Entries Tagged 'India' ↓

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Catch Imran Khan knocking your desktop screen on MSN India home page.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Net savvy: India surges by 27%, 28mn surf net

India way above Taiwan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Japan and Singapore. Indian net user base increased by 27 pc this year nearing over 28 million users. Asia overall had a growth of 14% closing around 319 million users. In Asia Pacific the top 5 countries are China, Japan, India, South Korea and Australia. If you compare India and China numbers, even by the modest of the estimates there is a potential of Indian subscribers to grow 4x. In reality for next 5-10 years we should see y-o-y growth of around 20% atleast. This means a big business for ISPs & Telco’s in India. The current Internet pentration levels in India leave a lot of scope for the growth story to continue. Indian’s are not only getting on to commerce on the net but are also spending quite a lot of time now on social web. On a daily basis we are also adding lot of first timers on the net who will start off with their first mail on the web.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Should India switch to presidential system? : A very relevant message board topic on MSN India:

Yes, Why we should have a presidential system in India

• Elections in India are pretty expensive and people make use of money and muscle both to win the elections.
• No one can change the coalition game now, no party has the clear cut majority and hence such elections don’t make any sense any more.
• India is getting highly divided based on caste, parties, languages. And we need one person, one identity and one leader who can tie us all together and to think beyond regional politics.

Yeah, But why we can’t have the presidential system in India

• Many politicians who have crossed the retiring age or rather have reached their death beds are still waiting for this title. They would never give chance to young blood. A president who is also an ICU candidate is definitely not an ideal leader.
• India is actually United States Of India with dozens of states, languages, regional issues and their individual parties and politicians exploiting the miseries. I am not sure if any party would be able to pose their presidential candidates without any internal Mahabharat.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Cerius Shah writes about JuxtConsult’s report on India Internet Usage Trends.I was trying to know what it would mean from a product manager’s point of view. My observations are not limited to this report but how one should interpret such report and how to make sense for you own products. These reports are highly useful for any Internet company if you draw the right conclusions. In past 10 years I have understood that Reports & Survyes are like modern art paintings, for some it doesn’t make any sense for others it surely does.

Also, I am not critical of this report as others are. Why ? I have carried two/three surveys myself and I know it would take some super solid psychiatrist & mathematician to give you even the accuracy of 80%. But people who actually work on products know the 80-20 percent rule and would know what to understand from this. Also this report is based on what users claim and not what JuxtConsult claims.

Growth Indicator

If India Internet Urban Usage grew by 19% percent treat it as a figure like - GDP ; this doesn’t mean that your product’s growth rate has to be the same. It just means in a vast pool, some few more buckets were added. This data is more relevant for the established products categories like search engines & horizontal portals and they would see the year-on-year impact of this trend. A product in a growth stage has nothing to do with this. It’s just an indicator that market is performing well.

Daily Users

This is the bread and butter of any web site. This number you should never reveal to the outside world but keep it close to your heart and self-introspection. This is true both for open sites and for sites with authentication, and if you are not seeing growth in this you are in serious trouble. You would be surprised to know that majority of the Indian Net Users fall into once in a month & once in one/two weeks. So understand the classification of various types of users and how you can boost their usage and force them to come to your site.

Yeah! Social Media

81% of the users use social media platform. Now nobody seems to agree with my definition of social media so there you suffer. Please read this data as UGC data and I am sure even that would be wrong, why ? I would never treat chatting as social media, just remove those users from this and you would see a grand dip in this 81%. But that’s not the problem with JuxtConsult, it’s the problem with Internet Industry - we have removed the intelligence and representation from the word ’social’ & ‘media’. Anything and everything is social these days and anything and everything shouts to be media these days.

