India Business

A benchmark index of Indian equities markets Friday closed flat, a day after the benchmark index shed nearly two percent on the report that the US may reverse its monetary stimulus programme that spooked markets elsewhere in the world.

Mobile Marketing in the next big thing. Mobile has changed the landscape of consumerism in a few short years by becoming our favorite tool for reading the news, watching television, communicating, socializing, shopping, navigating…for just about everything! As a marketer, mobile is a very powerful place for you to connect with your audience. However, with great power comes great responsibility. Since mobile is such a personal medium, it is the easiest place for marketers to make massive mistakes that will turn off a customer forever. This articles serves the purpose to help you avoid making those mistakes. • Not engaging with your customers and not making your campaign local, social and mobile Mobile marketing is a way to build a relationship with your customer, the same way you do with social media marketing. Just pushing your product without building a relationship will annoy your customer and cause them to opt out. You should market to as much media as possible to reach as many people as possible. Concentrating on mobile marketing only excluding the other media will narrow the results you can expect. Concentrate on engaging with your customer through as many media as possible. Including other media can enhance your mobile marketing campaign. For example, when you use QR codes in your marketing, that can be scanned by customers with mobile phones. • Not respecting the privacy of your customer If you continually bombard your customer with push messages, and do so more than once a week without engaging them, you are going to lose them. Texting a mobile offer once a week is more than enough. When your customer subscribes he or she is literally giving you access to them 24/7. Don’t abuse it. • Not proofreading or testing your message Everyone makes mistakes. If you want your marketing to deliver results, make sure you know exactly how it looks. Do all the links work? Is there a phone number so they can call you back? Do the graphics show? Are the words a jumble? Not testing can be fatal for your campaign. • Mismatching content with mobile messaging Make sure your links to all content work on every mobile device available so everyone with a mobile phone can interact with your campaign. Don’t send someone with a normal mobile phone a link to an iPhone app. Make sure there are different versions corresponding to each mobile device. • Building an app without a plan for promoting it If you build an app and just wait for people to find it, you will be disappointed. When developing the app, make sure you plan how to promote it. You can use text messaging, e-mail, traditional ads and mobile advertising. You should continue to promote the app with regular updates, advertising any new features you release. It’s Mobile, Not Desktop Too many mobile experiences are just smaller versions of the brand’s desktop, enabling the exact same functionality, and trying to shrink it down to the small screen. Yet, a mobile app is an entirely different vehicle for experiences, and it should be treated differently for the new opportunities it provides. A mobile customer will quickly discard overwhelming designs that mimic desktop content page-for-page. It’s fairly common to assume that a customer will input as much information on the mobile device as they do on the desktop. But input is much more time consuming on mobile devices, and it’s important to design with that in mind. The reality is that the small screen can be a blessing, as it enables you to focus on what is truly important. Following the path of online advertising Mobile seems to be following the well-traveled path of online advertising with the same old strategy of placing ads around the experience taking up valuable real estate with irrelevant, interruptive and ignored advertising, rather within it.It is important that marketers understand what their target consumers are doing. Not Actively Promoting Your Mobile Web Site This one may sound like a no-brainer but it’s su

In a bid to shore up its market share in the two-wheeler segment, Japanese auto major Yamaha's Indian subsidiary launched Friday a new variant of its automatic scooter Ray.

Gurgaon, which boasts of some of the most imposing skyscrapers housing offices and residential blocks, faces acute water scarcity, besides being choked by eight to 16 hours of power outages. Now several Gurgaon-based companies are stepping in to conserve water in their premises.

Yahoo has continued its acquisition spree and bought yet another start-up, not big as Tumblr though. In a bid to expand itself in the gaming arena, Yahoo has acquired PlayerScale, which makes software infrastructure for cross-platform gaming. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but PlayerScale will not shut down after the buyout. “Today we acquired PlayerScale. We intend to continue to support and grow PlayerScale’s technology, and we look forward to building great new experiences on Yahoo! using the PlayerScale platform”,  Yahoo said in a statement emailed to AFP. Founded in 2011, PlayerScale develops software for cross-plaform gaming that allows publishers and aggregators to quickly scale titles across various platforms. The company has over 150 million users worldwide, and it’s adding more than 400,000 new users every day. PlayerScale is now being implemented in 4,000 games from more than 2,600 game developers, including Social Gaming Netwroks. ”We will continue to support our existing product and deliver new services to help you grow and manage your success in cross-platform gaming — whether it’s casual, social or mobile,” PlayerScale CEO Jesper Jensen said in a company blog post. Half of the company’s staff will be joining Yahoo, while the other half will stay at PlayerScale. The PlayerScale software also incorporates a data analytics tool, which gives developers information that allows them to understand user behavior and track users and revenue across mobile and web-based properties. This then allows developers to increase their monetization and to more rapidly introduce new games into the market. This is Mayer’s tenth acquisition since October last year all of which suggest company’s entire focus to mobile. Along with buying new startups and launching new apps the company is also revamping its existing products. Now, the company is reported to be eyeing online video website Hulu after its bid to buy a majority stake in France-based Dailymotion was derailed in May. It will be interesting  to see what will be Yahoo’s next move after the PlayerScale acquisition. Will the company go for another buyout next month? Lets wait and see. Image Courtesy |  geek Looking For A Social Media Agency?? - Contact WATConsult - India's Leading Social Media Agency

