Interview with Dippak Khurana, Co-Founder and CEO, Vserv Digital Services

Vserv, the Mobile ad network recently got a huge funding from IDG Ventures. We interviewed Mr. Dippak Khurana, Co Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Vserv Digital Services to find out more.

Tell us something about this investment.
Vserv has received $3 million is A series funding from IDG Ventures which is a leading Venture Capital fund , investing in technology related products and services. Given their vast experience in dealing with new media technology and global network of investments, we chose to work with them. As part of the investment, Manik Arora and Karan Mohla from IDG Ventures will be joining Vserv’s Board of Directors.  

How will Vserv’s new funding be invested?
With the funds we plan to expand our sales and engineering teams to drive sales growth in India and internationally. We also plan to utilize the funds to extend our offerings to Android Apps and further develop our monetization solutions for the global App developer community.

Foresight – Vserv in the next 2 years in terms of investment
With the funds, we will be able to start seeding our international expansion. Once we are able to built momentum we shall start looking for Series B in the next 12-18 months.

Has Vserv received any other funding apart from this investment?
We acquired an Angel investment of US$ 0.2 million in from Mr. Ajay Adiseshann in Jan 2010.  

Mobile advertisement in India – present and future scope
As we all know small is big. Mobile Screen is the most accessible screen for today’s consumer. With better connectivity and feature rich phones and short format content, users are being drawn to consume content on the go. Today there are about 40 million + mobile internet users in India alone. The number of mobile internet users in India will be twice of number of PC internet users in a couple of years.

Mobile Internet Advertising market in India is estimated to be US$15-20 Million.
As per Gartner, worldwide mobile advertising revenue is set to reach $3.3 billion in 2011 and the mobile advertising market for Asia/Pacific and Japan is set to account for 49.2 percent of this market. The global In-App advertising market will grow from US$900 million this year to roughly $5 Billion in 2015 according to IDC. Taking these figures into consideration the future of mobile advertisement market in India looks bright.

How are you betting with the 3G technology?
3G is definitely a big booster for the Indian mobile advertising market. Because of more bandwidth and high speed data transfer, consumers will be accessing all their digital content on the mobile phone. Since the market goes where the consumer is, mobile will be a new medium for advertisers and publishers to reach out to their consumers.  

How is your technology different from your competitors’?
Vserv’s unique App Ad-Wrapper technology for J2ME Apps has been well received by the global developer community as it can support over 500 phone models and allows both new and existing Apps to be Ad-Wrapped and monetized. Vserv is the first company globally to have developed a unique App Ad-Wrapper solution for J2ME Apps and is now extending this solution to Android Apps

Which are the top countries with maximum J2ME downloads
Currently the top countries with maximum J2ME downloads are China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the U.K. and Vietnam.

Interview with Alap Ghosh, Head of Sales for Mobango

We recently interviewed Mr. Alap Ghosh, Head of Sales for Mobango, the country's largest independent free app store. Alap has worked with several mobile innovators like Enpocket (mobile advertising) and Activemedia Technology (mobile loyalty) and is a veteran in the operator and consumer mobile applications domain. Having the experience of building and marketing large scale operator grade applications and nation-wide mobile marketing and advertising campaigns across hundreds of brands, Alap sees demands for great mobile applications in India rising to new heights, with smarter cheaper devices, mCommerce and technology savvy brands leading the way.

Here is the complete interview with Mr. Ghosh



How did the app rage start? Who is the pioneer?
I would say Apple as a pioneer and their release of the iTunes App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch on July 10, 2008 formed a major turning point in the direction of mobile application development. Mobile applications are around for a very long time. SMS services were apps in their most rudimentary form. It was only when Apple made people realize the need for entertainment and activity on the move and made developers realize the revenue potential is great quality applications did apps really take off.

What are the new trends in the app space?
Social connectivity is definitely a flavor of the season for applications. Apps have increasingly shown the capability to connect with and interact with a per group or social influence circle from within an app. This trend is at its peak now. Developers are experimenting with the right mechanisms to deploy social features within their apps.

Mobango has a unique business model called the Pay Per Download, which are the emerging business opportunities?
Pay per download (PPD) is a model that allows app developers to gain maximum return of investment on their user acquisition. Large developers have an evolved practice of buying media in the form of banners and text ads on mobile phones to inform users of their application and have them download it. This, however, lands up being expensive since there is no guarantee that the user who is seeing the ad is interested in the app. There is also no assurance that once a user clicks on the ad, they are interested in the application. Worse, some users might not even have downloaded an application before thus being unable to download at all. App stores attract audiences that are pre-trained in downloading, installing, using and rating applications. App store users are hence the best people to market new applications to. Mobango further eliminates all media buying risk by offering the developer Pay Per Download where the developer pays only for a successful download and not for clicks or ad displays. PPD is offered by many app stores, thought Mobango’s differentiation is that it is platform or geography agnostic.

