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Monday, March 16, 2009

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"

BJP Promises Internet/Tech Enabled Future To Garner Voters Support

Well the Lok Sabha Polls are nearing and the time for politician promises and rally for support have started. One interesting move by BJP which is probably running the most web/social media oriented campaign has been the announcement of promises regarding tech enabling the future of India. It has released an IT vision document in which it has stated what it believes can be achieved if BJP comes to power.

Here is what BJP is promising to do if it comes to power:

  • Multipurpose National Identity Card with unique Citizen Identification Number for every Indian citizen in 3 years
  • 10 million students to get laptop computers at Rs 10,000
  • All schools and colleges to have Internet-enabled education
  • Digital Security Agency to be set up for cyber counter-terrorism

The party has also claimed that it would undertake a National Digital Highway Development Project to create India's Internet backbone, and the Pradhan Mantri Digital Gram Sadak Yojana for last-mile access even in the remotest of villages.

The tallest claim of them all is the following:

BJP is forecasting that in 5 years that it will be in power it would increase the number of mobile subscribers from current 40crore to 100 crore (i.e. from 400 million to 1 billion). What it also stated is that the number of internet users would be equal i.e. in 5 years internet users would increase from current 4-5 crore to 100 crores!! i.e. from 40-50 million currently to 1 billion!

Our take on the claims

How much ever we hope and pray that these promises are met its difficult to fathom how the same would be achieved. It seems nearly impossible to believe that in 5 years BJP can grow the internet users from 40 million to a billion. I mean they plan to wifi the entire country is it? :)

I would suggest we all take these claims with a pinch of salt as its pre election time and promises are the need for the hour. That said even if half of what is claimed in the IT Vision document is achieved that would be great for the ICT industry in India.

One can download the entire document here

Whats your take on the BJP document?

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WWW: WAT Weekly WrapUp 9th - 15th March

Last weeks highlight was two announcements one on komli launch of the media planning tool and the other on Times audience network tying up with Bigadda. Have a look at last weeks action.

Posts via WATBlog.com

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Gaming on WATGame.com

Jobs via WATJob.com

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Bharti Airtel Spreads its Wings - Diversifies Into 9 Arms

In a bid to expand and scale beyond its voice telephony business, Bharti Airtel will restructure its businesses into nine verticals under different CEOs. Some of these new verticals are mobile commerce, entertainment, media, internet, enterprise services and small & medium businesses. Clearly Airtel is placing its bets completely on digtial media and not venturing out with its $22 billion power to any traditional business.

According to the ET report the reorganisation is to provide opportunities to its existing leadership pool of mid-level managers and to ensure these executives are not lured by rivals, said a person familiar with the development, requesting anonymity.  On the other hand one can even consider it strategic growth initiative after having consolidated its position as India’s leading mobile service provider.

The move certainly isn’t path breaking, however it does setup the company nicely for innovation. After years of low margin moves probably Airtel is considering to consolidate and improve its margin efficiency.  And even though the news is essentially internal, it can have its broadbased industry impact at a later stage. The leadership strucuture is changed to bring in innovation in the scope verticals. This would mean a lot of other people will get interested in these niches while at the same time the quality brought in purely by the financial might of a player like Airtel into say a field like M-commerce can kill a lot of nascent players in the segment. They can also set themselves up for acquisition perhaps paving way for an exit for a lot of mobile startups.

After the rejig, mobility will have three new business verticals after the reorganisation, telemedia will have two and enterprise four. Besides the DTH division of Airtel will get spun off.

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WWE.com Ties up With Sify - India Specific Branded WWE Page on Sify.com

Sify to my mind has pulled of a winner by tying up with wwe.com to be it’s Indian content partner. Though I haven’t found any news release regarding this yet, if one tries to access wwe.com from India, instead of the usual wwe home page we see an option to check out wwe.in or go directly to wwe.com. The wwe.in url redirects to wwe.sify.com which has both sify as well as wwe branding with what seems to be custom content tailored for the Indian audience.

Earlier when Rajiv blogged about wwe launching its own social network - fans.wwe.com, he had discussed the fact 10% of the traffic to wwe’s website came from India. That is a pretty big regional number, and considering it is an Alexa data chances are that the number could still be higher. Now it is hard to say if this tie up was initiated by sify or if it is a call taken by WWE to raise its online revenues by such local tie ups. I haven’t come across any piece of news that suggest that there are other such tie ups with local providers in other countries yet, if there are then we can safely presume it a strategic initiative by WWE to fight the recession which might have affected their revenues as well.

Sify has been trying to innovate its consumer business end since the beginning of the previous quarter. First it tried to gain a grip on its fast depleting email users by completely integrating Google mail and apps into its system. Then it announced its efforts to increase the user pie by bringing in courses which teach you how to browse the web and introducing single PC Internet Kiosks.

Branded pages seems to be the trend these days in online advertising. In.com certainly uses its extremely short URL to a good advantage to tie up with bollywood and television programs by giving them branded pages ala movie.in.com. It certainly moves with direction that pure banners which are essentially ripped off tv commercials don’t work on the web. The advantage of the web is interactivity and advertising is getting interactive online in this garb. For Sify this would be the best bet to target a generation of crowd that it has lost to Orkut and Facebook in India, and would surely improve its traffic numbers. The question though is can it hold on to these people long enough both in terms of accessing other site pages as well as coming back to wwe.in rather than wwe.com.

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