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Rate 'Funding updates: Qualcomm Ventures Invests $9 Mn in MapMyIndia,Accel India To Invest $2.5 Million In Healthcare Portal'

Should Twitter go the SmsGupShup route?

Would Twitter have survived if it was an Indian company? I seriously doubt it. I mentioned this at a talk which I gave at Startup Saturday too. In India, a business is pretty much considered a failure if it is not making money.

I’m sure the guys at twitter have some really good plans because they’ve been raising a decent amount of money off late. The popular techblogs, TechCrunch and Mashable love talking about twitter. In fact TechCrunch even gave a justification a few days back.

Here is what SmsGupShup.com is doing to monetize their business….

SmsGupShup launched back in May 2007 and WATblog was one of the first to review them. They went on to become pretty huge. They raised around $10 million in funding and is one company which proves to you that ‘Mobile’ is going to be huger than ‘Internet’ in India.

I have the group cricket on SmsGupShup.com and as you might guess, it has quite a few members in it. Last count it had around 28,500 followers. So these guys from SmsGupShup.com call me today and notify me that they are going to spam my group with an ad. It wasn’t a request! They were just letting me know that they are going to be sending an advertising message.

So I ask them, ‘Do I get a share of the profits?’
Which I feel is a pretty valid question. Its my group, I’ve built it. If you are going to monetize it, why don’t you share profits with me? To which the person on the other line says, ‘Of course not. You’ve been using a free service for this long.‘

I get their point. Thats the difference between an Indian co. and maybe a US based co. They need to make money. But I don’t like the approach. I use SmsGupShup.com because its free. They are already authorised to send a 20 character ad with every msg I send! They’ve lost a member today who used to be an evangelist for their product.

What do you feel? Would you continue using a free service like Twitter, which sends advertising messages to all your followers?

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Guruji Dons the Social Avtaar: Launches Social Networking Apps

From being a local search engine to a mobile search player to adding a finance vertical Guruji.com seems to be on a joyride across different digital segments and now it has got on the social bandwagon with apps for Orkut and Facebook. They announced the launch of their social apps on Orkut (MusicG) and Facebook (GurujiMusic) last week.

According to Guruji.com, the apps are designed to showcase Guruji's music search capabilities to end users. The apps claim to bring over 5 lakh songs for users to access and also has some interesting features to talk about. The Facebook application allows users to dedicate music to their friends, while the MusicG lets users tell their friends how they feel via music and also let's them test their own music quotients by taking a fun quiz.

The Facebook app currently has around 59 users and 1 fan. Considering this was a given a push as Valentine’s special from their stable perhaps Guruji could have launched the service a little earlier and given ample time to market it. I am not a big fan of Orkut apps so couldn’t exactly figure out how many people are using it or gauge its trend. However, the app page had a few comments ranging from downright spammy of other users, to some that seemed like a camouflaged PR attempt (seemed like it), interestingly the comments were made a month or so before the official announcement which also sowed doubts on their legitamacy. Was the app launched well before the official announcement?

Guruji has been one of the more active local search players as mentioned above with coming up with widely different digital aspriations. One thing they have chosen to stick to is regionilising content. With the music apps also continuing the regional sentiment they can certainly push the image further. Considering, they considered breaking even as a possibility by 09-10 and expanding otherwise we can expect more such product announcements this year.

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MagicBricks.com Offers Home Insurance While PolicyBazaar.com Looks To Expand: The Insurance Game Online

In one of the more competitive niches online, MagicBricks.com has launched a value add of Home insurance for its users. The service has been launched in association with Optima Insurance Brokers. The policy has been specially designed for Magicbricks.com by Optima Insurance Brokers in association with Oriental Insurance Company Ltd.

According to their release, the policy provides a range from a bare minimum coverage for the home building to covers for all furnishings, domestic appliances, electronic products and jewelry against fire, floods, storms, earthquakes, terrorism and burglary. The complete process of registering, getting a quote, applying and paying for policy is online. The payment is also made here via secure credit card payment gateway.

Being a Times group company certainly helps MagicBricks in the fact that they can advertise and promote this as an USP with Times’ mainstream media power till the time otehrs catch up. And in an era where advertisers are looking for value addition to the mere visits of site users, this can be a major bait. MagicBricks used to charge their advertisers heavily for virtual tours, now with a product being retailed online (well service product) they can present a case of spending customers to either seek a premium or rope in newer advertisers on board.

