Komli Launches ViziSense: India’s First Free and Open Online Audience Measurement Platform

I’m very excited today to announce the launch of Komli ViziSense, the first free and open audience measurement platform for India that accurately reports details of site visitor demographics and other audience characteristics. ViziSense helps publishers with an independent measurement system, enables advertisers to access and understand their online audience with precision, and allows ViziSense agencies to plan better media buys.

Read more details here and here.

Some screen shots below:

Internet Ad Spends In India To Double In 2007

Reported on ContentSutra by Anupama Chandrasekaran:

Media agency ZenithOptimedia expects Internet ad spend in India to more than double in 2007 and to be 10 times its current size in 2009. [via agencyfaqs] Ad spends on the Internet could jump to Rs. 450 crore this year from Rs. 210 crore in 2006 and could skyrocket to Rs 2,250 crore mark by 2009, the study said. This would mean that in two years, ad spends on the Internet will surpass those on radio, cinema and outdoor, individually.

India is 4th largest in mobile web access

ContentSutra reports:

The number of people entering Cyberspace via their cellphones has more than doubled in India in the past year, making the country home to the fourth largest population—behind the U.K., the U.S. and South Africa—browsing the Internet through mobile handsets, according to a study reported by the PTI.

I have to tell that I have "converted" after purchasing my Nokia N73. This is a superb machine, which I have fallen in love with. What I am amazed about is the GPRS speed and the ease of web-surfing. I can get my company email, Yahoo!Mail and Gmail all on this device, and pretty quickly. The speed is great, and the UI is great. This phone has an amazing history feature, where is displays miniaturized versions of the pages that I visited in the past - very cool feature.

I watched a video on this phone, with headphones - and thats Amazing - clarity, quality and speed. I have to agree that very soon people will actually watch TV and movies of their phones. That's your own personal space; no more fighting for the remote - and with equal or better video and sound quality.

To top it, it takes great pictures and videos.

BTW - You can find a good review of N73 here.

You can't get better than this, in the given cost - at least for the next week :-)

WSJ on Internet Advertising

WSJ has published an interesting writeup on Internet advertising:

It's becoming apparent that Internet advertising, in its myriad permutations, isn't just a new variation on traditional advertising. The ability of online advertisers to place information in highly targeted contexts in which users can click through to further information and even make purchases seems so revolutionary that it can hardly be called advertising at all. It may well be that the frequency of ad usage will generate the same data-intensive refinements that exist in the search field, yielding similar economies of scale -- and a natural monopoly.

As an investor, I love natural monopolies. Internet advertising is now a $40 billion-a-year industry with estimated 20% annual growth. I find Google at $470 a share attractive for its search business alone, with its continuing impressive growth and wide margins. These intriguing developments on the advertising side of the Internet make it even more compelling.

Web 2.0 and Internet as electricity

Allan Leinwand reports on GigaOM a very interesting conversation, something that I have experienced myself:

I was recently meeting with a Web 2.0 company discussing their network infrastructure plans. As I started asking questions about their racks of servers, their storage area network (SAN), their plans for routing, load-balancing and network security, the CTO of the company stopped me and made a bold statement.

He said, “The Internet is like electricity. We plug into it and all of the things that you mention are already there for us. We don’t spend any time at all on network or server infrastructure plans.”

In your opinion, has the Internet reached a level of abstraction similar to electricity? Do you use the infrastructure that is given to you by your local Internet service provider or a specialized hosting facility like Amazon without questioning how it is architected and designed?

Read more here.