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

STATS & STRATS
Nowhere, Now Here

The CCA sees new digi sign authorities soon. But the list is... Well,
read on.

K.N. Gupta, Controller of Certifying Authorities: yes sign

It's that time of the year again. remember the rush for gold when cellular licences were being issued? Or when internet licences were being sold by the government for only Re 1! (Since then, over 400 licences have been issued)

The herd is now headed towards the Controller of Certifying Authorities (CCA), the agency which hopes to see the first set of certifying authorities (ca) for digital signatures in place before the end of the year. Please note the word hope. When K.N. Gupta assumed charge as India's first Controller of Certifying Authorities for Digital Signatures in November 2000, he said the first certifying authority would be up by January 2001. By April 2001 the update was: ''We will kickstart the process by May.''

Anyway, the current list of wannabes runs into over 200 corporations and over a dozen individuals. Companies like Satyam, HCL, VSNL, BSNL, MTNL, and TCS may find it logical to extend the domain of their business. But when you start coming across names like Gujarat Narmada Fertiliser Corporation, Mukand Information Systems, Department of Customs, and Baroda-based Econenable, you begin to wonder whether it is the dotcom boom which is manifesting itself here, perhaps, in a limited way.

That makes Gupta's job even more daunting, for weeding out the chaff won't be any easy. He would have to sit down and sift through the good, the bad and the ugly, to ensure that only fail-safe companies are appointed. ''I hope that four or five CAS will start functioning by the end of the year,'' says Gupta. Well, we hope so too.

-Ashutosh Sinha

Touch & Play

At an age when local techies are dreaming products, this US import may sound just a wee bit unpatriotic. But the new web-based e-kiosks just launched by TouchWays, a division of US-based Object Technology Solutions has a few things going for it. Says G. Sunil Kumar, Manager (Business Development), TouchWays: ''The product is the first of its kind in the country as it is a portable, completely integrated touchscreen kiosk system that is vandal-resistant and durable for usage that could extend upto 30 million touches.'' Phew!

Weighing around 10 kg, the kiosk is priced at around $4,000 (Rs 2 lakh, without taking into account import duties). Kumar says the product is targeted at organisations in the automobile, banking, tourism, healthcare, retailing, and government sectors. ''By August 2002 we hope to get orders for at least 500 kiosks in the country,'' says he.

-E. Kumar Sharma

"We Are A Small Operation"

A week after he roped in ex-Novell honcho Eric Schmidt as the new CEO of Google, Larry Page, President & Co-founder of the search engine, chats with Praveen S. Thampi through e-mail on the secrets behind the site's success and simplicity.

Larry Page, President & Co-founder, Google: Tech is p2p

On March 10, 2001 (the day of the Holi festival) Google donned its logo with a small pichkari. Now, do you plan to expand to this part of the globe?

Well, as a matter of fact, about 55 percent of our traffic comes from outside the US. We are still a very small operation with about 230 employees, and we have just started establishing offices in other parts of the world. For example, we are preparing to open offices in London, Tokyo, and eventually Germany.

With regard to our Google logo marking the Indian festival of Holi, this is simply our way of acknowledging our international audience. At Google we are also adding more and more language options for our users. We currently have nearly 60 interface languages, including Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam that users can set as their preference.

But your revenues seem to be disproportionately US-based.

Yes, but it's important to note that we are working with about 130 companies in 30 different countries to power search services on their sites. In addition, we are ramping up advertising and business development activities in other countries.

This brand image of being a working search engine with no clutter... Will that be enough to sustain the lead?

Search is the most used net app after e-mail. Our mission is to organise the world's information, making it universally accessible and useful. To that end, we are working aggressively to capture that information-we currently have the web's largest index of more than 1.3 billion URLs-and deliver it to users.

Your revenue model?

Google has two primary revenue sources. The first is in Search Services, a program by which we offer websearch and site search capabilities to other sites. Our customers include Yahoo! and it's international properties (as a matter of fact, Yahoo India was launched with Google as its default websearch engine). We also offer the service to corporates including Cisco and Sony.

Our second revenue source is advertising. Google launched two advertising programmes in 2000. The first, Premium Sponsorships, is designed for large campaigns and budgets, and are sold through our direct ad sales force. The second, AdWords, is a self-service, fully automated programme that enables companies or individuals with smaller ad budgets to advertise on Google. Both programmes deliver text-based ads that are closely matched with a specific search query.

You recently won an award for best practices. But, how different is your AdWord feature from routine paid-up inclusion services?

Our search results are determined through an algorithm that delivers objective, unbiased search results. We do not allow payments to influence rankings in any way.

And finally, your bit to the wannabe dotcommers...

First and foremost, it's important to deliver a service that is useful to people. When Sergey Brin (the other co-founder) and I were working on Google as Ph.D. students at Stanford, we weren't thinking about starting a company. We were working on a technology that we felt could greatly benefit the world. And it's also important to focus and keep improving and innovating your core offering, spend money wisely, and hire the very best talent you can find.

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