Press Release: If bird flu is on top of the mind of Indians, this game based on the deadly poultry disease could be a way to get into the tp of operators' deck. Games2win.com, a casual gaming site from Contests2win stable, has launched a specially created casual game based on the plight of the chicken in the country, called “Revenge Of The Tandoori Chicken”.

The game play consists of the player enacting the role of “Tandoori Chicken” and shooting down his erstwhile admirers, the highway travellers, who have now against it. The game also includes a scoring system showing individual scores and a top ten list. Games2win.com is planning to come out with more sequels of the game to support the struggle of “Tandoori Chicken” in regaining his lost glory. Nice idea, anyway.

Sify.com: The Union Budget is the biggest annual business event in India. On February 28, Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram (left)will be presenting the Budget 2006 in Parliament. It will be live cast on TV channels, and all websites and wireservices would be picking up the important points live. SifyMax, the broadband portal from Sify, would be webcasting the budget presentation live. SifyMax has tied up with the government-owned National Informatic Centre for this, which is a first.

Surya Mantha, Sr. Vice President, Interactive Services, Sify Limited, said, " We are extremely happy to bring the Union Budget 2006-2007 live to a global audience through a webcast on SifyMax.in in association with the NIC. We will also be the only consumer portal to provide budget news and analysis in five Indian languages; Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. We have taken the lead in developing multi-lingual versions of our popular portal as we believe that content in Indian languages is crucial to getting many more Indians to access and use the Internet." The budget presentation will start at 11 am (IST), on Feb 28.

I should say that SifyMax has been aggressive in tying with event partners these days. For instance, the Lakme Fashion Week 2006 which it will webcast. Now Union Budget 2006. Way to go!

Update: Indiantelevision.com reports that MSN India is also webcasting the Union Budget live. The live webcast is available on http://www.msn.co.in/ from 11 am IST onwards. MSN India is presenting this live webcast in association with LIC. MSN is also providing users the option to catch up with the recorded version, which will be available for the next couple of weeks.

Related:
Broadband Portal SifyMax To Live Webcast Lakme Fashion Week 2006

BBC:Here is an amazing story on a do-it-yourself radio station in a Bihar village (thanks to Sridhar T Pai of Tonse Telecom for the link). The radio station is run by Raghav Mahato, a resident of Mansoorpur Village in Vaishali district. So it’s aptly called Raghav FM Mansoorpur 1, and is transmitted over an equipment that costs just over $1.
Thousands of villagers, living in a 20 km radius of Raghav's small electronics repair shop-cum-radio station listen to his programmes (primarily music that he plays from his personal cassette collection). It’s interesting…read the full story here.

Agencyfaqs.com: It’s interesting. Naukri.com founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani has joined as an independent director on the board of MakeMyTrip.com. Now you can be sure that Bikhchandani will not tread into travel space. :-)

Exchange4Media.com: WorldSpace Satellite Radio plans to services in 10 more cities. It's already present in 10 cities, including Kolkata, where it launched its operations recently. The new cities where it is starting its operations are Ludhiana, Amritsar, Jaipur, Baroda, Goa, Coimbatore, Madurai, Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada and Nagpur.

Newly appointed Managing Director of Worldspace India, Shishir Lall, said, “India is the single largest market for Worldspace. When the company launched its IPO, it declared that over 50 per cent of its money from the IPO would be invested in India. So, we are very bullish about India.” The company also plans to start mobile satellite radio once the regulatory issues are sorted out. Lall said, “It’s...a regulatory problem. At present, we are allowed only to transmit through extra-terrestrial mode and not on terrestrial mode. When government gives us the permission, we will roll it out in India.”

Business Standard: If you are a mobile content provider / or wish to provide content to Tata Teleservices, here is a list of stuff they are planning to do in the next few months. Tata Indicom plans to offer bollywood music, video clips and songs straight from its servers, so the users need not download the heavy files on to their mobile phones. They plan to start a subscription service for this - priced at some Rs 15-29 per music channel.

The Economic Times: For outsourced sweat shops to co-production deals, that's the way to go for Indian animation companies. India's animation talent cannot be underestimated. For instance, Walt Disney’s 2005 blockbuster Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was done out of India. It was executed by a 700-strong team in the Los Angeles and Mumbai offices of animation and visual effects studio Rhythm & Hues. Now the movie has been nominated for the Oscar in the Best Visual Effects category. In fact, R&H’s visual director Bill Westenhofer, with Dean Wright of Visual Effects, Jim Berney of Imageworks, Scott Farrar of Industrial Light & Magic have been nominated.

