Posted by Saurabh KumarCategorized Under: Online TrendsNo Commented
India has been able to create and maintain educational brands like IIT – where very good technical education is given at some of the world’s lowest costs. At the other end of the spectrum, India has about 350 million people who form the primary work force of the country without any education to speak of. Primary education is therefore one of the top priorities.
The Government of India recently announced that it is going to ask every school to have a website of its own. Schools will be required to publish updated information about its infrastructure and faculty. This is going to be made into a law very soon. Every student will soon have a unique identification number, which will help monitor India’s primary education program. The first set of such numbers will get rolled out by 2010.
The latest TechCrunch TokyoCamp was held last Friday and by the looks of it, it was a resounding success with some great Japanese (and 1 Singaporean and 1 South Korean) startups demo-ing their wares. This also includes some demos by previous Asian startup who had presented at TechCrunch50.
Here is the list of startups that presented in the DemoPit, as you’ll see they were not all web startups, some offered innovative cameras, bluetooth headsets and gadgets to remotely control your race cars through the browser! My favorites are iTwin, UserHeat and the PatentBueau… all of which should help increase efficiency and productivity one way or another.
Finally!… I just can’t believe it’s taken this long, but it looks like Search is finally catching up with other forms of Online Advertising in Australia.
As a report compiled by PwC (Price WaterHouse Coopers) shows, for the Quarter ending on 30th September 2009 Search Engine Marketing (PPC) has grown while Displays ads have fallen.
… the expenditure in the general display advertising market fell by 5% quarter on quarter and year on year. With separate Eyeblaster research showing Australians are among the least likely to click on general display advertising in the world, it appears that marketers may be looking to search, which grew by 12%, for more effective campaigns.
This is quite a significant milestone, and Search Engine Marketing is likely to continue making in-roads into Online Advertising as Advertising Agencies and Companies realise and recognise the power of Search in supporting brand campaigns and converting ROI.
China never fails to amaze me with the number of “copycat” websites adapting successful business model in the US for use in China. Was reading this article on TechCrunch on Tudou.com – aiming to be the YouTube in China. Tudou is one of two companies left fighting it out to be the YouTube of China (the other company is YouKu). Both burning through hundreds of millions between them trying to find what YouTube still hasn’t: A way for online advertising to pay for video’s outrageous broadband costs.
Just last week, Tudou won a deal to be the online video channel for China Mobile. So far video can only run on high-end phones and much of China can’t even get 2G access, let alone 3G. However, Tudou is optimistic about the future as China Mobile is investing some 58 million RMB to build out 3G infrastructure in China. China Mobile is also planning video-subscription plans that offer unlimited uploading and downloading of video for the equivalent of 75 cents a month – that makes it very affordable for the masses to upload and download videos – throwing the floodgate of user generate video in China wide open.
In addition, they foresee the changing of technology as Taiwan chip company MTK is developing chipsets that allow very low-end phones the ability to download and upload video – this means that even with a low-end handset, consumers would be able to view video on their mobile phone. And lastly, in China people are replacing their handsets roughly every nine months. That means all of these changes could ripple out faster than if they required, day, a PC upgrade cycle to complete.
Tudou sees mobile video starting to take off in 2010, growing rapidly in 2011, and in 2012 generating enough actual revenues to equal what it makes in traditional online advertising. In the mean time, content being king, the company is running around Asia doing content deals to add professionally produced, non-pirated content to the 30 million pieces of video inventory Tudou has already. The company is also producing a ton of original content and reality TV shows for its website.
Being curious, I went over to Tudou.com to try out its services on my 100 Mbps line and the video content download experience have been very slow (maybe because Tudou’s server is in China and optimize for use in China). Guess there will still be a need to invest in their video hosting servers if they were to target audiences outside China. I had yet had the chance to test out the services in China to see if the download experience is the same….any feedback on their video download experience in China would be great.
Friendster has launched virtual gifts and the Friendster Gift Shop in Malaysia, which represents the first in a series of upcoming products the social network will roll out to better monetise its global user base. The virtual gifts and the Friendster Gift Shop products will use the new Friendster Wallet allowing for its users to buy and send gifts to one another. The gift shop initially launches in Malaysia and will be rolled out within weeks throughout SE Asia and globally.
