Instacoll which is led by Sabeer Bhaita, has earlier raised funding from Softbank (read Sabeer Bhatia back to business, Instacoll raises funding from Softbank).

Live Documents is a full-featured suite of online Office productivity applications offering functionality equivalent to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Built using RIA technologies such as Flash and Flex, Live Documents allow users to view and edit documents within any common browser on any operating system from anywhere. Live Documents uses a Flash-based user interface that offers a richer and responsive user experience that is comparable to native Office software applications.
In addition, Live Documents is available as a optional desktop client application that wraps around Microsoft Office and embeds collaborative capabilities into these hitherto standalone software applications – Live Documents converts Microsoft Office applications from static standalone software to smart clients that are connected to the Internet and facilitate in-context document sharing (multiple people can edit a document at the same time) and management (security, access control and revision control) without requiring users to give up their familiar user interfaces. The Live Documents desktop client also ensures offline access to documents – a key failing of current online Office applications.
Instacoll had earlier launched hosted services for business users and with its live-documents.com it aims to expand its usage and build visibility for the product while directly competing with Google Docs and other online office productivity suits.
Sabeer Bhatia, who became a poster boy of dotcom era after successful sale of hotmail to Microsoft for a reported USD 400 mn, is yet to taste success post hotmail. His earlier venture Arzoo.com folded where the investors had to write off their investment in Arzoo. Sabeer reincarnated Arzooo.com in 2006 as a travel portal in order to capture a share in India’s booming online travel industry without any success.

Sabeer Bhatia also launched a social networking site called apnacircle.com which again seems to be floating somewhere in already crowded social networking space.

Hence whether Live-documents will create waves like hotmail and might become an acquisition target for Microsoft / Google / Yahoo or will follow the path of Arzoo, is a question which only time will tell.

This news is bound to create excitement in Indian Internet market as it provides an important yard-stick to the ever-optimistic entrepreneurs, who are now bound to measure their own ventures in terms of Desimartini’s valuatuion.

Desimartini.com, launched by Pahwa Knowledge Based Services late last year, is funded by the Pahwa Group of Companies. It was claimed that Desimartini has a membership-base of around 250,000 with traffic of around 2.5 million page views a month.

The traffic numbers as claimed by Desimartini, if true, indicate a good traction for website, but somehow the actual traffic does not seem to be that high, as per external indicators.

Desimartini, which regularly advertises on TV, Internet and other medium, has an Alexa ranking of 77,467 while its Compete ranking is 889,553 with around 1000 US visitors per month. Incidentally, Alexa rankings overall are not considered trustworthy as they can be engineered to generate high ranking. Hence, generally speaking, a high Alexa rank doesn’t mean much, but a low Alexa rank certainly means that there is no big traffic on this site.

The sites which are in same Alexa league get traffic of around 600k to 800k page views a month with around 200k unique visitors a month and, hence, the claim of Desimartini having 2.5 million page views is highly suspect.

Hence, to think that a Fund Manager will pay around US $ 10 Million for a site with marginal traffic, no great brand loyalty (the site is just a year old), no great business model (just another social networking site), makes the whole thing a little suspicious, as it strongly suggests that either there is something more on the table beyond Desimartini.com, or HT Media for some reason is really desperate to get into action without wasting a day.

Further details of this deal will be available in some time, as HT Media, being a listed company, would be required to inform the Stock Exchange regarding this transaction.

The Hindustan Times Group had dabbled with Internet earlier as well in 2000 dotcom boom (almost near to the time when the great Internet bubble burst), where it hired a high-profile team from banking and consulting industry, and had a big-bang launch for go4i.com headed by Mr. Piyush Gupta. Go4i was launched in association with Chase Capital Partners and the HDFC Group. The Hindustan Times and Chase Capital Partners each held 38 percent in the venture, while the HDFC Group had 8 percent. The total investment in the venture in the initial phase was reported to be US $ 15 Millions.

Also, at that point of time, go4i.com had plans to launch some other portals – related to career (go4career.com), cricket (go4cricket.com), movie ticketing (go4ticket.com), and so on and so forth.

