WildBlueSkies - Trends and strategies in Digital Media

BloombergUTV.com Now UTVmoney.com – Stock Community Portal

dhirender — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:58:28 +0000

In an attempt to help consumers make more informed choices for picking stocks, BloombergUTV.com has rebranded and relaunched itself as UTVmoney.com. Building on the Wisdom of the Crowds, the new website hopes to serve as a credibility manager for ‘celebrity tippers’ who make predictions on several TV channels. It also allows users to offer regular tips and build their individual reputations.
Interestingly, the website will keep historical track records of predictions that tippers make and based on performance, each tip will be assigned a ranking.
Currently, the site is still in beta, and looks like it a bit incomplete. The design is minimalistic, along the lines of Google Finance, or Rediff Money, and surprisingly puts news on the backburner in one of the tabs, and the community element upfront. What does this mean for sites like MoneyVidya.

Google Android Outsells Apple iPhone iOS

dhirender — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 05:10:47 +0000

Andriod based phones have been sneaking up on the iPhone over the last six months, and it’s adoption by new smartphone subscribers have has finally passed phones with the Apple iOS to grab 27% of the market share of news as opposed to the iOS’s share of 23%. RIM is still up there at the top with 33%. However, among the current subscribers thinking of switching mobile phones, a staggering 90 percent of iPhone owners say they will opt for the iPhone (talk about loyalty in the face of the mess that Apple is currently in), while 21 percent of Android owners and 29 percent of BlackBerry users would consider switching to the iPhone.
While much of this data pertains only to smartphone subscribers in the US it is significant when you note that the Nielsen Company estimates that by the end of 2011, there could be more smartphones in the United States than the less advanced feature phones.
One factor that would no doubt be reigning in the iPhone would be that it is available only with select carriers, while the others are not locked in. Moreover Android is available for use by multiple phone manufacturers, while iOS and Blackberry is available only by their respective companies only. Thanks to this, with companies like HTC, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG chipping in with products, shipments of smart phones running the Google-backed Android operating system are estimated to have grown 886% in Q2 2010.

Wireless Subscribers In India Now At 635.51 Million

dhirender — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:45:32 +0000

The total wireless subscriber base increased by 17.98 million in June 2010 to reach a total of 635.51 Million, even as the wireline subscriber base declined 0.18 million to reach 36.18 million in the same timeframe.
This takes the the overall tele-density in India to 56.83 (or there is one telephone for every 58.83 people in India).
The total Broadband subscriber base has increased from 9.24 million in May-2010 to 9.45 million in June-2010, (a growth of 2.27%). Hopefully, this should show a dramatic increase with the launch of BWA services. [Via]

275 Million High-Speed Internet Subscribers In India By 2015

dhirender — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:58:04 +0000

As telecom firms begin to deploy Broadband Wireless Acess (BWA) based solutions, the number of high-speed Internet users is expected to touch 275 million up from nine million by 2015 according to a study by Assocham and Frost & Sullivan. Hopefully, the definition of “high speed” should change as well.
By the end of 2009, around 43 per cent Internet subscribers were still using conventional dial-up connections.
BWA spectrum enables high-speed Internet access as well as Internet telephony and TV services. It can also be used for voice and high-speed data services.

BSNL To Bring Wimax To Chandigarh Next

dhirender — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 05:13:25 +0000

With a planned investment of Rs. 70 crores for rolling out services in Punjab and Chandigarh, BSNL has already launched services in Punjab, and are now in the process of rolling out the services in Chandigarh within the next two months.
In Punjab, at present Wimax Broadband services are available in all the districts of the state, 61 tehsils (out of 74 tehsils) and 80 blocks (out of 143 blocks) with plans to roll out the services in the entire state within the next six months. BSNL currently has 1,000 wimax broadband customers in Punjab and targets to go upto 18,000 customers by the end of this financial year.

