Mobile Advertising in 2013

It is interesting to know that Google has pioneered Internet Advertising across the globe and its empire primarily gets to innovate and expand because of its thriving advertising business. The advertisements (ads in short) started in print medium long back and after evolution through different formats has moved into television domain. With the dawn of Internet followed by search and social media revolution, it made absolute sense to present the ads through this medium as well.

With the access to Internet changing from Desktops / Laptops to Mobile devices - smartphones and tablets - the need to shift the ads to this new form-factor of devices has become inevitable. The challenge in placing ads in mobile devices is the size of the device screens. With so little real-estate space on-screen to show the main content, there would be little left to display ads.

There are quite a few opportunities to tag along ads under 'Mobile' advertising:

1. Ads along with web content (news sites like Times Of India)
2. Ads interspersed along with the content (like in Facebook)
3. Ads in fixed position - typically bottom - in any mobile application including games and education content
4. Ads along with multimedia content (like in Youtube)
5. Classifieds Applications (like sulekha or yellowpages)
6. Deals Applications (Dealchaat)
7. Video Ads (what facebook plans to launch shortly)

8. Ads sent as direct sms messages or embedded into free sms messages
8. Location-based Ads

With more content being consumed on the mobile devices now, certainly there would be more scope for ads placement in the context of various mobile applications in future.

The Ad ecosystem typically consists of Advertisers (like HUL and MakeMyTrip) and Publishers (like Times Of India and Rediff) with Ad-Networks (AdMob from Google, InMobi) to bridge them. From the functionality perspective, not much has changed in the Internet ad-world for the last few years; but, there is significant improvement in the business models, reach or coverage and analytics on the ads showcased to provide performance reports.

With convergence of traditional media (print, television and radio), communications (telecom networks) and Internet, the scope for more ad-business in Mobile domain is only bound to increase in future.

I might buy more Noodles or Panneer in a neighbouring outlet soon, influenced by the contextual Ads on my Mobile :-)

Indian Films and TV Shows on Youtube

Have you missed watching your favorite TV show last night? No problem. You would most likely find it on Youtube.

Youtube, from Google, offers a platform to share videos with the public. Anyone can create an account with Google and upload videos under that account for free (limited to 15 minutes for public; a partner has different offerings) while adhering to Google's terms of service. One can browse, search and play videos available on Youtube. One can also subscribe to channels, which allows a user to stay tuned with the updates in that channel.

There are separate sections on Films, Music, Education and even TV Shows; the last one can be found at http://www.youtube.com/shows. There are lot of shows from Indian TV Channels as well. Classic shows like Mahabharat, Ramayana and Chanakya can be viewed in this section. Women who watch soaps can be happy to play their favorite shows at any time (though slightly delayed). There are shows and films (yes, full length movies but a small collection) in regional languages too. If you can watch some advertisements in-between you can watch these videos for free.

Youtube's site mentions that 48 hours of content is uploaded to the site every minute, which makes it 8 years worth of content every day !

I would like to catch-up with my favorite 'Chanakya' series sometime :-)

Watching Indian TV Channels Live on Internet for Free

My kid is not well and could not go to school today. If at all someone watches TV at home, when she is around, that would be her. It is fun initially, but it is also difficult to watch waybuloos and Tombliboos (characters in Cbeebies programs) repeatedly with them. Today being the budget day in India, I wanted to get hold of remote control to watch the budget sessions live. Hard luck !

I thought I shall check-out the India news websites periodically in the day to get budget updates. But then I was wondering - If I have a 512 Kbps bandwidth broadband connection at home, why not watch Live TV on the Internet? I was happy to get live streaming of Times NOW channel on the Net at http://live.indiatimes.com. Almost all the business and news channels - NDTV at http://www.ndtv.com/video/live/channel/ndtv24x7, CNBC TV18 at http://moneycontrol.com/tv/ and Bloomberg TV at http://yourmoneysite.com - have their live presence on the Internet. You might want to check-out links to other Indian channels online at http://watch.squidtv.net/asia/india.html.

With the evolution of Internet, the convergence of traditional and Internet broadcasting is bound to happen. How does it matter whether the feed comes from the Internet or through a traditional set-top-box at home?

E-Commerce India - Watching Movies Online

You like watching movies? Are you a net Junkie as well? Then you can mix your work with pleasure by watching movies online. http://bigflix.com, a service from Reliance BIG Entertainment, offers thousands of movies across multiple Indian languages. One just needs a computer with Internet connection and appropriate speaker system.

One can watch 10 minutes of movies on the site for free. After that the site says you can subscribe by paying Rs.249/- per month. If I can get to watch any movie of my choice (in that list) for that price, I would be tempted to take the service. I can watch the movies online or download them for my leisurely watching. But the content is DRM protected (Is Flipkart going to introduce Video-on-demand service with DRM-free content like in the case of MP3 songs?), which prohibits me from transferring the content to another system. There are some free movies, trailers and TV content as well on this site.

http://seventymm.com was offering another such service in India earlier, but they moved into e-commerce domain lately.