Top 5 activities

India is still at the very nascent stage of the growth (considering our overall population). If this is 10th year of your Internet usage, for majority of new Internet population they just figured out how to click compose and send. The Internet in India will be still be dominated by people who provide search & email and are better in doing that. I would not doubt the Top 5 activities cited in this report: Emailing (91%), Job Search (72%), Messaging (70%), Reading News (63%) and Sports (57%). But I may want to replace sports with Movies. But users tend to bring more of their serious or active side on the net.

Preferred Location

What does this mean for you as a product manager. This shapes your peak traffic during the day and gives you highs/low over the weekend. But again this is required to super fine tune the performance of your site and only meant for people with deep understanding of the product and their users. Most of the others should not feel too happy or sad to know what it means.

Net Access Points

Do not think at all from net access point of view when you are working on a product. Just ask yourself, is your service worth and/or really usable on mobile. There is no need to grab the share of the mobile usage if that share is going to be absolutely pathetic. Focus on maintaining the growth story of your core offering be it web or mobile. 0% web & 100% mobile or 100% web & 0% mobile both product scenarios are possible.

Top of the mind recall

Try to list down the reasons why these companies are there and now try to see if something is applicable to your products and market. Don’t take this too seriously though, some brands can feature here because they just had a big advertising campaign and therefore the recall might be high. And also, when you ask somebody a question he would dare not show his/her ignorance and would always come up with something from TV/Newpaper if nothing was available from his/her actual keyboard.

Popularity: 39% [?]

Animal Welfare Board of India discovered puppy in Vodaphone Ad, may be someone at AWBI started doing Ramdev Baba’s kapalbhati and had a instant niravana and the indriyas started working after 10 years of latency. These puppy is the most telecom friendly puppy I have seen, see the extreme loyalty he carries - must be carrying the same number throughout the orange-huth-voda transition.

Ramadoss is unhappy with SRK & Big (Old) B that they are a bad influence on society as they smoke and drink on screen. May be Ramadoss Sir, you should start attending Rajyasabha and Loksabha, you will have a different view then.

Indian Medical Association is endorsing Tropicana - These guys are working for a cause please don’t say anything to them. They need to take care of their brothers - Doctors and Pharma companies. If you are not on a sugar rush how the hell would you get obesity, diabetes and plenty of other diseases. Do you know how expensive the medical education is or how difficult is to run a pharma company.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Imagine! Kenya sings for India

Popularity: 24% [?]

Barcamp Bangalore 6 is happening on 19th and 20th April at IIMB. Visit the website and checkout how you can contribute - by attending, by volunteering or simply by blogging about it. Such camps are collective and democratic effort. Come here, share your experiences, learn from others or just mix and connect with some like minded people. You can visit the Sessions page to know about what will be discussed and who are all going to talk at this event. But of course you will come across many more interesting people and can have a nerdy chat or fume about Bangalore Airport, Autowallas and traffic conditions also.

Now my story:

There are many exiting techie events happening from a quite some time now. But due to my work schedule and maramari in Mumbai, I was never  able to make it to any such events. Now that I am in Bangalore and life is much more peaceful, wanted to attend and did some twittering around to find about such happening stuff in Bangalore.

And guess what ? -  some good friends immediately replied back with a twitter. First was @aDese (blog) who had desiged a poster for Barcamp Ahmedabad and she informs that  Barcamp Mumbai Edition 3 is coming up on 29th. You should also visit her interesting blog and know her success story through such Ahmedabad event.

The second guy who replied back to me was @adityamishra (blog)who is actually the planner of Barcamps in Bangalore and Mumbai. Not only did he quench my thirst for info, he was also kind enough to connect me with others.

Thanks Aditi and Aditya, it’s nice to meet you and yes yes now I admit that Twitter is some serious stuff too.

Popularity: 68% [?]