Twitter Unveils @Earlybird – An eCommerce Revenue Model

dhirender — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:05:20 +0000

Twitter seems to have finally gotten serious about making some money from the humungous members it seems to go on adding. First advertising, and now e-commerce (the deals variety that seem to be the rage these days – with Amazon buying Woot, Snapdeal buying Grabbon, others raising funding, etc.)
Through it’s company managed @earlybird account, Twitter plans to partner with advertisers to tweet and retweet offers that they would like to promote.
The advertising partners would get to determine the terms of the offer, including availability, amount, and price. This would be great for companies like Dell who already use Twitter to propagate their deals (and claims to have notched up sales of over 6.5 million through them), and even better for companies not yet on the bandwagon.
At the time of writing this, the @earlybird account already has 10,970 followers
Right now it would be limited only to the United States, but going forward you can expect it to be rolled across the world, perhaps even location based deals.
ReadWriteWeb was the first to break this last week

Magicrooms.in Raises Rs. 7 Crores From NVP

dhirender — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:51:15 +0000

MagicRooms.in billing itself as India’s first hotel global distribution system (GDS), has raised Rs. 7 crores from Nexus Venture Partners.
The Bangalore-based startup integrates all existing hotel property management systems that brings together all available room inventories across all hotels in India. In fact, MagicRooms has also signed up MakeMyTrip, one of India’s largest online travel agents (OTAs), as its customer.
As MagicRooms, MD Niranjan Gupta, who earlier co-founded online travel agency Via says:

Hotels need to be able to offer all available room inventory till the last minute; while travel agents, OTAs and corporate houses need the convenience of being able to make instant online reservations in real time. MagicRooms will change the way hotel rooms are booked from now on.

MagicRooms intends to use the funding to build infrastructure and increase their marketing efforts.

Chrome Checkout Extension Allows Payments On Android

dhirender — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:51:39 +0000

Google has recently released an extension for its Chrome browser that now allows payments while on the movie for Android smartphone users.
If you want to want to make use of it, this is how it works:
Merchants first need to create a Google Checkout merchant account and configure your tax on the Settings Tab.
Then use the Gadget Wizard to generate a web store template on their website (they can also create a free Google Sites page just for this purpose).
Then, after filling in their products in the Gadget’s spreadsheet, they need to install the Android Payment Extension for the Chrome web browser, and they are ready to roll.

Now when a customer wants to buy something, you could create a shopping cart with those items on your computer, click the green Checkout with Android button and have the customer scan the QR code displayed with their phone. This QR code directs your customer to the buy page where they can complete their purchase. [Via]
Seems pretty long drawn, but look at it this way - a customer can actually pay using their mobile, and doesn’t need to carry plastic anymore, and might just be more secure as well.

Browse Facebook On Airtel Free For 2 Months

dhirender — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:41:29 +0000

If you have an Airtel mobile connection, you can browse Facebook Mobile (m.facebook.com) free of charge for 2 months ending August 31, 2010.
This would allow you to post status updates, comment and write on walls, message others, and also be able to view or upload photos – all without any data charges (provided you have a facebook account, or open one).
Facebook’s mobile site will be initially available in English and Hindi, with five other languages – Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam – soon to follow by July 15, 2010.
It seeems like a great marketing partnership – for Airtel, their users would be the first to get access to the Indian language versions (Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam) of Facebook mobile, while Facebook gets access to the subscriber base of India’s largest telecom service provider.

Impact Of Marketing Emails In Purchase Decisions

dhirender — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:18:24 +0000

The Global E-mail Attitudes Survey conducted on behalf of e-Dialog’s Centre for Digital Marketing Excellence by Lightspeed Research in April 2010 reached out to 13,000 consumers in 13 countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific to survey the impact of marketing emails on their purchase decision.
The result – an unbelievable 58% respondents claim that a marketing email influenced the purchase (be it in a store or over the phone).
In addition, two-thirds of consumers indicated that e-mail inspired purchases have prompted them to further research a brand and its products while more than half say it spurred a peer recommendation.
Additionally, the survey claims, an increasing number of consumers across regions are purchasing products and services based on promotional SMS messages. However, the cultural differences are strong with 57 percent of Asia-Pacific, 21 percent of European, and 14 percent of U.S. consumers having done so.

It would be good to remember here that e-Dialog puts as it’s byline – Intelligent eMail Marketing.