Reliance Big Entertainment Acquires Majority Stake in Willow

The company in news is Willow.TV. It is the world’s leading portal for live Internet streaming of all Cricket events worldwide, and has been providing live streaming video of every major cricket series since 2003. It is a paid site with a subscriber base of over a million registered users, primarily in the US, Canada, Australia and Europe. It provides subscribers with an unparalleled viewing experience with enhancements such as live interactive scorecards and high bandwidth video streams as well as mobile and IM offerings

Willow.TV, last year, streamed all major cricket events live, including the iconic Indian Premier League, as well as all Australian, South African and English international matches. The Willow.TV gain maximum visibility in India when it telecasted the Indian Premier League.

Reliance Big Entertainment, which is on buying spree, has acquired a majority stake in the US-based cricket webcasting portal – Willow TV. According to report The Anil Ambani company will invest Rs 300 crore in the portal over the next two years. The amount also includes the acquisition price of the portal.

Reliance Big Entertainment has been aggressively strengthening its position in the entertainment and media space and has been building value across the value chain. The acquisition will strengthen the presence of Reliance Big Entertainment in new media.

Akbar Birbal remixed

Rajshri Media

Rajshri Media is the digital entertainment arm of the 60-year old Rajshri group, one of India’s oldest, largest and most successful Film and TV Studios. It also has successful operations in TV production and music publishing. The group has produced over 50 films till date many of which have attained significant commercial and critical success.

Rajshri Media is one of the leading Internet and Mobile Studios of India. The company runs India’s leading broadband video streaming and download portal http://www.rajshri.com their Internet and Mobile videos are also available at their Youtube channel – http://www.youtube.com/rajshri.

Akbar Birbal remixed: A new beginning

Gone are the days of TV serials; its age of Internet and mobile serials. Rajshri Media, India’s leading Web and Mobile Studio, has launched Akbar Birbal remixed. The Akbar Birbal remixed is 3 minute a piece 90 episode series. The Akbar Birbal remixed, set in the by-lanes of Bhendi Bazar in Mumbai.

The show revolves around a loud and brazen don – Akbar Anna, and his intelligent , witty and ever-bankable sidekick – Birbal Bhaiya. Each day, to them, begins with it a new nut to crack. Doesn’t it sound like Akbar-Birbal, and Muna Bhai – Circuit combination? The first 10 episodes are live on http://www.rajshri.com and their Youtube channel which is http://www.youtube.com/rajshri. In addition, it will be launched soon on MMS and SMS via Idea Cellular.

Rajshri would reformat the content for audio and text and will be distributing it to Idea for 3 months, thereafter going live across other operators. The content will be released initially on Internet and mobile and subsequently formatted for TV, home video and Radio.

Mobile Value Added Services demands Level playing field with Telecoms

The value added services industry has contributed significantly to the growth and adoption of mobile telephony in India. It has also helped telecom sector clock additional revenue. Hence, it is imperative to have a level playing field between large telecommunication and small Mobile Value Added Services companies. Based on the fact the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) has sought a level playing field between the telecom operators and the value added services companies. They strongly believe that it is imperative for the growth and sustainability of mobile telephony in India.

IAMAI has asked for a faster process of obtaining shortcodes, standardisation of the terms and conditions of access and interconnection and a transparent revenue sharing model between operators and Mobile Value Added Services players. IAMAI has also said that there should be some additional obligations on the current licensees in terms of maintaining a level playing field, otherwise, the MVAS industry should be treated as the single largest users of telecom services and their rights should be protected.

Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/

Indiagames

Indiagames Ltd is India’s benchmark mobile and online gaming company The Company is engaged in publishing and developing games across various platforms including Online through its portal www.indiagames.com, and Mobile. Majority of Indiagames revenues comes from international markets as in India industry is still in its nascent stage. The company plans to tap the growing mobile market in India and is investing heavily in generating awareness about games among mobile users. Indiagames is targeting 50% market share in mobile gaming business by 2010.
Indiagames has over 300 employees and offices in Mumbai, London, Los Angeles & Beijing. Indiagames’ distribute its product through partnerships with mobile operators in over 75 countries. The key investors of Indiagames include UTV, Adobe Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc.

Bharti Telesoft

Bharti Telesoft, established in 1999 is owned by Bharti Enterprises, venture capital investors Sequoia Capital and Cisco. Bharti Telesoft offers software products and services to wireless and wireline operators.
In 2002, Bharti Telesoft acquired CellCloud Technologies, a leader in the field of prepaid recharge solutions and in 2007, acquired Jataayu a leading player in the mobile Internet space, to bolster its portfolio of Internet and VAS applications for mobile operators and handset manufacturers. Bharti Telesoft has deployed solutions for over 100 mobile operator customers in more than 60 countries worldwide. Its solutions help power services to over 500 million mobile subscribers globally. It has a strong sales and marketing focus in the Asia Pacific region, Russia and the CIS, the Middle- East, Africa, Europe and Latin America. It has its R&D facilities at New Delhi, Banglore and Mumbai.
Bharti Telesoft is works on number of services including SMS router, voice SMS, SMS chat, and Live video services, P2P transactions including balance transfer, music sharing and videos sharing. mCommerce and Live TV to mobile are the key focus areas for future growth.

