Google Competition for India

Just came across this yesterday.

The Google India Product Engineering Competition

Rules & details of the competition are here:

http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/productprodigy/competition.html

It’s only for students of Computer Engineering students [Computer Science] of select Engineering Colleges in India. They should have provided a list of these eligible colleges. Now all students will be contacting their respective Head of Departments of their college to find out, whether their college is on Google’s list of included colleges for this Product Prodigy competition.

You can download the Registration form from here:

http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/productprodigy/Registration.doc.zip

It says that the shortlisted candidates will receive a funding of Rs. 50,000/-

Shortlisted teams will be given 3 months to complete their project.

Prize money of around Rs. 20,00,000/- It’s not clear whether this 20 Lakhs prize is an individual prize for the winning team or whether it would be distributed among all the top winners. Also, it says, the winners ‘COULD’ get to present their product @ Googleplex, California.

My Take: Great to see industry sponsorship for motivating engineering college students develop new & innovative products.

I hope college students do take this up as a challenge. I remember in my time for final year engineering projects, many students resorted to getting their projects built by existing companies in their respective industry sector [mine was Mechanical engineering]. If that’s applied to this day, would it mean that a few web development companies would see these students approaching them for ‘ideas’? Remains to be seen…..

Online marketing strategy for FutureBazaar.com

In April of this year, I wrote a couple of posts on
“It Happened in India” & “Kishore Biyani“.

Since then, I wanted to follow it up with this post, but just never got the time [just like the previous blog entry].

Listening to Sankarson [CEO of FutureBazaar.com], Skanky’s podcast interview on The Kiruba Show, motivated me to write this blog entry. Here goes:

Fact 1:

Number of NRIs [Non Resident Indians] & PIO [People of Indian Origin] worldwide are approx. 31 Million plus. Here’s the distribution country wise. Indians are present in over more than 130 countries worldwide.

Fact 2:

For last year the remittances [money sent from abroad to India] from these NRIs was 24.6 Billion USD$.
Now this 24.6 billion dollars is split into money coming in form of personal investments into property, securities, equity, mutual funds etc. A lot of this money is also given to relatives as ‘Gift’, for which I guess Gift Tax is levied.

According to a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) survey, about 13 per cent of the funds remitted by Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) in 2006 were invested in equity and real estate. While 20 per cent of the funds are parked in bank deposits, 54 per cent of remittances are used to meet family expenses.

54% of 24.5 Billion dollars is used to meet family expenses, which comes to a magical figure of 13 Billion USD$ <<< WoW !!!

Links for the above facts are at the end of this post.

Now, that we have the facts in place, here are the theories & strategies.

Scenario : Most of you must have seen the Mastercard “Priceless” ads on TV & other media.

Taking that into consideration / perspective, what is the value, associated with sending gifts to your beloved family back home in India? That value is “Priceless”. Till now, NRIs could send, Rakhis, Cakes, Flowers & so on, to their family members back home through ‘ecommerce’ shopping portals. Yes, there are some portals which are strong locally, which offer goods other than those mentioned above, however, none with a national offline presence.

Now, just imagine that majority of these 31 Million NRIs knew that they could purchase online from wherever they are outside India, and that these could be home delivered to their families back home in India.

The USP is “A recognised retail corporatrion which has PAN India offline presence” & not some ‘only online’ ecommerce portal run by ‘wannabe dot com millionaires’.

Strategy: So, can FutureBazaar.com run a traditional media advertising campaign in 130 countries globally & still be cost effective too? Nopes, it won’nt be profitable.

So, which is the most cost effective strategy to reach 31 million NRIs & make them signup on FutureBazaar.com?

The answer to this is an already tried, tested & proved model and it has been successfully executed earlier & is a major case study in MBA textbooks.

It’s no rocket science as such, the crux is in the implementation & smart execution.

Any guesses to what it can be? Let me know.

—————x-x-x—————-
Reference Links:

NRI Population;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-resident_Indian_and_Person_of_Indian_Origin

NRI Remittances;

NRI remittance: How it is invested http://ia.rediff.com/money/2007/sep/05nri.htm

Remittance; Remit to India http://www.nrirealtynews.com/nri-remittance/nri-remittance.php

AP tops in NRI remittances http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2006/08/09/stories/2006080905091900.htm

NRI remittances to rival MNCs as investors in India : Hindustan Times http://in.biz.yahoo.com/070609/32/6gtkf.html

Master Card Pricelss: http://www.priceless.com

Domain Name Availability Search Results

Domain Name Availability – What do the search results mean. I wanted to post this for an year now, just did not get the time. Anyways here goes:

I ) Google provides a tool whereby, you can estimate the number of searches being performed for a particular keyword, link here. So, does Overture, [Yahoo now], link here.

This is a boon to internet marketing people & just about everyone who wants to know as what are the keywords being searched for by millions of people the world over. Nothing new about this, it’s prehistoric

The point to note is: The very search keywords that you & I have been inputing into Google are taken into account here. Which means that all the searches that you have performed till now, have been made public. Since your searches were similar to millions of others, it does not matter as your identity is not being disclosed to anyone.

II) Similarly, several people [especially Domainers] and those in the internet marketing industry would like to know as to “What are the domain names that people input into the Domain Name Availability Box of several domain registrars & their resellers”.

This would provide an insight into what people are trying to register or checking for the availability of a particular or multiple domain names.

I bet that this data is being used by domain name registrars themselves & maybe being provided to Domainers for a ‘special price’.

I feel that if this info were made out to the general public or even to those with accounts with registrars, then it would be a Win-Win situation for both the clients as well as the registrars, as eventually more domain names would be sold.

Does anyone know of a domain name registrar who can provide this data? Let me know. Thankx.