The movie is special for the R&H’s India team, says Rhythm & Hues, India, MD Prashant Buyyala as it’s for the first time that a special effects project of such complexity and scale was done in India. That India has arrived on the global animation scene is now well accepted. India’s transformation from an animation sweat-shop to a high-end outsourcing partner has already been achieved,” says Pankaj Kedia regional manager Southeast Asia & India, Autodesk Media & Entertainment.

New age Indian animation houses are undertaking end-to-end production of outsourced shows and series which has led to the rise of the co-production model, where animation houses hold equity in the production that they have created for international markets, says the report.

Mohit Bhatnagar, Vice President, value added services and new product development, at Bharti Tele-Ventures, is said to be on his way out. Today's Economic Times story on organisational rejig at Bharti also has a pointer to this. Bhatnagar is said to be moving into a private equity firm.

As we get more details, we will post it here.

We need a transcriber or a transcription service for the audio interviews we do on our main sites paidContent.org and MocoNews.net, and will start soon on ContentSutra as well.
The volume of the interviews will be around 15-20 a month, each ranging about 30 mins to an hour long. What we need is a cost-effective service with quick turnaround, usually in a matter of 5-7 hours (or less) after we send in the audio file. Send me an e-mail if interested, along with the rates you charge.

Televisionpoint.com: We had reported this earlier too. The Indian Space Research Organisation, India's equivalent of America's NASA, is going ahead with its design of satellite for its mobile TV programme. "Satellite design is going on. It requires a huge antenna to be deployed in space and also high power. So, it's in the process. That (unfurlable antenna) is one of the major elements in that," chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) G Madhavan Nair said.

Director of ISRO satellite centre in Hyderabad, Dr K N Shankara, said the proposed spacecraft is a multi-media one. Making of unfurlable antenna needs new technology which ISRO is developing, Shankara told reporters on the sidelines of an international conference on electromagnetic interference and compatibility.

ISRO is also talking to an NRI group in the US to commercialise the mobile video technology in India.

Related:
ISRO Plans Mobile TV Based On Satellite Delivery; Commercial Pact With NRI Group Being Sewn Up

Televisionpoint.com: Tata Indicom may implement mobile broadcast by end of the year. It is exploring installing Korea's Digital Mobile Broadcating-Terrestial technology, which will enable mobile phone users to access their favourite programmes live, even while they are on a move. Users can listen to their favourite music, catch-up on latest news or follow their sports team.

For the mobile broadcast in India, Tata Indicom is looking at video streaming at 25 frames per sec. The existing video streaming is seven frames per sec, which would require setting up of a very high-capacity delivery system.

Related:
Korea Eyes India's Mobile TV Market
Know Your Digital Multimedia Broadcasting

TMCNet.com: SifyMax, the broadband content website from Sify Ltd, will do the live webcast of the forthcoming Lakme Fashion Week (LFW) 2006. SifyMax is the ''Official Internet Partner'' for the event to be held in Mumbai between March 28 and April 1st 2006, for the Fall/Winter week, and in September/October for the Spring/Summer week.

As the Official Internet Partner, SifyMax will host the Official LFW 2006 Website, webcast the event live and host exclusive content from the event. SifyMax will also be accessible from several points at the National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA), the venue for LFW 2006. SifyMax is also one of the Official Sponsors of LFW 2006.

EFYTimes.com: Tata Teleservices is going to launch Anant Uncle Pai comics in English and Hindi on its mobile service. It will also be provided in other Indian languages including Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Bengali and Punjabi.

Pankaj Sethi, vice president of content and applications for the company, said, “Tata Teleservices wants to provide interesting content to its diverse subscriber (base).” Coruscant Tec, a mobile content solutions company which had tied up with Anant Pai in November last year, has provided this wireless application. “This is the first time that BREW application has been developed with a regional interface," according to Coruscant.

Sify.com: Mobile value added services are now looking at audiences in small towns and regional markets for the next stage of growth. "Unlike metros and mini metros, the travel time and work pressures are much less. The free time is often consumed with the mobile VAS," says Bibhu Kumar, Vice-President (Marketing) of IMImobile. To reach out to these masses, IMI is providing regional content such as local songs and wallpapers of regional actors. Adds Kumar, "While in the North, people download Amitabh Bachchan wallpapers, Rajnikanth and Nagarjuna wallpapers would be downloaded in the South."

The demand for regionalised content has shot up in southern States. Tollywood, Kollywood and Bhangra are among the most popular download categories. The tier II cities of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra and Karnataka are the leading markets for IMI. "We have seen phenomenal growth in UP, Punjab, Gujarat, and to some extent, in Maharashtra," points out the company's marketing vice-president.

