National Telecom Policy 2012 - Web Entrepreneur's Dream Come True

All web entrepreneurs rejoice!

After a very long wait, recommendations, deliberations, the Govt of India has finally given a nod to the National Telecom Policy 2012. So, in the coming 8 years i.e. by 2012, India aims to have a tele-density of 100, i.e. every house hold should have a internet broadband connection with a minimum speed of 2 MBPs.

Read the entire approval of the key points here:
National Telecom Policy 2012 Approval Press Release


The policy envisions providing secure, reliable, affordable and high quality converged telecommunication services anytime, anywhere for an accelerated inclusive socio-economic development. The main thrust of the Policy is on the multiplier effect and transformational impact of such services on the overall economy. The thrust areas of NTP - 2012 are:

• Increase rural teledensity from the current level of around 39 to 70 by the year 2017 and 100 by the year 2020

• Repositioning of Mobile phone- as an instrument of empowerment

• Broadband –“'Broadband For All” at a minimum download speed of 2 Mbps

• Domestic Manufacturing- Making India a global hub

• Convergence of Network, Services and Devices

• Liberalisation of Spectrum- any Service in any Technology

• Simplification of Licensing regime- Unified Licensing, delinking of Spectrum from License, Online real time submission and processing

• Consumer Focus - Achieve One Nation - Full Mobile Number Portability and work towards One Nation - Free Roaming

• Resale of Services

• Voice over Internet Protocol

• Cloud Computing, Next Generation Network including IPV6

The policy seeks to provide a predictable and stable policy regime for a period of about ten years. Policy will be operationalised by bringing out detailed guidelines, as may be considered appropriate, from time to time. Implementation will enable smooth implementation of the policies for providing an efficient telecommunication infrastructure taking into account the primary objective of maximizing public good by empowering the people of India. The policy will further enable taking suitable facilitatory measures to encourage existing service providers to rapidly migrate to the new regime in a uniformly liberalised environment with a level playing field. 

[InfoGrapghic] Google's 2011 Revenue Break-Up - Top Spenders on Google Ad-Words in 2011

© WordStream, Provider of AdWords solutions.

Samsung’s “We’ve Been Samsunged” Super-Bowl Ad-Teaser denting Apple’s Domination?

Have you been Samsunged?

As much as I love Apple for the brilliance in design, precision and high quality prducts, I am getting wooed by Samsung’s recent ad-camapigns. Clearly Samsung is green with envy by Apple products but then they are trying really hard and I must say it can pay off.

Android activation numbers are mind boggling and especially the two recent ad campaigns shows Apple to be buidling green lock-ups to lock people up with their expensive Apps regime. While it projects Samsung to be the cool open world economic app store through Android MarketPlace! It makes Apple fan boys feel bad about:

- The long waits they have to go through during launch of new Apple products
- Paying for apps that Samsung users get free of charge
- And the launch of Apple iPhone 4S while the fans expected iPhone 5

The two recent Samsung Ad-Camapigns saying: “We’ve Been Samsunged” are really poking fun at Apple

1) We’ve been Samsunged: The ad-campaign teaser that Samsung is running for the Super Bowl.

2) And the previously run ad-campaign making Apple fan boys feel bad about standing in queues.

Do you think Samsung’s efforts are really denting Apple’s smartphone domination?

Who in India is Spamming your Inbox?

I am sure every one hates SPAM and we continue to get SPAM in our inboxes. We try all sorts of ways to block SPAM but then email SPAMMERS find new ways to reach our inboxes.

I recently installed Plaxo for my outlook and I was running some filters on it. I created a filter of people who are not in my address-book and have mailed more than 3 times in past 3 weeks. I hit upon over 100 such contacts and started wondering how is this possible that I have over 100 contacts who have mailed over 3 times in the past 3 weeks and they are not in my address book.

I copied all this data in an excel sheet to see what is happening here. Used some quick excel functions to filter out the email addresses using the LEN(), LEFT(), RIGHT() functions in excel. After obtaining the final email list, I started putting them in categories, spam status and industry type.

The three columns I made were:

1) Category of email – Let’s say I have subscribed to an advertising industry news letter, so I called it industry newsletter. Let’s say Linkedin or Twitter sends me some regular transactional emails about who connected / followed me then I called them as Professional or Social networking updates. Similarly for Banking, Finance, HR, Marketing, Technology, Travel, Food, Airlines etc.

