goBroadband India Fonero – Up and Running
I don’t know if I am an advocate of FREE Wi-Fi, but I do like the idea of La Fonera [Wi-Fi Router for sharing your Broadband] You can read more about what Fonero is all about here. I got my La Fonera this week and I am all excited to get it up and running. I think I am the second Fonero in Bangalore after the one located in the vicinity of Bangalore Turf Club.
As promised in the manual, the setup is really really simple. I just plugged in the RJ-45 / LAN cable into the DSL Router and the other end goes into La Fonera, power it on, and I could see two Wireless networks – MyPlace and Fon_AP. I chose “MyPlace” for secure encrypted communication and enter the S/N number located at the back of your La Fonera Router and I am on the Internet posting this blog.
I have also configured this to be a “Linus” so that aliens in the vicinity can have a free ride if they want to. I don’t intend to make any money but if my ISP complains if this is il-legal then I may take it offline. [Our Post on Reliance Wi-Max Broadband in Bangalore has given more than 50 sales leads and we never expect anything in return]
It will be nice if Cisco/Linksys and D-Link routers are La Fonera enabled. Hooking La Fonera to your existing router, will start a different subnet of IP addresses. My Windows Server 2003 box would have something like 192.168.1.3 and my Laptop connected to La Fonera has 192.168.10.1 The only disadvantage is I can’t use the my server name to remote login and I had to use the IP.
You can see both sitting on my desk. Stay tuned I will drive and check from how far can I access this Fonero, Signal Strength, Speed etc. If you have a Fonero, then you can map it as I have done it here.
Tags: Broadband India, Fonero, WiFi India, Wireless Broadband
Inorganic Traffic Acquistion by Microsoft and Guruji
What is common between Microsoft and Guruji ? Both are struggling to better their market share in “Search” and have resorted to rewarding their users for using their search engines. Microsoft unveiled Live Search Club in June which offers gifts for playing and winning on the website where you will be using Live Search.
Guruji, an Indian search engine has a similar promotion to artificially boost its Traffic. Looks like this contest began in late June and is still going on. Instead of resorting to such means to acquire traffic they should spend more time on Research and Algorithms 
When your competitor is far ahead of Industry and Academic Research in search, never count on Marketing and Promotions to be a Winner.
Tags: Search, Microsoft Live, Guruji, Google
Bharti Airtel Q1-2008 Results Insight
Here is a peek into Bharti Airtel’s performance for Q1 2008.
- It has 42.7 million wireless subscribers [up from 37 Million a quarter ago]. Bharti Airtel has the highest wireless market share in India at 23.5%
- Bharti has 1.9 Million Broadband and Telephony[Wireline] customers
- Airtel Broadband Subscriber number now stands at 0.63 Million [up from 0.59 Million a quarter ago]
- Wireless Subscriber ARPU is down to Rs 390 [Rs 406 a quarter ago] and the monthly average number of minutes per customer is 478 [same as previous quarter]
- SMS contributed to 5% of total wireless revenues
- Broadband and Wireline ARPU stands at Rs 1121 [Rs 1112 previous quarter]
It is a cause of concern that ARPU is down to Rs 390 without any substantial increase in the number of minutes used per customer per month. Going forward the new IT and Communications Minister wants to auction 2G spectrum, which until now is linked to subscriber growth and may eat into the bottomline of these Telcos directly.
Tags: Mobile India, Broadband India, Airtel, Telecom India
160By2 – SMS based Advertising Startup
Few days ago I had couple of questions on my mind about throwing away money to read SMS as offered by mGinger, mGarlic, adMad, m-earn etc. We had a response from 160By2 team which is successfully running SMSCountry a Free SMS website for the past 4 years which lead them to found 160By2. The company is founded by Satya Yerramsetti and Raju Kalluri and the team has diverse specializations complementing each other. Here is an extract from their response. [My comments appear in Italics]
The basic idea in founding 160By2 [80 characters each for User and Advertiser] is customers were asking for FREE SMS service to communicate from the conveinece of their PCs. Brands & media companies are trying to reach their consumers on mobiles in mobile dense countries like India. These advertisers prefer targeted advertising capturing the users’ attention. Traditional advertising channels like TV, Radio, newspaper, billboards etc do not capture consumers’ complete attention. Internet solves this problem to some extent when relevant ads are served in context of intent from the consumer. Most of Asian countries have low internet penetration but very high mobile penetration with high SMS usage.