The Cabinet has approved the proposal for creation of 20,751 additional posts in the Income Tax Department in various cadres.

Google Inc is considering buying Israeli mobile satellite navigation start-up Waze Inc, which may lead to a bidding war with Facebook Inc, who has also earlier expressed interest to buy up the maps company. Waze has already been receiving expressions of interest from various Silicon Valley giants like Facebook. Reports had surfaced some time back that Facebook wanted to buy Waze for more than $1 billion, but the deal hasn’t taken ground as of now. The possible reason we can speculate is that Facebook will want the Waze team to move to California after the buy, something which the founders of Waze are against. Google and other parties approached Waze after the Facebook talks became public but none of the bidders are close to clinching a deal, though the start-up might decide to remain independent. Industry analysts have already started reasoning as to why Facebook would want to buy Waze. Waze is a mapping app for smartphones that’s infused with some cool social features. The deal will improve Facebook’s chances of  their mobile conquest and also create a mobile application platform that can be effectively monetized. Maps and geo-location apps are the way for location-based industries in the future, and this fact seems to be driving Facebook’s acquisition of Waze. Another reason could be that integration of Waze could provide a richer experience to mobile Facebook users. I believe Google too has plenty of reasons to gobble up Waze. Google Maps could become a stronger product after the incorporation of Waze. And it would also secure Waze from it’s competitor Facebook’s hands. Waze has not communicated regarding this development, and nor have Facebook and Google. Waze uses satellite signals from members’ smartphones to generate maps and traffic data, which it then shares with other users, offering real-time traffic information. The four-year-old company has 47 million users. It has raised $67 million in funding from firms including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Blue Run Ventures and semiconductor company Qualcomm Inc Facebook has been making powerful in-roads into the mobile space lately, time after its founder announced Facebook will start focusing on the mobile platform. It announced Facebook Home for Android, which even hit 1 million downloads. On the mobile front, Google recently announced the Google Play Music All Access App at the Google I/O 2013. Today it overhauled its Google Drive App for Android devices as well. Let’s see how all three companies, especially Waze, react to this development. Image Courtesy |  forbes Looking For A Social Media Agency?? - Contact WATConsult - India's Leading Social Media Agency

Ever since Google I/O, the company has been releasing boatloads of new features across most of its products. Today, they have announced two new features for Chrome Beta. One for Chrome for Android Beta  and the other for the Chrome Web Browser beta. Chrome Beta  for Android: With today’s update to Chrome for Android, the app can now translate foreign languages on the websites. Whenever the browser identifies a web page written in a foreign language, it shows the translate button which upon being pressed gives the translation of the page to your default language. Chrome now sports a + button at the address bar so that new tabs can be added easily. They have also added a fullscreen feature for immersive consumption.  Chrome for Android also has an experimental data compression feature. You can now check out a graph of this compression data by going to Settings > Bandwidth Management in the browser app. Chrome Web Browser Beta: The Chrome Web browser beta on Windows is now getting a new notification system which is very similar to the one they have in ChromeOS. This notification system can be accessed by Chrome apps and extensions to deliver updates to users on the web. In the image above you will notice the Google Now design metaphor on all these notifications. Google’s design philosophy is now converging across all its services as it readies itself for a more consistent ecosystem this year. These notifications are not just announcements and updates but also offer some richer features depending on the app involved. These images below will give you an idea of the context specific implementation of the notification system. It will allow you to reply to mails, call, see image previews etc. right from the notification bar, thus saving your lots of time in your overall workflow and helping you not get distracted completely from the task at hand. If you want to check out these new features, download the latest Chrome beta on Android and your desktop OS (Windows). Download Link | Chrome Beta For Android | Chrome Beta For Windows Looking For A Social Media Agency?? - Contact WATConsult - India's Leading Social Media Agency

A benchmark index of Indian equities markets was trading flat in pre-afternoon trade Friday -- marginally up 0.16 percent.

Industrial growth in the 10,000 sq. km. eco-sensitive Taj Trapezium Zone has come to a halt, forcing large-scale migration of rural labour to urban hubs.