Jay Hind - The Future of Indian TV is here.

I have been away from writing on my blog for few months now. Work kept me so busy that I didn’t get time or maybe I didn’t jump up in excitement to write about something. Though, after this long break, I found something really interesting. Jay Hind produced by Undercover productions (was not sure if it existed J) in association with Buzzintown.com is the 1^st late night standup comedy show on Internet (youtube channel) in India and this indeed made me jump in excitement and here I am writing about it.

I see the future of Indian TV in this stand-up comedy show. This series is path breaking for Indian TV and the power of Internet in India. If this series becomes a hit and starts making revenues to become profitable, then this will be the 1^st gen TV series online and can give birth to more talented players to come online to provide content and be profitable while running the shows.

I am a firm believer that solid content will find it’s FAN following… and evidently I have seen over 1250 Fans of this show already on Facebook FAN page of Jay Hind growing rapidly by word of mouth in just a month or so.

Jay Hind team has done a wonderful job in creating the same magic of Movers and Shakers as Abhigyan Jha brings in his expertise and creativity to tickle the funny bone with the sarcasm, pun, entertaining and funny conversations, hilarious disclaimers and very well executed gags by Sumeet Raghavan and off-course the Divya aka Savita Bhabhi!

After having not watched TV in a long time, this show re-affirms that it was worth NOT watching the idiot box. The same old boring Saas Bahu $#%) and those cameras panning to every joker’s face gives me total grief. Jay Hind comes as a refreshing change and cuts across the clutter and provides solid entertainment. Interestingly, I am trying to see when I will start seeing ads in the breaks on this show. Presently they are building the momentum for getting the eye balls and with few million people on Internet these eye balls are coming very soon for this show.

Jay hind is leveraging the Social media well for it’s promotion. After the 1^st month of it’s launch in August it has crossed over 1 million views. You can:

Follow Jay Hind on Twitter
Become a Jay Hind Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to Youtube channel of JayhindTV
Check it out on Buzzintown.com

Reliance, TATA, Airtel Retarding Broadband Internet growth in India?

Are the three BIGGEST Telecom giants in India who are blinded by their short term company revenues are the real perpetrators of retarding the Growth of Broadband Internet in India?


Premise: Reliance Communication, Bharti Airtel and Tata Indicom all three are offering their wireless datacards for laptops and PCs. These datacards offer various connectivity speeds. However, it's very apparent that the bad wireless infrastructures, poor dataspeeds and over all un-satisfactory customer service is retarding and shooing away the customers from Internet. People get a very poor user experience and the overall confidence in the online media as the main stream media gets distorted completely. Day-by-day poor online experiences just adds to the frustation of new and existing users and end up making people anti-online. What could become as one of the biggest strength of India in uniting and bringing education and more jobs to the country may just go down the drain if appropriate steps are not taken.

A country like India where people plan months ago to buy their next gadget and save money meticulously and buy their dream gadget get fooled by buying such stupid datacards for better Internet connectivity.

The Proof: The Internet by its own nature of bringing the Voice of each customer to one common platform shows the PROOF of pathetic service, speed and connectivity issues which came along with these Wireless Data Cards from Reliance, Airtel and Tata Indicom.

Mouthshut.com an Online user generated content company which provides a platform to Indian users to post their personal experiences in terms of product reviews is just filled with BAD reviews about all these three service providers.

Reviews on Reliance Wireless Data Cards
Reviews on TATA Indicom Wireless Data Cards and USB Modems
Reviews on Bharti Airtel Wireless Data Cards and USB Modems

If this isin't proof enough, do a simple google search and over 50,000 review related search results will show up...mostly people crying out loud at the bad service or drivers or connectivity and bad user experiences.

Strategic Flaw or The Time is not right?
Well a lot of top honchos sitting in those top management plush seats would want to argue that this is not a strategic fault and they do offer Broadband Internet services but people are not ready to take those services up. Well obviously if you produce those stupid Datacards in BULK and push them through a marketing plan, people are bound to get driven. However, it's a SHORT term retarding growth strategy for overall Internet Adoption Strategy for the country. In a way the Datacards and USB modems etc are detrimental to the growth of the Internet adoption and widespread in India. And the best part is both Broadband and datacards are coming from the same Telecom company (Irony Simplified)!

When over 4 Millions users have adopted broadband internet (refer to TRAI report, July-08) there are very few reasons why others wouldn't want to adopt it. The reason (primarily) is high bandwidth cost and lesser education and awareness. Well if you have to shell out Rs 999 per month to get a decent broadband connectivity per month, obviously you are discouraging people from adopting Internet. When Mobile recharges come in small pre-paid values, why don't we allow the users to have low cost flexibility for a LONG Term Internet penetration and growth in country.

Conclusion: The short term revenues of organizations which are blinding them for providing poor infrastructure and bad connectivity should be overcome quickly. The Broadband Internet services should be provided at cheaper rates fueling the Internet demand in India. Improvement of Wireless Broadband, Cost reduction and better infastructure can really contribute to the fast paced growth. Public Private Partnership based Awareness and Education sessions to masses about the benefits of internet should be conducted to help promote the Internet growth in India.

