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Saturday, January 17, 2009

WATBlog Update "Saturday Startup Review II - Yoplr.com" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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"Saturday Startup Review II - Yoplr.com" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Saturday Startup Review II - Yoplr.com

The second saturday startup we are reviewing is in the travel planning space. We look at a startup  called Yoplr.com. Yoplr is a personalised travel planner and its currently in the beta stage. This startup is started by the same guy Deepankar Biswas who was behind Chittr a microblogging tool that shutdown. We had reviewed chittr here.

yoplr

One sentence description: An online platform for holiday planning

About Startup: Yoplr is a travel planner for holidays which aims at siplifying your search for a holiday destination and ways to get there. Yoplr provides search for various holiday themes and gives the option for the user to demarcate how far off from the city would he/she like to tavel. The revenue model for Yoplr  is that via lead generate and revenue share with travel services providers.

About Founders: This startup is founded by 3 co-founders in Deepankar, Raja and Santosh. The company behind Yoplr is Astuon.

Funding Status: : Looks self funded.

WAT's HOT: The execution is A - class as the use of Google maps and the number of holiday destinations in and around bangalore itself is very indepth. Also the way the content is represented is also fantastic with great detail to UI and options to save, email and print one’s itinerary. This tool could be very useful for foreigners travelling to India for a tour as it covers many places that even locals might not know of. So all in all full marks to the team for making a decently comprehensive product even at the closed beta stage.

WAT's NOT: There is not much wrong with the product though one may question the need for such product in standalone mode rather than being a part of an OTA site as the use case  for standalone seems to be a tough one as well as the mode and possibility of monetization.  Firstly not many families/individuals in India go for holidays that frequently. Even when they do its usually home town or religious places. So this kind of limits the novelty of this product as well as usage to foreigners looking to discover India. Also with regards to monetization being a part of an existing OTA would have really helped.

All in all it seems this has come ahead of its time which just means the gestation period for Yoplr to gain traction and sticky users would be that much more longer. Hope they manage to stick around till that time.

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Friday, January 16, 2009

WATBlog Update "Saturday Startup Review I - Fachak.com" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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"Saturday Startup Review I - Fachak.com" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Saturday Startup Review I - Fachak.com

This saturday we bring to you a startup which is still in alpha stage and is by invite only.  This is Morpheus Venture Partners portfolio company and started by Sarabdeep. The startup is name Fachak.com and was first described on WATBlog here.

fachak

One sentence description: A platform for sharing non hosted docs, ppts, videos and pictures (currently compatible with youtube, flickr and slideshare and also has its own upload function).

About Startup: According to the founders Fachak is somewhat like Meebo of content sharing platforms that assimilates Youtubes, Slideshares & Flickrs in one single web-service. It’s not a pure aggregator, neither is it a pure bookmarker, rather it’s an independent ‘multi-format’ & ‘multi-source’ content sharing platform.

Fachak is -

·         An independent platform that creates a new layer on top of existing rich-content sharing services.

·         Format neutral; so a user can share & view a presentation, a video, an image & a document with equal ease.

·         A one stop front-end solution, where a user can upload various rich format files from his computer within a single interface, besides sharing existing content on internet.

·         A novel & awesome way to tie up content on the same topic present in different formats all over the internet.

About Founders: The founder Sarabdeep is an engineer turned car sales man turned banker turned  internet entrepreneur. Also this started is backed by Morpheus Venture Partners.

Funding Status: : Very much self funded.

WAT's HOT: I think the concept a good one! Fachak essentially allows users to aggregate their favouite content in terms of videos, ppts, docs and pictures at one location. One could also do this around a certain theme for eg = social media videos, ppts and pictures or obama videos, ppts and pictures. This may be probably the hottest feature.

WAT's NOT: On the business model and on the usage front. I think Fachak may be a weak contender. Fachak as the about the startup states creates ‘another’ layer of usage over an existing layer. So if  I want videos I can go to youtube and upload them or favourite them and same with slideshare. Also similar functions are available to me via facebook apps on my facebook profile so the value add by fachak’s service isn’t making me die to signup with them.

Another missing feature (though this service is still in alpha) is the fact that I input my youtube id and it pulls all my uploaded videos. Ditto for slideshare and flickr. Now that would be a great feature and then I can sort, tag and segregate them in separate groups with unique urls to share with whoever I want to. Then one can keep adding sites like vimeo, slide etc and even add feeds option for sharing ones blog posts on fachak.