Surprisingly, 65 per cent of such SMS entries are from tier II cities and revenues from these areas have grown by 60 per cent. The average customer in a tier-II city is in the 28-35 age group. Youngsters there also want to stay in sync with latest mobile technology to keep up with their urban counterparts.The mobile entertainment market in India is estimated at $100 million, constituting 8-10 per cent of revenues of mobile operators. IMImobile claims to control over 70 per cent of such services.

Update: (26/02/06)
Delhi-based Cellnext Too Plans Regional Language Offerings

WebIndia123.com: This is another coup for Mumbai-based mobile content company Nazara Technologies. It has signed up an exclusive worldwide deal with the latest cricket sensation Mahendra Singh Dhoni for developing a wide range of mobile phone content based on him. The product line up will include games, wallpapers, screensavers, themes, SMS and the latest news on Dhoni.

Nazara, in which VC firm WestBridge invested $1.5 million last year, already has mobile content rights for all-time cricket star Sachin Tendulkar.

Indiantelevision.com: The India cricket telecast pie for the upcoming India-England series has now been settled with the unveiling of the cable & satellite broadcaster for the India territory as Sahara One. Doordarshan is the terrestrial broadcaster while the England territory rights remain with Sky Sports.

Indiantelevision.com: The report says Sky Sports has won the England territory rights from Nimbus Sport to broadcast England's tour of India starting with the First Test from Nagpur on 1 March 2006. It is the first series in a 4-year agreement that includes England's next series against India in 2009 as well as eight other international series, and Indian domestic cricket.

Related:
Will Nimbus Partner With Zee TV For Telecasting Cricket?

TMCNet.com: Venture capital funds globally are chasing wireless deals and India is also going to get a bigger share of it.

According to a report by telecoms industry research firm visiongain, investments in wireless technology have maintained a strong growth. "The portion dedicated to wireless investments is on the increase, and will continue to do so, hitting an all-time high in 2006.

"Wireless is where the action is and this is a great time to be a wireless start-up in search of venture funding," says visiongain analyst Lynne Gregg. "The focus of private equity investors is squarely on the rapidly growing, global wireless market. Longer term, we expect the movement towards financing wireless start-ups outside the US to grow, as major funds are earmarking funds for start-ups in Asian countries, such as China and India."

According to the report entitled "Venture capital in wireless and telecoms: Funding technology innovation", Wireless was a significant growth sector for venture capital investment in 2005. During 2005, 152 wireless-related companies received $1.3 billion in funding, a 24 per cent increase over 2004's $1.1 billion. Wireless accounted for 7 per cent of total VC investment last year, a figure that will rise in 2006 and beyond. The bulk of telecom investment today - around 60 per cent - is in wireless and related technology, including networking, infrastructure, semiconductors, mobile computing, content and services.

Also read: Where the Money Is in Wireless: S&P's Ken Leon says the sector looks strong, with mobile music and TV driving sales.

Exchange4media.com: Yahoo! India is looking for a media agency, and is inviting agencies for a pitch. Currently Canco Advertising is doing the job. It's also a possibility that there will be multiple media partners. However, no change is expected in the creative side of the business, which is handled by DBW. “Canco Advertising has done a good job for us,” explained Sonya Banerjee, Head, Marketing, Yahoo! India. “However, why we are looking for specialists in various categories is because Yahoo! India is on high growth trajectory and we want domain experts to take us to the next growth level,” she added.

Indiantelevision.com: eBay Inc. president and CEO Meg Whitman is on her first visit to India. She said that the company would continue to look at acquisition opportunities globally but the focus would be on "consolidation and integration" this year.

On India, Whitman said it was one of the fastest growing markets for eBay along with China, Korea and a few other countries in the Asia Pacific region. In 2004, eBay acquired India's most popular online shopping site, Baazee.com. "Though the internet base in India is low, it is growing at a fast pace. We are looking forward to the increase in broadband penetration as it accelerates the growth of online trade," she said.

eBay India has two million users across 240 cities in India and the most popular items sold on the site are jewellery, mobile phones and digital cameras. Globally, eBay has 181 million users. After the acquisition of Baazee.com, the Indian operations have gained from eBay's global presence. "One-third of our business now comes from cross border trade. Sellers from India have access to buyers from nearly 100 countries. An Indian seller sells to an international buyer every nine minutes," said eBay India country manager Gautam Thakar.

Though the top six towns in India account for 40-45 per cent of eBay India's trade, rapid growth is coming from the small towns. Sellers are also coming from these places and micro enterprises. "There is width and depth in the marketplace. A piece of jewellery sells every five minutes, a mobile handset sells every seven minutes and a digital camera every 46 minutes," Thakar said.

Related stories:
What makes eBay click
"E-Commerce Will Do Very Well In India:" Meg Whitman