And for all those who care for historical data-keeping, this was the quotable quote as given in The Hindu in year 2000.

‘“We (go4i) are hopeful of a turnover of Rs. 30 Crores in the second year of operations,” Mr. Gupta said, adding that go4i.com would break even in the next two years, and become profitable in the year thereafter.

“We (go4i) are planning a public issue of the portal in the next couple of years. Whether to go for an overseas float or a domestic one would depend on the prevailing market conditions at that time,” he said.’

The above statements by Piyush Gupta were made in 2000 in a truly style of forward looking statements (this is another matter that they really turned out to be forward looking qs whole go4i venture was shut down after some time).

Tyroo Media Pvt Ltd is one of the leading Indian self serve ad marketplace and has around 1000 publishers as its clients. Of the late Rediff.com is also working to roll out its own ad network and is busy signing publishers.

Earlier there were rumors that Yahoo is planning to launch its Yahoo publishing network as some publishers of Google have received enquiries from Yahoo India about Yahoo publishing network. ( Read “Yahoo publisher network in India”), but it seems rather than developing its network from scratch, it has decided to go M&A route to get direct access in the market and pose some challenge ( if there is any) to Google Indian advertising operations.

Indian online advertising market is presently dominated by Google which has been able to bring Indian advertisers as well as publishers on its fold followed by rediff. Due to increased attractiveness of Indian market, all internet majors are trying their best to catch the action in India including AOL ( it launched its India centric site aol.in sometime back though without much success).

Yahoo, despite being an early entrant in the Indian web-space ( around 2000) has not able to demonstrate any success so far, and its performance in term of content, stickiness or technology has been pathetic. Majority of Yahoo traffic is driven by yahoo mail which has remained the most popular email service so far, though Gmail, which has come out of its beta just 4-5 months back is now almost breathing on its neck.

Hence by acquiring Tyroo, Yahoo will be able to gain much needed foothold in Indian advertising space immediately, which is right now dominated by Google, but how far this strategy will bear fruit , is anybody’s guess. But there is one thing that is “In internet space, market shares are not factor of M&A and relationships but a function of management vision and technology”, and unfortunately on both part, Yahoo! yet to get that zing at least in India.

You Telecom, (previously known as Iquara broadband from British Gas) today announced the acquisition of Ahmedabad-based Internet service provider (ISP), IceNet.

StartupAvenues has eralier reported this event on 14th April 2007 (GVFL make an exit from Icenet?) and broke the news first.

IceNet has established itself as the country’s first and Gujarat’s largest registered ISP in the private sector, with a strong hold on VoIP solutions, primarily data and voice. However going was expected to be very tough as slowly and slowly Telecos led by Bharti have been steadily capturing the market by providing internet services.

Icenet was started by first generation entrepreneur Chirag Mehta who launched Gujarat first ISP in early 2000 and catapulted it to the first position in Gujarat in a short span of time. Icenet has received investment from GVFL.

Iquara which was launched in India around 2002 by British Gas, has been renamed as You Telecom after investment of Citigroup Venture Capital International (CVCI) and seems to be in expansion mode by following its strategy of inorganic growth as experienced in Latin America.

It is rumored that You Telcom might be looking at Delhi based ISP Spectanet as well.

Of late Indian market has been getting considerable interest from internet majors and both Yahoo & Google have large development centers in India. Even AOL is expected to launch an Indian dedicated website sometime by the end of year 2007.

At present, internet advertising space in India is dominated by Google Adwords/ Adsense program, being main choice for all major advertisers. The other players are either the extension of brick & mortal advertising agencies like MediaTurf or Group M or new startups with marginal share of overall market.

Thus entry of Yahoo publishing network is certainly going to create some buzz in the market and will provide alternative to publishers.

Majority of tagged message received were from some generic Indian names from gmail and yahoo accounts and looked genuine enough so how could it be a Spam mail. But again devil is in detail and on careful scrutiny we found out that all this tag message are send to generic mail ids like sales, info, customer support of a particular domain name and so on so forth , the addresses which have been mined by spamers and hence so many tagged messages. Further this mails flew to yahoo group owners and tried to mine open mailing lists so as to reach out to potential users who by mean of curiosity might end up clicking the mail as for a Indian name with a tag message, curiosity level will be very high.