This Video-on-demand service (end-point could be TV or Computer) would grow much bigger for the following reasons:

1. 13 million plus broadband connections and growing in India

2. 100 million plus Internet users

3. India is the largest producer of films in the world !

4. Movies is the #1 entertainment in India still

But there is nothing like Politics reality-show on TV News channels in India :-)

E-Commerce India - Flipkart and legal MP3 music download

There are many sites on Internet which allow MP3 music download but they do not offer legal or genuine mp3 songs for download. For the first time in India, here comes an e-commerce site http://flipkart.com, which offers legal download of songs in MP3 format. Flipkart has released this new offering, brand named flyte, over the last week-end.

I can browse through songs in different languages, genres, albums and tracks. I can also listen to samples of tracks before buying them. The best part is the ability to purchase (make online payments using credit card, debit card or even net banking) and download individual tracks. This would precisely help me browse and add only specific tracks (not entire albums) to my cart and download them all in one go.

Another good part is that I can transfer my downloaded songs on to any of my personal devices. If I get an opportunity to collect all my favorite songs in one format and can play them on all my personal gadgets - smartphone, MP3 player, Car stereo, Laptop or Personal Computer, what more can I ask for, as a music lover?

Online Music in India

When I was going to school way back in 80's, one priceless possession for all of us at home, was a sony tape-recorder cum radio. It's a small 'boom-box' type device, which is a fond object of one and all at home. We siblings used to follow laborious process to get songs of our interest recorded, to listen to them in this boom-box, when we come back from school. We sit together, list out all the songs of our interest, go buy an empty tape cassette, go to the recording guy and sit with him to identify if he can record all of these songs and go back after a day or two to get the recorded tape. Once recorded, we used to listen to that till the tape gets wrangled and unusable.

In the Internet Age, the above process is unthinkable. iPods and other MP3 players have changed the world completely. The songs are all available over the Internet for free. There are sites like http://gaana.com,  http://saavn.com, http://musicindiaonline.com and http://raaga.com, which allow streaming of songs over the Net. I can create my own playlist and play all those songs repetitively as long as I have a network connection from my device. A broadband connection, with unlimited download capacity, is quite common these days, which makes my song-listening experience enjoyable all the time at home.

I still want to keep that sony tape-recorder as it would become an expensive vintage item soon :-)

News about India and World

After the publishing technology has evolved, news has become easily accessible to one and all. Initially, the newspapers carried around the news from across the globe and reached our doorsteps. We are witness to our previous generation waiting for the newspaper in the morning to know what is happening around the world - global, national and local. 

In modern days, newspapers is just one channel to access news. Information technology has made it feasible to make the news available in 'real-time'. There are umpteen sites on the Internet, who brings news to the people. 

My favourite website to check-out the news used to be http://rediff.com. In the beginning of the new millennium, this site used to provide news in a crisp landing page. I think they have moved away from their original intent to provide news and diversified into online shopping, social networking and sleazy content to attract traffic to their site. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com and http://ndtv.com who have online presence in news domain with channels on Internet as well as traditional television. These days, every media company offering news through television has their active presence on Internet and try to engage with the viewers in different ways. 

Though I check news on the Internet, I haven't stopped buying news paper yet - umpteen reasons !

Animation wonder !

I love animation movies. I admire this division of IT for the sheer creativity it brings out of humans. Are we all not tired of the repetitive love story themes of bollywood / kollywood / tollywood? Kudos to Pixar animations which brought many animation characters to life using advanced computer graphics technology.  Though my all time favorite movie is 'Ice Age' (which is created by Blue Sky Studios belonging to 20th Century Fox), my heart goes to Pixar for introducing the animation feature films and producing best of the lot.

Pixar has produced twelve animation feature films:

1. Toy Story in 1995

2. A Bug's Life in 1998

3. Toy Story 2 in 1999
4. Monsters, Inc. in 2001
5. Finding Nemo in 2003
6. The Incredibles in 2004
7. Cars in 2006
8. Ratatouille in 2007

9. WALL-E in 2008

10. Up in 2009

11. Toy Story 3 in 2010
12. Cars 2 in 2011

Have you wondered how many hours of happiness all these films would have brought to kids across the globe?

It would be unfair not to mention late Steve Jobs, a major share holder in Pixar, who brought all the above marvels through Pixar studios.

Steve Jobs said: “You know, we don’t grow most of the food we eat. We wear clothes other people make. We speak a language that other people developed. We use mathematics that other people evolved… I mean, we’re constantly taking things. It’s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human experience and knowledge.”

E-Commerce India - For the book lovers...

If I want to buy books online, I tend to go to http://flipkart.com. That is the de facto site for me to browse books and buy them - if I find ones of my liking. No more going to the book-shops. Saves me irritation from driving in traffic and also time. I can enjoy the luxury of browsing books according to my whim and fancy, without having to move across sections in the physical book store. Hopping from one book to another relevant one through recommendations is a boon to book lovers.

There is no doubt that brick-and-mortar book stores had negative impact after the online ones have become popular.

Publishers have nothing to lose as their sales have increased rather.Customers like me are having fun with browsing all the books online - definitely the beneficiary in the whole game ! Isn't that not the crux of any business - making customer happy?