ACL Wireless Limited

ACL established in 2000 is a privately owned company funded by IAVM, with strategic investments from Naspers/MIH. It employs over 240 people and is headquartered in Delhi.
ACL Wireless is a mobile VAS player in managed mobility and community messaging service across 21 countries. It works with Airtel in India, MTC-Vodafone in Middle East, Claro in Brazil and AIS in Thailand. ACL Wireless offers interactive SMS & voice response along with permission based SMS broadcasts & alerts. ACL wireless offerings also includes service creation and operation for enterprises and operator VAS, billing & content aggregation. Its community & messaging services suite includes: mobile chat, mobile social networking, mobile photo sharing and internet messengers on mobile available across GPRS & SMS mediums.
ACL has partnerships with Gemalto, Smart Trust, Eposs and Unified Communications which enable it to develop cutting edge products and distribute them globally.

Mauj

Mauj established in 2003, as a digital media entertainment company. It is the wireless division of the People group with interests across very well known internet businesses in India like (Shaadi.com, Fropper.com) and Film Production (People Pictures). MAUJ has developed partnerships with more than 25 operators and portals worldwide. The Company specializes in Mobile games both in the domestic as well as international markets. The company currently develops over 20 original titles every month and also has marketing rights for 800 international mobile games. The company has one of the strongest management teams as well as infrastructure in this industry and employs approximately 150 people in its offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Dubai, London, and New York.
Mauj offers services in three areas: Mobile Content & Applications aggregation and repurposing which includes Games, Wallpapers, Ringtones, News, Matrimonial; Mobile Software & Services which provides Middleware Solutions, Roaming Applications, SMS Gateways; and Mobile Media Solutions which includes Advertising and Branding Opportunities.

OnMobile

OnMobile, Incubated at Infosys in 2000, is headquartered in Bangalore. It is the first Indian telecom VAS company to go public. OnMobile also has offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Singapore, Paris, Jakarta, London, Kuala Lumpur, Seattle and Sydney. OnMobile is India’s largest white labeled VAS company for Mobile, Landline and Media Service Providers. OnMobile offers integrated platform across various technology silos traditionally found in Telco’s infrastructure for up selling and improving user experience. On Mobile services include: Managed Services like infrastructure, operations, SLA management, fault management etc. for telcos; Marketing Support Services which include Mobile 1-to-1 marketing, Event based opportunity analysis, execution of marketing services, Content Aggregation and Management for their enterprises customers; and Mobile Media, and mCommerce.
The acquisition of French data products company Voxmobili has further strengthened the product portfolio with products like Phone Backup, Network Address Book & Mobile Paparazzi – deployed with many global carriers like Orange, AT&T, France Telecom, T-Mobile, Wanadoo, & Turkcell.

Webaroo

Webaroo established in June 2004 has developed several market leading products. Some have already achieved significant market attraction. Webaroo employs approximately 150 people in its offices in India and USA. Webaroo’s founders include Silicon Valley based experienced serial entrepreneurs Rakesh Mathur (founder of Armedia, Junglee, Stratify) and Beerud Sheth (founder of Elance). Webaroo’s management includes world-class, highly-experienced executives with decades of experience in building and managing high-growth companies. Webaroo has offices in Silicon Valley, Seattle, Mumbai and Delhi. Webaroo develops mobile software and services for consumers across the world. With a large and rapidly growing user-base, it offers advertisers — unprecedented mobile reach and targeting. Its core offering include SMS GupShup service that enables creation of groups of any size and allow communication with all group members at a cost of a single SMS sent by the group creator; Webaroo Software enables users to browse and search web content offline which is compressed for consumption on laptops, PDAs or smartphones. Since these features are built on an SMS platform, it can be used even on the most basic and low-end phones.

Phoneytunes

Phoneytunes offers mobile content services, content management solutions, premium billing platforms. Phoneytunes has a state-of-art technology development center in New Delhi. Phoneytunes is among the top and most respected players in the Telecom VAS domain with a series of highly innovative, high feature and revenue generating services and platforms helping carriers and operators globally with powerful technological solutions. The key values while designing solutions include helping operators with increase in revenues and reduction in costs. Phoneytunes focus on: Development Platforms which include BREW, SMS, Symbian MMS platforms, online charging platforms, portal frameworks; Content creation & aggregation which offer mobile content and interactive voice recognition systems, Customized polyphonic and monophonic ringtones creation, wallpapers, video downloads; Application Development that include Utility applications like SMS gateways & SMS applications. Fun Applications like SMS / WAP Games & Chat/ Dating engines; and Other services including mobile secrets, phone tricks, lost mobile reporting board and a discussion forum.