PubMatic acquires Pune based MobiPrimo

Digital media platform company for publishers, PubMatic has acquired Pune based MobiPrimo, becoming the first strategic selling  platform to provide native, cross-device support for premium publishers. MobiPrimo is a mobile development technology firm that specializes in bringing mobile platform integration to companies such as Nokia, Motorola and Microsoft.  The transaction will allow PubMatic’s mobile platform to integrate directly with the leading mobile networks, ad servers and demand-side platforms (DSPs).  In addition, the acquisition more than doubles the number of employees on PubMatic’s dedicated mobile development team.

PubMatic’s mobile platform will support all the features included in the PubDirect suite of management tools.  PubDirect offers premium publishers everything they need to navigate the increasingly complex digital marketplace by allowing them to monetize their guaranteed and non-guaranteed inventory in a private marketplace that covers all demand channels.  PubDirect includes:

• Unified Optimization Engine allows publishers to monetize guaranteed and non-guaranteed inventory against multiple demand sources with a unified strategy to maximize publisher revenue at the impression level.
• Audience Direct gives publishers the ability to respond to the growing demand for audience buys by helping them to create and manage the variable value of their audience in real time. By combining first-party and third-party data sources, publishers can sell audience- targeted campaigns on a guaranteed basis using their existing ad server relationships.
• Deal Management enables pricing and brand controls and enhanced floor and deal modeling to help publishers do more than examine campaign performance. PubDirect tools and services facilitate action.
• Unified Insights enable publishers to understand their inventory and revenue across guaranteed and non-guaranteed sales channels and delivery platforms.  In addition, publishers can identify and package new revenue opportunities and easily access PubDirect via their iPad.  This first-ever iPad application allows publishers to conveniently view performance at any time and from anywhere.

- Recommended Read: Pubmatic story

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News Roundup: Indian web censorship court date moved to May

Top executives from all subpoenaed companies (including Google, Facebook) were originally scheduled to make a court appearance yesterday but executives of all companies have been exempted from appearing in person by an earlier higher court order. The controversial Indian legal imbroglio over censorship of web content and involving twenty companies including Google, Facebook and Microsoft has been deferred until May 23. Source

Cellular Operators Association of India moves Supreme Court on dual technology licence

The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) sought the Supreme Court’s intervention to declare dual-technology licences granted to the telcos as mala fide, in the light of the court’s own decision to annul 122 mobile permits granted to eight new telecom companies last month. The GSM operators lobby has also sought that GSM airwaves be taken back from the three companies and re-distributed through auction, similar to the apex court’s recent decision.

The lobby group that represents GSM telcos like Airtel and Vodafone has asked the Supreme Court to ‘quash and set aside’ the government’s decision of ‘allotting GSM spectrum to CDMA licencees’. [Source]

Company Law Board asks Unitech to buy out Telenor’s stake or exit JV

The Company Law Board, a quasi-judicial body that rules on corporate matters, on Tuesday directed Unitech Wireless to decide by March 19 if it wants to buy out the 67.25% stake held by Norway’s Telenor, or exit their joint venture. [Source]

Bharti Airtel may kick start 4G services from Kolkata on March 20

Bharti Airtel, India’s largest mobile phone company by revenues and customers may kick start its fourth generation services from Kolkata on March 20, executives familiar with the development told ET.
This would be the second launch of 4G services in India after Augere Wireless, which has been offering high-speed data through dongles (data cards) since last month. [source]

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MilkADeal and HiShop Malaysia Combine With New Funding From CHI

MilkADeal is a group-buying site. HiShop Malaysia is a flash sales site, the sort of e-commerce that opens exclusively to members for a limited period of time and focuses on selling just branded goods [1].

Anyway, both of these sites have decided to work closely together. Though there aren’t any details on exactly how they will do so, but we’ll update you if we find out more. Both brands will continue to operate as they are, but will actually be a single entity.

With the two sites working together, it looks like they have both ends covered, ranging from deal hunters who are looking for discounts, all the way up to luxury deals.

HiShop was invested in by Crystal Horse Investments (CHI). So with this merger, CHI has once again put its faith into HiShop, and MilkADeal as well by investing (as I understand it) about half a million Singaporean dollars. This merger looks interesting and I’m sure many would wonder how it will work out in the already somewhat fatigue deals market.

