mGinger enables advertisements including offers, vouchers, news and more, sent in the form of SMS on consumers’ mobile phones. These advertisements are specific to consumer interests and demographics mentioned during sign-up and received only in the timings that consumers specify. An additional value-add for consumers, is the earning potential of receiving these advertisements, which is redeemed through a gift cheque from mGinger.

The susbcriber of mGinger gets 20 paisa per sms and can refer his / her friends and family on mGinger. For every advert that referred mobile receives, main subscriber gets 10 paisa and 5 paisa for every advert that friend’s friend receives. Thus mGinger aims to created a pyramid structure mobile advertising list by using referrals and incentive scheme ( smart way of using word of mouth publicity).

This service is akin to Chequemail.com which used to pay users for reading their email and used to sell advertising space. Chequemail which received funding from ICICI venture in dotcom haydays finally closed down (though domain is still active but has no website as there is no name server listed against it).

DFJ which is a early stage / seed stage investor has recently opened its Bangalore Office with Mohanjit Jolly as Director and Sateesh Andra as Venture partner. DFJ other investments in India are seventymm, Komli etc

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).

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.