Category — Internet@India

Last week, I had this blog post profiling Bixee and its launch of Pixrat. Yesterday, Pixrat was featured on TechCrunch. Hey! I BEAT Techcrunch on this one .

Pixrat is a cool photo bookmarking tool from Bixee, the Bangalore based startup. Its a mashup of del.icio.us & flikr. Pixrat must surely be the FIRST WEB2.0 INDIAN company to be TechCrunched !!

Congrats to Himanshu Nautiyal and other co-founders of Bixee on this.

There have been multiple cases (read controversies) in India recently, that demonstrate that either Indian legal & financial frameworks are simply too naïve to understand the internet economy or they are trendsetting & will give the entire world novel lessons in how to regulate the internet.

The latest controversy showcasing this is the Naukri v/s Bixee case. As the report indicates, naukri.com has dragged bixee.com, a Bangalore based job aggregation site to court and the courts have restrained Bixee from deeplinking & aggregating content from the Naukri website. Interestingly, Naukri could have simply used standard circumventing means (like modifying robots.txt) to stop this. Also, this has happened, in spite of Naukri’s CEO earlier saying (in this report) that aggregator sites would actually benefit Naukri.com immensely. Bixee has since taken off all references to Naukri.com from its homepage. Wonder, what the thousands of job/news/classifieds aggregator websites in other parts of the world would have to say about this. This incident is not isolated and is amongst a barrage of equally bizarre cases, such as -

-Google being asked to pay service tax for the Adwords program- the tax authorities earlier ruled that Google was liable to pay service tax for selling advertisement space on its search site to Indian entities.

-The Bazee MMS clip episode– the infamous case which led to the CEO of bazee.com being imprisoned because somebody tried to hawk a pornographic MMS clip on the auction site; are service providers liable for prosecution for the content they carry?

-The IIPM controversy– the first case in the world where a blog writer got sued over a blog post (and had to quit his job with IBM because of this).

Such incidents can’t entirely be explained away by the credibility of the parties involved; while the IIPM controversy was sparked off by an institute of questionable repute; naukri.com certainly is not in the same league as IIPM, yet they have chosen to act in this manner. This blows away all notions that self regulation is a better solution than judicial activism in such cases.

With every such incident, people will clamor that the Indian IT Act 2000 (in its current state) is inadequate to deal comprehensively with such issues. While that is certainly true, I am not sure that an act of legislation will ever be able to keep pace with the new issues that the rapidly changing technopreneurial landscape is going to throw up every now and then. Every time some new incident happens, the act is likely to be blamed but can law ever keep pace with technology?

Maybe some umbrella industry body (like a media ombudsman or something on the lines of TRAI) needs to be contemplated. It would be worthwhile to understand how the internet savvy countries like US, South Korea etc deal with these issues at a systemic level.

Does anybody have any suggestions….?

There is clearly a dearth of information about website traffic data for Indian websites. I have often tried to search for any publicly available sources of information about data for Indian websites (reach, penetration, page views etc) but to no avail. No Indian website publicly gives out its traffic figures and there is just no external database or tracking methodology or agency.

Alexa.com (a subsidiary of Amazon.com) is widely acknowledged as the default choice for estimating website traffic ranks (specifically for US websites). There is no other source that has the credibility that Alexa has and hence their published data serves as a good reference point for webmasters or SEO companies. However, I have noticed a few Indian websites quoting Alexa data to substantiate their claims about Indian website traffic. I think this is NOT JUSTIFIED and here’s why.

Alexa.com has been around since 1996 and their web traffic data gathering/mining is based on samples collected from people using the Alexa toolbar on their computers. The Alexa toolbar has been downloaded by millions of people (this is what Alexa claims and there is no reason to disbelieve that) and the toolbar tracks the websites visited from the computer having the Alexa toolbar and relays it back to Alexa’s server for aggregation and analysis. The figures are then extrapolated for the entire web universe to generate overall website ranks. That’s perfectly reliable from a statistical perspective. And since most of Alexa’s users are likely to be in the US, it would provide reasonably good estimates about web traffic data and traffic ranks for US sites.

Now, how many Alexa toolbar users are there in India? Nobody has any idea and Alexa does not publish country wise penetration figures for their toolbar. I am a fairly heavy Internet user by Indian standards and I don’t have an Alexa toolbar (my browser has a Google toolbar currently and I have downloaded Yahoo & MSN toolbars in the past); also I don’t know or have heard of anybody in India who has an Alexa toolbar on his/her computer. Ask web savvy users around you if they have heard of Alexa. I bet they haven’t. So what does this mean? This means that since the number of Alexa toolbar users in India are negligible, insignificant Indian data is getting captured in the Alexa figures for estimating Indian website traffic. If this is true, are Indian websites justified in using Alexa data for substantiating their claims.

