Jay Hind – The Future of Indian TV is here.

I have been away from writing on my blog for few months now. Work kept me so busy that I didn’t get time or maybe I didn’t jump up in excitement to write about something. Though, after this long break, I found something really interesting. Jay Hind produced by Undercover productions (was not sure if it existed J) in association with Buzzintown.com is the 1^st late night standup comedy show on Internet (youtube channel) in India and this indeed made me jump in excitement and here I am writing about it.

I see the future of Indian TV in this stand-up comedy show. This series is path breaking for Indian TV and the power of Internet in India. If this series becomes a hit and starts making revenues to become profitable, then this will be the 1^st gen TV series online and can give birth to more talented players to come online to provide content and be profitable while running the shows.

I am a firm believer that solid content will find it’s FAN following… and evidently I have seen over 1250 Fans of this show already on Facebook FAN page of Jay Hind growing rapidly by word of mouth in just a month or so.

Jay Hind team has done a wonderful job in creating the same magic of Movers and Shakers as Abhigyan Jha brings in his expertise and creativity to tickle the funny bone with the sarcasm, pun, entertaining and funny conversations, hilarious disclaimers and very well executed gags by Sumeet Raghavan and off-course the Divya aka Savita Bhabhi!

After having not watched TV in a long time, this show re-affirms that it was worth NOT watching the idiot box. The same old boring Saas Bahu $#%) and those cameras panning to every joker’s face gives me total grief. Jay Hind comes as a refreshing change and cuts across the clutter and provides solid entertainment. Interestingly, I am trying to see when I will start seeing ads in the breaks on this show. Presently they are building the momentum for getting the eye balls and with few million people on Internet these eye balls are coming very soon for this show.

Jay hind is leveraging the Social media well for it’s promotion. After the 1^st month of it’s launch in August it has crossed over 1 million views. You can:

Follow Jay Hind on Twitter
Become a Jay Hind Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to Youtube channel of JayhindTV
Check it out on Buzzintown.com

The rosy picture painted in my precious post about BOKU.com doesn’t seem to be that rosy. Based on reading fine print on BOKU.com’s website and some number crunching and deeper analysis, it might become more expensive to acquire new customers and retain customers if you use BOKU.com unless you get a phenomenal increase in conversions.

Airtel + BOKU can reach a huge user base of mobile customers in India. However, it seems like talktime currency can not be used to make payments. So the overall user reach (especially in smaller regions) reduces tremendously.

Postpaid customers – If postpaid users are going to be charged in their bills then service charge, recovery and fraud management will become an issue.

Broadly there are some more important issues to think of:

1) Customer’s Perspective: In the bill amount the user has to pay ~10% service charge. Which means that if they spent Rs. 100 they actually have spent Rs. 110 which they will realize in their 1st bill.

Merchant’s Perspective

1) Airtel + BOKU is charging some ridiculous amount of 25% – 45% fee to allow such transactions. If we go by industry standards, online payment gateways accepting credit card/debit card/Paymate(mobile), ITZ Cash cards etc… all these guys charge not more than 10%. Which means in the case of BOKU, the merchants will have to compensate nearly 25% to 45% of the cost of payment made by users. Which is ridiculous.

2) Merchant’s Perspective: If BOKU says that these numbers add up and it’s volume game and more conversions will help in driving revenues and break-evens then it means that by adding BOKU your conversions need to go up by atleast 10%(this number varies for various industries) till you break even.

3) After careful consideration and number crunching it looks like your existing customers who are already using credit or debit cards to make online payments should actually NOT move to this Mobile payment option as in the earlier case the merchant is compensating for 10% of the fee, however, with BOKU the compensation increases steeply.

BOKU Vs Merchant VS Telecom Provider
1) Credit period and liquidity – Telecom providers are asking for a credit period of 90 days before they release payments. Which means the merchant’s liquidity will get hit. They are willing to reduce it over a period of time to 30 days or 60 days. However, this is ridiculously high as compared to almost 24 hours time frame provided by Online payment gateways.

