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STATS & STRATS What's Hot! Riding the subscription wave, a Hindi newspaper takes its online edition pay, and AOL's silence about its FIPB approval makes the rumour mill come alive. Team BT There's something about Vinay Chhajlani. Or at least in the way the founder-CEO of Webdunia Networks goes about his business. He forayed into languages other than Hindi-Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam-at a time when most publishing barons were shelving their online vern plans. Now, as the world debates whether charging for online services is a wise step or a recipe for suicide, Chhajlani has gone ahead and made his naidunia.com, the online edition of the Indore-based Hindi daily, a pay site. One of the first content sites to go the payment way in India, naidunia will charge subscribers Rs 1,000 a year for accessing the daily. Like several other dotcoms, Chhajlani's other venture, webdunia, has been trying to leverage its domain expertise to create solutions. Revenues from its language solutions business currently account for 70 per cent of its total revenues, according to company officials.
Close on the heels of the hp-Compaq mega merger, the desi dotcom scene is abuzz with rumours involving one of the world's biggest internet players, America Online (AOL). With the Foreign Investment Promotions Board (FIPB) giving the go ahead to its investment plans in India, AOL has been talking to a clutch of major Indian corporates and horizontal portals for a potential business alliance. What adds spice to the FIPB approval is that the sad state of the scrips of two Indian internet majors, Rediff and Sify, on Nasdaq (they are quoting at $1.10 and $1.37, respectively), makes them attractive acquisition targets. As of now, both players say nothing is brewing, while AOL is keeping totally mum on its plans. While Rediff's was a terse denial, Sify's had an air of contemplation. Says R. Ramraj, MD, Sify: ''All that I understand is that they (AOL) were probably looking for some call centres here and that may have let to this speculation. But there is nothing really to it. We are of course open to strategic relationships, especially for tech support.''
Bangalore now boasts of India's first cyber crime police station, which will register cyber crime cases under the Information Technology Act, 2000. The station, with jurisdiction all over the state, has a multi-disciplinary group of experts which will help the sleuths in tackling cyber crime. It will accept complaints both online and offline, and will be headed by a deputy superintendent of police (as stipulated under the it Act) who will be assisted by three inspectors. State government officials say experts from Indian Institute of Science's Super Computer Centre and from software majors like Infosys and TCS have also offered help. As if the geek domain was short of confusing jargon, the move to tax e-com is complicating the e-lexicon day by day. The latest nugget of jargon-PE-has been doled out by the finance ministry in a bid to clear some prevalent confusion about e-com taxation. PE stands for permanent establishment, a term indicating the place of origin of a website or its services, but no one has yet come to an agreement on the technical definition of the term. The ministry, in a bid to clarify matters says it will tax only those e-commerce transactions involving foreign companies operating in India that are completed through a dedicated server based in the country, and adds that PE will refer to the location of this server. This is in line with the model adopted by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development countries which states that a website in itself cannot constitute a PE, and a website hosting arrangement typically does not result in a PE for the enterprise that carries on business through that website. NEW TECHNOLOGY
Dr. Prithwis Mukherjee, Head (e-Business Practice), PricewaterhouseCoopers, speaks to BT's T.R.Vivek on the future of m-commerce in India. Q. Despite the hype, WAP has been a pure non-starter, at least in India... A. WAP has been a non-starter because
of slow data transfer speeds. That problem will be solved by 3g
technology. And when that happens, handset prices too are set to come down
to more realistic levels. Do you think SMS could deliver what WAP couldn't? Definitely. And there are immense opportunities with SMS. For instance, there can be location- and presence- based services on the SMS. Then, there is a great potential for mass advertising in SMS. So are we still awaiting a ''killer'' app? Once General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) with 2.5G comes in, there will be a sea change. It will reduce the cost and make higher bandwidth available. And that is when we can hope for a killer application. The convergence of the cellphone and the wallet into a single entity will make the mobile phone replace the credit card. Instead of paying through the card, one can just give his cell number to the merchant who can enter it into the card swipe device which is connected to the cellphone company. The charge appears as an SMS message on the phone and you press ok to confirm the purchase. When do you see this happening here? 2.5G and GPRS will be here in a real way by the middle of next year. There are some business bottlenecks like the uncertainty over the entire issue of will. Why has m-commerce been a great success only in Japan till date? In Japan, the reason has more to do with their mobile savvy culture. See, the key to m-commerce lies in 2.5G. In Japan even though they don't have the 2.5G technology, they follow the 2.5G philosophy which is pay per use and not by time. PwC puts the Asia-Pacific m-biz adoption curve ahead of North America... Most definitely, because Europe and Asia-Pac are already on GSM, which is a generation ahead of the Analog Mobile Personal System (AMPS) being used in the US. So m-commerce adoption becomes that much easier in the Asia-Pacific region. 1 2 |
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