2) Spam Status – I assigned 3 separate statuses to these mails:

• Subscribed
• Spam
• Transactional

So for example, if I have subscribed to a newsletter, I called it Subscribed. If I get a Banking transaction alert, I called is transactional and some crap that hits my inbox, I called it Spam.

3) Industry Type – To generalize and clearly categorize my emails I started putting them under broad industry segment eg:

• Advertising
• Airlines
• e-Commerce
• Entertainment
• Finance / Banking
• Food/Beverages
• Gaming
• HR
• Market Research
• Media
• News
• Publishing – Includes all blogs, online information sources and general publications.
• Real Estate
• Technology
• Telecom
• Travel

Below is a chart which summaries my findings.

Key findings:

1. Publishing – Is the highest SPAM generator category in India. Like fake job sites, fake deals site and these new online deals-online commerce sites which are all publishing crap content on blogs and their sites and are acquiring email addresses and spamming.
2. Finance / Banking – I keep getting a lot of SPAM from finance / banking vertical too. This is mostly about invest here or invest there. Best schemes to make more money and why my life is in danger so I should insure myself crap.

Surprisingly media and other sites are following much better ethics in emailing.

This was my experience. And my guess is that if I monitor this data over a larger sample size and longer time period this will show seasonality eg: Jan-March quarter more finance/banking SPAM as the year is ending everyone wants you to invest and buy insurance. And hence the increased SPAM. VS during Diwali or similar festival season, you would see more SPAM for consumer brands trying to give the biggest discounts on their products.

Where do you get SPAM mails from and what do you do to block / deal with it?

Is this what Online Banner Advertisements in India are coming to? #DigitalMarketing #India

Is this what Online Banner Advertisements in India are coming to? #DigitalMarketing #India

Answer here

Komli's ATOM - Online Marketer's Dream Come True?

The new year's party got Real Time for the online marketers with the launch of Komli's Real Time Bidding (RTB) engine ATOM. 

I met Satish Kadu, VP and Business Head, ATOM, Komli Media few months back when he came to take my feedback and an advertiser's perspective on what advertisers would want to do with an online advertising and automation engine. I shared a lot of pain points and also summarized that I want to do the most effective 1-to-1 online marketing with the lowest possible cost while I can continue to scale the campaign up. Satish said, he is very happy with the feedback and he chuckled as he knew he is already onto something as big and powerful as Real Time Bidding engine ATOM. Now, hopefully, I will be able to deliver my promise of 1 to 1 marketing at a mass scale with real time bidding, impression by impression for my Display advertising campaigns.

I have always wanted to optimize my online display campaigns and due to the poor visibility into the campaigns, always wondered how to cut wasteful impressions, my sincere hope is that ATOM should be helpful on implementing the same. We have learnt, optimized and perfected the science of search marketing. We have been able to build models and deliver real performance on search networks as keyword level optimization and keyword level bidding was much easier. However, on Display side, the existing solutions have suffered and even till now they require a lot of manual intervention.

Though, I am yet to see the technical and finer details on implementing the campaigns and seeing how much automation can be brought into the campaigns, however, I am impressed by what I hear. And as Satish likes to put it: "With RTB enabled auction based media buying, the science of search advertising is coming to display advertising, driving quantum leap in effectiveness for display campaigns.  Advertisers are able to selectively buy audiences and impressions that matter, and pay exactly what the impression is worth."

Look forward to meeting with my business colleagues and DEMOing the RTB ATOM.

Download the Press Release here.

Hair Raising Story of a Blogger

Hair Raising Story of a Blogger

I specially created this picture to appeal to Dove to make Hair Care Products which are easy to use and can help cure male alopecia. And this picture was dedicated to the Dove All Women's Blogger Meet #DoveSpa, where men are not invited :-).

Jokes aside, two of my friends Vineet Rajan and Renie Revin have dedicated their heart and soul to build a brilliant community of Indian Bloggers i.e. Indiblogger.in.  This post was to talk to fellow marketers out there who have run blogger contests and get some feedback on how well it works?

What objectives do you want to achieve from such contests or offline connect programs?
What challenges you see?
What contributes to success?

Any expectation on outcomes of such activities?

Google chops off Indian Head - Jammu Kashmir off the map

Oops they did it again! A screenshot from Google's Analytics software says it all...