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Saturday, March 28, 2009

WATBlog Update There are 2 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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There are 2 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

BSNL and Hungama Tie Up to Launch on Demand Digital Entertainment Store

BSNL has introduced a entertainment broadband value added service with Hungama who have conceptualized and created by Hungama Digital Media. This digital store basically offers music, videos and games and claims to have a catalogue of over 50,000 songs and 1000 videos. Also, BSNL customers can also access over 500 plus games and redeem loads of prizes by subscribing to the digital store. The site is hosted at bsnl.hungama.com

Hungama will also manage and update the digital store with the through content partners including T-series, Yash Raj Films, etc. These unique and superior quality services will be available in a rental subscription model offered Unlimited Music Downloads for Rs. 149 per month and Unlimited Game plays for Rs. 49 per month only. I really like this price to be honest.

Neeraj Roy, Managing Director & CEO, Hungama Digital Media said, "We are very excited about our partnership with India's number one broadband service provider BSNL, to launch the country's first On Demand Entertainment store.  With this digital store, all BSNL customers will have exclusive access to download their favourite songs and music videos digitally, as well as download and play games.  These unique services on the digital store are available at extremely competitive price points of Unlimited Music Downloads for Rs. 149 per month and Unlimited Game Downloads for Rs. 49 per month. The price points demonstrate the value and convenience that we are bringing to the BSNL customer, coupled with the interactive features that will provide an enriched experience to the user."

The release claims this site to be the first digital products store in India and from what we read it seems they are betting big on music to drive sales and business. It’s been quite a while since digital music was set to score over physical music sales, especially with mobile creeping in to the picture. Considering that, such a site has come a little late in my opinion.

What is interesting to see is the model they have chosen. Unlike itunes which charges per download, BSNL and Hungama have bet on monthly subscriptions which is actually a more scalable option in India, though not as cheap as the itunes model would have been for Indian customers. For Hungama in particular tying up with BSNL is a good strategy and as is obvious is a seemingly perfect VAS for broadband customers. The point that will undoubtedly remain is whether this can curb or will it encourage piracy of music and games and the content sold on the site.

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The Changing Trends in Online Advertising

If you are a netizen, then it is assumed that Online Advertising has played a major role in all the activities that you have performed on the web. One shouldn’t be a scientist or a researcher to understand that there has been changes in the form online advertising has taken place over the last couple of decades.

The 1990’s

The 1990’s saw Online Advertising primarily focused on email marketing, classifieds and banner ads. Come the new millennium, there happened a change with contextual advertising in the form of text ads taking the numero uno position.

2005 and beyond

Soon after 2005, Online advertising practically exploded with displays (static, rich media and pop-ups), rich content multimedia and search engines. This latest trend has gathered the maximum revenue and has grown in leaps and bounds.

What will drive the future?

Going into the technical specifications, Online advertising is done by keeping two factors in consideration - users’ demographic information and online behaviour. This is studied by understanding the the user’s gender, age, location, income bracket, browsing history etc. With the changing trends, the online preferences of users’ go through varying degrees of change. As media buyers, the study of the following areas which are doing pretty good nowadays will help strategize for the future -

1. Mobile Technology - The drastic decrease in rates of 3G phones have made them affordable for the common man. With figures indicating increase in data services from mobile phones, there lies a scope of building up a partnership between media buyers and mobile content providers. The future holds good here because presently a few companies have successfully followed this in recent times with the introduction of mobile coupons, product campaigns, click to call services etc.

2. Virtual Communities - The plethora of social networking communities have started acting as a paradise for online advertisers because these communities bridge the distances between old friends, bring together people with same interests etc. People keep on coming back to these sites and therein the advertiser extends the scope of its services and generates revenue.

3. Spreading the word - This is purely intentional in nature and is deliberately done to increase the target audience. This is also termed as Viral Marketing and occurs through word of mouth which results in a buzz being created about the ad. The first step in advertising i.e. attracting your audience takes place through this and then after the chances of a sale increase significantly.

4. Ad Customization - The biggies in this space will soon implement this personalization of ad concept to specific users. Extensive data analytics can reveal the details about a prospective user and thus the advertiser can customize its ad services keeping in mind the user’s needs, wants and desires.

In early 2008, Julie Ruvolo wrote, “Some of the trends in Online Advertising that people talked about were (a) Content versus community ad-targeting emerging as a major debate (b). The gap widening between the proportion of people online, and the proportion of ad dollars spent online“. These concerns are very genuine and our national advertisers should be able to address this issue beforehand so that it does not become a problem for the parties involed.

For sure, Online Advertising is here to say and can only grow big. It is also expected to change its way to reach the masses as it has done thrice over the last two decades.

Ever wondered - Which is the biggest catalyst in Online Advertising ?

