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Ireland’s Independent News and Media (INM), sold a 7.3% stake in Jagran Prakashan Ltd (JPL) in a series of bulk deals yesterday and today. JPL CFO R.K. Agarwal said the company has authorized INM to sell upto 22 million shares, amounting to 7% stake in the publisher of Dainik Jagran, India’s .. read full article »

Music and entertainment have been the most prolific VAS in use in India amongst the many available. In a bid to make the most of the scenario, Idea has launched Idea Madhur. It is a music driven value add that focusses on forgotten artists and folk/grass roots music. The focus of course is to .. read full article »

As per a research report by Cleantech Group and Deloitte, cleantech companies worldwide have raised $1.2 billion in Q2 2009 (preliminary report). Worldwide, the 2Q09 total is up 12 % from the previous quarter, although down 44 percent from the same period a year ago (the investment is led by .. read full article »

It’s Zee’s turn to be on top this week in the continuing musical chair for the top slot among Colors, Zee and Star Plus. Even though Zee’s lead is marginal, it has the historical significance of being the first time in nearly a decade that the Subhash Chandra-owned channel has become No.1. .. read full article »

contentSutra has learned from highly placed sources in the ministry of information and broadcasting that Raghu Menon, a 1974-batch officer of the Indian Administrative Services, will soon take charge as the secretary at the high-profile ministry. He will replace Jawahar Sircar, the tourism .. read full article »

by Pranav Agarwal Facebook vs Orkut. Which one of these do you have an account in? Chances are, both. Orkut was an early entrant into the Indian Social Networking Scenario. Facebook, which arrived much later, however seems to grabbed quite some attention. Though both were launched at the same .. read full article »

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By Pranav Agarwal There have been several startups in the past 3-4 years and it has become difficult for them as well as for the concerned industry to connect to them and to understand their innovative products. We have been following companies that help promote new technologies since we .. read full article »

Mouthshut, a pioneer in user generated content is set to change the social media scenario in India as it would soon be doling out free accounts to corporate and brand owners for brand reputation management. Mouthshut initiatives holds weight as it is one of the largest user generated portals .. read full article »

Did you know how to choose colors for your portal? Well, if you are an entrepreneur then either you gotta have an eye for the right combo of colors or some good money to hire a great designer to do it all for you? Of course this post is another way of helping yourselves. Also, this post .. read full article »

Today after coming to office, I opened my gmail account first and got a new window informing me about new drag and drop feature of gmail labels. Using the new features, I managed to add labels, manage them and organise my inbox easily and effectively. Gmail is constantly adding new features to .. read full article »

This is our 3rd edition of India News Digest that brings you news that you should not miss. We will be posting these News snippets frequently for the benefit of readers. Mobiles number will now start with 8 ! Yeah, this had to happen sooner than later – with the kind of growth that Indian .. read full article »

Designing an ecommerce site is tricky – customers tend to leave you at any given point and as per numerous surveys, check-out point is the zone where abundance rate is the highest. So how do you build a great shopping experience and have a greater conversion rate? In this fortnight’s theme, .. read full article »

Since there is some confusion on the blogosphere regarding Twitter’s API limit, we thought we will clear the air. Twitter has increased the hourly API call limit from 100 to 150 per hour (link), even though the official wiki shows 100. What does this mean? The apps that you use, for e.g. .. read full article »

Yesterday, I wrote about a step-by-step process on how one can start a business in India. Today’s report – Doing Business in India 2009 – released by World Bank takes a more holistic view of it. Today’s report is a much comprehensive look at doing business in India and talks about .. read full article »

It seems TRAI wants to leave no stone unturned for smooth implementation of Mobile Number Portability in India. It has therefore issued a draft legislation to clear the uncertainty surrounding the introduction of mobile number portability. The draft guidelines describes the rights, obligations .. read full article »

As a virtue for browser performance competition, Microsoft IE 8 released a feature that come along with IE 8 Add-ons collectively called as Accelerators, Internet Explorer 8 is now offering a feature that claim to save time and clicks and lets you get things done more quickly. These Accelerators .. read full article »

