Telecom operators can expect a spurt in their advertising revenues with the launch of 3G services as top advertisers script plans to tap the huge potential of the medium that includes personalised delivery of audiovisual mobile advertisements with interactive features.

The third generation telephony, with high-speed internet speed and services like mobile TV and live gaming, has been a great driver of mobile advertising in all the markets it is available. The story is expected to be the same in India, justifying telcos’ spending Rs 68,000 crore for its licences.

“3G may completely redefine the media mix for Indian advertisers,” said Debadutta Upadhyaya, VP (India) for Vdopia, a US-based mobile video advertising platform that has done 3G mobile ads for clients such as Coke, Warner Brothers and Disney.

She said companies are currently not excited about mobile advertising because they cannot deliver the brand experience through bland SMSes and plain-vanilla WAP banner ads.

But 3G will allow much better delivery of more creative advertising content. And marketers are excited.
“A lot of the TV advertising can be replicated in mobiles through 3G, with far bigger impact. Mobile advertising in 3G will have scope for interactive and personalisation of content,” said L K Gupta, chief marketing officer of LG Electronics India.

The country’s largest consumer electronics and home appliances firm, which currently uses SMS-based ads to manage consumer relationship like after-sales service and loyalty schemes, plans to use 3G mobile ads for brand promotion, said Mr Gupta.

The size of the Indian mobile advertising market, estimated at $15 million, is growing by 50-60%.

Advertising industry people expect marketers to increase their spent on mobile advertisement to 7-10% of their total adspend from current 2-3% within two years of 3G launch.

It’s quite likely going by the experience in other countries. In Australia, for instance, the mobile advertising market grew by more than 300% a year since 3G launch in 2007. In the US, 3G ads pushed the mobile advertising market to about $416 million last year. In the UK, the entertainment, media and telecom sectors have spent the largest amount of their advertising budgets for mobile advertising, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

“There is no doubt 3G can increase the value of mobile advertising to the advertiser provided the telecom operators are active,” said Sam Balsara, chairman and managing director of advertising firm Madison World.

The DoT estimates that 3G mobile subscriber base in India will reach the 90 million mark by 2013. A study released by research firm Crisil on Monday said there will be 100 million 3G users in the country within five years of its launch.

A slew of marketers such as Marico, electronics firm Samsung and jewellery retailer Geetanjali Group have big plans for 3G.

“3G will be a big enabler and improve access,” said Sameer Satpathy, marketing head of FMCG firm Marico.
Samsung plans to take its mobile advertising campaigns from metros to smaller cities with 3G, while Geetanjali will increase the share of mobile advertising several folds from less than 2% of ad budget at present.
Telcos too are gung-ho. “We will strive for such (3G advertisement) revenue once we have been able to deliver great experience to the consumers,” said Llyod Mathias, chief marketing officer at Tata Teleservices, which has won nine 3G circles.

Vdopia expects 3G mobile ads in India to find bigger acceptance from FMCG, entertainment, auto, consumer electronics and technology companies. It plans to grow its 3G ad business as its main revenue stream in India and will roll out its global technology here.

Source : Economic Times

Solutions Infini is the Official Communication Partner for India’s Largest Wine Festival – “Bangalore International Wine Festival”. BIWF is going to be held between 10th and 11th April, 2010 and will run from 12:00pm till 10:00pm at White Petals, Palace Grounds, Bangalore. The event will showcase wines from all over the world and allow wine drinkers and novices to experience and understand the vast world of wine. Its the biggest wine event in South India with participants from 3 continents and some great band performing along with Fashion shows, Dance and DJ’s. This two day event would be first of its kind in India. A minimum of 20,000 footfalls are expected in the event spread across two days.

Website Development – What Needs to Be Done and How Much Does It Cost
Today’s businesses require letterhead and envelopes, business cards, ads in the Yellow Pages, Justdial and web pages as part of their business stationary. Even if you have the smallest of businesses with a limited clientele, a website is part of your professional arsenal to attract and keep clients.
People new to the Internet or web pages tend to see them as complicated or expensive. They are neither, unless you choose to allow them to be. They are, in their simplest form, a billboard on the information highway, advertising your wares and expertise for all to see – if they can find you.
Like a billboard, potential clients must travel down that particular road to see the signs. To ensure a successful website, make sure your website address is featured on all of your business cards, letterhead, classified ads, shop signs, yellow pages listings or ads, emails, and any advertising.
The cost of a website should be a natural inclusion in your financial accounting as a business expense for advertising or stationary. The initial set up costs may be high, but add these to the long term expense of the site to make the figures more reasonable.
The process of creating a website is three fold. Let’s look at the various areas you need to focus on to develop your own website.