It is the ‘money’ that people have and generate from Online Advertising. The APIs will probably be the biggest drivers in the emergence of a new advertising and pricing model in the near future. Let’s wait and watch ‘the change’.

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Thursday, March 26, 2009

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

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

Confickr.C - Is a Virus Threat Looming This April Fool’s Day?

Graham Cluley, of the security specialist Sophos, has claimed that Conficker C is programmed “to hunt for new instructions on April 1″.  There has been tremendous online buzz about Conficker C, a malicious virus for quite some time now. Will it Wont’t it and if it will what will it do are the many questions doing rounds.

Conficker C is a sophisticated piece of malicious computer software, or malware, that installs itself on a PC hard drive via specially written web pages and then conceals itself on a computer.  According to PCMag, “avoiding detection is a major theme with Conficker.C. It’s not the first malware to try to defend itself in-memory against security software and diagnostic tools, but C does a lot of this. For instance, it disables Windows Automatic Updates and the Windows Security Center.”

Conficker.C is not the first of its kind though. There have been earlier versions A and B (and even a B++ if I am not wrong).  Conficker first caught attention in 2008 infected over 9 million computers. According to Yahoo, Conficker C, the worm has grown incredibly complicated, powerful, and virulent… though no one is quite sure exactly what it will do when D-Day arrives. And that’s the catch. Everyone knows that the malware is going to be deployed, but what will it do and how will it harm just presents clueless faces.

The ET report suggests that on April 1 all the world’s millions of infected computers may receive simultaneous instructions to attack, or to flood the Internet with spam email. Cluley explains the situation as, “It’s as if someone is assembling an army of computers around the world, but hasn’t yet decided where to point them.”

Alright, so another exciting April 1 in the making. I figure the funny part would be that a lot of unwitting users might get their computers infected and not even know that their system has been infected. It will also put a lot of harmless online pranks under the microscope perhaps.

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Recession Blues Spurring Online Ventures - AskSaurabh - a New Job Portal

AskSaurabh, a portal set up by Pune-based Mr Saurabh, talk about inspiration for a name. Saurabh recently lost his job in Yahoo, has started this portal along with his friends Mr Anthony, Mr Iqbal Gandham and others. It is a job portal where users can post CV and jobs in a wide range of areas such as design, engineering finance, general, HR, quality assurance, testing and software development, among others.

Businessline quoted one of the founders Iqbal saying, "Our philosophy is simple, if we can help one person get back into a job, our Web site would have done its job.” Apparently Asksaurabh doesn’t allow recruitment agencies to post, while at the same time there is no charge for posting. According the report, 60 companies posted their requirements in the last 20 days while over 500 job seekers signed up for posting their CVs and finding prospective employers.

To me this seems a venture just to showcase the skills of the people involved with this project. At the footer of the site, they have prominently displayed a hire us link, which leads to a web development firm’s site. In that way more than AskSauarabh it seems a promotion for Sapna solutions, with Ask Saurabh acting as a case study in my opinion. In that case it puts serious doubts on Ask Saurabh as a project. How long will it run? What is its business model? Will it end if Saurabh gets a job?

Now the about page of the site clearly suggests it as a fun, non profit initiative. While that point is taken one wonders how long can such a project last really, which to a certain extent mind run on the minds of the users.

Such questions apart, the site itself is quite a neat piece of work and has a very different look to conventional cluttered job sites that most Indians are used to seeing. The fact that they don’t seem to rake in any advertising revenues either means the site is …well free of ads (how obvious was that). Most of the jobs seem to focus on tech and web related from the postings we see on the home page as well as through features like the tag cloud. Personally I feel they could have come up with a better tagline, though the group of European friends using the Indian flag’s color scheme certainly adds the desi dose to the whole project.

Check out the website if you have recently been laid off or if you are looking for people to hire, you might find them cheap here.

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Guruji Sees Surge In Search Traffic - Will It Really Help Ad Revenue?

It was not so long ago when Guruji was termed as the next big thing on the Indian  web scenario but what really happen is not less than a debacle.
Its USP of providing Indian based search results could never prove much useful to an average internet user.
This made them to introduce different services like music and directory search to improve their traffic despite it receiving flak from the blogging world.

Impact of music search engine?

The introduction of music services  by Guruji really seemed to have helped them to inch forward with their traffic stats as this has catapulted them into top 5 search engines in India.

According to them they are currently  receiving about one million searches a day.

There traffic shows an uptick after july - i.e. the launch of music search services.


Music services - the way forward?

Currently guruji provides music services by pulling feeds from other music sites like MusicMaza.com, MusicIndiaOnline, Dhingana and provides an interface to search them at one place.

