Category: Software

NEW DELHI: Viadeo, the professional social network which operates Apnacircle in India, has completed series D fundraising round of $32 million, split between the French Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Fonds Stratégique d’Investissement, existing institutional shareholders, Idinvest and Ventech, and a pool of new investors including Allianz, Jefferies, the global investment banking firm, and Middle Eastern private funds.

The new investment will allow Viadeo to accelerate growth in Europe and China (with its local brand Tianji), as well as other key emerging markets such as Latin America, Russia, India (local brand ApnaCircle), and Africa.

“This achievement serves as a testament to the value Viadeo brings to its users whether they are managers, corporate professionals, recruiters or entrepreneurs who are its registered users,” the company said.

Viadeo had reached profitability in early September 2009. With over 45 million members worldwide, Viadeo claims leadership in France and China markets.

It is the world’s second largest professional social network and is growing at one million new members each month, the company said.

The company focuses on non-English speaking markets and continues to pursue an aggressive international development strategy with recent partnerships such as the announcement of a joint venture in Russia in the second half of 2011.

“We‘re a global society where critical business connections span multiple languages, geographies and cultures,” said Viadeo CEO Dan Serfaty. “We have always been laser-focused on our ‘multi-local‘ approach, which goes beyond simple translation and focuses on catering to, and understanding the business and cultural needs of each market. This approach has awarded us tremendous growth and success in both European and emerging markets.”

Viadeo’s members consist of business owners, entrepreneurs and managers from a diverse range of businesses both start-up and well-established. Every month Viadeo attracts more than 1,000,000 new members, 10,000,000 new connections are made and over 100 million profiles are viewed.

Based in Paris (head office), Viadeo also has offices and teams in the UK (London), US (San Francisco), Spain (Madrid and Barcelona), Italy (Milan), Russia (Moscow) China (Beijing), India (New Delhi), Mexico (Mexico City) and Senegal (Dakar). The company employs 400 staff worldwide.

MUMBAI: The IPL ratings might have fallen beyond expectations on television, but the response to online streaming of the matches has a different story to tell altogether.

The tournament‘s viewership on official YouTube channel and Indiatimes‘ IPL channel has seen an upward swing registering a 56 per cent growth over last year with the first week of the tournament, including the opening ceremony, recording 13.7 million views, as against 8.8 million views last year, according to Times Internet, the digital rights holder of IPL.

In contrast, the television viewership of the first six matches of IPL went down 12 per cent garnering average viewership of 3.76 TVR, compared to 4.63 TVR last year.

Coming to online viewership, New Delhi and Bangalore lead the viewership with 14 per cent each, with Mumbai coming in a close second at 13 per cent.

Among the matches registering maximum online views include the ones played on 10 April between Royal Challengers Bangalore and Kolkata Knight Riders, and Delhi Daredevils and Chennai Super Kings. The day saw a total of 2.15 million views on the site, which included 0.7 million unique visitors.

Almost 0.6 million viewers have enjoyed the match action on their mobiles over the last seven days on Apalya mobile TV platform across Airtel, Idea and Vodafone which is double the traffic registered last year, Times Internet said.

Times Internet Ltd CEO Rishi Khiani said, “Last year, we delivered a superior viewing experience and garnered significant audiences. This year, our emphasis is on higher interactivity and our strong social focus has paid off right at the start, becoming a sign of things to come over the season.”

Google India head of media sales Praveen Sharma said, “We’re really excited to see the continuous growth in online viewer ship of IPL. This is the third year of our association with live streaming of IPL and the viewer ship numbers clearly indicate the distributed media consumption pattern of the Indian consumers.”

Earlier, Times Internet had roped in Coca-Cola, Samsung and Maruti as premium sponsors while Kotak Mahindra Bank, Hero Honda, Citi Bank, E Bay, and Karbonn Mobiles and Hindustan Unilever had come on board as associate sponsors.

While premium sponsors are paying between Rs 35 to Rs 50 million, the associate sponsors have forked out between Rs 15 to Rs 30 million.

NEW DELHI: The Cable and Satellite Broadcasters Association of Asia (Casbaa) has protested the decision of the Indian Government to impose a 10 percent royalty fee on foreign satellite communications services and make the fee retroactive to cover the last 36 years.

In a letter to Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Casbaa said the rule’s retroactive feature “is against the basic international rules and principles of fair play.”

It also warned that if approved by Parliament, this new tax will cripple Indian broadcast and other communications at a time when India faces a shortage of domestic satellite bandwidth.

