This clearly allows Microsoft to reach out to a larger base and take a considerable share in the worldwide search traffic. Microsoft will also have immense opportunity to establish Bing and its self serving advertising plaftform, giving serious competition to Google

Some other key highlights of the agreement as per the official press release:

•    The 10 year agreement entitles Microsoft a 10 year exclusive license to integrate Yahoo’s core search technology with its own

•    Yahoo and Microsoft would continue to maintain their sales force and advertising business

•    Yahoo to get remuneration from Microsoft through a revenue sharing agreement based on the traffic generated from owned and operated (O&O) sites as well as affiliates

•    Guaranteed revenue per search (RPS) for Yahoo! in every country for the first 18 months after initial implementation

The two companies would however continue to compete in all the other areas such as email, display advertising, instant messaging and other web properties.

The deal was announced after months of speculation and denials by both the parties.
Both Microsoft and Yahoo! have been contemplating over ways to curtail the dominance of Google in the search market.

Many analysts, industry experts and even shareholders of Yahoo! were not very happy with the deal as there is no cash payment involved. The agreement would have to get regulatory approval before closing.

The agreement opens up a new front to tackle Google’s supremacy. The new alliance will also affect search advertising and user experience to a great extent. Whether it would be successful in slicing a portion of Google’s share is yet to be seen.

Is this the end of Google’s domination? Digimouth welcomes its readers to share their views on this agreement.

A new multi-medium campaign that’s already started with a TV commercial would be supported by print, outdoor and online advertising. This 360  campaign is the second biggest for Reliance Broadband after the high profile promotion for its GSM launch earlier this year.

The new campaign developed by TribalDDB India, is aimed at people who need to access high speed internet anytime, anywhere.
Sanjay Behl, Head of Marketing at Reliance Communication explained that the campaign reflects the aspirations of new age Indian consumers who want to stay in touch and have access to information and entertainment all the time.

Much has gone behind this campaign as the agency conducted a detailed research across the country to feel the pulse of internet users.  Based on the findings and the USP of wireless broadband, the campaign portrays young professionals and students expressing their desire to do various things online from outdoor locations.

Reliance Communication is the leading wireless provider in India with its CDMA 1X technology. Reliance Netconnect Broadband+ made a history of sorts when it received more than 50,000 pre-bookings through its special online pre-booking campaign before the launch. Reliance Netconnect Broadband+ service is available in 35 cities throughout the country.

Reliance has developed a special microsite www.goforit.co.in for this banner ad campaign. The site allows users to call up anyone in India (yes even STD calls) for 1 minute between 9. AM and 9 PM. All you have to do to make the call is provide your friend’s name and cell number along with your details. The call is absolutely free.

The online campaign was launched simultaneously on 8th of June on leading Indian portals like Rediff.com, Indiatimes.com, Yahoo.co.in, NDTV.com and has received a tremendous response since then. The online campaign had more than 26,000 call requests within just 24 hours from the launch. The response rate can be termed as healthy as there were more than 10,000 unique users.

The campaign is just an experimental for brand building and is not meant for lead generation. Reliance’s latest TV commercial features Bollywood Star Hrithik Roshan reaching out to his old friends. The idea behind the campaign was to take further the TV commercial by allowing users to make free calls from the microsite.

Reliance is aiming at reaching nearly 45-55 percent of the online users in the next three to four weeks. It would use ad networks like Network Play, Komli Media and Tribal Fusion and several other websites for close to 250 million ad impressions.

Reliance is one of the many leading Indian brands that have realised the potential of digital marketing.  The company is spending about 4% of its total advertising budget on digital marketing.

Services like 3G are mostly used by internet savvy customers. Reliance wants to reach out to all these users by using a combination of online and mobile advertising.

If you are thinking that this would be just another social networking platform, then you’re mistaken! Known for its innovations, this latest offering from Google will definitely send ripples in the world of online communication and interaction.

So what exactly is Google Wave all about?

Imagine Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and Friendfeed all combined into one. Well, that’s what the team behind Google Wave had in mind when it started building a prototype two years ago.

As Google itself puts it, “Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.”

The idea is to bridge the gap between different forms of online communication like email and IM by using a single platform for ‘real time’ interaction.

How will it help you?

Well, if you use email, IM, micro blogging, photo sharing, online collaboration tools, maps etc. you would no longer have to use them all separately. Google Wave would get them all at a single place. With Google Wave, you can create a ‘wave’ and add your friends, colleagues or just about anyone you want and start communicating in ‘real time’ with the help of richly formatted text, gadgets, photos and feeds from multiple other sources on the internet.

Okay, but what’s so different about it?

Google Wave would take online communication to a whole new level. To give you an idea, you would be able to watch other people in your wave type and edit in real time as if you are sitting right next to them, thanks to concurrent rich-text editing!
You can work with your colleagues on that all important presentation, discussing, making changes and doing it all in real time using Google Wave. Communicate, interact, and collaborate all at once!

Is that all?

With Google Wave, you can “playback” or rewind the wave and see the project or wave right from the beginning. You can see who did what, when and how. Of course, there would be privacy settings to ensure that you have control over who does and sees what.

Google Wave brings in several useful features that can really change the way you communicate and interact online.

• Embed the waves into your websites, blogs, etc.
• See each and every character that people in your wave are typing, as they type.
• With the playback option, you can add people to your wave at any point, not just at the start or end. The other users subscribed to the wave can rewind and go through the entire conversation.
• Edit messages written by you or any other user. The original author is notified (like Wiki). Other users can replay the wave and make changes.
• No need to attach any files. Simply drag and drop files into the wave for everyone to view and share it.
• Get suggestions for spellings through natural language tools

You can use audio, video, images, rich text all at once. Based on the Gmail philosophy, where you don’t have to delete a message, you can export your wave if it gets too big and just continue from there.

Open platform means endless possibilities

Google has made Wave open for developers to create and add to its usefulness before throwing it open to the public. Google Wave would support all the gadgets of iGoogle or OpenSocial. The gadgets can be used by everyone on the wave and would not be limited to a single user.

Google Wave has some useful built in gadgets like Maps to organise an event, Bloggy to turn your blog post into a wave, Polly to help you embed a poll into a wave, Spelly to get your spellings right, etc. Expect some real interactive games to be developed using the Wave platform.

It’s still some time for Google Wave to reach the public shore

While Google Wave is open for developers, users will have to wait for a while before it goes live to the public. Google would also want to launch it at the earliest to ensure that it stays ahead of the competition.

Wave or Grave?

While Google Wave looks promising, there are many who are concerned about its security, reliability and most of all, its usefulness. Social networking sites are prone to virus attacks and various other security threats. With so much personal information at stake, the concerns are not unwarranted.

Google Wave would have to store and manage extremely large volumes of data while ensuring that there are no service outages. The internet bandwidth requirements would also be considerably higher for Google Wave, raising serious concerns about its usage in countries like India, where majority of the users still do not have fast broadband connections.

If you would like to get the latest updates on Google wave, you can sign up here

We’ll also keep you posted about the developments right here on Digimouth.