Feels like I am writing after decades. But I am glad I feel like writing again. So many thoughts pass my mind everyday that it makes me feel I am living in a T20 world! Anyway, I have moved on to another internet&mobile company and heck I am loving each day here. Life has been like a roller coaster ride so far .. new posts coming soon!

Do we see Indian portals opening up? And trying to cater not only to masses but also to niches?

A personalized home page, according to me, helps us consume the content we are most interested in, at one place. It also enables us to decide the way our stuff gets displayed. Most importantly, we can add content from multiple publishers and blogs.

Indiatimes launched its personalized home page with my.indiatimes.com today (beta version). This is the first such offering from any Indian portal. my.indiatimes.com is a way to customize content from Indiatimes and from around the web. You can drag and drop the boxes, delete content, add whatever you prefer from any site. It requires you to sign in with your Indiatimes id. As far as content goes, I see quite a limited set of content right now. However, the ease of use and functionality is quite neat. There is no clutter and it is easy to add and delete stuff. I am sure content feeds and widgets would be ramped up soon enough.

This is an encouraging move from a publisher which is trying to go content neutral by providing content feeds from the likes of Hindu, BBC, CNN and Newsweek. Under each content category there is a clear distinction between Indiatimes content and other content from around the web. It will be interesting to see the adoption pattern of such a site in India. I would like the audience to share their views on what they want the most from a personalized home page. And yes, there are no advertisements on my.indiatimes.com (yet!)

OLTA[Online Travel Agents] space in India in heating up. Local players like makemytrip.com, indiatimes travel, yatra, travelguru and cleartrip are slugging it out. All of them ‘claim’ to offer one or more of these – the cheapest tickets, the best service or the widest range of airlines. How to differentiate oneself in this crowd? Lowest fares would have to be there – a study in the US shows that lowest fares was by far the most important thing people looked for while buying tickets online.

• Be a ‘customer champion’ strategy:

Given that the lowest fares are on offer ‘most’ of the time on ‘most’ of the sectors, OLTAs have to gear up their activity system and reach the highest level of technology and operational efficiency to differentiate themselves. Let me get more specific here. If both MMT and Yatra offer the same price on Del Mum sector, the consumer would go on one or the other depending on the ease of use of their websites. Or, if the consumer is facing a problem in booking, then the provider who offers ‘chat’ or ‘phone’ help would be preferred. These are some examples which would produce differentiation in the mind of the consumers and finally make one or the other brands stronger.

• Be a ‘travel experience’ provider
  

From being a provider of plain vanilla air-tickets to building travel experiences for consumers. If one could bundle the deal [tickets+hotel+car rentals] in such a way that sum total is greater than sum of the parts separately, it could provide a source of differentiation as well as better margins. The consumer would be happy to get the best deal and the provider would be able to differentiate itself from other air-tickers providers.

A twist in this whole game is the imminent entry of global giants such as expedia and travelocity. How will they change the game among local players? Are they going to partner, acquire or go on their own? It will be interesting to see how they arrive!

Another trend to watch out is the increasing popularity of metasearch engines like rediff faresearch, mobbissmo, flightraja etc. These guys lead traffic to OLTAs+Airlines and hence are important for them.

Given all this, it becomes important to understand how a customer books travel online. What are his most important needs and what makes him stick to a particular provider.

Some 5 years back, I remember going to the railway reservation offices in Delhi and standing in queues for hours to buy tickets. The system at best was inefficient – some times one would wait for hours to find out that the tickets have been sold out. Also, customer service was a tad above non-existent.

And yesterday, Dad told me to go online and book his Rail tickets to Indore. The fact that I don’t have to stand in a queue was reason enough to give their website a try. Managed to get the tickets done after some 100 odd attempts and a total time of 5 hours. But, I would say this was still a lot more efficient and I don’t feel bad about the experience.

why?

The good :

- the website is quite functional with a simple layout.

- there is a lot of information and help text all around.

- You can actually buy tickets in the end!
The bad:

- The backend can’t support the traffic most of the time. So, you see ‘Unable to get information from the server’ most of the time

- There are many payment options – makes the process confusing.

I would give Railways a pat on the back for going online – they are competing with LCCs and going online will help them be at par on tickets distribution. The surging e-commerce transactions in India will impact their top line and make them sell their tickets more efficiently.

There is a buzz about time-shifted technologies around the world – Tivo for video and podcasts for audio. Forrester’s podcasting forecast is mentioned in The Future Of Digital Audio report, which says that podcast adoption will be driven by a mix of broadband penetration and MP3 ownership. The report puts 2005 forecast to 300,000 US households, rising to 12.3 million US households by 2010. That is a freaking large number but the challenge being faced is to find a business model to monetize podcasting. The possible options could be sponsorships, advertising, cooption or subscriptions.

When US and Europe are showing a lot of interest in Podcasting, what is happening in India? The low broadband and Ipod (or other portable mp3 players) peneteration are the main reasons for slow growth. Also, there is hardly any Indian content available as Podcasts. Some of the news websites have started making their news stories available as podcasts. So, where do we go from here?

Some questions to be answered — what kind of players will enter this space? Will content providers see value in providing another vehicle for their content and when? Looking at the growth of blogging in India, can the user-generated podcasting also pick-up?. Only time will tell…

World, checkout for this space if you are interested in Internet …