Voiee, your personal online voicemail
Voiee is a phone-to-web voicemail messaging service from Genie Interactive Pvt Ltd., a Bangalore based company. The concept is simple. Sign up for the service, activate your account and choose your V-PIN (I’m guessing it implies virtual pin). Distribute your V-PIN to your network of friends, family and contacts. People who wish to contact you can leave you a voicemail by calling one of the Voiee numbers local to their country - city. They’ll need your V-PIN to leave you a voicemail. You can check and retrieve your voicemails by logging into your account.
Currently, the service is free, with 50MB of space for each account. Paid premium accounts with additional features (including higher storage space) are in the works. They are also planning to add other features and customizing the solution for corporations.
Sequoia India sells partial stake in FirstSource
Sequoia India announced that it has sold a 4.45% stake in Firstsource Solutions (formerly ICICI OneSource) to SUN Group for an amount of $42 million. Sequoia still owns 5% stake in FirstSource after this deal.
Sequoia India’s investment portfolio includes Applabs, Bharti Telesoft, Coffee Day, Firstsource, GlobalLogic, Indiatimes, Travelguru, Shaadi and Guruji.
via PR
Some interesting tidbits from Indian online world
A story in Financial Express explains the online promotion of the movie Metro on Shaadi.com.
No, this post isnt about this promo. A couple of other bits in the story caught my eye:
1) Revenue through Desktop TV for MSN India has reached $40K per month, a 250% YoY increase. Number of advertisers jumped from 65 in 2005 to 260 today.
Hmm…pretty interesting…I think Rediff is a bigger portal in terms of market share and pageviews than MSN India. As per Rediff’s earnings report early today, they had 177 advertisers. While MSN India had 260 advertisers ? That’s almost 80 more advertisers !!!
2) Multiplexes account for 60 - 70% of all ticket sales. For PVR Cinemas, one of the leading multiplex players, 17 - 18% of their ticket bookings happens at the PVR website.
Full story in FE.
Google plans for cross language search engine
TechCrunch reports that Google will soon announce a cross language search engine. Search queries will be auto translated into other languages and all results will be translated on the fly, back to the original query language.
Considering that Google launched Blogger in Hindi and more recently, Google News in Hindi, Google has the ability to do effective transliteration into Hindi — and so it shouldnt be very difficult for them to enable search in Hindi and display search results in Hindi.
Yahoo, Rediff, Guruji — watch out !!
VSNL plans to expand Wi-Fi presence
VSNL plans to increase its Wi-Fi presence by increasing the number of hotspots from 250 to 1000 during this calendar year. Current VSNL partners include Taj Group, Le Meridien, Cafe Coffee Day, Barista, Manipal University and Wockhardt.
via release
Rediff Quaterly, Annual Earnings
Ok. I’m not going to rehash the numbers about Rediff’s latest earnings report. If you want, you can view their release here and their entire earnings report here (Doc file).
Instead, I’m going to highlight some of the interesting questions asked by the analysts present at the earnings call.
Analyst:
In terms of the advertising formats that currently very popular in India, do you continue to see banner advertising as a dominant format? And any progress on any other formats if you can talk to sort of what you think would be big, whether it’s contextual or behavioral search? Anything?
Yatra takes it offline with Hughes
Online travel portal Yatra announced a tie-up with network provider Hughes, which will enable customers to use Yatra services through select HughesNet Fusion centers. This will provide Yatra an offline channel to connect with customers by tapping into HughesNet Fusion’s existing infrastructure.
As per Dhruv Shringi, Yatra founder, “the portal can now tap into those sections of the population which do not have access to credit cards or are not familiar with Internet transactions, or are wary of using their credit cards for e-commerce transactions”.
via Hindu
Moser Baer to buy 15-25% of new Indian releases
Moser Baer is planning to buy rights to almost 15-25% of all the new Indian movies released this year. Going forward, they are looking to buy at least 50% of all new movie releases. They will also consider buying bulk titles from production houses instead of taking the one-off route they are currently taking.
Moreover, with 500 Hollywood titles, Moser Baer has earned a spot at Cannes Festival, where they can directly negotiate and interact with production companies in the US. Pricing for international titles will be Rs. 100 tops.
Moser Baer will release a few of the latest Hindi titles - ‘Life Mein Kabhi Kabhi’, ‘Ek chalis Ki Train’, ‘Apne’ - Rs 34 for a DVD and Rs 28 for VCD, one month within the movie’s mainstream release.
Entire story in BS.
Alcatel-Lucent acquires NetDevices
Alcatel-Lucent has acquired the Bangalore based, privately owned NetDevices, a developer of gateway products for enterprise branch networks. Terms of the deal arent disclosed. NetDevices is headquartered in Sunnyvale and has 45 employees - majority out of Bangalore.
via Hindu.
Patent and Intellectual Property (IP) statistics in India
Patents and Intellectual Property (IP) are one of the strongest assets that a corporation can own. You can legally shield your idea,product, algorithm, process or invention from other copycats out there. You can also end up making huge amounts in terms of royalties (Qualcomm anyone?).
The significance of patents and IP is well recognized the world over.So, how does India fare when it comes to patents and IP ? What can be done to increase India’s IP wealth ?
Let us begin by taking a quick peek at the patent process in India.
The process of filing a patent / trademark in India falls under the jurisdiction of the Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks. The Patent department has four offices in Kolkata (head office), Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi. The Trade Marks Registry has its head office in Mumbai, with branches in Ahmedabad, Chennai, Delhi and Kolkata.
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