In the above, a user has tagged a list owner at Yahoogroups of which he is neither member nor related to

Further all these mails though looking like coming from gmail or yahoo are basically coming tagged mail. It looks like the company has executed very smart strategy for building a mass traffic by going through human and robot combination where it first focused on country specific email lists and then used humans to create country/ region specific email ids and then configured them with its servers and then start shooting in a low volume but with very high response level. So does it cost a bomb for that. Not exactly, for USD 200 a month one can get a full time email data entry operator for a whole month who can easily create 100 email ids every day and send 100 mails from each id using little technology with a high response rate of ad high as 15-20% ( might be more as I never ever open a spam mail but I did open it once, so lot many other people) compared to totally automatic spam system where bounce rate is very high and success rate is hardly 0.2 % to 0.3%. Hence for USD 200 and additional USD 50 for network and other costs, one can get around 300,000 legible mails per month with a very high success. at a success rate of 20% it will be a cost of USD 2.00 per 1000 page impressions (assuming 2 page views per user and succes rae of 20%)

Further if you can generate enough page views you can get a ecpm of say even a low USD 1.00 , your cost per 1000 page views will be less than one USD while you gain huge mileage and footage without worrying about the bidding process and in case you get a good ecpm, or have appropriate Google Adsense, your income can very well be in range of USD 3 to 5 ecpm and then you will be making 1-2 USD per 1000 pages and if you serve some million pages per month!!!!

So got Tagged!!!

InstaColl’s collaboration solutions provide businesses secure, online working relationships with key customers and partners, allowing dispersed stakeholders to reduce time-to-decision and problem-resolution by responding in real time to critical incidents and opportunities.

Sabeer Bhatia who rose to fame on account of acquisition of his venture hotmail by Microsoft and is one of very few who made millions in dotcom boom. Sabeer tried to repeat his hotmail experience but so far has not met with success as Arzoo.com in its initial phase failed and was written off and has become live again as a travel portal in second avatar but so far seems to have make no impact in keenly contested Indian travel market which is dominated by yatra, makemytrip, Cleartrip and Travelguru along with some marginal players like flightraja, Indiatimes travel, rediff travel etc.

While Softbank which is one of the most aggressive investor during dotcom booms days have maintained a overall low profile during web 2.0 boom and Instacoll is its first investment in India.

InstaColl, the Bangalore-based startup co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia, has announced the launch of InstaSecure, a new hosted service that enables knowledge workers to better protect, share and track the usage of Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel documents as part of day-to-day communications and collaboration. This new, easy-to-use, web-based service gives business professionals the power to grant and dynamically revoke access to documents distributed inside or outside the firewall, as well as audit actions such as opening, adding comments to, or printing those documents

It looks like that Indian Internet portal Rediff.com (NASDAQ : REDF ) has taken a cue from Domain booking & Web Hosting company Godaddy (Godaddy’s commercial during Superbowl was banned due to wardrobe malfunction and thus created quite a controversy and visibility for Godady) and has decided to release a quite racy advertisement to promote its newly launched unlimited storage email facility where two hot girls discuss about size of their colleague???

The advertisements shows two girls having a conversation about something big that their colleague, Raju, has. They ask each other in amazement, ‘Is it really that big?’ The shot moves to the rest of the office, where other employees are also wondering about Raju’s big thing. Finally, one of them asks Raju, ‘Is it really that big?’ Fed up with all the gossip, Raju replies, ‘It’s not big, it’s unlimited.’ The ad ends with a voiceover saying, ‘Rediffmail with free unlimited storage space. Big enough for anything.’

Quite a advertisement for email services by Rediff which has been promoted by advertising agency Rediffusion and takes its name from it.

Rediff.com, founded in 1996 and listed at NASDAQ, was one of the first Indian portals which tasted success but seems to have been withering away since then due to lack of any clear cut strategy and business direction.