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1. Some also call this model VIP e-commerce stores.  ↩

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Baidu HR Staffer Launches Pop Career with Debut Song ‘Angry Birds’

A human resources office worker at the Chinese search engine Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) has transformed into a pop star today with the launch of her first-ever song. Fittingly, the single by 23-year old Liu Dong – or Jocelin, to use her English name – is being released first of all on her company’s own streaming music service, Baidu Ting.

The song is called Angry Birds – yes, we’re not too sure how Rovio Mobile, makers of the hugely popular Angry Birds games, will feel about that – and went live at lunchtime today on the Ting web app. The song can be streamed or downloaded for free (it might be geo-restricted to China only) from Jocelin’s special promo song page. It’s a typical love song, with plenty of acoustic guitar, and an impressive singing debut from the Baidu HR staffer.

Jocelin Liu’s move into the music industry came after her appearance on the catwalk at the Baidu Chinese New Year party two months ago, which caused photos of her in a somewhat revealing dress (on the left in the top image) to flood Weibo and the Chinese internet as a whole.

After her catwalk photos first went viral, the number of her Weibo followers sky-rocketed, and her microblog account – here – now has nearly 300,000 fans. It is believed that Jocelin is sticking with her day-job at Baidu, and that a full-time move into the music industry or, say, modeling, is not yet on the cards. The song is a one-off release for now, with lyrics written by Jocelyn herself, and without record label distribution.

Baidu Ting launched in May of last year – and last summer resolved all of its outstanding copyright litigation to become the one of the country’s largest legit sources of free music.

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Report: Personal Cloud Will Replace the Personal Computer by 2014

The reign of the personal computer as the sole corporate access device is coming to a close, and by 2014, the personal cloud will replace the personal computer at the center of users’ digital lives, according to Gartner, Inc.

Several driving forces are combining to create this new era. These megatrends have roots that extend back through the past decade but are aligning in a new way.

Megatrend No. 1: Consumerization — You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
Gartner has discussed the consumerization of IT for the better part of a decade, and has seen the impact of it across various aspects of the corporate IT world. However, much of this has simply been a precursor to the major wave that is starting to take hold across all aspects of information technology as several key factors come together:

• Users are more technologically savvy and have very different expectations of technology.
• The Internet and social media have empowered and emboldened users.
• The rise of powerful, affordable mobile devices changes the equation for users.
• Users have become innovators.
• Through the democratization of technology, users of all types and status within organizations can now have similar technology available to them.

Megatrend No. 2: Virtualization — Changing How the Game Is Played
Virtualization has improved flexibility and increased the options for how IT organizations can implement client environments. Virtualization has, to some extent, freed applications from the peculiarities of individual devices, operating systems or even processor architectures. Virtualization provides a way to move the legacy of applications and processes developed in the PC era forward into the new emerging world. This provides low-power devices access to much-greater processing power, thus expanding their utility and increasing the reach of processor-intensive applications.

Megatrend No. 3: “App-ification” — From Applications to Apps
When the way that applications are designed, delivered and consumed by users changes, it has a dramatic impact on all other aspects of the market. These changes will have a profound impact on how applications are written and managed in corporate environments. They also raise the prospect of greater cross-platform portability as small user experience (UX) apps are used to adjust a server- or cloud-resident application to the unique characteristics of a specific device or scenario. One application can now be exposed in multiple ways and used in varying situations by the user.

Megatrend No. 4: The Ever-Available Self-Service Cloud
The advent of the cloud for servicing individual users opens a whole new level of opportunity. Every user can now have a scalable and nearly infinite set of resources available for whatever they need to do. The impacts for IT infrastructures are stunning, but when this is applied to the individual, there are some specific benefits that emerge. Users’ digital activities are far more self-directed than ever before. Users demand to make their own choices about applications, services and content, selecting from a nearly limitless collection on the Internet. This encourages a culture of self-service that users expect in all aspects of their digital experience. Users can now store their virtual workspace or digital personality online.