Casbaa, which has 130 members in the Asian region, said the Finance Bill 2012 would characterise fees paid to non-Indian satellite operators as a royalty subject to a minimum 10 per cent withholding that would be forwarded to Indian tax authorities.

Casbaa said international tax treaties have refused to class satellite communications services as a royalty, which means the satellite operators can‘t be permitted to claim a tax credit in their home countries. This is equivalent to double taxation and would put India in breach of tax treaties that the Indian government has signed.

Even more striking is the retrospective nature of the proposed law that would claim the 10 per cent withholding for payments made since 1976, the year that this section of India’s tax law first addressed foreign royalty payments.

Casbaa said the tax amendment would merely clarify the royalty definition and make it applicable to transactions back to 1976, but that certain concepts in the proposed amendment — including conversion for downlinking of any signal — barely existed in India in the 1970s.

“It is inconceivable to think that a concept that did not exist in 1976 was intended to have been present in the original legislation,” Casbaa said in the letter sent by its chief executive Simon Twiston Davies.

Casbaa said its members now represent about 54 per cent of the total satellite bandwidth used by or on behalf of Indian media and corporate customers.

Casbaa said that, faced with a 10 per cent withholding that cannot be compensated by a credit in their own tax homes, foreign satellite operators active in India will be forced to pass on the royalty withholding to their customers.

Because India is facing a shortage of satellite capacity as a result of Isro’s regulatory practices and the inability of India’s domestic satellite system to keep up with demand, “Indian companies have no alternative but to rely on services offered by international operators,” Casbaa said.

MUMBAI: Spuul, a cloud-based streaming video service that provides consumers around the world on-demand access to more than premium Indian movies and TV programmes, has been launched.

Founded by seasoned industry and technology entrepreneurs Sudesh Iyer and S. Mohan, Spuul offers current content from some of the biggest content distributors such as Eros International and UTV. It boasts of a library of more than 600 Indian movies and TV programmes.

Iyer is one of the Indian promoters who were behind the establishment of Sony Entertainment Television India, while Mohan is the Founder of Palo Alto-based Accellion, buUuk and a number of other technology and venture companies.

In addition to freemium content which includes access to more than 100 free movies, Spuul offers two additional levels of content. Specials, which are Pay Per View movies, available at US$0.99 per movie for 72 hours of unlimited views; and a Premium content subscription, which gives access to the very best of Bollywood and is available for $4.99/month.

The content on Spuul can be accessed from a variety of devices including laptops, smartphones, tablets and connected TVs. To ensure the end-user experience, Spuul is offering a unique resume capability which allows users to watch a movie on one device, hit pause, and then pick up where they left off on the device of their choice.

“When developing Spuul, our goal was to create a service that is flexible enough to accommodate today’s busy lifestyle without sacrificing quality,” said Spuul co-founder S. Mohan.

“By providing the ability to start a movie on your TV, stop when it is time to leave for work and resume where you left on your iPhone in a train on the way to work, we believe we’ve succeeded in our goal. It is about being able to access quality content whenever, wherever you want.”

To assure users quality viewing, the service is being powered by a combination of Amazon Web Services, Brightcove‘s Video Cloud, and Akamai‘s CDN. Together, Spuul delivers a cloud-based solution offering multi-bit rate streaming, allowing video content to be uploaded centrally and delivered no matter what the infrastructure is locally.

MUMBAI: Swedish telecommunication and data communication systems provider, Ericsson, has partnered NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group, to provide a range of video processing solutions and support services during its coverage of the 2012 London Olympic Games from 27 July-12 August.

Ericsson‘s solution will help NBC Olympics to deliver HD content across both contribution and distribution feeds to ensure the highest picture quality from the Olympic venues to millions of viewers in the United States.

The company is also providing a range of products including MPEG-4 AVC encoders, professional receivers, multiplexers and satellite modulators as well as a team of support engineers in both London and New York. These engineers will assist in equipment/system set-up, maintenance and troubleshooting ensuring no great sporting moments are lost in transmission.

“The Games are the biggest sporting event in the world, and as a result viewers expect coverage to be of the highest quality. Live events like this create TV memories and I‘m sure that the team at NBC Olympics will raise the bar again this summer. We are proud to provide solutions that allow NBC Olympics to bring U.S. viewers closer to the action and give them the best seat in the house,” said Ericsson VP and head of TV Staffan Pehrson.

NBC Olympics SVP Engineering David Mazza added, “With the athlete‘s moving so fast, TV coverage of sporting events is some of the most demanding content to compress and transmit. With millions of viewers throughout the United States watching these events, it is essential that we deliver the best quality pictures possible. Based on our long association with Ericsson, we can be sure its technology will deliver exactly what we need, from the opening ceremony through to the final events.”

