Smart Techie, India’s leading technology magazine, has chosen Dot Com Infoway as the Top Mobile App Company in India. In its latest issue (January 2011), Smart Techie has crowned Dot Com Infoway (DCI) as the Top Most Promising Mobile App Company in India, appreciating it for being a pioneer in the Indian mobile app market. [...]
Source: Karthick
Forget iPads and smartphone apps – in India, the real “new media” are basic feature phones.
Media companies aren’t letting the market’s relative technological immaturity stand in their way – they’re embracing new opportunities using old media
“People are buying $50 phones that can only make a call – so we’ve given that access to all kinds of content on a multimodal number,” the digital VP of News Corp.‘s Star TV, Lalit Bhagia, told Digital Content Monetisation Europe in London on Tuesday.
“(Providers in India) are providing subscription content on voice. People pay half a dollar a month to listen to old movies.” Bhagia calls it “audio cinema”.
“The kinds of stuff that has worked well is converting a two-and-a-half hour Bollywood movie in to 30- to 40-minute audio content which they listen to on the mobile.” The library ranges from classic flicks like Sholay to new releases, with one hour of free listening per month. But it’s not just cinema Indians are subscribing to…
“If you missed your favourite TV show, you can dial a number and listen to your favourite show,” Bhagia said. There are also TV-related contests and an intriguing take on the familiar microblogging…
“Like with Twitter and stuff, the stars leave audio blogs – whether they were catching a taxi, or are on set, or what they’re eating,” Bhagia. Some of the most popular movie personalities count as many as 700,000 to a million subscribers paying to dial up to their latest audio status updates (Ev and Biz, take note).
With nearly 700 million mobile phones in circulation in India – more than TV sets – it’s a significant opportunity, even given the low subscription rates of 20 to 50 cents a month for such a service.
“It’s a crime to limit new media just to laptops and iPads, there’s so much more,” Bhagia told paidContent:UK. “Mobile is already reaching a lot of people that can’t afford a television. For a lot of people, the only means of entertainment is mobile.”
But in overseas markets, Star TV plans to court an international audience of 22 million south Asians with a very digital paid subscription video offering.
“It’s a whole different ballgame, opening up international distribution arrangements (with cable operators),” Bhagia said. “But we now have the possibility to charge them through the internet.”
Source: Robert Andrews
Our full-day namesake conference covers the subject from every relevant angle. Last year, senior business executives from across the content industry came together for paidContent 2010, eager to share possible solutions and find new ones for making digital content pay without pinning it all on advertising. Now the story continues at paidContent 2011: The Next Decade In Digital Content on March 3 at TheTimesCenter.
The setting is the same — and some of the players will be, too — but much has changed and much more is in the works: the next act for wireless tablets now that iPad has set a scorching pace and Android is in the hunt; the ripple effects from the just-approved merger of Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) and NBCU (NYSE: GE) Universal; Hulu’s venture in subscriptions and the Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) response; shifts in the local landscape with the advent of Patch and the Groupon effect; the FTCs push for Do Not Track; the ascendancy of e-reading across dedicated devices and platforms. And, by then, Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad Daily should be out while the Gray Lady should be on the verge of unveiling her new metered look.
The day will include Q&As with:
» Lauren Zalaznick, currently president, NBC Universal Women & Lifestyle Entertainment Networks, and, once the Comcast-NBCU merger closes, chairman, Entertainment & Digital Networks/Integrated Media in the post-Comcast NBCU
» Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, who will be interviewed by Reuters’ blogger Felix Salmon, bringing their spirited online discussions to the stage
» Dan Rose, VP, Partnerships and Platform Marketing for Facebook, and an Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) alum who helped incubate the Kindle and serves on the Borders board.
And info-packed sessions featuring leading executives, including:
» Jim Bankoff, CEO, SB Nation
» Deanna Brown, president & COO, Federated Media
» Lisa Frazier, CEO, The Bay Citizen
» Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com
Plus Forrester’s Sarah Rotman Epps on How The New Tablets Will Change Your Content Strategy
This is just the beginning. We’ll be announcing more in the days ahead. We’re not actively seeking speaker submissions at this point but, as always, you can send suggestions to events AT contentnext.com and on our speaker suggestion form.
Our sponsors are Gigya Freewheel and Oracle. If you’re interested in joining them, please contact our sales staff at ads AT contentnext.com.
Source: Staci D. Kramer
Dot Com Infoway (DCI) Mobile Studios’ iOS app team was ecstatic when the news of the Apple App Store having crossed another milestone by hitting 10 billion downloads came out on the Apple website. The team has been following the app download ticker on the Apple website for a while now since many of DCI’s [...]
Source: Karthick
A Harvard professor has accused Google for biased search results. He attacked the search engine giant for giving preference to its own product. Ben Edelman released his study ‘Measuring Bias in Organic Web Search‘ which attempts to measure bias in the organic search results of Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, and Ask. It claims that Google [...]
Source: Karthick