Megatrend No. 5: The Mobility Shift — Wherever and Whenever You Want
Today, mobile devices combined with the cloud can fulfill most computing tasks, and any tradeoffs are outweighed in the minds of the user by the convenience and flexibility provided by the mobile devices. The emergence of more-natural user interface experiences is making mobility practical. Touch- and gesture-based user experiences, coupled with speech and contextual awareness, are enabling rich interaction with devices and a much greater level of freedom. At any point in time, and depending on the scenario, any given device will take on the role of the user’s primary device — the one at the center of the user’s constellation of devices.

The report seems too far fetched in terms of (personal) cloud-only future by 2014. No doubt that we are going through Cloud storm, but enterprise companies are still wary about security and importantly, the essential software supporting cloud hasn’t yet matched the ease of Cloud’s promises (portability?).

“The combination of these megatrends, coupled with advances in new enabling technologies, is ushering in the era of the personal cloud,” said Gartner’s Kleynhans. “In this new world, the specifics of devices will become less important for the organization to worry about. Users will use a collection of devices, with the PC remaining one of many options, but no one device will be the primary hub. Rather, the personal cloud will take on that role. Access to the cloud and the content stored or shared in the cloud will be managed and secured, rather than solely focusing on the device itself.”

Another report by US based ChangeWave Research survey suggests that a total of 84% of companies are planning to buy tablets next quarter and more than one-in-five companies (22%) say they’ll be purchasing tablets for their employees during 2nd Quarter 2012.

Interesting times ahead.

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Confirmed. Indians have more mobile phones than toilets, Only 3.1% Households have Internet Connectivity [Census Data]

Indian government has released census 2011 data and as per the data collected, 49.8% Indians defect in the open, though 53.2% household have a mobile phone (and 63.2% have a landline phone).

As far as toilet facilities are concerned, 49.8% defect in open, 3.2% in public toilets. The situation is (expectedly) bad in rural areas where open defection stands at 67.3%.

Key insights from the report:

- 246,692, 667 households in India, out of which Rural stands at 1,67,826,730 (i.e. 68%).

- Out of 246,692, 667 households, 213,526,283 are owned and only 27,368,304 are rented.

- Talking about the Internet penetration, urban India has close to 10.4% households with laptop (without Internet) and 8.3% households consist of laptops (with Internet). On the contrary, 76.7% households in Urban India have a TV set.

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- Data link.

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NPC Rep: Telecoms Not Stopping Spam Texts is a Crime

Garbage text messages is pretty annoying, especially when they wake you up in the middle of the night. But are they a crime? Chen Weicai thinks so, and he says that telecom operators who fail to stop those texts are criminal accomplices.

Being a responsible lawmaker who takes China’s myriad social issues very seriously, Chen spent his free time during last week’s NPC sessions collecting spam texts from the other NPC members. “In one week, I collected 17 fraud/spam texts,” Chen said. Of course, there are 2,987 representatives in the NPC, so 17 isn’t a particularly large number, but probably Chen didn’t find time to talk to everyone. (Plus, Chinese telecoms offer government bigwigs special spam-blocking services regular folks don’t get unless they sue).

But Chen says that in 2011, over 100,000 fraudulent text messages were sent, which cost losses to the people of over 4 billion RMB ($634 million). It’s not clear where he got those numbers; apparently an awful lot of people fall for these spam texts and end up giving money to the senders.

So why don’t telecoms stop these messages? According to Chen, “The telecom department is enticed by large sums of money, and doesn’t filter texts for the masses; this is losing the big picture in pursuit of small profits!” And it’s not a technical problem. When asked, Chen brought up the case of Mr. Yang in Guangdong, who sued China Mobile because he was being harassed by spam texts and was eventually put on an anti-spam list.

Chen suggested telecoms could also screen texts sent from a single number to more than 10,000 people at once. This, he says, would not be an invasion of privacy because sending a text to 10,000 people isn’t something regular people do.

Since sending spam texts can be a crime — a subset of spam texts are also fraudulent — Chen says that telecom operators failing to block the texts are criminal accessories.

On a completely coincidental note, we’re sure, Chen’s PSB department owes telecom operators more than 180,000 RMB ($28,571) after sending a flood of anti-spam warning texts to users over the Spring Festival holiday.

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