Latest news in the digital world in India

Brand Equity’s Ad Agency Reckoner has listed the top ten Digital Agencies in India recently and according to the annual survey this year the no.1 digital agency is Webchutney followed by Hungama at no.2 and then Contest2win at no.3. This survey by Brand Equity usually lists the top 25 traditional agencies, media houses, creative directors, [...]

NetworkPlay the vertical centric ad network which just burst onto the scene recently and which was in the news a few weeks back for signing on Gawker media as one of the publishers has launched a new vertical today. Networkplay has ventured into the news vertical by signing on zeenews.com as the first publisher in [...]

Reliance Communications has launched “Samachar” an text based news service on Reliance Mobile Phones. This service provides text news in Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. For this service Reliance has tied up with Webdunia.com a regional language content provider for web and mobiles.
Mr. Krishna Durbha, Head – Value Added Services, [...]

Tie ups continue in this space and Ibibo which we have been tracking closely has gone ahead with another entertainment tie up and Paymate which recently entered the nepal market has closed a tie up with IDBI bank. Lets look at the details of these tie ups.
Ibibo Ties Up with Sony BMG - Launches Michael [...]

Rediff.com which was always sold on regional language and had also acquired technology startups in the space is soon to launch regional language versions of its flagship site rediff.com in 22 languages. So come January 2009 and rediff users would be able to use and converse on rediff.com in 22 different languages.

“After extensive study we [...]

Canaan Partners has funded Chakpak an entertainment and bollywood centric community site according to this article. The amount is not disclosed as yet but the news is confirmed. This is the third company in the consumer internet space that Canaan has invested in. The earlier two are Bharatmatrimony and Techtribe.

As far as talks in the [...]

These are tough times for travel in India and tough times need tough and precise measures. That is what we are seeing across the board in online travel with companies focussing on niche’s rather than mass market and whole hog as I may put it. Thomascook.in the travel portal for Thomas Cook (India) Ltd, which [...]

Microsoft yesterday lauched the Bizspark programme which makes microsoft technologies and network easily available to the startup community in India. This programme is very much like Sun’s Startup Essentials programme which has been running in India for sometime now.

The BizSpark program will give a startup access to:

Design tools (Microsoft Expression Studio with MSDN Subscription)
Development test [...]

Worldwide OTA biggie Travelocity which had launched its Indian operations with Travelocity.co.in has turned the tables on the marketing media mix by setting a higher share for online ad spends. It launched a new microsite and plans to allocate 60% of its advertising spend for the site to online advertising and promotions.

The mobile web seems to be taking everybody by storm. There was a time when the ability of accessing wap sites on the phones was just a novelty. The real serious candidates would always end up with a BlackBerry. However, with more bandwidth and technologies like 3.5G making a headway in mainstream market, no one can hush away the importance of mobile web any more.

Price Waterhouse Coopers reports the Indian mobile VAS market will reach $2 billion by the end of 2008 and expect it to account for 18% of operator revenue by 2010. So its no surprise that Nimbuzz a Dutch mobile instant messaging and VoIP provider is very gung ho about the Indian Market. Nimbuzz which we blogged [...]

A good couple of months back, I had written about Movable Type’s latest blog script version and about how it can redefine digital publishing. This was so because MT had gone social with MT Pro and made the whole idea of community building simple for publishers. They have no gone a step ahead and launched in Beta - Motion, a microblogging and social application.

Bookmyshow.com Web18’s entertainment ticketing service provider has partnered with Bharti Airtel to offer all Airtel subscribers across India direct access to bookmyshow.com on their mobile phones. This will be done via three modes i.e. via a mobile applications, airtel’s wapsite and tele-booking as well.

This means that airtel customers can book tickets on the Airtel WAP [...]

Guruji is fast transforming from the one time local search player to a full fledged Indian portal avatar. If there was any doubt in anyone’s mind on this imminent shift then the launch of their finance vertical called guruji finance should clear it once and for all.

Guruji finance is an out and out rediff money [...]

Browsing some of the popular news sources today, we found a lot of space occupied by dot commers in the press spread, here are some of the key developments in the Indian online industry that caught our attention today.