Earlier, Friendster has partnered with MOL AccessPortal Berhad (MOL) for the company to power a prepaid payments platform for Friendster’s 115 million users globally. The introduction of this payment platform, through its stored value Friendster Wallet system, is a critical step towards the social networking giant’s ability to monetise its global user base. Friendster Wallet credit is stored as currency called Friendster Coins and can be spent throughout Friendster’s site for goods and services. It will give Friendster the ability to develop other revenue streams surrounding virtual goods, gifts and games.
This initiatives is somewhat similar to Facebook – which rolled out its virtual currency earlier whereby consumers can make use of Facebook credit to purchase and send gifts, even in the real-world. I guess it will only be a matter of time for Friendster to also roll this out to the real world. It would really be interesting to see whether consumers would adopt this new form of currencies to make their purchases.
Posted by Saurabh KumarCategorized Under: Online MarketingNo Commented
In a recent study, it was noted that in the UK, 73% more people went to hotel review websites than to hotel booking websites. This means that a much larger time is spent online researching the hotels and destinations before booking. Also, some of the bookings can and will happen offline, while most of the research (ignoring Rough guides) happens online.
There are a slew of hotel review websites in India. Tripadvisor leads the pack, but there are quite a few others – Raahi.com, Indianhotelreview.com and oktatabyebye.com.
The website generate a decent amount of traffic, but rue the fact that not enough people leave back comments. They point out the fact that Indians are more worried about basic amenities while a hotel review would tend to focus on a few addons which were liked by the reviewers. Lack of a personal PC could also be a reason, given that the cybercafe still remains the an important point of contact with the internet.
The cultural diversity of India means that reviews written by one set of people might not be relevant for another. A Bengali might not mind the meat market closeby but it might drive a vegetarian up the wall.
A few of these Indian websites report exceedingly negative comments – users do not bother when all goes well, but mess with their coffee or their Air conditioning and expect a long rant on one or more of these websites. Hotels beware – the online Indian hotel guest is here to stay. Though the business might be small for now, as with a lot of other models based on India’s growing online penetration and volume, its potential is not in doubt.
On a lighter note, click here to see an ingenious display of using the ubiquity of Google search for self promotion.
I’ve seen this chart on several blogs the last few days, and thought it was quite useful. It aims to present a geographic view of average internet speeds around the world in relation to the monthly cost per every 1 Mbps.
It’s great to see Japan and Korea leading the pack so prominently… and more than 10 times the average speed in the US…
Japan 61 Mbps… at a cost of 0.27 US$ per 1 Mbps
Korea 46 Mbps… at a cost of 0.45 US$ per 1 Mbps
USA 4.8 Mbps… at a cost of 3.33 US$ per 1 Mbps
As reported here and here, Google is looking to participate in the upcoming auctions for providing WiMAX services in India. WiMAX or Wireless microwave access is also known as Broadband Wireless Access or BWA. Google could either go on its own or be a technology partner to an existing Telecom service provider.
India’s WiMAX subscribers are expected to touch about 60 million by 2014. It is expected to grow faster in a country like India – with a low fixed line pentration in a large country. The opportunity is expected to be very valuable, with all major telecom players in the bidding race. The government aims to earn a minimum of $350 million from this auction, which is the reserve price.
Google has had an interest in India’s mobile, broadband and VASP space for some time, with some active lobbying being done by Google with the TRAI over matters of future policy – see here. India has a far greater number of mobile users than internet subscribers. Because of this, search engines like Google as well as any company wanting to grab a share of this large and lucrative pie would want a piece of the WiMAX spectrum.
YouTube Australia has just launched a paid model to help companies promote their videos on YouTube. Companies will now be able to promote their videos and ensure they appear next to relevant content, and in front of relevant audiences.
Essentially, Promoted Videos is a CPC paid model based on the Google Adwords keyword bidding model, and has been integrated into Adwords for easier management (for in-house marketing teams or agencies).
Here’s a clip about Promoted Videos from the YouTube Australia blog. Google is also offering Webinars to help early adopters get to grips with how it all works.
In a very odd turn of events… a leading Chinese paper is now blaming Google for censoring their content!
Oh.. how the tables have turned?!
For as long as most of us can remember, it’s been the other way around with China normally requesting Google to censor or limit accessibility to pornographic sites or content related to the Tiananmen Square ‘incident’.
I find it ironic now, that the ‘People’s Daily’ is now complaining that Google was censoring their content… and pointing out that Baidu wasn’t. The content in question is related to Google’s controversial Book deal… and the implication is that Google is not indexing and presenting the negative view that the People’s Daily has about that deal.
We don’t have enough information to go into the detail of who was right or wrong, but will monitor the progress and update in due course.