Online Media - Solution to Crude Oil Price Rise and Real Estate Market in India?

You must be hearing that the crude oil prices worldwide have been rising and it has led to inflation in a lot of economies. Can “Internet” and “Online Media” become a small stepping stone solution to abate the rising Crude Oil and Real Estate prices?

The continuous rise in Crude oil prices worldwide is posing inflationary effects in emerging as well as developed economies. We all understand that Crude oil is a resource which will diminish one day. So the environmentalist, the energy honchos, corporate and governments worldwide are trying to find out solutions to reduce crude oil usage and trying to develop parallel sources of energy like: Bio-Fuel, Nuclear Energy, Water, Wind etc. I am hereby explaining the affect on Real Estate industry in India and how they can recuperate from the same.

What’s the Present Real Estate Industry’s situation in India?
The recent bloodbath in the real estate sector has started taking a toll. Almost all large developers are now facing a severe cash crunch and finding it difficult to complete their ongoing projects. In fact, the situation is so bad that most of them have reported a 50-70% cash shortfall. Industry sources say that the liquidity crunch has forced many developers to pick up cash from the unorganized market at interest rates as high as 35% to 50% annually. The lending rate of banks is between 18% and 20%. The grade A developers which are facing crash crunch include DLF, MGF Emaar, Shobha Developers, Unitech, Omaxe, Parsvnath Developers, Hiranandani Group, Ansal API, BPTP Developers and TDI Group. As a result of the crash crunch many developers have started going slow or even stopped construction of projects which are either in their initial stages of development or which would not affect their bottom line in the near future.

Why it happened?
There are multiple factors (explained in my previous entry) which have led to this situation which can be like:
-Rising Crude Oil Prices
-Inflated Cement and Steel prices
-Recession in US
-Increasing inflation
-Over-hyped prices of properties (for higher gross margins)
-Overspending on Marketing by these developers (tradeshows, marketing collaterals, TV ads, billboards, hoardings etc).

All these reasons put together led to the increasing real estate prices and here we are with cash crunch amongst real estate developers.

What’s the Solution?
Obviously, if people start buying more houses, the real estate developers get more cash. If people start using lesser oil, the consumption will go down and subside the demand and help in reduction of prices. However, with the inflation mounting the cash in hand is reducing for the common man and impacting the purchase cycles of the buyers and sellers. I can’t suggest what can be “ONE” solution to this country wide problem. However, here is one solution which I can think of, and can be helpful from a perspective of a “techno-marketing” professional.

Presently in India the consumption of fuel follows a pattern like this:

· Transport (Petrol, Diesel, CNG, Aviation Fuel) : 51%
· Industry (Petrol, Diesel, Fuel Oil, Naphtha, Natural Gas): 14%
· Commercial & Others : 13%
· Domestic (LPG & Kerosene): 18%
· Agriculture (Diesel): 4%

These numbers clearly show that Automotive Industry is definitely a majority fuel consumer. So if we can help reduce a small amount of automotive fuel consumption, we are surely headed to ease the pressure.

Solution: Leverage the Online Media.

Benefits of using Online Media in solving various issues:
Lower energy requirements.
-Work from home.
-Instead of people traveling for so many meetings all across the city, you can have web conferences and reduce your travel time and cost of traveling. You are saving time, money, oil and gas. Eg: www.webex.com
-You will be more productive while you are meeting people online and you would be able to do more in lesser time.
-Set-up Web cams in your construction sites to show the present construction status.
-Give maps of everything online to help people see the location of your site and many more similar things.
-Less print promotions, lesser expenditures and more ROI
-Lesser marketing expenditures.
-You can do online exhibitions and tradefairs eg: www.unisfair.com
-Spend less on marketing by doing away with billboard, TV and other sort of ridiculous expenses.

Spend money in promoting your websites and driving people to go Online and save money. Lesser use of energy sources which will get depleted one day. More usage of technology which can drive businesses and reduce dependency on oil based energy.

Though I am proposing something which is far fetched, however, things like these take a definite time span to get implemented and early adopters reap the benefits of Brand leadership and differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Also, this is just one small solution which can go a long way in helping to reduce energy requirements and may help the inflationary pressures, public discretion can never be discounted for!

Which blogs do Journalists read?

Found an interesting article on BNET regarding which blogs do Journalists read...

Wondering which blogs journalists themselves find most valuable? Brodeur Strategies and Marketwire did an online survey. “We did the study because we wanted to help clients better understand the interplay between online news activity and journalism. We know who the traditional reporters are that cover our clients’ industries and beats but we need to better understand where they’re getting their information online.” (Jerry Johnson, executive vice president, Brodeur Strategies)
Here are the results:
Lifestyle journalists:
TMZ
Perez Hilton
MSN Lifestyle
AOL Living
Political journalists:
Huffington Post
Real Clear Politics
Talking Points Memo
Daily Kos
Tech journalists:
Engadget
Gizmodo
Boing Boing
Arstechnica
GigaOm
Travel journalists:
Tripadvisor
Frommers
Forbes Traveler
Travel Channel
Yahoo! Travel
Healthcare journalists:
NIH
WebMD
Mayo Clinic
MSN Health