The website has been made keeping in mind the Indian audiences and will contain concentrated analysis, breaking news as well as bulletins which will be specific to the country. Apart from India, Australia as well as New Zealand have got new websites from BBC.

According to Chris Davies, MD of BBC.com,

“At present BBC.com is the leading international news website in Asia-Pacific with 11.1 million unique users per month. These editions are the response to overwhelming audience feedback and testing and will ensure even greater engagement from new and existing users.”

The new website will contain sections like ‘India Direct’,  ‘Generation Asia’ and ‘The New Middle Class’ which will contain commissioned reports by special correspondents.

Says James Montgomery, Digital media Head of BBC Global news,

“In an unstable world and a rapidly developing media environment, these three new editions across Asia reflect the BBC’s commitment to accurate, high-quality and independent news across digital platforms. BBC.com commands levels of trust and relevance unmatched among international news providers – based on expert journalistic analysis around the globe and rooted in a deep understanding of our audiences. The launch of these dedicated editions across Asia Pacific will strengthen that offer still further.”

BBC’s venture into the booming Asian markets was a long planned move. Recently, they recruited a core team for the Asia-Pacific markets to cater to the growing urban audiences there. Apart from this, they launched a new programme called The Power of Asia, which keeps a tab on the economic growth in India.

With the rapidly growing Internet usage in country, many more International players can soon be expected in the lucrative Indian digital market.

New statistics show that Indian LinkedIn users are more active then users from other countries like Australia, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In the month of June, LinkedIn had over 10 million users in India. The website has about a 100 million users around the world.

According to Arvind Rajan, MD at LinkedIn,

“People are surprised at how big LinkedIn is in India. Not only are users going there on a very regular basis, a lot of them are tending to use it as a utility. There has been a change in behavior over the last six months”

LinkedIn is the 14th most visited website in India, says Internet statistics provider, comScore. In the month of August, close to 6 million Indians used the network.

In May, LinkedIn went public with their IPO and managed to raise $352 million. This significant funding managed to enhance the network which gave way to more users around the world, including India.

“From 3.4 million members in November 2009, we have now grown to more than 11 million members in India. We have seen growth acceleration in Q1 and Q2 this year. It’s been turbo charged after the IPO”,

Rajan said.

LinkedIn says that close to 86% of the country’s Internet users do not use LinkedIn. They plan to capitalize on their current popularity and expand their user base in the future.

With the ever rising popularity of Social media in India, it does not seem like a hard task for LinkedIn to complete their future aspirations.

In a new development, Airtel has contacted China’s ZTE to buy Fourth Generation Networks (4G) services for India.

Under the new deal, ZTE will roll ot the 4G services in Kolkata first. After this, they may extend their services to other states depending on the response.

ZTE will be providing the services via its Long Term Evolution Time Division Duplex (LTE-TDD) technology. It is the first venture of the China based development firm in India.

Bharti Airtel had been eyeing the 4G market from quite a while. During the auction for wireless broadband airwaves (BWA), the telecommunications provider has spent Rs. 3314.36 crore.

India is a hotbed for 4G services at the moment. ZTE competitor Huawei has been trying to set its foot in the country’s Market as well.

“If ZTE successfully implements Bharti’s 4G network roll-out in Kolkata, it may be the lead contender for supplying LTE gear for the remaining three circles as well, although it is likely to face stiff competition from Chinese rival company, Huawei for the Karnataka network deal”,

an official at ZTE said.
Airtel chief Sunil Mittal had met ZTE chairman Hou Weigui to talk about the deal recently. But there has been no official comment from Airtel about the development as of now.

Technology will be a major obstacle for the launch of 4G services in India, but Airtel hopes to overcome this by launching LTE – Ready devices in the near future.

Browsing the Internet on mobile phones has become a fast growing concept in India. This new development will help increase the number of users significantly for Airtel.

Ranjit Yadav, the head of the mobile and technology division for Samsung says that they are targetting for a market share of 40% soon.

Currently, Finland based Nokia is leading the mobile market with a 48% share. But their sales figures are diminishing fast. Last year, Nokia had a market share of 81%.

