Club Mahindra, the travel and leisure services of Mahindra Holidays & Resorts India Limited (MHRIL), is planning to enter into content partnerships to create microsites on leading portals where its own content can be displayed.
The company is also planning to revamp its website ClubMahindra.com to enable online bookings on the site. Club Mahindra is also preparing to launch a corporate blog where it could interact with its customers and answer their queries.
According to Arun Nair, senior manager, marketing, web initiatives, MHRIL, Club Mahindra is already spending upto 10 per cent of its ad budget on internet and is planning to further scale the online spending. Nair has not revealed how much the company is spending on its online marketing, but it is estimated that the figure is about Rs 2-3 crore annually
Interview : Nanda Kishore, business head at Mediaturf in Chennai, says, “ The way Indians are holidaying has changed. Families with higher disposable incomes are spending more on foreign holidays and are not limiting their holidays to one a year. Therefore, we have selected a set of keywords that match these aspirations ” Kishore adds, “ Whether a person clicks on a search ad or not, the brand awareness definitely goes up ”
Arun Nair, senior manager, marketing, web initiatives, MHRIL says " We are using search marketing more from a branding perspective, though the ultimate goal is sales " , further he adds " We realised we were missing out on the search results, but we are optimising our website now for search engines ”
Travelocity India, which is part of the group of companies of ZUJI, has introduced the widest choice of domestic and international air / flights available online in India.
The new range of 450 domestic and international airline choices includes both low cost and full service carriers. This means Indian travellers can now book trips to thousands of destinations, departing from 80 Indian cities.
Indian consumers can now also tailor their own travel packages online, combining the air and hotel options they want, using the new ‘dynamic packaging’ technology on Travelocity.co.in. This is the first introduction by ZUJI of this technological innovation to its Asia Pacific sites.
Interview : Himanshu Singh, Managing Director, Travelocity India says , “ Travelocity India is helping to transform travel bookings in our country, and giving travellers more choice, control - and more security - with their online travel bookings ”
Users are now able to sync their button choices across computers via the toolbar, as well as add Google gadgets. The toolbar now includes an autocomplete function as well as having support for Google Notebook built in.
People Group’s real estate portal Makaan.com has launched ClickPay, a new service that enables property brokers to create their own ads using various editing tools and list multiple properties in the same ad. ClickPay also allows the brokers to target customers according to specific locations.
The Clickpay banner introduced by the portal is an innovative service that allows property brokers to list multiple properties in the same ad. These ads are highly customised and property agents can create their own ads using various editing tools. The theme of the banner can be changed, and so as the font and size of the text. Moreover, this service enables brokers to target customers according to varied specific locations.
The value for advertisers comes in with Clickpay since the payment mechanism is such that the advertiser would only be charged if a user clicks on the banner to display ads, thus ensuring cost effectiveness and efficiency.
Titbits : Currently Makaan.com has nine branch offices across the country, and is concentrating on the top 13 cities of India, including Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Indore, Kochi and Ludhiana.
Interview : Aditya Verma, Business Head, Makaan.com says , “ We are in the planning stages of a mass media campaign but it is a little premature to disclose anything of that sort since we are in the process of finalising things. We have a direct marketing approach to target the widespread broker community of India, and we have dedicated sales team for that matter ” , he further added , “ We are evaluating user-generated content for Makaan.com. Once the post internal analysis is done and the product reaches its launch phase, we would be in a better position to comment on the same ”
Ok .. the hot news now is - Super Cassettes Industries Limited (T-Series) is planning to file a contempt petition against the Google-owned video sharing site YouTube for its failure to take cognizance of the Delhi High Court interim order which restrained YouTube from carrying the T-Series content on its site.
The Google YouTube case will come up for next hearing in February, 2008
Note : Super Cassettes Industries Limited (SCIL) under its brand T-Series owns about 35,000 audio titles (about 70% of the industry), including the latest releases such as Om Shanti Om, Bhool Bhulaiyya, Heyy Baby and the yet to be released films like Welcome and Amir Khan starrer Taare Zameen Par. T-Series, however, claims that film clips, videos of many of its latest movies continue to be available on YouTube
Titbits : The music company has also sent a legal notice to Rediff’s i-share.
Interview : SCI V-P Neeraj Kalyan says , “ In the interim, we plan to move a contempt petition against Google on the same. The company seems to have little regard for the law of the land as our content is still displayed on YouTube ”
Titan Industries has launched Fastrack.in, a youth focussed interactive website to promote its Fastrack brand of watches and eye-glasses. The website represents a virtual college campus and enables visitors to participate in various contests and polls.