There music services could attract a bunch of lawsuits in future because they also allow downloading of music content from wreck sites which in turn violates many laws. They are currently looking for associations with other legal music providers to launch their own inline music search service.

Can other services bring more traffic?

Their focus on providing Movie Timing search, local search (yellowpages) and music search is certainly bringing in traffic but could also be hurting their PPC revenues due to less dependency of advertisers on guruji’s search traffic and the objective moving to listening to music which lowers click through rates on ads.

Only time will tell if guruji’s strategy to diversify in different verticals helps both traffic and ad revenue in the long run. According to me the game with ad revenue will be tougher with multiple verticals.

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WATBlog Update There are 5 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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There are 5 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Social Media - Its Power, ROI & Marketing

For sure, Social Media has exploded and has helped online businesses to a great extent. Just a simple search on Twitter would reveal you the plethora of social media enthusiasts in the world who earn their daily bread through it.

Social Media has emerged as the single largest viral marketing source in recent times. I doubt if there is a close second spot to it. The immense online advertising opportunities it holds are utilized in every walks of life viz. politics, marketing, branding, networking etc. The power of Social Media lies in its ability to build up a relationship damn quickly and being able to sustain with it over a period of time. It is amazing to interpret from this research that it is women who rule the social media usage over men; and this ‘relationship’ funda which is considered emotional to some extent strikes the correct chords with them.

Social Media Marketing is another area which is worth pondering more than a thought for reasons because it has revolutionized the way products and services are advertised. Advertising is more about communication with your target audience by treating the web as a platform. Since the web 2.0 revolution, courtesy Social Media, new jargons such as Online Advertising, Internet Branding and Internet Marketing have been redefined. “Express Yourself” would be the correct articulation of a thought that businesses and customers implement on various social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

This video by Chris Pirillo helps us know better why Social Media has become a craze across all generation users. Chris very rightly puts it across when he says “Markets are conversations” and clearly explains how can a brand lure its user by sheer engaging of thoughts. Social Media has changed the way we consume information by making us engage in what they want. Isn’t it a brilliant business model ? Yeah .. it is !!

But, therein lies a challenge for every brand. Social Media is so much decentralized that it gives every brand the equal amount of opportunity to evangelize itself. The sooner Brands understand that their locus of control lies in the way they engage, communicate and converse with the user, the better it is for them.

Lastly, the efficiency of any business cannot be interpreted until and unless you calculate its ROI. The ROI of Social Media is a widely debatable issue, because people assume it to be something which is based on human interactions and engagement; and it is in verity difficult to quantify this. The currency return on the Social Media lies in the way relationships are made and the amount of content and time used in building up that particular relationship with the customer. Mashable wrote a great article on How to Measure Social Media ROI for business and clarified the calculations by considering two aspects Qualitative and Quantitative.

Indeed, the conclusion remains the same for probably every attempt to calculate ROI on Social Media Business and i.e. Benchmarking your parameters in a success metric.

Is anyone out there who can automate this process of calculating ROI ? I leave the floor open for you :)

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Politics Online: Using The Internet is Not the Obama Way of Marketing

Here is some real world advice for politicians trying to tap into the Youth base by going online. At the outset I would like dispel the notion that the youth is only an online being without any life out of it. So the first step for you take is synchronize your offline and online campaign to mean and say the same things, else you will get royal beating ver 2.0 both on the web and beyond.

However, cunning that you all are you might probably know the above point beforehand. However, there is another notion that needs to dispelled before you make a mockery of the whole system. The notion is that having a website and/or a blog online with profiles on all the major social networking site isn’t using the web the Obama way. Case in point - Even John McCain had all these with him. In fact any Tommy can have one. If you think the youth is going to consider you tech savvy because some web design company made a website with your photographs and accomplishments then you are sadly mistaken.

The fact remains that Obama didn’t win because he used the web to drive voters. Obama won because he drove a new wave of hope and action and everything that the average American voters sought in their leader. His online campaign didn’t just work because his speeches were on YouTube or because his Facebook page grossed the highest number of fans ever or because he was on Twitter. You see the online world is a reflection of and not distinct from the offline one. His campaign worked online because it is what people were looking for offline. The digital medium just helped get the word across faster and cheaper and with more authority.

So if you want to use the Internet you needn’t spend a dime on an adword copy or a banner or even put your TV campaign video on YouTube. You do the right thing by presenting the proper leadership and putting a proper plan for the country and believe me your online campaign will be taken care of by the same people whose votes you seek.

People will tweet about you if you say the things that they want or don’t want to hear from you. They will re-tweet if you say the things they would have wanted to say. People will blog about you if you sow an idea of a country that you envision, the idea will take roots as a million trees on the web with every blogger expressing their vision of the idea. People will capture your speeches and load it online if you open their eyes to the country you see in the future. They will make fan pages of yours and invite others if you do and act as a role model should.