Online collaboration is a beast and readers of this site have been getting a doze of online collab tools very frequently. Today, Zoho has entered into the ‘Yammer/Twitter’ domain of live streaming (and lot more) and has launched a newer version of Zoho projects. Zoho projects enables you to .. read full article »

Bindass, the youth centric TV channel from the UTV Group has launched Bindass.com - a community platform for the youth. Just like MTVIndia’s connected they seem to have integrated it with facebook connect platform to reach out to the youth on facebook. Bindass already had a platform in .. read full article »

DoT has exhausted all numbers starting with 9 and new numbers will begin with 8. Earlier DoT moved ‘95′, which was reserved for Landline numbers to cellular operators; and is now instructing operators to use 8. DoT is even considering 11 digit numbers from the next year. This will surely .. read full article »

T.N. Prabhu, CEO at UTV New Media, is leaving the company, according to a person familiar with the situation. The company has hired Manish Agarwal to replace him, the same person said. Agarwal is director, marketing at Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) India, and was formerly vice president, marketing, at .. read full article »

It looks like payment gateways has become a main attraction for financial services giants as Citibank India, consumer banking arm of Citigroup, has tied-up with Vodafone Essar Ltd and Nokia India to launch a pilot project testing its Mobi-payment solution in India. The pilot project is said to .. read full article »

MTV India has always been very active with its social media activities and we have tracked the same here at WATBlog be it  for MTV roadies or Battleground 2. Now MTV has chosen to integrate facebook in the launch of its new show Connected. This show is about how connected real twins can be. .. read full article »

[This is a series of short articles started by Mayank Bidawatka, head of marketing at Redbus.in. The first part is 101 of branding, perception management and why startups should really care about it!] What is a brand? Without getting into a technical explanation, a brand is the perception an .. read full article »

Now the western countries and especially the US is looking to outsource many of the unlikely industries – even those industries which were thought to be untouchables or the un-outsourcables! As Thomas Friedman said in his book, there are fungible jobs and non-fungible jobs. Non-fungible jobs .. read full article »

Now this is one question I have come across very frequently from our trak.in visitors, especially NRIs and foreigners who want to come to India to start their own Business. So I thought it would be a great time to put across detailed procedure on how to Start Business in India, along with the .. read full article »

Now when I say traffic games they aren’t quite the kind of games that YouTube publishers started building recently. It rather works on the metaphor of playing tricks using features that weren’t made for such tricks. The games however can now happen because of what YouTube plans with an .. read full article »

Black Book of Outsourcing has been publishing the top outsourcing companies in world for a few years now and this year was no exception. They have recently published the list for 2009 as well. I am actually not a big fan of Black Book of Outsourcing list, simply because, if you compare 2007, .. read full article »

Leading digital agency Webchutney has released Digital Media Outlook 2009: A Study Of The Indian Digital Marketing Scenario. While the study has the customary projections on ad spends, what we found more interesting was the ‘perception mapping’ exercise that plots the perceptions of brand .. read full article »

Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, has called for a “creative renaissance” on the Internet, which he said has been “an unthinking hostage to a direct-marketing culture and tradition that devalues creativity and its long-term effect on brands.” .. read full article »

This may seem somewhat off-topic to some of you, but I get lots of emails from users who are confused about their career, unhappy with their jobs and unsure of what’s next in their professional life. This post on a so-called ‘quarter-life crisis’ sums it up so well. Although written in the .. read full article »

MeraMaal is a new site, attempting to gun for the Craigslist of India. It has the usual fare that you’d expect from a classifieds site with various sections categorized by different Indian cities. While launching a classifieds site isnt too difficult, the main challenge they will have in .. read full article »

The next edition of Proto.in, India’s biggest startup event,  is scheduled for July 25th at the Dewang Mehta auditorium, Persistant Systems in Pune. This edition of Proto intends to take a solid leap and focus on policies that support Start-ups both in IT and non IT sectors. The start-up .. read full article »