Note : The agency which developed the site is Maxus Interaction in Bangalore
Titbits : Other than the website, Fastrack has also ventured into social media, where it is trying to engage with the youth. Two communities called Bikers on the Fastrack and Life on the Fastrack have been created on Facebook. Both groups feature Fastrack products and showcase its latest Bikers Don’t Cry TVC, apart from discussions among its members. Blogworks, the consultancy which handles the social media responsibilities of Fastrack, has developed its brand page on Facebook.
According to Ronnie Talati, associate vice president and business head, Fastrack, the company has set aside 8 per cent of its ad budget of Rs 8 crore for advertising on digital media.
Interview : Biraja Swain, business director, Maxus Interaction, says, “ The objective (of the site) is to establish a dialogue with the young audience and there are plans to roll out UGC based contests in the near future. For example, we can come up with ‘spoof the ad contest’, under which we will allow members to create a spoof of a Fastrack ad and submit their entries ”
Microsoft confirmed it has fixed a bug in its online file storage and sharing service Windows Live FolderShare after users reported problems that the service was deleting files without user authorization.
Note : Windows Live FolderShare, which allows users to store files online and then download and synchronize files to and between different devices and computers, is currently available in beta release.
Microsoft sent an e-mail to users Friday alerting them that it has fixed a bug that may have "accidentally moved" user files from their original folders into the FolderShare Trash folder, and that users should not delete files in Trash until they ensure they were meant to be deleted. It also advised users how to retrieve deleted files from the Trash folder.
A copy of the information sent to users has been posted on the FolderShare Web site.
In a Microsoft statement e-mailed by its public relations firm Monday, the company said it is working to assist users who have lost files on how to retrieve them. It also said that another online storage service that is also in beta, Windows Live SkyDrive, had not been affected by the bug.
Titbits : Prior to being notified by Microsoft, users had been posting about the strange behavior of Windows Live FolderShare on a Microsoft online discussion board last week. Microsoft also sent out a notification via the discussion board to let users know about the problem and how to handle it. Even after Microsoft said the problem with moving files to the Trash had been fixed, users on the discussion board still were reporting buggy behavior from the service. Users noted that they were having trouble synchronizing files between computers and locating directories when using the service on Windows Vista.
Yatra Affiliate Program - is the new scheme launched by the OTA portal Yatra.com that allows website publishers to generate revenue by promoting Yatra Online products and services on their websites.
This program allows Yatra Affiliate partners to earn commissions for every booking originated from the affiliate’s site. The commission structure for domestic and international hotels and flight bookings are Rs 75 per booking for domestic flight, Rs 200 for domestic hotels, Rs 100 for international flights and Rs 200 for holiday packages.
Interview : Dhruv Shringi, co-founder and CEO, Yatra.com, says “ Yatra Affiliate program is an open business invitation to all the websites owner, an opportunity to diversify their services with our help to assist their customers with travel related queries and guidelines. This programme reiterates our continued commitment to introduce innovative ideas in the travel arena, making travel convenient ”
Saregama India has launched an online music store Saregama.com that offers songs download at Rs 12 each. According to Saregama, the downloaded songs will come with related information like singers, music director, lyricist, the movie, its production details and the star cast.
The online music store currently has a catalogue of over 35,000 song tracks which can be downloaded directly on to a PC. Saregama.com also allows users to download ringtones and mobile games and buy audio CDs, VCDs and DVDs. Users of the site can also create and order personalized audio CDs.
You can read our previous coverage of Saregama here .
Antya.com - a human powered , Indian based search engine is launched today .
Delhi based Pahwa KBS has made an undisclosed amount of seed investment in the company .
Note : Pahwa KBS is the company behind DesiMartini.com, a social networking site that was recently acquired by FireFly E-ventures, the internet arm of HT Media.
Antya.com describes itself as a simplified search engine aimed at non-internet savvy or advanced users looking for quick, reliable information on the web. Antya is co-founded by Mr . Bharanidharan Viswanathan and Mr .Sunny Saurabh. The company is currently based in Chennai and is planning to set up operations in Gurgaon (near Delhi) and Mumbai.
Interview : Vivek Pahwa, CEO, Pahwa KBS, says “ This is one of the most exciting products I have seen in a long time and am happy to invest in the venture and help the founding team in refining the product through its early stages ”
Mr. Sunny Saurabh and Mr.Bharanidharan , founders of Antya.com say " We hope Antya will be successful primarily because, in the end, users don’t like to type too much. That’s one pain point we are trying to solve "
Do you have an interesting Website ? Well you can tell us about it by
clicking here. The submitted Web Sites will be filtered and reviewed by bloggers at Site Seeing Part of Strollby !
Copy rights 2007 Strollby beta.com. All Rights Reserved
Vivek Pahwa, CEO, Pahwa KBS, says “ This is one of the most exciting products I have seen in a long time and am happy to invest in the venture and help the founding team in refining the product through its early stages ”