Rediff which right now feature more on CAT preparation and investment tips on home page seems to be trying hard to capture some space and of the late has become a champion of me too products but has so far not able to do even one with much success on account of bad execution. Yahoo answers ~ Rediff Q&A, Bogspot – Rediffblogs, Adwords ~ Pay4clicks, Google news – rediff news, and travel, books, matchmaker and list is on and on …….

In its initial phase, Rediff tried to be a online bookstore taking a cue from Amazon.com but by 2002 has shifted its focus on search and ran major campaigns about Rediff lightening search and now seems to have shifted its focus on email where it has been competing as a also ran category. At present mails in India is dominated by Yahoo and Gmail and with Gmail now coming out of beta and available to everyone, presents quite a big challenge to Yahoo and other emails providers ( read Indiatimes and rediff) as it has ever increasing quota and offers much more sophisticated service with its thread structure and search facility and has incidently never advertised its hugely popular email service.

Community services Connexions is still under beta stage and does not count any significant space while rediff blogs though in market for couple of years is yet to make any dent as market is lead by blogspot and wordpress.com.

Rediff recently launched many other initiatives like Rediff jobs, Travel, Finance and Rediff text advertising service (similar to Google in look but without context) but has not been able to be a category winner in any of these due to delayed launches and lack of focus. Indian internet market which seems to be again in light on account of success of Naukri.com ( its market cap is around INR 20 billion with a top line of around INR 1000 million has made much success compared to Rediff as naukri was a struggling in dotcom in 2002 while Rediff was listed on NASDAQ at that point of time).

Problem with Rediff is that it si not very sure the space it wants to be. Is it a content provider or services or a pure content aggregator / distributor?? So far it seems to be going to be a one stop place which gets content from all place depending upon mood of season and home page is dominated by stories from cricket to CAT to Indian film industry heroines and supported by loads of services. But if it is content aggregator then it has just failed to capture emerging trends and seems to be still going by web 1.0 methods of getting content through tie ups and republishing without any social networking impact.

Probably what it needs is a racy visionary in internet space than a racy advertisement for a email service!!!!!

Incidentally Google was earlier in the talent market looking for a senior person in corporate development (M&A) who could identify upcoming opportunity in internet space but now seems to have decided to take LP (limited partners: Investors in a venture fund are known as limited partners as they have limited liability and are not involved with the day-to-day operations of the fund) route by investing in two early stage venture funds.

Incidentally both venture funds seems to be focused on Search engine Optimization / marketing (SEO/ SEM) and pay per click industry, the main/sole revenue driver for Google. Seed Fund promoter Mahesh Murthy runs a search engine optimization and PPC company “Pinstorm “ while Erasmic Venture fund has made only two investments out of which Position2 is a again focused on SE / SEM / PPC markets.

Google which has revolutionized search market and has left its peers far behind in Search and email services and created a revenue history but seems to be lagging behind in other areas of internet. Its shopping comparison site froogle seems to be there without any significant impact and is yet to make a mark in top three slot in US, while its video venture seems to be far behind Youtube, and Google tried to capture booming consumer video market by acquiring Youtube, though so far this acquisition seems to be creating more legal waves than revenue waves.

Hence it looks like by going LP route in India, Google want to keep a tab on upcoming disruptive technologies as well as find companies so that it can understand latest SEO / SEM techniques better in order to improve upon user experience which seems to be distorted by SEO / SEM companies.

Adscape Media, based in San Francisco, Calif., was funded by H.I.G. Ventures. Adscape Media is an in-game advertising company that helps advertisers create a more compelling connection with the rapidly growing gaming audience through in-game ads and interactive community experiences outside the game. The company’s proprietary technology enables the placement of static as well as dynamic advertising in interactive entertainment on PC, console and cellular platforms. In addition, Adscape’s AdverPlay technology provides advertising metrics and community building capabilities that enable publishers to monetize their IP in numerous ways.

Google was earlier reported to be in talk with Adscape Media as per reports in The Street.

The video game sector is considered to be a hot sector as Google main rival Microsoft made a move in this market by acquiring a in-game ad company Massive for USD 200 million.

Check out the interview with Adscape Media CEO, Chris Gilbert which was carried out in Gamasutra in June 2006.