Year: 2011

2010-11: Looking Back, Looking Forward – Part 3

The big new thing that we did in 2010 at NetCore was a stronger focus on Consumers. While that was how we had begun our mobility business 3+ years ago, over the past couple years in our endeavour to ensure profitability, we had reduced focus on this. In 2010, we did two important things – the acquisition of OneIndia and the launch of MyToday.

OneIndia is India’s largest languages portal, with over 9 million unique visitors each month across the web and mobile. It is among the top 3 in each of the four South Indian languages and has been ranked the fourth-largest Indian news site by Comscore. With OneIndia, I am back in the Internet portals space after a gap of a decade. The timing couldn’t have been better – with users and usage growth accelerating.

MyToday was launched in late June 2010 as a direct-to-consumer mobile content marketplace. We have focused on paid SMS subscriptions to begin with. In India, there is a need for more mobile data services which offer simplified publishing and direct billing of consumers. The second problem is especially hard – collecting small amounts of money from consumers with an intent to pay is not easy. We have worked through the past few months to simplify that process.

Both these initiatives will help us in the way I think Digital India will be monetised – advertising on the Internet, and micro-transactions on the mobile.

Continued tomorrow.

2010-11: Looking Back, Looking Forward – Part 2

I can look back at 2010 along three dimensions – NetCore, Politics and Personal. Let me start with NetCore.

2010 was a year to build upon the positive momentum that we had in NetCore in our enterprise mailing and mobility businesses. These are out cash-generating businesses, and we needed to ensure that we sustained the growth in volumes of emails and SMSes to ensure that we benefited from increasing scale. This has worked out very much along the lines we expected.

In enterprise mailing, we have four primary solutions we offer companies: Linux-based mail servers (on the LAN or in the cloud), anti-virus and anti-spam for emails in the cloud, email archiving and high-volume mass mailing. The last two were launched in the previous year. Mailing has been the primary business we have been doing for many years, and we now have a customer base of over 2,000 enterprises in India.

In enterprise mobility, we have three primary offerings: a platform and pipe for transactional SMSes (alerts sent to banks, airlines and others to their customers), SMS-based promotional marketing for branding or new customer acquisition, and end-to-end solutions where SMS integrates into business processes.

There is now good scale across both of these segments to ensure that 2011 is even better for us.

Continued tomorrow.

2010-11: Looking Back, Looking Forward – Part 1

The transition of a year is always a good time to look back at the year that was and look ahead to the year that is coming. There is something about the Christmas-New Year period that seems to make one naturally introspective. Perhaps, it is the combination of the holiday mood all around and the less work that one has! Either way, one tends to start thinking more than usual about things that were and things that are to be.

The only other time that I do some more thinking than usual at the scale of a year or beyond is the Diwali period. But given that now the holidays are limited to just a couple and it is typically the middle of a work quarter, it does not lend itself well to longer-term thinking. But I do hope that I will be able to continue a tradition my father has followed for a few decades – writing out many pages of the year that was in a book for all the family members just before the Lakshmi Puja is done at home. He has done it for as long as I can remember.

This year-end, I decided to take a Think Week off for myself. I have never really done this in my life. I set off alone on a jetplane to meet a friend far far away! It is something I have thought of doing many times, but never got around to doing it. There was always something ‘urgent’ that ensured the idea remained just that. And so here I am, on a long flight, writing out thoughts about two connected years just as one gives way to the other.

Continued tomorrow.

Blog Past: What does India’s Internet Need?

From a post a year ago:

There are two killer services that can help drive demand for home PCs and broadband:

  • Education: Rs 100 per month for an hour of online education daily for kids, as an alternative for parents sending their kids to coaching classes.
  • Mobile Social Networking: Even though this may seem counter-intuitive, a “mobile-first” approach to social networking can help drive PCs and broadband as people want a better experience.

In addition, there needs to be a lot more money in the value chain to drive content and services. Advertising spend is not enough to lubricate the innovation cycle at Internet companies. Something different needs to be done. Internet companies need to think beyond advertising and learn from the world of mobile VAS and get subscribers to pay small amounts of money.

Weekend Reading

This week’s links: