BT Dot.com: What's Hot! [Pg.2]

STATS & STRATS
My Music Files

With its bag full of copyrighted content, Saregama lands in town.

It started almost a year back. That's when the RPG group's Saregama India (formerly Gramophone Corporation of India) decided to leverage the tonnes of copyrighted music content that it owned. For those who came in late, the offer was starightforward: surfers could select their choicest tracks (across artists and albums) from the company site HamaraCD.com, pay up, and the customised CD would be delivered to them within seven days anywhere in India.

There was nothing new about the business even then-CDnow.com had launched the service about two years ago-apart from Saregama's extensive library: over half of all recorded music in the country, a repertoire that extends to over two lakh songs in nine languages. But the company didn't put the entire library online. Even now, it has just a little over one-tenth of its inventory on HamaraCD.com. In an attempt to popularise the service, Saregama has now installed kiosks in their outlets of Musicworld (also owned by the RPG Group). The offering: enter the Internet kiosk at a Musicworld; log on to HamaraCD.com; listen to a 30-second audio clip; choose the songs you want on your CD; and place the order. The price per CD is fixed at Rs 375. As of now, the site doesn't allow direct downloads, but the company plans to implement the service in the near future, with adequate copyright protection measures in place.

-Rakhi Mazumdar

Of High Tide & Low Grass

Agri portals have managed to bypass the crunch, but there is still no sign of when they'll harvest profits.

Beam Me Back BT!

Surfing back@Net time, to Aug 1996.

More ammunition is pumped into the browser war as Microsoft releases Internet Explorer version 3.0. The final release is preceeded by two beta versions, launched in May and June 1996 respectively. The features with which ie 3.0 comes: full support for HTML tables specifications, frames, and more HTML elements; scripting support (VB and Java); support for cascading style sheets and Java applets.

Not to be left out, Netscape rolls out Navigator 3.0. It's first beta is titled Atlas, and came out in April, 1996. The new release adds many new plug-ins, and support for background colours in tables. Netscape will upgrade Navigator 3.0 with version 3.7 in October 1997. But, obviously, that isn't known in August.

This is a story from the fringes of the dotcom domain. The casting too is unromantic by all counts: farmers, and a future that depends as much on the shape of the market as on, well, monsoons.

A search in Rediff for ''agricultural portals'' yields just one relevant result, but there are around a dozen active in the Indian terrain. Unaffected by the recession they are, but that doesn't mean the health of the players has improved. Most stand more or less on the same terrain as they were, say, an year ago, but prevalent issues in dotcom land-like cash burn blues-don't bother them too much. They are essentially low cost operations, and on an average an agri portal's monthly operational costs come to about just one third of that of a horizontal portal. Says S. Sivakumar, Chief Exec, ITC (International Business Division), which has three portals, aquachoupal.com for aquafarmers, soyachoupal.com for soya farmers, and plantersnet.com for coffee growers: ''Many agri portals are in the nature of bulletins, not necessarily for farmers but a different clientele of trading customers.''

In some cases, the idea of an agri portal was essentially to provide a forum to farmers and agri-input retailers. Underscores Niranjan Deshpande, Managing Director, kisan.com: ''We have not made much investment on the portal as our idea was only to create a network.'' Another example is Sugartrade.com, a B2B content and commerce site, that provides services such as live sugar prices from across India; weather forecasts from 100 sugar belt towns; statistics; reference material; and directory of the sugar industry. That's the staple content for many.

The players who stand out are those with cash reserves, like the portals of ITC, or ikisan.com set up by the Rs 1,500-crore Nagarjuna Fertilisers. Aquachoupal, for instance, launched in February 2001, provides farmers in the Bhimavaram district of Andhra Pradesh with district-wise weather forecasts and information on best practices in aqua-farming. The company has also set up 15 kiosks covering about 100,000 acres in some 60 surrounding villages. The plan is to have 70 kiosks by the next year. ''The aim is to help enhance farm productivity, improve farm-gate price realisation and to cut transaction costs,'' says Sivakumar.

Ikisan is working towards offering a range of technical and support services such as soil sampling, making farm implements and equipment available on rent, crop information and solutions for a fee. It is in negotiations with around 20 companies and 100 dealers to register with the site. ''We have also started charging a membership fee of Rs 100 per annum from farmers'' says Dr V. Krishna Mohan, CEO, ikisan.com.

A word of wisdom comes from Sugartrade.com's Director (Marketing), Paritosh Joshi: ''Revenues essentially lie in the company's ability to leverage the content.'' For Joshi's company the content creates the community but revenues come from the e-marketplace, Ecleus.net. The site began mock trading in February 2001 and went commercial last month. ''So far, we have close to 40 trading members and have concluded deals worth Rs 6 crore. The revenue is Rs 3.50 per bag (quintal) and a membership fee (Rs 1 lakh for a sugar supplier and Rs 25,000 for a wholesale buyer). We are keenly awaiting the opening up of futures trade in sugar,'' says Joshi.

Concludes ITC's Sivakumar: ''Only those agri portals that can offer value-added personalised services for a fee can think in terms of long-term sustainability. These could be by way of commodity price risk management and accounting solutions.''

As for the rest, well, they'll just have to wait.

-E. Kumar Sharma

1 2

Issue Contents Write to us Subscription Syndication