Launching Of Indian Portals

In this present world world every MNC is launching its own portal. India is recently becoming the IT extraction centre for the whole world. Although Sify was taking steps in this respect from quite a longer time the introduction of AOL's India portal is a big buzz. AOL is channelizind itself much towards indian system like the introduction of bollywood and Indian city guide.

Sify Launches Broadband Portal For Hyderabad

.After its launch of broadband portals mumbailive.in and bangalorelive.in, Sify has launched the Hyderabad version of the portal, www.hyderabadlive.in in the city yesterday. The portal is largely video-centric with an extensive coverage of the Telugu film industry.Sify has developed some exclusive videos for the portal featuring hosts, which it calls ‘net jockeys’, reporting on the events in the city. This is besides the usual listings on what’s happening in Hyderabad. The traffic channel streams from live web-cams placed at key junctions in the city to help people choose their routes. The news on the portal is both in English and Telugu.

HyderabadLive.in will showcase Hyderabad-centric video content created for an online audience and will focus on city news and events, entertainment, celebrities, lifestyle, commerce and politics.Hyderabad’s net users to publish their news and participate in discussions and upload images and videos by sending an SMS to a short code (4545). The messages appear as a ticker on the portal.

Speaking at the launch, Raju Vegesna, chairman and managing director, Sify Limited, said "We aim to make Hyderabadlive a high-quality entertainment destination, especially for the youth of the city. This is the medium they are increasingly comfortable with, and we will provide them compelling content in video to bring the city to life on the net".


AOL Launches India Portal

AOL’s India portal offering a host of services that, well, we have heard of before from other players of the net like email, instant messaging, local news and information. They’ve also launched AOL Messenger, and incorporated content focusing on Bollywood, Cricket, Hollywood, News, Sports and International music. There’s also a City-Guide and a Guru channel with advice from local and international experts.

AOL President and COO Ron Grant believes that AOL is one of just four companies with the scale, network infrastructure and resources to compete at a global level, and they’re looking to leverage that in India. The others, I suppose, are Google, Yahoo and MSN, though India has its own share of media companies in this space including Indiatimes (owned by the Times of India group) and Rediff. AOL is looking to target an Internet population that is reported to be about 94 million by 2008 and 147 million by 2010.

The City Guide currently features content from Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and both text and video content for Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai. For mobile, they’re using a short code 51515/16, which I don’t recognize - have they gotten their own? The similarity of the AOL India main page with Yahoo India is striking... well, the design is similar to the AOL.com design.