Mobango generated 200,000 downloads (DLF IPL app) in 10 days, were there any social media initiatives. Tell us about the traffic on Mobango.
Unlike most common app stores, Mobango offers FREE content, mobile storage (through WAP Locker features) and apps. Users have never needed to pull out their credit cards to get an app or a piece of content from Mobango. Because of this, users coming to Mobango are not only habitual application consumers that are driven by need and necessity. Mobango has a healthy mix of casual and serious users that are looking for entertainment in the form of games, videos, themes, ringtones and wallpapers as well as functionality through apps. This gives our advertising developers a greater and more varied mix of audiences for their apps.

What are the latest innovations we will see in the near future?
We’re very optimistic in seeing apps that feature hardware functions like gyro sensors, accelerometers  GPS and NFC. We’re also hoping that with ad platforms like VServ, who happens to be a close Mobango partner, we will see a lot of paid features and advanced levels in games becoming free to the user. We’re expecting a slew of unified messengers that are promising to reduce clutter and provide social messaging integrated into handsets. These are exciting times for mobile app lovers.
 
What are your investment/expansion plans?
Mobango is investing a lot of time and energy in building a great user experience and introducing new product functionalities that enable users to search and discover their applications and content more quickly.   We are evaluating a set of partnerships around advertisement revenue models.  Some of these discussions are preliminary and confidential, and we will share an update shortly.

What is the future of mobile advertising?
Mobile advertising on the whole has still to go through a phase of rationalization where stakeholders will have to relook at their plans and motivators and come up with a fresh approach. The publisher acquisition frenzy for WAP has just slowed down with major participants having hoisted their flags. The new wave, which is of most relevance and shows most promise to us, is in-app advertising. Though very nacent, in-app advertising offers a larger, more captive display area with potential rich media capabilities like video and audio accompanying display. Further, advertiser data collection, feedback and social media interactions built in, in-app advertising could drive the next wave of consumer satisfaction on the mobile, using better apps and games reaching markets for free, subsidized by advertising.

Your views on 'free content drives mobile app market'
We believe that a store that sells just one kind of product, strains that single product line with the entire responsibility of attracting consumers and bringing retailers and advertisers good returns. We offer apps, games, videos, ringtones, wallpapers and very soon, free music and movies. Our goal is to make sure our users may never need to go to another mobile destination again, for any reason or purpose. If asked how close are we to our goal, we’re the world’s largest mobile user content and rich content app-store community. I’d say we have our goal firmly in sight.

We hope you enjoyed reading it.

Exclusive Interview with Abhijit Saxena - CEO, netCORE Solutions

Last year in June, netCORE Solutions Pvt. Ltd. announced the launch of MyToday SMS SuperStore. With close to 300 subscriptions to choose from, MyToday SMS SuperStore is the Biggest SMS SuperStore. We spoke to  Mr. Abhijit Saxena, CEO of netCORE Solutions Pvt. Ltd and asked him about the challenges faced, response from users and lots more. Here is an exclusive interview with Mr. Abhijit Saxena

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1. It has been about 7 months since you launched the premium version of MyToday. What have been the major challenges faced?

It is much more than just a premium version of our free service. First, we moved from an ad-supported to a subscriber-paid model. Second, we opened our platform up to any partner who wants to provide quality content. So it's a mobile VAS marketplace now. Third, while we have started with SMS subscriptions, this marketplace will host mobile products and services beyond SMS too. 

Because this is a direct-to-consumer business, our challenges have been two-fold - reach and payments friction. Our focus now is to deliver the best possible service experience before any major scaleup.

2. What has been feedback from your users?

It has been very positive. Of everyone who tried MyToday, over 50% have wanted to pay for it. This includes people for whom this was their first MyToday experience. Our customers are delighted by two things: one, the sheet variety of SMS subscriptions in our catalog -  we have close to 300 subscriptions to choose from - which they cannot find anywhere else and two, even for mainstream content like news, cricket, Bollywood, the great value for money that we offer. About 10% of all our subscribers have 'gifted' some part of their prepaid balance to friends and family and signed them on to MyToday. Almost 80% of all our subscribers have said they would recommend MyToday to other people. We have also signed up over 30 content partners, who are among the best in their sector. They are very excited about MyToday because this is a great way for them to tap into a new medium - mobile - in addition to their existing media (whether print, TV or web).

3. What are people willing to pay for?

A very wide variety of SMS subscriptions. With such a service there is no point in looking at what is 'doing well', because it's a marketplace. Whatever content has mass appeal - astrology, cricket, entertainment and similar - will have higher numbers of subscribers. But the real value of MyToday is that because of the wide range of content, there is always something that appeals to you. A large number of our niche SMS channels have small numbers of highly loyal subscribers. But together they make up a very large number.