2) Money recovery from customers – Recovering money from post paid users for wrong charges on their bills might become an issue as they will have to handle fraud complaints and resolutions.

What BOKU can be helpful in is… converting new users. Making payments for the 1st time when the user is not sure about using their credit cards.

Unless Telecom carrier’s and BOKU’s combined cost doesn’t come down to something similar to other online payment gateways, this looks like a flashy new system to me which will take it’s own sweet n slow route to become what they want to become.

BOKU.com, mobile payments made easy, NO Plastic Needed.

Today morning I was munching my breakfast after a solid gym routine and while scanning through my feeds, chanced upon an article on Watblog by Maneesh about mobile payments system by a company called BOKU.com where you DON’T need any credit card, debit card, bank account etc to make a payment.

I just jumped in the air and got glued to this post and quickly pounced to check out this site BOKU.com. And YES, they are offering direct payments through mobile phones without any card plastic / bank account.

If BOKU.com continues to expand their partnerships with more and more service providers like, there is nothing which stops BOKU to become the World’s most trusted and easiest online payment system.

BOKU.com is funded by Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures. VC’s investments includes high-profile start-ups like Infinera, MySQL, OpenTable, PureDigital, Second Life, Tellme, Twitter, Yelp, and Zillow, and franchise companies such as eBay, Juniper Networks and Red Hat.

BOKU.com’s strong management team comes from web, payment and mobile companies like Amazon, AT&T, Apple, Bank of America, GE, Google, mBlox and Paypal.

They claim to have a strong fraud management systems from their strong experience in managing risk in top notch companies like Amazon, PayPal, Google, Bank of America, and FirstUSA and they claim that Mobile phone is a different story as its used by only you… lets hope that’s the case.

This is how the payments work in BOKU.com, citing an example via @watblog a payment test they did in Facebook on Texas Holdem Poker application.

This can be the NEXT big thing to fuel online business growth with over couple of billion handsets across the world. The 3 step easy process just makes it so lucrative for customers to go ahead and make a quick payment.

As a publisher we are up-beat about this service and I personally am very optimiztic that this system will completely revolutionize the online payments in the coming time.

If this is increasingly adopted by more telecom providers, this will basically revolutionize the online payment systems in India as well as worldwide. I had written about one application of such system (to book local train tickets through mobile) on my blog last year. This is super exciting news for many online businesses. However, what would be interesting to note is, how telecom providers cope with managing the Post-Paid customers with bills and recoveries and charge-backs.

Anyways, this is Fantastic, I being in a online games company where we handle daily online payments… this will help us boost our conversions significantly. I think all online publishers will welcome this as a booster for their sales.

Looking forward to a close collaboration with BOKU.com.

Online Games have provided the new playgrounds to the world which has no limits, no boundaries and no times to close. The Digital Playgrounds have actually strengthened the social fabric of India and brought the same old days of people sitting together in a choupal back.

The other day, my friend and I were discussing how we missed the joy of being able to just run around and play all day long. When we were kids, we looked forward to the late afternoon – early evening period. This was when we would forget about all our childish problems like homework, cleaning our rooms, fussing over vegetables etc., and rush out to the playground to start the all-important task of choosing teams and deciding on the game we would play.

As we grew up, it became tougher and tougher to avoid the huge amounts of homework we got in school. Plus, we had to go and ‘hang out’ at all the ‘coolest’ places. All through college most of us were half-dead trying to keep up with the never-ending amounts of research and assignments that seemed to just keep piling up. Then came the crazy routine of sending out our resumes to literally thousands of firms, hoping we would get a call from one of the most prestigious companies telling us, “Congratulations. You’ve got the job!”. And before we knew it, we were full-blown adults, with jobs and real-life bank accounts!

We didn’t even have time to catch up with old friends anymore. Most of my friends had gotten jobs in different parts of the country. We went from talking to each other every single day, to calling each other maybe once a month.

