Shilabhadra Banerjee, the secretary of India’s Ministry of Tourism, has launched a Brand Channel on YouTube.com to help communicate the wonders of India to a worldwide audience. The “Incredible India” campaign will see promotional Incredible India videos being made available to the YouTube community at www.youtube.com/India. Banerjee advised that India must show the world the progress made since its independence 60 years ago.
YouTube.com rates eighth globally in regards to web traffic. Banerjee hopes that due to the huge number of visitors to the site that www.youtube.com/India will give excellent international exposure to “Incredible India” and, with its dynamic video content, will complement the already content-rich web presence of the Ministry of Tourism’s website http://www.incredibleindia.org. Presently there are 18 films/videos posted at the site and more will be added in due course.
Another major online firm, Yahoo! is making communication easier and cheaper thanks to a new version of its mail service, Yahoo! Mail. Using Yahoo! Mail, users in the US, Canada, India and the Philippines can send real-time text messages to a mobile phone number directly from their e-mail account. Simultaneously, Yahoo! Mail accounts can receive text messages from mobile phone users.
Yahoo claims that it is the first web mail service to offer e-mail to text messages for free. The functionality is created by adding telephone number information for the people in your list of contacts. Click on a name, type, and it goes directly to their cellphone. When they respond, the message shows up in your mailbox as an instant message.
Now, if you’re enough of a techie to be interested in web mail to mobile texting, then you definitely should have your resume posted at Naukri.com — the top job site in India. Established in 1997, Naukri.com is the fifth most popular website in India across all categories with a database of 8.5 million registered users and over 25,000 registered companies.
Post your resume at Naukri.com free. Browse job listings by location, company or category. According to Naukri.com, more than 10 percent of the site’s client list consists of companies located in the US, Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. To further serve the Middle East Market, Naukrigulf.com has a focus on both employers and talents in the region.
The fact of the matter is though, that if you’re a NRI who’s been away for a while, the time may have come to return home. For certain job categories, particularly in the field of ICT, companies in India are making offers for experienced technical staff that meet or exceed the salaries and benefits offered in the Gulf. Especially in these times of poor exchange rates and inflation, many NRIs are rethinking their career options. According to Naukri.com, about five percent of jobseekers registered at the site are NRIs, who are looking for opportunities in India or globally.
While global outsourcing gets most of the attention when it comes to ICT activity in India, small and medium businesses (SMBs) on the subcontinent are doing their part to fuel the Indian IT boom. Access Market International (AIM) Partners reported that SMBs are on track to invest about $640 million on buying packaged software this year, up more than 25 percent over what they invested in 2006. Spending on databases, accounting, networking, productivity and system software will account for more than 90 percent of SMBs software spending.
“We expect the Indian IT market to maintain this bullish trend because of increased IT awareness among SMBs,” said Nirupam Chaudhuri, research manager with AMI Partners. “SMB users have become more alert and they know what they need to be able to accelerate their business. A small percentage of IT-savvy SMBs are now demanding tailor-made solutions with superior support services.”
He added, “Hosted applications have surged as well. Recent advances in security and a growing level of awareness of the benefits of hosted applications have gone a long way to reduce inhibitions about information security. The prevailing low bandwidth costs have added impetus to the adoption of such solutions.”
AIM Partners have also noted that India’s economic boom, coupled with high IT awareness among SMBs is boosting the fortunes of resellers or channel partners in India, with more than 90 percent of channel partners reporting a rise in their annual revenues over the last 12 months. The average revenue of channel partners focusing on IT needs of SMBs in India was $324,000 in the 2005-06 financial year. It has risen to $399,400 in the last 12 months. Channel partners in India have aligned their business models to suit the requirements of SMBs. Currently, channel partners focusing on SMB needs are still product-oriented and their revenue mix is dominated by computing and networking hardware (about 52 percent). But Partha Sarathi Sengupta, senior analyst at AMI-Partners, cautioned that hardware reselling has become a commodity business with heavy discounting and that resellers need to offer IT services to grow revenues — an option that everyone seems to be considering.
“Getting entry into an account is becoming difficult for channels due to multiple brands, endless offers and fierce competition,” explained Sengupta. “So the channels are heavily banking upon services now. There has been a significant increase of IT services — from 12 percent to 17 percent — as a contributor to revenue growth of channel partners. However, resellers complain that IT vendors are making an aggressive entry into services just to keep profit margins up and are eating into resellers’ shares.”