Ericsson engineers have been present at all major Summer and Winter Games including Salt Lake City, Sydney, Torino, Athens, Vancouver and Beijing. Its encoding solutions were used by NBC Olympics for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games, the 2008 Beijing Games and the 2006 Winter Olympics from Torino, Italy.

NEW DELHI: The Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (Tdsat) has directed ESPN Star Sports to raise fees to Dish TV on the basis of Reference Interconnect Order (RIO) with effect from 1 September 2011.

The directive by Chaiperson S B Sinha and member P K Rastogi came on a petition filed by Dish TV case against ESS filed in September last year.

The Tribunal also allowed Dish TV to recover the excess payment made to ESPN Software India, the company that owns and operates ESPN, Star Cricket and Star Sports, for the period starting September 1 2011. The amount is estimated to be in the region of Rs 250 million.

Dish TV CEO RC Venkateish said, “This judgment of Tdsat is a landmark judgment for the DTH Industry clearly establishing the right of a DTH operator to move from a fixed fee arrangement to a RIO based agreement. The said judgment will bring order in the Industry and will also enable the DTH operator to continue providing the channels to the subscribers on affordable and competitive rate.”

Dish TV had moved from Fixed Fee Agreement to RIO-based Agreement. – which was valid up to June 2012 – following the reduction of quality content in these channels and the rights available to Dish TV as a DTH Operator under the Interconnect Regulations of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai).

Dish TV had intimated ESS in the month of July 2011 about its distribution to take effect from September 2011 and asked ESS to raise the invoices on Dish TV on the basis of its RIO rates, with effect from 1 September 2011.

However, when ESS rejected this decision, Dish TV filed the petition before Tdsat, but continued to make the payment to ESS on the basis of Fixed Fee Agreement while the case was pending.

ESS also filed a petition before the Tribunal seeking a direction from it against Dish TV to continue making payment according to the agreement of 12 March 2009 and also to declare that the request of Dish TV to ask for RIO was not binding on them.

Admitting the Dish TV petition in its order, Tdsat dismissed the petition made by ESS seeking specific performance as wholly without merit.

Tdsat said: “The parties did not enter into a non-RIO contract. It was a lump sum contract. It had nothing to do with the subscriber base. It had nothing to do with the rate fixed by the Trai. The interim order passed by the Supreme Court of India fixing 42 per cent of the rates applicable to non-Cas areas would, therefore, must be read in that context.”

Tdsat asked the parties to enter into an agreement with effect from 1 September 2011 which would be governed by the modified RIO.

The Tribunal said:We are of the opinion that the interest of justice would be made, if the Petitioner is declared to be entitled to the restitution of the amount which has been paid to it for the months of September 2011 till date, subject, of course, to the amount which the Respondent was entitled to on the basis of the SMS reports.”

MUMBAI: The digital advertising in India is expected to reach Rs 35.35 billion by the end of this calendar year and Rs 43.91 billion by March 2013, according to the annual digital advertising report jointly published by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Indian Market Research Bureau (IMRB).

As of March 2012, the total advertising spends, including classifieds, were valued at Rs 28.50 billion. Of which 20 per cent are in search advertising, 13 per cent in portal/vortal websites, three per cent in social media ads, five per cent in advertising on email services, two per cent on video ads, four per cent in mobile devices and the major part (i.e. 53 per cent) relates to classified listings.

Since March 2010, there has been a strong growth of around 25 per cent in all the components of digital advertisement (search, display, classifieds and mobile).

The report said that according to publicly available sources, the total size of offline advertising market including print, TV, OOH, radio, cinema is Rs 265.01 billion in the year 2012. Compared to this, the digital market, at Rs 28.51 billion, is almost 11 per cent of the conventional medium.

Sector wise, travel industry uses display advertising most followed by automobile, telecom and BFSI. 39 per cent of all display ads are of simple flash, 24 per cent are images while 24 per cent are rich media with video. The display ad spend by automotive companies has increased. Its overall share has risen from 9 per cent in FY2010 to 13 per cent in FY2011 to 14 per cent in FY2012.

Search advertising is also used the most by travel, followed by BFSI and online publishers. In FY‘12, 90 per cent or Rs 5.25 billion of search spend is in terms of SEM (search engine marketing) i.e. buying or bidding for adwords. This is in comparison to Rs 580 million for SEO (search engine optimisation).