Website Development
Most companies think of websites as promotional tools for their business. Today, websites are an arm of your business, representative of your company’s customer service efforts and policy. They serve the public needs, not your needs. Developing a website today means understanding how people use websites to gather information and make decisions, and maximizing that criteria with the resources, services, and products you offer.
Putting the user first, your website design and development needs to be organized way so people can easily access the information they require to help them make a decision or be informed. What information do they need to have, what do they want, and how can you best provide it.

Another important part of website development is targeting your audience. In order to make your website work, you need to help people find it. This includes search engine submission, concentration on keyword writing and content, and providing content worth linking to, letting others direct users to your site. Most of all, the content must have value, so a lot of focus needs to be on the writing, writing style, spelling and grammar, and creating clear, easy to understand content. The better the quality of content the more likely people are to find the site and stick around.

Website Design & Search Engine Optimization
Designing a website is the creative side of the process and involves the expertise of the site owner, marketing and advertising departments, artists, photographers, writers, technical writers, programmers, and code experts. This list of experts can be a whole team or one person. Either way, it is a team effort to combine all these skills and talents to complete an interesting and professional website.

Website design requires clear direction from the research within the website development plans. Focusing on the user’s access to the information, a solid navigation menu is critical, helping the user find the information they need.
Website design and layout needs to combine navigation and content with graphics and photographs that help guide the user and showcase products and services. Website designers are constantly battling between new technologies and their creative desires and bandwidth, seeking a compromise between the three. It’s not an easy task, and requires good coding and design skills, so this isn’t part of developing your website that should be cheap. It is the largest part of your website budget.

Along with the design comes the writing. Search engines can’t find you if there is no text to search. Quality written content is critical to a successful website, rich with keywords and website style writing. While the look of the site is critical to its visual success, what it has to say is more important. Content matters, so make sure that it is well written.

Website Maintenance
After the development and design, someone must maintain the site. This can be as simple as looking at it once a week to see that it is still there and working, or more intensive such as adding frequent updated information or content regularly. In general, a small site (1-10 pages) may require 2-20 hours a month to maintain properly. If designed well to begin with, a small site can be ignored for months on end, except for the occasional check-in.

For good search engine optimization (SEO), you need to really consider how page rank in search engines plays a critical role in how people find your site when they search. Part of the criteria is how often the site and the content and links are updated. So frequent additions and updates to your site will help keep your site at the top of the search engine results.
Links need to be checked for dead ends, responses to comments and feedback checked and action taken, the site and database backed up, and a whole variety of common website maintenance tasks. You can do this yourself, or hire someone called a webmaster to maintain and monitor your site on a regular basis.

How Much Does a Website Cost?
The more time you spend preparing for your website design and development, researching demographics, identifying your audience and collecting the information needed for the website, the less time and money you have to pay a developer and designer to research this information for you. The developer and designer will go through the information with you, but the better prepared you are, the faster and easier the process is for everyone. If you have money to splurge, hire them to do this research and preparation for you, as they will know what to look for as they prepare your site.
A lot of information is required before sitting in front of the computer and laying out the first page, though many people start with the design of a page before getting to its content. What goes INTO a web page is more important than how it looks, at least to start. The prettiest web page is worthless without good content that keeps the viewer there after the first blush of “wow” is over.

For your information, the average price for development of a basic website (5-10 pages) is between INR 12,000 – 20,000. The diverse range is based upon how many professionals are involved, their expertise and reputation, the length of project time, the complexity and sophistication of the development and design, and the inclusion of animation, interaction, e-commerce or advertising.
On average, it can take 20 to 40 hours to design a one to five page website, even for a professional. Expect longer hours for more pages, dependent upon their complexity and content. Hourly rates range from INR 600 – 800 per hour. Different regions offer more or less than the average rate.
The bottom line? If you pay less than INR 10,000 to produce a web page, you are probably getting someone inexperienced or less than qualified, which could result in problems in the future with the design or less promotional coverage. A well-designed website must meet certain standards and requirements established by professional organizations, including meeting the country or state accessibility laws for the handicapped, which means you need to go with an experienced web developer and designer, or spend hours learning these rules and regulations yourself.