PolicyBazaar Looks at Expanding Presence

In another bit of news in the online insurance retailing segment, policybazaar.com is said to be looking at expanding its offline presence nationwide. Policybazaar.com is an online non-life and life insurance aggregator by eTechAce. It plans to invest Rs 18 crore in expanding its offline presence besides taking up marketing initiatives across the country over the next one and a half years.

Infoedge had invested around 20 crores into PolicyBazaar last year, and it seems the company is planning to use the entire remaining amount of the investment into this expansion. In an interview immediately following the investment Infoedge had mentioned that the success of initiative similar to Policybazaar is what attracted them to be stakeholders.

” but the success of businesses like moneysupermarket.com and confused.com in the UK points in the direction of size being attractive.”

It would be interesting to see if these companies had followed a similar expansion policy or if PolicyBazaar is opting for an innovative India centric approach with this move. According to Yashish Dahiya, Co-Founder PloicyBazaar.com the company expects about 1,000 leads a day on the portal from March 2009. Policybazaar has tied up with insurance majors like Reliance Life, Tata AIG, Bajaj Allianz, Birla Sun Life and Mahindra Old Mutual Life. It had also got LIC the biggest insurance player in India into its fold recently.

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Social Media In Politics: Congress To Take On BJP’s Online Strategy

As most people know BJP was going pretty aggressive with its online campaign for the upcoming elections and also positioning its Prime Minister Candidate Mr.L.K Advani as the next Prime minister through blog, twitter and online ads across the online world. BJP has been so aggressive with its online marketing that its ads are even running on what one would call objectionable sites.

Looking at this it seems Congress which is the ruling party has woken up to the strategy followed by BJP and is looking to ramp up its own social media marketing inorder to take on BJP.

As this Indiatoday article reports Congress is working on launching a special website and also plans to use social networking sites such as Orkut, Facebook and YouTube for campaigning. Like BJP it also plans to advertise via search engines like google. It seems the election season and the bitter battle between the ruling and opposing party and their use of online media could increase the online spend numbers substantially for 2009.

All in all it remains to be seen how congress positions its online campaigns as BJP seems to be clearly playing the advani card when it comes to garnering support. It will be interesting to see if Congress uses Sonia Gandhi or Rahul Gandhi in its online ads to garner support from the online audiences. Whatever may be the result of the upcoming elections one can be rest assured that 2009 can be termed as the year when Politics & politicians became online savvy and I believe this trend will rival the online savviness of US elections in the years to come in India.

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Tie Up Updates: NDTV - Quikr / Bharatmatrimony - Itz

There are atleast 2-3 tie up announcements each week these days. A sign that companies are focusing on core competencies and partnering wherever they can. This week we look at two such tie ups.

NDTV ties up with Quikr for NDTVClassifieds.com

NDTV Convergence and Quikr.com, backed by Matrix Partners India and invested in by eBay Inc., have partnered to launch NDTVClassifieds.com.

Besides for such tie ups NDTV has been launching their own properties and till now has sites like Nogyan and Tubaah.com. But since 2 years now NDTV has been following a tie up strategy where it has been creating verticals through tie ups with players like Careerbuilder (NDTVJobs), Ixigo (NDTVTravel) and NDTVAnswers (Ammas.com ) Now defunct. This strategy hasn’t served them well as Yellojobs had left the jobs vertical to start operations on their own. Also such verticals add little or no value to ndtv.com as a property as these are separate domain names and not part of the ndtv.com bouquet. Given the times we are in and advertisers across the board consolidating advertising budgets it may make sense for NDTV convergence to launch these as sections rather than separate sites altogether.

Bharatmatrimony ties up with Itz Card

ItzCash Card a Multi Purpose Prepaid Cash Card has added yet another online player to its customers with its alliance with the matrimony portal – BharatMatrimony.com. This alliance will enable new registration and renewal available to the customers through ItzCash Card.

Alternative payments seems to be catching on and Itz card is on a tie up spree with online players as this is their second announcement in just a week. They earlier tied up with Cleartrip for travel bookings.

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