We probably hear a lot about awareness drive by government regarding various human and social illnesses but its first time that the Hyderabad police has launched a campaign named ‘Delete’ on the similar lines to drive awareness regarding Cyber crimes in India. Hyderabad Police has launched .. read full article »

Sidin Sunny Vadukut will replace Durga Raghunath as managing editor of Livemint.com. We reported last week that Raghunath was leaving to join WSJ India as editor, mobile and digital product development. “Sidin, a staff writer at Lounge, has written extensively on a range of subjects including .. read full article »

India is the second largest investor in UK. There were 108 foreign direct investments and GTL Communications and Times group-Virgin Radio tie-up are two such investments. India will invest $4.2 billion in Ethiopia across 439 investment projects and Indian entrepreneurs have received licenses for .. read full article »

We have covered Magicrooms, the hotel aggregator service launched by Niranjan Gupta who co-founded Flightraja and here is a quick chit-chat with Niranjan on Hotel aggregation business in India as well as Magicroom’s future plans. Hotel Aggregation Business in India As the co-founder of .. read full article »

The long awaited [yes for over 3 years] Mobile Number Portability is all set to go Live this Year, finally TRAI just minutes ago issued complete guidelines on Eligibility, Consumer Rights, Operators Obligations for undergoing the same. Here is an excerpt, There is a time restriction of 90 .. read full article »

Although the title of this article is somewhat similar to (stolen actually) that of the unofficial guide for start-ups, the content is entirely different in terms of the segment for which this article is written. While the former (the original) is meant for start-ups and the people behind those .. read full article »

Social Graph is a facebook application that gives you a deeper/additional insight about your network of friends. The application relates your friends (and your friend’s friends, who are common to both of you) together, and throws up different social clusters or groups that you belong .. read full article »

Webchutney - The Digital Marketing Agency has released the first edition of its annual report which looks at the future prospects of the Digital Media Industry in India. This report analyzes the digital medium by analyzing the ad-spends of the Top 500 marketers who control two thirds of all .. read full article »

We have been reporting from time to time on this blog about how corruption is widespread (as if I had to tell you that :) in India and who are the people who take maximum bribes. However, I was not able to actually provide any numbers on the extent of corruption in India. Finally after some .. read full article »

Mobile apps have taken the world by storm be it Apples iphone apps or growing number of Anrdoid apps or Palm pre apps. Apple has already seen one billion mobile app downloads, Palm pre app catalog hit 1M downloads in less than three weeks of it’s release and Piper Jaffray estimates that mobile .. read full article »

Last week, I wrote a very detailed post on the Iran controversy and the importance of social media communications; on how Twitter and the new online media has emerged as the hero in Iran by helping us get the news from the very heart of chaotic Iran. The current Iran government might have .. read full article »

3G is supposed to bring in a lot of services and revenues for a lot of people in the telecom ecosystem. The network providers, telecom operators, value added services providers, content providers and the all pervasive handset makers – all set to gain big in this 3G blockbuster. Companies .. read full article »

Building (read- coding and designing) a website or a social network is the easy part.  How you build a loyal, active community of users is the hard bit. Here’s an interesting post that provides an awesome example – definitely worth a read. Internet Entrepreneurs – Make something People .. read full article »

EduCell is a startup founded by IIT currently enrolled IIT students with the goal of mentoring students who hope to ‘crack the IIT- JEE’ exam. Around 200 IIT students provide mentoring sessions to IIT aspirants and guide them through their preparations. The USP being that having ‘been .. read full article »

It looks like terrorism is playing havoc with cyber cafe business these days.Earlier it was responsible to introduce stringent rules regarding user information for record purposes, now it has taken it a step forward with recent police proposal of making fingerprint compulsory in cyber .. read full article »

Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd, one of India’s largest listed media firms, said its board has approved an employee stock options (esop) programme for the benefit of its employees and directors. Stock options will be issued over a period of five years and would be convertible into equity .. read full article »

Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd, one of India’s largest listed media firms, said its board has approved an employee stock options (esop) programme for the benefit of its employees and directors. Stock options will be issued over a period of five years and would be convertible into equity .. read full article »