So there we were, my friend and I, grumbling about how drastically life had changed for all of us, in the blink of an eye. But at least there was some respite. At least we had the wonderful world of Online Gaming for some recreation. There were no time-constraints or even border-limitations for that matter – these were the new-age playgrounds : Digital Playgrounds! We could play whenever we had the time or inclination to play, with anyone who was online at that moment – whether they were in Bangalore, Kolkata or Mumbai.

And the best part was that I could beat my friend, who was, according to herself, unbeatable in Online Rummy. Every night, after work, I would settle down in my favourite chair in front of my laptop and begin my winning streak. It was my way of unwinding after a long day of work. This was the time when we went from being friends to competitors – for 3 long hours.

My friend and I came to the conclusion that life wasn’t all that bad after all. Sitting in our own apartment, with hot steaming bowls of soup, and an entire night of gaming stretching in front of us, life seemed pretty darn good!

Co Blogger- Duhita Jagtiani

Results of 1st 64 Player Online Rummy Tournament

Games24×7.com is super excited to announce the results of the 1st ever 64 Player Online Rummy Tournament conducted on 9th January, 2009. We want to thank all the players for such an enthusiastic response and making it such a big success!

Since we saw such major participation, now we are going to hold 64 player tournaments everyday at 8 PM starting from Wednesday, 14th January, 2009. This is 1st time ever in India that any Online Games portal is holding daily 64 player tournaments and giving out real cash prizes!

For further information Go here.

You can win Daily Real Cash Prizes! And the best part – there is no entry fee!

List of winners of the 9th January, 2009, 64 Player Rummy Trump Tournament:

• 1st Prize: 1000.0 – krimesh
• 2nd Prize: 600.0 – skrocks
• 3rd Prize: 400.0 – royalkichu
• 4th Prize: 400.0 – rummyboy
• 5th Prize: 200.0 – vijaykumar
• 6th Prize: 200.0 – captrt
• 7th Prize: 200.0 – babulal
• 8th Prize: 200.0 – baadshah99
• 9th Prize: 100.0 – yogesh
• 10th Prize: 100.0 – deepika_dell
• 11th Prize: 100.0 – ajaytiwari
• 12th Prize: 100.0 – sundaravathanameee
• 13th Prize: 100.0 – winner1
• 14th Prize: 100.0 – Sajosh
• 15th Prize: 100.0 – Vthampy
• 16th Prize: 100.0 – KashPat

Games24×7.com Press Release

Experience the thrill unleashed with Multi Player Tournaments on Games24×7.com, India’s 1st Online Tournaments portal. With over 15,000 Online Tournaments and over Rs. 3 Lakh won in cash prizes, Games24×7.com today announced the launch of their multi-player knock-out tournaments platform.

“The new tournament engine will help us expand our tournament offerings rapidly. Now we will be running 32, 64, 128, 256 multiplayer tournaments and our technology backup allows us to scale it to any number, given the demand. This will reduce disappointment for late enrolments. And now we are all set to offer the most unique winning experience to thousands of players across India.” explained Mr. Vishnu Ram, CTO, Games24×7.com.

Our research also indicates that www.games24×7.com is India’s 1st and only online tournaments portal that gives real cash prizes. The real-cash knock-out tournaments in rummy and chess are a daily attraction and have helped the portal to grow rapidly.

“Today we are proud to be India’s 1st Online Tournaments Portal which is earmarked with these important milestones. We are happy to see the good response to our existing “Jhatpat” and “Trump” tournament series. We look forward to expand our online tournament offerings and continue to hold our leadership in online tournaments in India.” concluded Mr. Sachin Uppal, Marketing Director, Games24×7.com.

What is most interesting about games24×7.com is that as a special introductory offer, there is no tournament entry fee. Anyone can just log-in, play tournaments, and if sufficiently skilled at the games, laugh all the way to the bank. Surely it makes sense to say play more and win more at Games24×7.com.

Games24×7.com is India’s 1st online tournament company. Founded by a group of entrepreneurs from IIT and IIM backgrounds, Games24×7.com is set to bring forward the Indian competitive spirit in online games by offering real cash prize tournaments.

Games24×7.com, India’s 1st Online Tournaments Portal