To get a sense of what I am driving at, check out the list of disclaimers on the Alexa website.

I have seen Indian websites use Alexa.com traffic ranks to back their own claims. Check out this banner ad that Naukri.com has on their site. The ad clearly mentions that the figures are based on Alexa data. As per the ad, Naukri.com has a rank of 363 worldwide and is the most frequented Indian job site. That by itself (for Naukri.com) is a great achievement. But this data does not give the correct picture. What the figure indicates beyond reasonable doubt, is that amongst Internet users in the US, Naukri.com is ranked 363rd and is the most popular Indian job portal. This is probably because the Indian community in the US is a sizable portion amongst US Internet users and they are frequently logging onto Naukri.com for their job needs. It is also possible that, with India becoming a big recruiting ground for overseas companies, many overseas companies are using Naukri’s huge database to search out suitable employees.

But this data has practically no relevance to Indian users. What I would be interested in knowing is the following - amongst Indian internet users (and not amongst US internet users), which website has the highest traffic, reach or coverage ? Unfortunately, I think that there is just no data available on this. I am aware of a few surveys that some Indian market research firms have undertaken from time to time to estimate web traffic ranks but those are one-off dip-stick studies and do not involve continuous tracking.

I use the example of Naukri.com to exemplify my assertion though I have no doubt that they are the biggest (and the best) Indian job site. I use Naukri’s recruitment services myself and I think they are the most effective jobsite in India. I also have huge respect for them because they were the first Indian dotcom to have a viable business model. Not for a moment am I contesting any of the claims that they have made in their banner ad, no questions about that.

All I am saying is that simply because of lack of any other reliable data, Alexa figures for Indian websites can at best, be quoted as a passing reference. From a technical perspective, the data does not give the correct picture and any claims made on the basis of that data are unjustified.

More often than not, we make the government our favorite punching bag for its inability to present a user-friendly visage to the public. The launch of its official website marks a genuine attempt by the government to help change that impression.

The Government of India launched its official website last week by announcing it through half page advertisements in all the national newspapers. The website is positioned as the National Portal of India and its objective is to “ provide a single window access to the information and services being provided by the Indian Government for the citizens. An attempt has been made through this Portal to provide comprehensive, accurate, reliable and one stop source of information about India and its various facets. “
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So its finally happening in India as well…mobiles phones doubling up as a payment mechanism (Now, pay with your cellphones). Just a couple of months ago, I was scouting around to find if this was possible in India (for a prospective business idea). I was disappointed to learn that it wasn’t; however I conjectured that it would not take more than six months for this to surface. I have been proven wrong. Credit card companies had better watch out, for this competitor has the potential to yank the carpet from under their feet.

This is the stark reality of today’s world.Technology,which till yesterday was a key differentiator,is now proving to be a great leveler.Product manufacturers and service providers typically guard against the threat of new entrants in their industry and try to put up entry barriers. However, how does one tackle the threat of being simply substituted out of business from the most unexpected of quarters? Michael Porter foresaw this trend two decades ago and enshrined this in his 5 Forces Model of Competitive Analysis by dilineating the threat of substitutes from the threat of new entrants.

This is leading to a constant churning in our digital lifestyles with product life cycles getting shortened. Consumers often find themselves burdened with the task of choosing from a plethora of disparate choices & preferences for buying a particular product or service. Some of the most notable substitutions that come to my mind are as follows –

Typewriters being substituted by computers two decades ago
Parcels getting substituted by couriers
Snail-mails getting substituted by email
Faxes getting substituted by a combination of scanners+email
Wristwatches getting obviated due to presence of cellphone
Travel agencies losing business to online/SMS based railway/air ticketing
Stock Brokers losing business to online share trading
Alarm Clocks getting substituted by cellphones
Digital Diary becoming obsolete due to multifunctional cellphones
Phones calls/email getting partly substituted by SMS
Digital Cameras getting substituted by camera cellphones
Music Casettes/CDs getting substituted by IPOD
International Phone Calls getting substituted by VOIP( read Skype )

So what’s the next big substitution shaping up in the technology world….Microsoft Windows getting substituted by a Google client-server modeled OS ?

Did I hear the geeks say ‘amen’ ?