While the median price of a subscription is Rs. 10, the average recharge amount is Rs. 140! Which means people are paying for more than 1 year's subscription up-front. The popularity of cheque as a payment method is also encouraging - our surveys indicated that people would prefer dropping a cheque to Netcore in their nearest ATM, so we rolled out such a method. This accounts for about 40% of all our payments now. Most also subscribe to two or more subscriptions. Finally, we have worked hard to bring our payment transaction error rate down to 10%. This is far better than the industry standard.

4. Are you finding it difficult to convince people to use your Premium service?

Not at all. The intent to pay is astonishingly high, over 50% as I said. We have been vindicated in our bet that there is a large mass of people who want to move beyond voice, ring-tones and wallpapers. And as we continue innovating with payment collection methods, we will be able to ramp up conversions even higher.

5. How many SMSes do you send per day?

The absolute number will increase with the increase in subscribers, so it is irrelevant. Most of our 'live update' SMS channels send anywhere between 4 to 6 updates a day. Most of our 'SMS packs' send anywhere between 1 and 2 SMSes a day. The key is to be predictable, your customer expects that SMS from MyToday at a set moment in his or her day.

6. What are the opportunities that you see in the space?

There are tremendous opportunities in the direct-to-consumer VAS space. Beyond SMS there are opportunities for every kind of content that can be consumed on the mobile device - whether it is multimedia, gaming, other published material, networking, local services, plugging into Government services and so much more. A huge number of Indians treat their mobile device as their identity. It is through this device that they interact with the world around them. How can we build services for that?

7. What are your plans for the current year in terms of new innovative value added services?

Like I said at the beginning, our first area of focus is delivering the best possible experience for our current service, including content quality, reliability, communication, payment collection. Once we have achieved that, we can tap into any of the opportunities I outlined in your previous question. Netcore has tremendous reach via voice, email and SMS, so we have the ability to dramatically scale. Finally, we are also creating a large distribution setup so that purchase and recharge of our mobile VAS services becomes much easier.

8. As Cricket World Cup is round the corner, are you planning to come up with any special Cricket World Cup Packs?

Yes certainly. We will launch a pack specially for the World Cup that offers great content and great value for money. We are also considering similar packs for the World Cup and beyond. We will have details on www.mytoday.com as we introduce these packs.

Interview with Sagar Bedmutha, Founder & CEO of Optinno Mobitech Pvt Ltd

Mr. Sagar Bedmutha is Founder and CEO of Optinno Mobitech Pvt Ltd, a mobile app development company. Two popular applications of Optinno Mobitech which are currently available are Mobiwatchman and smsBlocker. Mobiwatchman blocks unwanted calls and SMSes ans smsBlocker blocks unwanted SMSes. We recently reviewed smsBlocker, you can read the review here.

Mr. Sagar candidly answered our questions about Optinno Mobitech. We hope you will enjoy the interview.

Q : Congratulations for winning AppContest at NASSCOM Emergeout Conclave. What does this achievement mean to you?
Thanks for the appreciation. By the way, after winning the AppFAME contest by NASSCOM, we also won the Top App award from Forum Nokia. So it was Double Delight for us.

These awards mean a lot to us. They have come from the industry leaders. Hence they have added immense credibility to smsBlocker. The uniqueness & utility value of smsBlocker has been aptly recognized by NASSCOM & Forum Nokia. We feel greatly honored & encouraged with these prizes.

Q : Optinno's two apps Mobiwatchman and smsBlocker are currently in the market. What are the future plans of Optinno Mobitech?
Broadly, we will continue to innovate in mobile domain with focus on the mobile apps.

Q : Both Mobiwatchman are available only for Symbian S60 series phones only. Why these apps are not available for other platforms?
Both of our apps need deep level message & call handling OS capabilities. Only Symbian offers such capabilities. As far as other platforms are concerned, we’ll have them included whenever possible.

Q : So what is next for Mobiwatchman & smsBlocker?
There will be upgraded versions available with increased accuracy for spam blocking (currently they can catch almost 90% of spam on their own). The UI will be even simpler.

Q : How do you view the new NDNC regulations affecting Mobiwatchman & smsBlocker?
First of all, nobody (including the regulators) know the exact nature and effectiveness of the new regulations. And we are tapping the international market also. So change in regulation in India will not affect.

Q : Has Optinno Mobitech achieved break-even point in terms of revenues?
Not yet. But we are fast approaching that.

Q : Lastly, Share your views about MobiGyaan.com
MobiGyaan is a fantastic platform for Mobile enthusiast. It has helped us a lot in getting the timely information on what’s happening in mobile industry and also to reach to avid readers across India.