On the revenue end I have no clue how this will make money. Even facebook finds it difficult so fachak may have huge issues. maybe branded content sharing pages i.e. microsofts videos, ppts and pictures of an event or product etc could work.

I hope Ive not been too critical on fachak though for an alpha stage its a nice execution of a platform. But in the long run just a good product doesn’t work its traction, use case, revenue model that needs to be thought through and worked upon from day  1. The greatest challenge would be for them to create a fachak community and increasing the wow factor and value factor of their platform. The current value factor is low.

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Thursday, January 15, 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"

We are at IAMAI Mobile Ad Conference Today & BlogCamp tomorrow

We are attending the IAMAI Mobile ad conference today and Blogcamp Mumbai tomorrow. We shall be bringing you live updates from both these events via twitter and we shall also try and live blog if our data connection and laptop battery supports us.

Do check the speakers and agenda for IAMAI Conference and shoot us questions that you may want to ask via twitter or you can also comment on this post.

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Twitter Launches Suggestions Feature

While you were sleeping last night, twitter quietly decided to unveil it’s latest feature, Twitter Suggestions. Twitter suggestions which can be found in the Find People sections suggests users whom you might want to follow. The algorithm it uses hasn’t been disclosed yet. Personally, I recommend Mr Tweet [ @MrTweet]. It takes time but at least it's worth the wait for the suggestions are decent enough. I say this because when I started using twitter suggestions, the suggestions it gave me weren’t to my liking (unlike Mr Tweet, which I found quite useful). And guess what, I wasn’t the only one.

Within minutes, there were Re-tweets all over twitter about this feature. Check screenshot below:

twitter_suggestion

Twitter has always been known to be application resistant, despite hundreds of twitter apps coming out each day from developers. So one would assume that when twitter finally comes out with newer features, they would be something spectacular or at the least make user experience much better. Personally, at first glance I am not very impressed by this. @Biz, are you listening?

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Smile Interactive Initiates Incubation Centre For Digital Startups

SITG the company behind digital agency Quasar and startups like Tyroo and Zoomtra has initiated an incubation centre in Gurgaon. Smile always has been in the business of incubation and this move just takes that strategy further ahead. Both tyroo and zoomtra have been outcomes of incubation at the SITG office and it has worked for them as well with Yahoo buying equity in Tyroo.

sitg

This incubation centre at Gurgaon is fully facilitated  and has in-house managed services like Finance, Legal, HR and IT. Consultation available from the top senior and respected digital industry professionals in India. Its obvious that Smile Interactive which has these facilities inhouse wants to leverage them to incubate newer ideas.

Though the world over such models have hardly worked (besides exceptions like Ycombinator which is still invests cash) I feel in India this may recieve some success. The reasons are multifold starting from setup problems, to low risk taking capability of experience middle managers looking towards entrepreneurship to the reach that SITG has built in the digital space with successes like Quasar and ofcourse the Yahoo investment in Tyroo ratifying their incubation model.

We had done a WATShow with Manish Vij of Smile Interactive earlier last year and had questioned him about their incubation model. Check out the WATShow here.

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Funding Updates: ApnaPaisa.com Raises Second Round Funding From JAFCO & Sequoia Cap

Apnapaisa.com which was not too long ago known as Apnaloan.com has raised a second round of funding from JAFCO and Sequoia Capital. Sequoia had invested $2.2 million in Apnaloan in early 2007. Though the amount of funding for the current round has not been disclosed but Apnaloan was in the news earlier for looking to raise around 15 million $.

apnapaisa-jafco-sequoia

In the loan segment Apnapaisa is probably the largest player in terms of funding as it competes with other players like LoanRaja.com, Deal4Loans.com and LoanWala.com all of whom dont have sizeable funding backing them.

Apnaloan had also tied up aggressively with various partners as well as diversified in insurance segment with Apnainsurance.com. In the insurance space it takes on Infoedge backed Policybazaar.com.

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WATBlog Update There are 3 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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Event Update: Emprise 09 & 3G and BWA: The Next Frontier

Two more events are happening this coming week. One in mumbai and one in New delhi. Check them out below:

3G and Broadband Wireless Access: The Next Frontier - 19th January - New Delhi - BDA and FICCI will launch the joint report "3G and BWA: The Next Frontier" followed by an interactive panel discussion organized by FICCI on "Demystifying 3G and BWA: Future Strategies & Projections" – BDA is the knowledge partner for the event.
The panel discussion will provide a platform to a very senior gathering of stakeholders in the Telecom sector, including senior government officials, policy makers, and chief executives of the leading operators and vendors to reflect upon the findings of the report and envision the future of 3G and BWA along with the imperatives required for enhancing their penetration.

