Follow on Google News News By Tag Industry News News By Place Country(s) Industry News
Follow on Google News | Is Social Networking Losing Its Charm?"Sites like Orkut or Minglebox are on the decline," says Dr. Amitabh Saran, Co- Founder and Managing Director, Buzzintown
By: Suchi Goyal The new version of the Indian website offers a streamlined view to the portal and improves the overall user experience. Dr Amitabh Saran, co-founder and managing director, Buzzintown discussed business strategy and technology tools being used by the company. Excerpts: What is the basis on which your website has stated that online social networking is slowly losing its coolness? There was a time when anyone and everyone online, wanted to be part of a community or a forum; when users spent hours in chatrooms mulling over long threads of message exchanges; when they were constantly in the “hunt” for a novice user or a casual surfer – that was all part of the “social networking” phenomenon as was defined in 2004-2007. Sites like Orkut or Minglebox which were a craze then, are on the decline, and have to reinvent themselves. Facebook, LinkedIn Twitter - are the newer forms of “Social Media” platforms – where we interact with largely known set of people, or allow a one-way communication to happen. Further, as disposable incomes increase (in the Internet savvy target market), people tend to go out and spend time with friends and family. Social Media platforms help in scheduling or spreading the word quickly – but we do get off our chairs, walk out from the confines of our rooms, and “meet” in the offline, physical world. Please explain the concept behind coming up with this website when there are similar sites already up and running in the industry? Although there are a many entertainment choices available in India, most people do not have access to relevant information. Print, the medium largely used for such communication, does not provide focused entertainment options to choose from, apart from the regulars like movie listings for example. Buzzintown was born with the idea of providing people with high-quality (rich media) but very localized information on all kinds of entertainment options, using all kinds of media available. We want to empower people with information and then let them decide how they wanted to spend their time. When there is a portal that starts listing events, I consider it to be a constant validation of the marketplace “need”. There is a different value proposition which Buzzintown is bringing on board like a single point of information and entertainment content. The kind of reach Buzzintown has today, I don’t think, anyone would have. The value-add which we provide is in terms of providing access to local content, well in advance – for which we created a network of over 40000 stakeholders of the entertainment industry across India. What is business roadmap of your company? In the near future, Buzzintown plans to expand its presence, both online and offline, in India and abroad and foster more industry alliances, while growing the syndicated portion of its business. We have also recently launched coverage in 16 cities across US and Canada with an eye on the growing non-resident and ethnic Indian community across North America. We have a WAP site (m.buzzintown.com) How are you going to position Buzzintown for audience to differentiate it from your competitors? No one today has the singular focus on becoming a wholesome entertainment hub as much as Buzzintown. An external audience does take Bookmyshow, Asklaila and Burrp in the same league as Buzzintown – we feel each of them has their strengths. Buzzintown focuses on “dynamic” content, not just ticketed shows or “static” information. Our content is not only user generated but also sourced from all stakeholders in the entertainment industry like event managers, artists, venue owners, theatre groups, production companies and so on. Our users now have thousands of different entertainment options to choose - ranging from theatre, art, children's workshops, movies, food and dining and even unique travel destinations. What is the back-end infrastructure you have put in place for running this website? Is there any plan to upgrade this infrastructure in the next couple of years? We have a very strong research and development team that takes care of all engineering needs of Buzzintown.com. The team is responsible for ensuring availability, user experience and scaling of the portal. One of the success factors for us is how effectively we reach out to our users and retain our audience in a cost-efficient manner. We have reduced our web and video hosting costs by more than 300 per cent by moving our hosting setup to a cloud computing environment. We have built our email platform and reduced our email delivery costs by over four times. Being a consumer portal, responsiveness of portal is critical, so is security of data and availability of site - these are all critical issues for us – we had no security breach so far and our systems have more than 99.99 per cent uptime. We design our systems for high scalability in multiple dimensions like user traffic, geographic spread of operations, security, managing growing size of data, storage and backup needs, centralized management and monitoring of systems etc. For sure cloud computing and virtualization technologies are changing things in a big way. It will present a great opportunity for businesses to scale operations “on demand”. This is definitely one area to watch out. We use some of these services for our video hosting today, we expect this to grow further. Another major area is social media. We are definitely focusing on growing our social media presence and this is an area we will continue to keep engaged. Video is interesting - both in terms of content, delivery and distribution technologies. Apart from the above we are looking at few data mining and analytics related technologies which we are either evaluating or in the process of implementing. Most of the web based companies are now extending their reach to mobile platform. What are your plans for this platform? We have a WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) site for wireless handheld devices that will allow users to access the content anywhere “on the go”. Though cost and coverage are still constraints in this initiative, we feel that having a viable application for the mobile platform is essential for further growth. Users can also opt-in to get a free SMS every day with the top two events of the day in their city. We currently have around 2 lakh subscribers to this service. What is Buzzintown doing to make it website more engaging for its target audience? We are constantly looking at new ways to engage with our target audience. We recently launched a new version of our portal Buzzintown.com with offerings that improve the overall user experience. This version displays additional features such as Buzzintown recommendations, suggestions and information on events of the week, movies section, extensive listing of restaurants along with their specials and food festivals. We have section for travelers, which talks to aspirational travelers about various travel destinations in India and abroad along with travel tips. Beyond this we have a community on Facebook with over 1.75 lakh fans. Buzzintown does not need to convince people about its expertise in the areas of travel, food, movies etc. The uniqueness and dynamics of the content shared itself speaks volumes about it. # # # Buzzintown is a premier household Internet portal dedicated to the promotion of events and entertainment in India. The portal has a presence across 19 Indian cities and covers over 100 categories & genres of entertainment options. As an entertainment hub, it provides India’s widest array of events, including videos, venue details, artiste profiles, groups, and other stakeholders of the event industry. Buzzintown is owned by Wortal Inc. based in Palo Alto, USA, an Intel Capital funded company and is headquartered in Bangalore, India with offices in various cities including New Delhi, and Mumbai. For more information, visit www.buzzintown.com. Follow us on facebook http://www.facebook.com/ End
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