Interview with Rajesh Jain, Founder and MD of Netcore Solutions Pvt Ltd

Mr. Rajesh Jain is Founder and Managing Director of Netcore Solutions Pvt Ltd , the company behind MyToday SMS SuperStore. MyToday is a web and SMS-based service where you can subscribe to premium SMS updates on over 200 exciting topics, from Bollywood to Breaking news, from Home tips to Health advice, from Spirituality to Self-improvement, from Puzzles to Politics and much more.

Interview with Ashish Kashyap, CEO of ibibo web Pvt. Ltd.

What is the total demand that is being created for the mobile social network in the country?
The demand for mobile social networking has only been on the upswing. It can be seen that there are mobile operators who are vying to get the best social networking sites on board so that the consumer can use the social networking experience at their fingertips. Social Networking is now not only restricted to the PC, the mobile has also become a major player and the mobile operators are en cashing upon this opportunity to also create a demand for themselves.

What are the different services that are being offered by ibibo on the mobile ? How is ibibo trying to leverage the mobile user base to come onto its site?
ibibo's philosophy has been to evagelize the tastes of the consumer always, and keeping this in mind, it has launched a set of different and state of the art services such as playing the immensely popular game called 'Great Indian Parking Wars'. Apart from this there are free sms that a user can send and also interconnect with friends through ibibo mobile.

There are a lot of other exciting initiatives that are there on the anvil which would enlighten the entire mobile Social Networking experience.

What has been the response of the services that ibibo has started to offer to its mobile users? Which services are regareded to be the most popular ?
The response has been tremendous on the aspect of having services active on the mobile. We are seeing a lot of traction coming our way from the mobile consumers.

What are ibibo's future plans when it comes to mobile gaming ? How many games does the site currently have which are active on the mobile?
ibibo has certain plans when it comes to the mobile gaming domain. When 3G actually takes its full shape it will be interesting to note that the mobile gaming domain would also benefit from this. There are going to be certain games that we are going to launching on the mobile so that that particular user base also comes to us.

As far as the active gaming content is concerned till now there is a game called The Great Indian Parking Wars that is available on the mobile for the users to play. There are few other games on the anvil that we are planning to launch once the 3G effect takes its full shape.

What weight age do you think that ibibo would garner with the recent partnership with Aircel?
It has already started attracting users from the Aircel community to log onto ibibo. This would eventually turn out to be a very fruitful partnership between the two corporate entities. And it is for sure that there is going to be a lot of benefits that ibibo would be drawing from this alliance.

Exclusive Interview with Suresh Narasimha, CEO of TeliBrahma

We recently interviewed Mr. Suresh Narasimha, CEO of TeliBrahma. TeliBrahma started its journey in 2004 and recognized by Red Herring as one of the 'Best Startups in the world. TeliBrahma is the winner of the Red Herring Global 100 Awards 2007. Mr. Suresh Narasimha talked about how can TeliBrahma help end users, unique features of TeliBrahma and more. Check out his exclusive interview.

Tell us about TeliBrahma?

TELiBrahma is a venture funded mobile solutions company with special focus on marketing and government verticals. Our solutions enable brands to deliver rich media engagements to targeted consumers mobile.TELiBrahma has most of major automobile, liquor, FMCG and life style brands as its customers.

How does Telibrahma add value to the end user?

TELiBrahma has created BluFi network across the country in key locations like

• Hangouts ( Barista, Nirulas, Stadiums, Café’s)
• Retail ( Malls, Shoppers stop, Spencers, More, etc) and
• Corporate (Airports, canteens, exhibitions)

BluFi delivers rich media content and location based services to consumers at ZERO cost to them. E.g. Consumers can receive a daily mobile magazine, free mobile games, offers @ the locations and even live sports updates on their mobile.

What are the unique features of Telibrahma?

1. Rich media content, Zero cost of download, Location based targeting of consumers
2. Ability to recognize 2000+ make and models, Range ( Complete stadium has been converted in to BluFi zone)
3. Worlds Largest OOH network integrated with measurement and engagement
4. Innovations like Augmented reality

What is the competition for TeliBrahma?

Internationally there are competitions from the European companies.

What are your observations on Indian mobile scenario?

Brands are looking for innovations in terms of engagement and solutions through mobile. If mobile is offered as an additional “me too media”, there is not much of acceptance.

Does the majority of the participants to your mobile marketing campaigns are youth? Or are there equal distribution of the users?

While in most of the campaign primary target is youth (Skewed between 21 to 26 years), with right call for action and value we have seen other age groups embracing our solutions.

What are the future goals of Telibrahma?

To achieve 10Million ‘downloads’ on a monthly basis, to achieve 10% consistent engagements for the campaigns.