More Funding.. 5 Million $ By Sequoia For Cybercafe Ad Network - Ideacts.com
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Its seems to be the official funding news day with earlier the announcement coming in from Ozone media regarding raising of 4 million dollars and now its time for another advertising based startup by the name of Ideacts to announce its funding. Sp Sequoia has gone ahead and bet 5 million $ on Ideacts which esentially has a product called Clinck that powers desktop advertising. Well these are desktops distributed across chains of cyber cafes across the country.
 
 For those of you who are still scratching their heads thinking how that desktops in cybercafe’s be monetized think again! CLINCK is an Active Desktop Application which provides the user with shortcuts to Internet Browsers, Messengers, System Shortcuts, Search, News, Entertainment and Online Storage. And its monetized through ads. Currently Ideacts has advertisers like Dell, MSN, Cadbury Perk etc which suggests potential in the model.
 What supports this kind of advertising is the fact that over 5.7 million of the overall internet access population accessing internet from cybercafe’s and thats according to a 2007 IMRB report. Sify which has over 3400 cafe’s over 154 cities already has similar advertising options available across its cybercafe’s so Ideacts business model isn’t really a new one.
This investment by Sequoia is keeping in mind the unorganised market As this interview with VCCircle states that Ideacts is essentially targetted unorganised standalone cyber cafes and not the branded cyber cafes like Sify and reliance webworlds. According to Rudrajeet Desai CEO of Ideacts they current have an arrangement with 625 cyber cafes, which means more than 5,000 computers screens. They plan expand to around 3,000-3,500 cyber cafes.
The problem that I see about the unorganized segment is implementation of the application and the tracking of the same. Im not sure how the logistics and the technology behind the application work on tracking whether or not the application is installed but currently Ideacts guys pay a fixed fee to Cyber Cafes to run Clinck on all their terminals.
On the whole this does seem like a workable business model as Sify is known to have made moolah from the number of screens that it owns in the market. But overall the dependency for Ideacts is to reach out and convince a large number of unorganised players.
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