The Obama way of using the web was not about money or content, but it was about being an inspiration and that’s why it worked. Nothing spreads like inspiration on the web. So if you are a poltico then all you need to do to use the web effectively is just be a good leader. That’s the winning online strategy.

Read this post on WATBlog on some poll related initiatives online.

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@box Takes Internet Beyond The PC

iChip has launched a low cost, small Internet access device called '@box' through which one can access internet on any existing display devices (TV, PC monitor, etc). The product is developed by iChip and will now be available through the BSNL broadband service network to users.

iChip would be supplying over 5 lakh such devices to BSNL over the year 2009-10. This clearly illustrates BSNL’s plans of taking this box and making it the first internet access point for those still not owning a computer.

The @box provides all the Internet functionalities and is  enabled by a keyboard and a trackball as a user interface device to make sure the browsing experience isn’t compromised.

The pricing of the device is pegged at Rs 2,500 while  technical trials for the same has already been completed.

iChip the company behind the product has invested up to $3 million in the R&D for development of the product and is looking to generate $80-90 million revenues in 2009-10.

The success of such a product depends on the usability. If its too complicated to setup the product and plug it in and out of your TV screen then the adoption might be limited. Also the real question is whether people would want to surf internet on TV or keep a TV separate from the computer?

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IIITians Working on Open Source Language Translation Tools

Come June 2009 and Sampark an open source web based translation tool would be launched. The beta version of this tool allows users to get their documents translated to Hindi from seven Indian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Punjabi and Marathi.

The development of this tool is been done across 9 tech institutes including the IIT’s and its led by IIIT (International Institute of Information Technology). The programme is funded by the Union Ministry of Information Technology.

The institute is also working on an open source translation programme called Anusaaraka, which allows translation of English texts into Hindi.

The importance of translation tools for online content

Its been often repeated that internet in India needs to grow beyond the metro’s to the towns and villages but for that to happen Internet as a medium needs to be useful and fit for consumption for such areas. Such kind of translation tools make that possible especially as their focus is hindi which is the single largest spoken and understood language in the country.

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How a Jewellery Store Can Use Social Media to Promote Their Brand

When it comes to social media it can be broken down into a very simple idea - be part of conversations. The whole premise is that people now have an avenue to talk in masses among masses, and brands can either participate or stay away, they can’t dictate terms. Staying away is not an option because that’s suicidal so the only option really is to participate.

With this post and with a jewellery brand (no particular brand) as an example I attempt to illustrate the whole notion of participation. So here come 5 ways in which a jewelery brand can use social media in their promotional mix.

1. Find out bloggers and tweeple around your brand store (use social media for this) and email or tweet to them when you invite your celebrity ambassador to your shop (like an store inauguration, or some festival), unless you have some really sorry character as your brand star of course. Having a beautiful celeb around your area is good for some online buzz. You can even upload their snap to flickr or twitpic for it to grab some social attention. Tag the image well.

2. Have an online jewellery design contest. If your target is youth, the college crowd then have them design the kind of design they love to see. Have a community on Facebook where the participants could interact and showcase designs. Give the winners some coverage and of course have prize. You have just used social media not just for branding but also for market research and feedback as well, not to mention a collection of designs.

3. What if your target is not the young crowd? Pick a day say Mother’s day and ask the young women and men of social media to design a necklace for their mother, and the winner gets his/her design made free.

4. Ok is there anything other than contests? Yes sort of. Start a group on Facebook or Orkut - I forget my wife’s anniversary. You give a platform for people to come and talk about instances and what they did etc. You just need to start the group, invite people and moderate it. Your branding is taken care of, the conversations are bound to involve you somewhere and the next time people think of gifting something for someone’s anniversary you are bound to cross their mind.

5. Now this is a tricky one, and something I have no idea of how it might pan out. Have a fake robbery attempt video made somehow, should seem as real as possible, not a polished ad that you might put on Star TV. Have ingredients in the video that will add unexpected dimensions like a really scared shouting store manager or a laughing salesman, stuff that trigger conversations and thereby sharing. Put this Video on Youtube with the title - Fake Robbery Attempt at My My Jewellery. Go viral.

There we are, 5 ways of promoting your brand through social media. Now social media has a personality quite different from others. Which means now that I mentioned these suggestions they might never work or they might even scale up a notch, you can never be sure, for you can never be sure where a conversation is headed. To that extent there can be methods of promotion a 100 times better than the ones above because the scope and scale of any social media campaign is limitless.

I hope this post gives people a better idea on how to approach a task of using social media for promotion better. If you found this interesting or worth a read then share it with others. If you feel I got the whole point of social media wrong then throw the bricks in the comments section.

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