articles
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