Dear Indian Blogosphere friends, since I was handling my own products most of the time, my learning and observations were limited to the scope of work that I was doing and my deadlines . Would really like to understand from you if you have spotted some wonderful stuff in the Indian Internet Market for the following

1. Web Directory - Something like Dmoz. Nothing comes to my mind when I think of this.
2. Classifieds - Like Craigslist - Thousands and millions of them, but I almost end up calling Just Dial.
3. Search - Already done by Google, Yahoo and MSN. The rest that we have doesn’t give me something special, that I won’t find here. Which one do you use which is uniquely Indian.
4. Social News - Not like social gossip, I mean real news like OhMyNews
5. Tech Community - Millions of developers & IT professionals, what is there home page, where do they interact ? Where do they slashdot
6. Jobs - Naukri you are a rockstar !!!. Actually you, Jobsahead and Monster do such a excellent job that there are no further invention in this space.
7. Social Networks - A real, pure, raw, arrogant, desi twist. Not another mai-bhi orkut and facebook types.
8. Blogs - After changing 3 CMSs and at least 5 domains, finally I have a permanent place to call my home at my own domain now. Just within a month of active blogging, spotted couple of few cool blogs from Gaurav Mishra, Rajesh Lalwani, Rajesh Jain, Atanu Dey, Dina Mehta, Amit Agarwal, Kiruba and many others. Can you please share some few more.
9. Blog aggregator - I have seen many Indian blog aggregators come and go, which is the place where you belong
10. Events - There are so many blogcamps, barcamps and such. Really the cool ones but stupid me, I always end up checking that place few months later. Where do I find these updates, all at one place. Please recommend

Please don’t limit your comments, suggestions and feedback to this. Any insights, observations for Indian Internet would be very helpful to me or the readers. You can post in the comment, write on your blog, buzz me on twitter:@santoshmaharshi or hotmail:santosh_maharshi me.

Thanks in advance

Popularity: 71% [?]

Times : From MTV Insight Studio’s book, The State of Cool:

Only 1 pc of young visitors of UGC sites actually upload any fresh or orginal. 90 pc are passive participators and 10 pc participate (in any form ) and leave comments

There have been previous study in the past which had the same observations about the UGC category in general. For people who work on UGC they know for real that it is always under 2 to 5 percent. It has become sort of a thumb rule - 2% UGC rule. But this is not a problem, the UGC should focus on overall growth and invite a steady flow plus incremental growth in these numbers

Youth across India spend up to Rs 9 billion in pocket money every day and only mobile phone is a item where they have 100% ownership

I hope this report should have come 10-20 years earlier, I would have shown this to my parent and prove them how I was below poverty line in terms of pocket money.

I hardly see anything happening in India in terms of personal electronic devices. In any of the metro’s you can see 100s of hawkers selling of cheap FM, MP3 players and myriad of other stuff which is mostly imported from China. But most of the electronics manufacturers have not ventured into personal electronic items - even though it has a great potential.

59% of youth visits social networking sites on the web to stay connected with their friends

Indian youth demands privacy and self-expression. He can post porn on Orkut, vent his anger against politicians and enjoy all voyeuristic pleasure - which is not at all possible in the so-called cultural Indian society. But they also engage into meaningful stuff or just to be in touch with real friends.

Popularity: 62% [?]

Beware of the Grandma :). It’s really touching to know how a Malaysian granny is using web 2.0 in politics to spread the awareness and the message. Cyndy Aleo-Carreira on Profy has the details. Examples like these actually makes you happy how people have taken the internet to the grass-roots levels and how they are using the tools to bring about the change in the society. My vote for the granny. India is such a big country and I constantly complain to myself, why don’t we have such grassroots particpation. Even the intellectuals doesn’t seem to connect over something here. Is it that we are too talkative and less action oriented. Have seen some initiatives like e-panchayat and babajobs but they are very few. I would really like to know if these kind of initiative exists in India and if you are aware about it, please do let me know.

Popularity: 40% [?]

Some interesting facts on ET about mobile VAS in India :

- By 2010 India will have 500 million mobile users and 7% share will be of mobile VAS.

