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WHAT'S HOT The First Mail In the pink of health, the e-mail celebrates its thirtieth birthday as the net crawls along uncertainly. Thirty years back, on a December day like this, an engineer affiliated with the US Department of Defense's arpanet project, Ray Tomlinson, typed in ''QWERTYIOP'' in his digital PDP system and sent it across the nascent network. Tomlinson was-he didn't even bother to record the date-just trying to play around with SNDMSG, a program then used to exchange messages between users who shared the same machine. The new invention announced itself; the electronic mail was born. When Tomlinson sat down to play around with SNDMSG, he had been working on an experimental file transfer protocol called CYPNET, for transferring files among linked computers at remote sites within ARPANET. He set out to adapt CYPNET to use SNDMSG for delivering messages to mailboxes on remote machines through the ARPANET. Tomlinson noted later with visionary-like modesty: ''All it needed was a minor addition to the protocol.'' A report on e-mail written as part of the ARPANET project in 1976 reads: ''A surprising aspect of the message service is the unplanned, unanticipated, and unsupported nature of its birth and early growth. It just happened.'' That December also saw the birth of the virtual alphabet, @, which Tomlinson used to separate the user name and the name of the host computer. Today, with nearly 9.8 billion e-mail sent each day worldwide as per IDC statistics, the technology has clearly overtaken the topsy-turvy fortunes of its other ARPANET brothers. But then, it was the first one of the net-based services to reach critical mass, thanks to the pc revolution of the early eighties. The IBM PCs and Apple Macs triggered off a surge in technology innovations making electronic messaging programs more readily available, interoperable between systems, inexpensive, and yes, fashionable. So what does the future hold for e-mail? An increased bandwidth suggests e-mail routinely embedded with voice and video. Instant messaging might get integrated into the e-mail wagon, the probability of this happening soon is just as strong. But then, it is not very wise to make too many predictions. After all, e-mail got to where it is today without any predictions. Wired Wisdom
Hong Kong-based GE Asia Pacific Capital Technology Fund says it is in the process of closing two deals in India. Though the company names are under wraps, the deal size is tipped to be in the range of $5-10 million. The GE Asia Pacific Capital Technology Fund is a $150-million fund whose principle sponsor is GE Capital along with APC Asset Management and Acer. The Fund's other investors include Sumitomo of Japan and Reuters. Thou Shalt Mourn Once valued at several million dollars, internet service provider Excite@Home announced it would fold up operations by February 2001. The decision came after the company's controlling shareholder and former partner, AT&T, backed out of an agreement to buy its internet business. Excite@Home, a company formed by the 1999 merger of the internet content company Excite and the access provider AtHome, had filed for bankruptcy in September 2000 but had expected to raise cash to repay some of its $1.1-billion debt. "Net Was Never A Let-Down" As the controversial President of Indiainfo.com during the bubble, Vice President of Times Interactive during the shake-up, and now as Head, New Media Investments, Star, Sunil Rajshekhar, has travelled a course as tumultuous as the dotcom wave. Currently, also the acting CEO of Indya, he comes clear on Star's plans for the Indian web in an interview with BT's Praveen S. Thampi.
Q. ''The revenue from Indya did not justify the money being poured in, and it appeared that things would not change in the long-term,'' you told us a month back on the Indya happenings. Now, does that observation hold true for Star's other investments like Baazee and eGurucool? A. Not really. Unlike Indya, both Baazee, eGurucool, and for that matter Indiaproperties.com, are verticals. They are clear leaders in their respective niches and have well-defined and sustainable revenue streams. I believe that in every niche segment there is room for just one, maximum two players, to make it. Apart from the Star content, will Indya be getting into the emerging webcasting services segment as well? If you mean as an application service provider (ASP) or a content provider-no, we wouldn't. We will webcast our own programmes directly only when we see revenue opportunities large enough to sustain investments in broadband delivery. Do you have a consolidated plan for the Indian dotcom space? The single goal is to get each one of our investee companies to gain traction and break-even in the very near future. One way is to allow them to take advantage of the synergies that exist between Star's programming strengths and their own online capabilities. Another is for Indya to be the hub on which each one of them resides. And they, in turn, will naturally benefit from all cross-media driven promotional activities directed at Indya. But if Indya is to be Star's dotcom hub, then why is Temptation Island being promoted through Indiatimes? The bait of The Times of India's reach-both through advertising and media coverage-that was thrown in by Indiatimes was hard for us to resist. More seriously, that Indya is Star's internet face does not mean Star will not seek out other online sites to maximise penetration. What's the Star Group's convergence vision for India like? Star's foray into the new media and convergence space is also in recognition of the fact that the future media consumers will want simplified access to information on our bouquet of channels, either through cable or through a host of multi-point devices. Apart from our presence in the internet space and recently into radio, our interactive TV project, planned for delivery through cable and the proposed DTH platform, is very much in the offing. You've been involved with the dotcom space right from the beginning of the bubble... How do you read the scene today? For me personally the internet has never been a let-down... It's the way we allowed the hype to overcome us. With just over five million users, the internet play as a 'media offering' had hardly begun in India. For it to have a serious impact on our lives and for businesses to truly benefit from its power, we need to see it gaining critical mass: a total user base of at least 25 million in India. That's when the revenues will come. Until then, we need to look at running our businesses far more realistically. 1 2 |
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Thou Shalt Celebrate