Samsung considers India as its third most important market in the world after the U.S.A and China. In the next three years, Samsung plans to make profits worth $10 billion in India. Apart from mobile phones, Samsung wants to increase the sale of flat screen LCD TV’s in India as well.

India has over 700 million cell phone users and the smartphone market is currently one of the biggest segment in the mobile market of India. Realizing its potential, Samsung plans to increase sales by introducing new products and pushing current products.

For India, Samsung plans to launch several low priced smartphones. With this move, they can have a direct effect on the sale of their major competitor-Apple. iPhone, the current worldwide leader in the global smartphone market is three times more expensive than the prices Samsung are targeting.

The South Korean brand is also relying on the delayed launch of Nokia’s Windows enabled smartphones. Samsung plans to take advantage of the time gap and establish themselves in the Indian Market.

With the new aggressive policies and pricing strategies employed by  Samsung, the war of the smartphones has just got a little more tougher.

Disney plans to invest substantial amounts in the Asian markets for the next few years. In the month of July, the media giant acquired shares worth $454 million in UTV, one of India’s biggest media houses.

The plans for expansion were announced by Jay Rasulo, CFO for Disney at the Communacopia Conference of Goldman Sachs held in New York yesterday.

“Over the last year and a half, we really have taken large steps to take a bigger footprint in other countries. Our brand awareness for Disney is fairly low in India, taking control of a company like UTV can accelerate Disney’s exposure there”,

Rasulo said.

In order to increase their penetration in the market, Disney Interactive will tap the lucrative cellphone market of India and China.With over 700 million mobile users in India, Disney plans to introduce downloadable content for cell phones soon.

“The amount of content that can be downloaded and interacted with even on a $50 mobile phone in the developing world is incredible and was a shock to us”,

Rasulo added.

The decision by Disney seems to come after Jay Rasulo and CEO Bob Iger’s recent India visit.

With the growing use of digital media in South East Asia, it won’t be long before other media houses set their eyes on India and China as an important market.

The portal lets users download various applications ranging from entertainment, news, education, lifestyle and many others.

In order to appeal to the Indian target audiences, the Web Store will have applications from Indian developers put up on the website.

Some apps like the ESPN Cricinfo provide alerts on cricket. Another application, TurboCricket, lets you play a flash version of the game. Other news applications like the Jagran news app lets users read news in Hindi.

Other lifestyle applications like Online radio, Burrp! and Inside Bollywood are also featured on the page.

Recently, we had reported that Google Chrome is one of the most used browsers in India. With the new application page, preference for Google’s browser may just go higher.

Amazon.com, the Seattle based company has already entered the digital book reading market with its popular electronic reader-Kindle. Using Kindle, users can buy and read e-books and other digital content.

According to the proposed plan, the service will start a membership plan where customers will have to pay an annual sum to access media content from Amazon’s library. This concept is similar to that of the popular media library service-Netflix Inc.

Some publishers told the Wall Street Journal that the plans by Amazon were not feasible as it would lead to a dip in the value of the books and could also strain the relationship with their retailers.

With Amazon.com’s plans to launch a tablet to compete with Apple’s iPad, the concept of startinga digital media library may just be a lucrative one.

The shopping portal will compete directly with Indiatimes Shopping, IndiaPlaza and Sify Mall. But Shopping.Expressindia.com surely needs to consider a few factors which could put them back in the race:

- No payment facility via EMIs
- Tie-ups with very few banks
- Though its launched its yet under construction

These few factors could set them back and need to be tended to immediately. We hope to see and hear more from Indian Express and its latest e-commerce venture.

With no revenue sharing it is a clean share swap that is benefiting both the parties. The new entity aims at generating a revenue of Rs. 1000 crore by the end of the fiscal year. As part of their global acquisition strategy Spice will be investing in the merged entity and will be branding the same.

The Essar Group will be their direct competitors as their chain, The Mobile Store, has over 1400 outlets all across India. Currently Cellucom has 120 stores while HotSpot runs 500 mobile retail outlets which still does not match up to the Essar scale.

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