- Currently 60% of all VAS revenues comes from music downloads and caller-back ringtones

- 70% of handsets sold in India are GPRS enabled - VAS revenues will account for $348.8 million by 2009, according to Boston Analytics

Trak.in has some more highlights from Mohit Gundecha’s presentation on Mobile VAS in India. Wireless Dunia also informs about the Mobile VAS 2008 conference in Mumbai on March 4th. Here’s Mohit Gundecha’s presentation from SlideShare.

Popularity: 71% [?]

Delhi-based Digital Empowerment Foundation is running a pilot project in rural India called Digital Panchayats. Through this pilot the villagers will be taught the usage of internet and express their needs and problem through their self made websites.

DEF founder Osama Manzar on this project:

“We are trying to introduce and execute the concept of “glocalisation” through this project. “Glocalisation” enables individuals and organisations to think globally and act locally. The project will enable villagers upload, maintain, manage, update and convert their websites into a digital home for all their activities, their grievances, stories, news, needs, business, entrepreneurial opportunities, schemes, health issues and so on,” Manzar stated.

Panchayat is an elected village council which takes up the local matters and issues. It’s a very old form of local self governance in India. Britishers also employed it during their administration and then post independence the government of India also took made further ammendments in the system.

E-choupal is another such project by ITC which involves farmers and help them with their issues, buying, selling and advices on farming.

Popularity: 29% [?]

Just saw a OLPC coverage on TV recently and it seems that first pilot is already few months old and running in Khairat village near Mumbai.. OLPC means one laptop per child and meant to be distributed in developing countries around the world to provide access to computers, gain & spread knowledge, explore and experient.

The hole in the wall experiment
At first, you would really wonder about the success of this project. But have a look the ‘hole in the wall experiment’, an experiment carried out in Delhi by NIIT. A few computers were placed near a slum area with screen and sort of joystick to control the mouse and no keyboard. Children aged 6-12, who had not seen computers in their lifetime, had very rudimentary education and with no English skills were the heaviest users of that project and on their own they taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the net. They copied each other, shared the skills and were very good discovering things and giving their own names to the menu options as they learnt.

From hole in the wall to power in the hands
I hope what was discovered in that project should also come out true in the OLPC since every child has access to one know. I am not sure what it will do and what will be it’s effect on our Indian education system. But I don’t want to be a skeptic and I am sure kids will find their own potential and discover things for themselves, the things otherwise they would have never discovered.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Abhishek throws some light on Tata Nano’s online marketing:

Tata has launched a website named www.tatanano.com to direct to an intrinsically social media driven website for the Tata Nano hosted on Tata Motors subdomain. The website features a blog and a forum which already has 12000 members and a dream car configurator which allows you to play with Tata Nano’s design and create your own design.

Popularity: 30% [?]

If you are newbie like me and planning to buy your first car, then you should have a look at this Indian Automobile special on MSN India. It’s a quick reference site for knowing the details on new car models and various other things like maintenance, expected launches, etc.

I was wondering which should be my first small car and on this current releases page  you can find the quick tips on the pros and cons of these car models Chevrolet Spark, Chevrolet Aveo-UV-A, Hyundai i10 and Maruti-Suzuki Zen Estilo.

And if you are curious to know what rides celebrity like John Abraham or Sachin Tendulkar prefer, check it on celebrity rides

  

Popularity: 21% [?]

Amir Khan has arrived as a Director, the perfectionist director.

Saw Taare Zameen Par yesterday, I was quite happy to see a simple and nice movie. Darsheel shines in full glory and Amir does that with full honesty and taking the back seat and focus more on a dyslexic child, his problem, his world and his self discovery. The last movie that I had seen was Sawariya, it just seem to be a showreel launch vehicle for Ranbir Kapoor with lots of blue-ish art-direction. Same was with Black - whenever it came on Television I had to lower down the volume - as it was shoutcasting affair from Amitabh or Rani.

