Ringtones are a big business in India, the worlds 2nd largest mobile market. They in fact make up for more than 35% of all mobile VAS revenues.
Isnt it time that companies stop charging for ringtones ? Why even pay the Rs. 7-15 for a ringtone ?
If you want to stop paying for ringtone downloads and want to create your own ringtones from your MP3 files, here’s a step by step guide for doing so (this is an old story - I recently came across it while doing housekeeping on my delicious links). The process involves installing a couple of open source softwares, so the inintial setup might take a bit longer. But once you have that in place and get a hang of the steps, creating subsequent ringtones should be darn easy.
So go ahead - create ringtones from your favorite Bollywood flicks - be it Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na or Kismat Konnection and share them with your friends.
Comscore has released numbers related to the Indian Internet usage for May 2008. As per the report:
- 28 million users in the age group 15 & older accessed Internet from home - work locations
- This indicates a 27% jump in the Internet usage from last year
- India has one of the fastest growing Internet populations among the countries listed in the comScore world Metrix service
- The 28 million still represents only 3% of the population leaving room for tremendous growth (I’ve talked about this before)
Some additional bits from the report:
- Average Indian visitor is online 25 times a month with each visit averaging 28 minutes
- Users in the 15-24 age group spent 12 hours online and are the heaviest users
- Fastest growing web site categories include Map (64%), sports (60%), movies (55%), finance & news (52%)
The network of Google sites ranked highest in terms of visitors with nearly 20 million visitors.
- Orkut had 9.3 million visitors (up by 39%)
- Blogger had 7.3 million visitors (up 102%)
- YouTube had 6.3 million visitors (up 131 %)
Only 6 of the top 15 sites are indigenous websites.
Read the release here.
Its been almost three months since Orkut apps went live. It seemed like a good time to visit and review some of the most popular Orkut apps and see how well they’re faring.
Orkut has the largest Indian audience amongst all social networks and not surprisingly, it seems that Indian apps seem to the dominate the top 10 list. At the time of this writing, six out of the top 10 Orkut apps were either targeted towards the Indian audience or were built by Indian companies.
Lets look at three of the most popular Orkut apps below:
Chakpak Movies: This Erasmic funded company’s Orkut app seems to have caught up with Indian Orkutters like wildfire. Install the app and you can rate - review movies, view celebrity wallpapers, compare movie tastes with friends etc. One of the most popular and engaging features of this app is the quizzes — I’ve seen so many friends within my own social graph taking the Chakpak movie quiz.
As per Chakpak folks, below are stats related to their app:
Number of app installs: about 0.5 million users have installed the app
Average daily signups: 20 - 25 average new signups daily
Time spent on the app (engagement): exact number not provided, but in the lower double digit minutes (ie, between 10-20 minutes)
Keep Reading »
US based Rocketalk has launched their social entertainment focused mobile app in India. The app runs on Java and Symbian based phones. Application features include:
* Social networking
* MMS
* Communities
* IM & Chat
* Music & video downloads
* Content & premium services
Rocketalk has raised $7.1 million from iSherpa Ventures, EDF Ventures and Mission ventures.
MobMe, the Trivandrum incubated startup, already has a good headstart & so Rocketalk will definitely need to step it up a notch to compete.
Is that awesome or what !!
Yes, Kerala’s first Unconference event - BlogCamp Kerala 2008 will be held on 16th August at Alleppey, Kerala. The event is hosted by Kerala Tourism, who has provided the event venue - a houseboat. Yes, the event has the distinction of being the first such event to be conducted on a houseboat.
More details about the event here.
Navajo is a neat little word puzzle based Facebook app. It is a multiplayer word game, which can be played in a public room, network room (only has friends from your social graph) or a private room. Essentially, you are presented with a jumbled word in an IRC style chat room. You get two hints to get the word right (remember, other players are competing too) - the hints appear at specific intervals if the correct word hasnt been guessed already. The more the correct words you can guess, the higher you rank.
There are different types of rooms based on the difficulty level of the words as well - easy, medium, hard and GRE level. The app is entertaining and pretty addictive. In no time, I ended up spending more than 45 minutes on it. Simple and entertaining - with some luck and wishful thinking, the app has the potential to become popular like Scrabulous.
A short while back, I did a post related to hiring for Indian startups. The sentiment that emerged from the discussion related to that post was a no brainer - hiring for startups still remains a daunting task !! Job portals like Naukri yield mixed results and end up requiring a considerable time weeding out candidates. In short, Naukri and other job portals are probably not the best resources to hire startup employees.
Jobyantra is an affiliate based job board solution that hopes to provide an alternative to hiring for startups. Here’s how it works. Employers post job openings via the Jobyantra website. Jobyantra then posts the job across the sites that have joined its partner affiliate network. Blog and website owners can sign up to the affiliate network and get Jobyantra’s job board integrated into their site / blog. The design of the board can be customized to integrate into the blog’s theme.
The concept isnt new, and has been successfully executed by several similar job boards in the US. Most of the prominent technology blogs have integrated a job board solution into their blog with good results. The benefits of the approach are obvious - employers get to target jobs to exactly the audience they’re hoping to target. That translates to getting the right candidates without spending large amounts of resources for the job search.
Keep Reading »
IndyaRocks has partnered with Eros Entertainment to launch a branded community channel. The deal is a win-win scenario for both parties involved - IndyaRocks gets access to new, interesting content related to movies and for Eros, this is just another channel for movie promotion and branding.
Eros Entertainments YouTube channel is here.
IndyaRocks will also launch another feature next week, where all your friends can be plotted on a map. This gives a nice perspective of how your social graph is geographically spread across the world, and you can find - make friends based on a particular region.
Kindo has launched a Hindi interface to their popular genealogy service. Now, you can interact and build your family tree entirely in Hindi. Hindi is among the top 5 spoken languages in the world, with about 500 million native speakers of the language.
As per Nils Hammar, co-founder of Kindo:
“We believe Internet access and usage will grow among Hindi speakers over the next few years, and that many Indians will want to use the service in their mother tongue. Apart from connecting typical Indian homes, Kindo will provide great assistance to families of many Indians who are based all over the world.”
Here’s a screenshot showing Sachin Tendulkar’s family tree in Hindi:
While the UI and the service is top notch and the Hindi implementation is awesome, I am skeptical if such a service would be popular in India for two reasons:
Keep Reading »
Found some interesting reading stuff over the weekend. Take a peek:
1) Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL:
Very interesting technical presentation in PDF format.
2) Early YouTube engineer talks about scalability and outages:
via GigaOM
3) The audience for US websites is becoming increasingly international. Sites like Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn etc. not only get US visitors, but they also attract a significant share of international visitors also. This story from Wall Street Journal digs a little deeper into this scenario and how the sites need to gear ads targeted towards these international visitors as well.
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