The panelists include:

* Shri. J.S. Deepak, Joint Secretary (T), Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India
* Shri. Kuldeep Goyal, CMD, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited
* Mr. Sunil Dutt, Country Head Mobile Business, Samsung India Electronics Pvt. Ltd.
* Mr. Michael Kuehner, Country Head, Nokia Siemens Networks Pvt. Ltd.
* Mr. Neeraj Roy, MD & CEO, Hungama Mobile

* Mr. Kunal Bajaj, Managing Director, BDA Connect (India)

Emprise09 - 24th January - Mumbai - Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIS) is holding an entrepreneurship conclave on January 24th, 2009 in their institute itself. The conclave will have workshops on topics which would benefit budding entrepreneurs and students to understand various aspects of a new entrepreneurial venture.

The confirmed speakers till now for the event are Mr Harish Mehta, Trustee, NASSCOM and Mr Sasha Mirchandani, Director, Blue Run Ventures. It will be a whole day long event starting at 10 am. The sessions before lunch are workshops on start up essentials, funding and new media marketing. The workshops after lunch is going to touch upon; how to build a great team, how to consolidate your venture and how to manage your business in trouble times.

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Rural India Has 3.3 Million ‘Active’ Users - Can Vernacular Content Drive This Number Higher?

IAMAI And IMRB have come up with a release on the number of active rural internet users. The number as of March 08 is pegged at 3.3 million active internet users in rural India. The total number of Internet users that have accessed the internet atleast once is pegged at about 5.5 million.

According to the survey the overall Rural Literate Population around 368 Million while the Rural English-Speaking Population is pegged at just 1/6th at 63 Million. Which means that 5/6th of the literate population speaks their own regional language. Also the report pegs the number of computer Rural Computer Literates at 15.1 million.

As the above statistics illustrate there is a definite possibility that that next 50 million Internet users in India would consist of a large chunk of regional language content consumers. Most definitely this report does make a clear case for content and applications in local languages in order to ensure higher and faster adoption of internet in rural India. So it ain’t surprising then that Rediff is going regional in 22 languages and not too long ago they also acquired mobile firm into regional content.

The question still remains though as to whether Vernacular content can drive the number of internet users?

Well the problem I feel is one of access, usability and value and not just about content. I feel regional content of mobile would be much more successful than on the web. The prime reasons are cost of device and frequency of consumption as well as the low tech knowledge as compared to a computer. I could be terribly wrong on this one as well. Would love to know your thoughts on whether vernacular content can drive usage of internet or it has to be the other way round? First the demand and then the supply? Or can over supply create demand?

The above statistics are from the recent Vernacular content report that we blogged as well. The report coverage and entire report can be downloaded here.

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DoT To Raise 3G & Wimax Auction Base Price by 70%

We blogged recently on how the 3G auction was relentlessly getting delayed due to the conflict on the reserve price between the DoT and Finance Ministry. Now in a bid to get the auction process for 3G up and running DoT has proposed an increase in the reserve price. But this increase isnt upto the Finance Ministries  Rs 4,040 crore figure but its a few hundred crores lesser than than upto 3540 crores which is still about 70% increase over the earlier figure of Rs 2,020 crore.

While the Finance ministry had suggested that the price across telecom circles be doubled DoT has come to this 3000 odd crore figure by doubling the reserve price for metro regions from Rs 160 crore to Rs 320 crore and category A circles, including Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka. While for category B regions, DoT has proposed to increase the fee by one and a half times. While the price in the category C circles such as Assam, Bihar and North East has been retained at 40 crores

One may wonder why is the Finance Ministry so interested? Well Its money that makes the world go round ain’t it? The finance ministry wants to make atleast Rs 30,000 crore from auctioning both 3G and broadband wireless access spectrum even if it means that the players would keep the bid price low

Even the  base price for broadband wireless access spectrum for WiMax is proposed to be increased from Rs 1,020 crore to Rs 1,725 crore while Finance Ministry had suggested this to be increased to Rs 2,020 crore.

Though the price has increased there isnt any increase in the number of slots to be auctioned. A total of 5 operators including one slot reserved for BSNL or MTNL would be the maximum number.

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