Indian movies, back in 70s and 80s had a simple storyline and characters but as we started getting influenced and as everybody started becoming an ‘angry young man’ in their 40s - we lost touch with the reality and all our characters became so abnormal that we would put even Mr. Mask to shame.

If you see the good movies in last couple of years - Lagaan, Dil Chahta Hai, Omkara, Munnabhai, Rang De Basanti and many others - all of them had a simple non-masala formula - they had a original story and very humane characters - who talked, walked and behaved like we all do.

It’s about Story

I was happy as an audience and a film buff that Amir made this attempt and even audiences are giving him a good response - sensible cinema was appreciated and will be appreciated. There is nothing like - "because people expect crap, we produce crap" logic given by Indian film producers. Otherwise, Munnabhai wouldn’t have been such a great hit - a movie which talks about Gandhi, his principles and our values in the society (which sounds very boring and completely non-commerical hindi cinema material)

It’s about the way you tell it

Munnabhai & TZP are actually serious movies, but tell their story quite interestingly. They are not like boring art movies of 80s which had to be boring to prove that they were intellectual movies. They used to be about social exploits, funded by government body and their makers dying to receive awards from the very corrupt politicians whom they criticised in their movies.

Masala - no more

I have heard this somewhere from a film critic that "we put so much masala in our movies, that it ends up being masala bullshit". And Naseeruddin Shan once said that "In future, if our kids asks us what was India like in the past, we won’t have any movie to show that - how we were, how we lived and how India was in reality". How true these two statements are, and unfortunately still valid. Pick up any recent movie and would you be able to cite it as an example of our current times or culture.

Popularity: 23% [?]

India television informs that the Indian media and entertainment industry is set to grow at twice the rate of the country’s GDP and the main factors of these would be -  a) regional players b) technology c) digitization of the media.

Wider access to Internet and change in consumer behaviour - with the latter migrating fast towards interactive platforms, will force the marketers also rethinking their strategy in terms of spending spots.
Earnst & Young estimates that though currently the online advertising revenue contributes a meager Rs 350 crores to a total of Rs 22,000 crore advertising market in India, advertising in the digital era is revolutionising the way brands connect with its consumers.
"To connect with these consumers, marketers are being forced to look beyond the traditional mass advertising model of 10-second spots and adopt interactive mechanisms to engage with them," the report says.

But to achieve this I think some greater push is required from the industry and also from the government to create the infrastructure to support this growth.

Television:

Most of the Indians have a ‘Home - Office - Home ‘ life and that wouldn’t change much hence Television is something that would not stop growing and there is sort of mimicing localization effect which seems to work very well. One successful show in Hindi or English - convert into a regional show and you have the local audience glued to the TV. Even with poor service from cable operators or DTH, people can live without food but not without TV. But these guys have to be more cautious while treating their young and influential audience - as these people are now spending more time on social networks and social media. The more you dumb down the more you would loose the creamy audience for which the advertizers pays for.

Mobile:

Again this caters to the aspirations of all the classes of people - strivers, aspirers and achievers, just the screen size and feature list changes for the mobile phones. Majority of the people are still voice customers but have taken on well some VAS stuff like - cricket scores, stock market updates, banking updates, and other basic stuff. All the major corporate now provide their employees with mobile internet and email equipped handsets and connection.

But the mobile operators have still very mediocre VAS applications - nothing beyond exploiting ringtones and cricket updates. I don’t really understand why they have no plans for personal communication & personal media sharing between their users. Every phone is now a camera phone and Indians love to stay connected and chat with their friends. Their goal should not be to push VAS offering but VAS which generates intercommunication between their users - MMS, Chat, Mobile Content and all that.