Trying to address these problems and combining the needs of consumers and advertisers, the idea of giving half screen (160/2) to both parties, originated.
The User: Clean, intuitive and fast service, with easy to use features (like intellitext etc)
The advertiser: The ads are powered by our Smart Match Ad Server Engine that appends contextual ad to user generated messages- based on profiling as well as context of conversation.
Business and Revenue Model: Get own Users, who come to www.160by2.com website and send personal SMS to their friends, family and contacts. This is currently working and we are overwhelmed by user response! Cater to Users from 3rd party content providers like stock alerts, astrology news etc. Free to the User always. Advertisers pay for each SMS. Mobile Operators make additional revenue on account of generating a response from the receiver of the ad either through a call back number or clicking on the URL (data charges) etc.
Proposition to Advertisers – We realized that each SMS has an emotion attached to it i.e. it could be a love or a romantic message; it could be a greeting and so on. Identifying this “emotion” in the SMS communication is the key to serving an appropriate ad. We endeavor to capture this emotional communication or “emocation” and serve the advertisers with the right audience. [They will have challenges like decoding Hinglish and other locales]
On Challenges: Creating a whole new industry of “mobile advertising in user generated SMS” is probably the biggest challenge. The advertising industry is still not very clear on some of the issues about mobile advertising. We are developing tools for the advertisers so as to where they can play around with our data. We have been giving advertisers a FREE trail period offer for them to create some campaigns, test the medium and also look at the results live. We should be able to balance the demand for free SMS against availability of an ad inventory that pays for delivery of SMS. There will be seasonal peaks and troughs, and the challenge will be to balance these out over a period of time.
Online and Offline Marketing initiatives: The trial launch of advertiser program has already led to highly encouraging results – we have small time local businesses like a boutique, gym, PC retailer, travel agent advertising with us. Since we conceived this idea we have been in constant touch with Brand Managers of some of largest brands in India and also with some major Medial Planning Agencies. [On how they will acquire Advertisers ]
Users and Advertisers Data on 160By2 SMS Advertising Platform: As of 15 July 2007, we had 22K plus users, with an extremely high proportion of active users. Right now we are adding more than 500 users per day. We have about 60 plus advertisers, of which five odd advertisers are big national brands while remaining are small to medium businesses who want to advertise with new age media advertising.
The company has in place an Anti Spam Purge System to control spam SMSs. They have also not raised any funding and all the operations are funded by internal accurals. They have the advantage of having stepped in early into the game. Rich experience with user feedback from running SMSCountry is distinguishing them from the rest of the crowd. If the Mobile Operators are forced to open the discussed interface, then SMS advertising companies can make a killing. Your thoughts ?
Tags: SMS, Mobile India, SMS Advertising, Mobile Advertising
Naukri – Info Edge India a strong Quarter ?
I normally don’t track this company nor their web properties for some reason. However, in a research report published by Citigroup analysts just a while ago, they expect the company to beat their estimates for Q1FY2008 of Rs 405m (+45% YoY) and net profit of Rs 69m (+31% YoY).
- Naukri continues to lead the India online recruitment market and should show solid YoY growth in Q1FY08.
- Jeevansathi and 99acres are not expected to contribute towards the bottomline of the company in the past quarter.
Naukri has another competitor now, techTribe which was kind of lost upon its business model [Career Networking, copy of LinkedIn] but still manged to raise VC funding.
Tags: Naukri, Web India, India Earnings, Internet India
National Do Not Call Registry of India is Live
The National Do Not Call Registry of India, an initiative by TRAI is Up and Running now. TRAI in a notification in early June had promised to take the registry live in 3 months. The NDNC Registry is hosted here.
The registry has an issue. If you subscribe to BSNL Landline, Airtel Mobile and Vodafone-Hutch-Essar Blackberry, then you have to register yourself with all the 3 operators separately and it will take 45 days to propogate to the NDNC Registry. You can register with your Telco by an SMS or through a web based interface. Here is a list of Do Not Call / Disturb Links for you to register of Telecom/Mobile Operators and Financial Companies. [Though registration with financial companies may not be needed any more if your Phone is in the DNC list]
A Tele-marketer in India is now obligated to become a member of this registry and download the list of subscribers who have opted out of Unsolicited Commercial Communication before making any calls. Consumers can file their complaint with the NDNC Registry here.
Tags: Telecom India, Do Not Call India, Do Not Disturb India, NDNC Registry
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