Total ad spend on mobile in FY2011 was Rs 900 million which has increased to Rs 1.05 billion in FY2012. WAP /browser based ads constitute to around 74 per cent of total mobile ad spend while in-app advertisements constituted to around 20 per cent.

Also, total ad spends on social media increased from Rs 800 in FY2011 to Rs 940 million in FY2012.

BANGALORE: Mobile advertising solutions company TELiBrahma has partnered with Times Internet Limited (TIL) to deliver near-live Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket video clips on consumers’ mobiles.

TELiBrahma has also roped in Maruti Suzuki as the presenting sponsor for this service.

The near live video clips from the matches are available on Buzz, a consumer engagement platform developed by TELiBrahma and deployed at its partner locations that include Cafe Coffee Day, Crosswords, Nirulas, Spencers, Barista, Transit Lounges, leading malls and select railway stations.

Cricket lovers visiting Buzz locations have to turn on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth on their mobile devices to experience IPL, TELiBrahma said.

Buzz is a mobile platform that delivers to consumers multiple engagements relevant to the location. The engagements can be in the form of movie trailers and interviews, music videos, location based content like reward programme and exclusive offers and deals from brands. These engagements come to consumers for free.

MUMBAI: Big CBS Network, the JV between Reliance Broadcast Network and CBS Studios International, has inked a distribution deal with Dish TV for Big CBS Spark.

With the deal in place, all three channels from the bouquet – Big CBS Prime, Big CBS Love, and Spark – are now available on the leading direct-to-home operator.

Recently repositioned as the ultimate music destination, Big CBS Spark offers music mix from the international and Indian market spread across genres.

Available on channel No 449, Big CBS Spark is targeted at the youth audiences and caters to their entertainment requirements with music and shows like the Cheaters, Maximum Exposure, Smash Cuts, Oblivious and Real TV.

Dish TV COO Salil Kapoor said, “Dish TV has now the bouquet of Big CBS channels for all its customers. We are proud to extend our partnership to the entire Big CBS bouquet to our 12.5 million subscribers.”

BIG CBS Networks business head Vishal Rally added, “We are happy to have the Big CBS Channel Network on Dish TV. This is part of our continued endeavour to reach the world-class content from Big CBS’s stable to audiences seeking English entertainment in India.”

This alliance complements Reliance Broadcast Networks’ recent campaign called ‘Choose Your Set-Top-Box Wisely’, designed to increase awareness and empower consumers with adequate information to make the right choice while choosing their set-top boxes.

MUMBAI: ESPN Digital Media, which operates popular sports websites like espncricinfo.com, espnsoccernet.com, espnf1.com, and espn.com, has tied up with leading telecom brand Idea to launch a new initiative, Dream Fields. The aim: to engage fans, players, parents, and local administrators to present their concerns and issues regarding the cricket playing spaces in the cities in India.

The collaboration between ESPN‘s cricket website ESPNcricinfo and Idea will span content and advertising in India. As part of the collaboration, ESPNcricinfo has conceived and created Idea Dream Fields, a dedicated editorial repository within the website espncricinfo.com. The editorial repository will also feature content gathered from the public via social media.

ESPNcricinfo.com editor Sambit Bal said, “Driving through Indian cities you would never know that cricket is India’s number one sport. You wouldn’t spot too many kids playing cricket because there is simply no space to play. It is not a big surprise that Indian cities are producing less and less national cricketers: playing cricket has become such an ordeal. For Indian cricket to stay strong we need to ensure apart from being cricket-watching country, India is also cricket-playing country. This initiative is a small step towards raising awareness about an issue that is vital to the future of Indian cricket.”

Idea, which has been a major sponsor of all cricket tournaments in India, enables them to target passionate cricket fans with a consistent and multi-faceted presence.

Idea Cellular CMO Sashi Shankar said, “Idea cellular has always taken a lead to address the growing concerns of the society through mobile telephony. Cricket is a national craze and we have always supported the game, we do hope that through Idea Dream Fields, we can play our small role in addressing a concern that looms the game- lack of space to play it freely. With Idea Dream Fields, we would like to create more and more awareness about this issue and thereby contribute in our own way to the nation’s most loved game.”

ESPN digital media India senior director Ramesh Kumar siad, “Expanding our collaboration with Idea Cellular to create Idea Dream Fields allows us to stay true to our duty of serving fans by providing a forum for the discussion of this important and complex topic. The nature and scope of this collaboration enables IDEA Cellular to engage fans in a comprehensive and credible manner and demonstrates ESPNcricinfo’s ability to connect brands to cricket fans at all levels of the game.”