Online:

This is where you see lots of stuff happening and I think now you have established players in all the vertical segments you can think of, and that’s a good thing. I would really appreciate people like Indian Railways where you can book  a ticket in midnight and get the ticket at 10 am on your doorstep. Then we have lots of engaging portals offering news, entertainment, videos, social network, user generated media and all the latest stuff happening online. Main stream media is trying hard to get into this space, but they end up doing offline things online and fail. Online user is not a commodity - he is a user, he is a consumer, he is contributor and he himself is a moderator. Think platform and do not think just as a publisher.

Government:

I think instead of just minting money from licenses and delayed policy implementation, the government should push for early adoption of technology and creating a healthy competition in all the sectors. Just try getting a broadband connection in financial capital - mumbai and the silicon valley of India - Bangalore and you would realize the level of ‘growth’. The delay in mobile spectrum allocation may really prove costly. Government should also involve private players in spreading the reach - why can’t we have free wi-fi on airport terminals - powered by some ISP with their ads all over the place - or a kiosk in village sponsored by a FMCG and internet access in Schools and Colleges through similar sponsoring. Make it open, make it bidding based and make it fast - business are dying out for such places to advertize.

  

Popularity: 42% [?]

Well, I have finally left Bombay - the city of dreams or ‘Bollywood’ as some people call it. And, now I have moved to ‘Bangalore’ - the city of IT or the Silicon Valley of India.

Leaving Bombay was an easy decision for me but hard to execute (I realized it later). All my life, I had lived in Bombay, but somehow this love-hate relationship was budding up in my heart from quite sometime now. Work pressures, daily travel and weather was taking my toll and I was missing all the fun and whatever else that I could enjoy in life. OR I must be really looking for  a change.

I will surely be missing all my friends, colleagues and lot of other good people from Bombay.

Bangalore is nice to me and much chilled out compared to Bombay. People out here are very nice, educated and helpful (other than Auto wallas). I enjoy the weather here, the personal time that I get, the people I work with , some nice parks where I can walk and everything rest. The only thing that I don’t like here is some chaps and specially Auto drivers take you for a grand ride, the moment they know you are new here and don’t know the language.

 

Some tips if you are moving to Bangalore:

Movers and Packers:

Chose your movers and packers very carefully, get the insurance paper one day in advance and don’t let your vehicle move if they don’t provide it. Don’t believe in promises. And mind you - you are promised that it will be an exclusive vehicle for your transportation, mind you - your goods will be offloaded and loaded atleast within 2 /3 vehicles.

Checklist.

Make a checklist of things to do - Urgent, Important and Last to do. You get enough time to plan as the days get nearer

Things you should must not transport:

All photo identity proofs, all education certificate, all banking details, all most valuable things - Dont pack it and send it with movers and packers - keep these things with you.

Address Change:

Almost everybody will require address change for - Gas connection, PAN Card, Bank Accounts, Change of Phone numbers (only with Reliance it is possible) or you need to terminate it.

Office & Home distance:

Bangalore’s traffic is really something arrange a place which is the most nearest to your office and if you don’t have a vehicle of your own. You will be paying double the Auto/Taxi fare both ways, daily.

Forget global warming:

Get a vehicle of your own at any cost or you shall suffer. It’s really difficult if you are out late in night and relying on public transport.

Public Transport:

There is nothing called as Public Transport in Bangalore and whatever is there, since it does not carry any English sign boards you won’t be able to make any use of it. The metro is being developed but it will take it’s own sweet time.

Superstores / Malls

Definitely a delight in Bangalore, you will find stuff that you didn’t used to find in Bombay. There are more branded outlets in Bangalore than any other city

Food:

People used to scare me that you won’t get anything here and would miss Bombay. But I have seen more speciality restaurants and options in Bangalore. Only difference is that , in Bombay you can see restaurant every 5 minutes and in Bangalore you would need to travel. So it may be bit difficult if you looking for options very next to office or home. And if you don’t carry food to offfice , a bachelor or no joints near office - you would definitely die hungry.

 

  

Popularity: 36% [?]