Domain name and website hosts fees are typically not included in the website design and development. Domain name fees are for one year, though they may be discounted if purchased for more than one year’s service. Web site host “rents” space on their computers to host your website. The come in all shapes and sizes, offering various products, storage sizes, email accounts, and services. Prices for a small, simple site can range from INR 900 – 2,000 a month, with discounts for a single or multiple annual payment. Commercial sites with many email accounts and e-comerce range from INR 3,000 – 5,000 a month.
Plan your website budget to include the initial set up fee spread across the length of time you expect the site to remain basically as it is. Typically, a website requires only minor changes and updates to its development and design for at least three years, sometimes five if the page is very simple. The website design and development industry is still evolving, so changes to the underlying structure might be required within the three to five year life of the site to keep up with technological advances.
Benefits of having a website

Do you think having a website is an avoidable cost? Although the Internet no longer remains a “new” technology there are still many business owners who are averse to the idea of having a business website either because they are not comfortable with the new medium or they simply deem it unnecessary. Now, we are not suggesting that the guy selling pani puri at the street corner should definitely have a business websites (well, why not?), but if there is business somewhere and you cannot do it simply because you don’t have a website then we will say that you are missing a big opportunity by not having a website.
Having a business website immediately propels your visibility and reach to a higher level. All of a sudden you are accessible to your customers and clients 24×7. Both old and new customers find you approachable and progressive.

We at Solutions Infini mean to proselytize you but here is a list of 12 benefits of having a website, whether business or personal.

1. Instant visual representation
Just imagine what thrust your business would get if people from all over the globe could visually see the products or service options you have to offer. All information pertaining to your business can be put on your website so that your prospective customers and clients can view it at their own convenience and without you having to be there each time something needs to be explained.

2. Keep your business open all the time
When you decide to offer business through your website, it is like a store or an office whose doors are never closed; people can come in and review your products and services at their convenience. In between if they want to do business with you and if your website is automated enough they can do even that. This way you can run your business non-stop without having to put in the extra hours.

3. New customers and clients can find you through search engines
Once you have accumulated a decent amount of information on your website people begin to find you on the search engines for the keywords and expressions relevant to your website. For instance if you sell perfumed candles and if someone searches for “sandalwood aroma candles” and if you have information on “sandalwood aroma candles” then there is a great possibility that people will find you on various search engines, come to your website, and place orders for sandalwood aroma candles.

4. Easier and cheaper advertising
Publishing on your website doesn’t cost you extra unless you are paying for every new page you create. Once you have set up the basic website structure you can keep adding new pages without incurring extra cost.
You can also complement your advertising efforts with your website. There are two ways of doing this. Whenever you publish your advertisement you can include your URL so that the information that you cannot include in the advertisement can be easily viewed on your website. Once your online traffic has gained momentum you can even run advertisements directly on your website. The best way of doing this is developing an online community so that lots of traffic builds up.

5. Highly enhanced public relations
You might not know that hundreds of or even thousands of your customers and clients might be using the Internet for all their information and research needs. Millions of views are exchanged on the World Wide Web. If some disparaging news regarding your organization gets circulated you can easily counter it, or at least present your own side of the story, through your website. High-value content and regular interaction with your visitors makes sure that you have a dedicated community of evangelists who would like to protect your brand and reputation even at the cost of putting in extra effort.
The more you interact through your website the more solid your reputation grows.

6. Reach distant markets
At Solutions Infini, a Bangalore based web design company, we get web design projects from all over the world and from very high-profiled clients. This becomes possible because our website is easily accessible to everybody who has an Internet connection. If you provide a service that can be delivered via the Internet or if you have a product that can be easily dispatched after taking an online order then you should definitely tap into this vast online market and promote your business in different parts of the world.

7. Create extra income streams
You can start new business ventures from scratch if you run them through your website. Unlike starting business ventures in the brick-n-mortar world the Internet ventures require very little startup income and they can be initiated in a matter of few days, or even few hours. In order to start a new business all you have to do is, have a great idea or product ready, register a domain suitable to your business, obtain a web hosting account, design the website or get it designed and hurray! You are ready to go.

8. Interact with your customers and clients regularly and obtain their feedback
Compared to telephonic conversations it is a lot easier to interact with your customers and clients through e-mails, blog posts and regular updates on your website. You can also host a forum where your customers and clients can leave feedback and exchange ideas regarding your service. This will improve your goodwill and reputation a lot and will also nurture a sense of trust and transparency. Getting good feedback to your website can be extremely critical to your further product development and service improvement efforts. You won’t have to wait for months and even years to know how your products and services are being received by your consumers.

9. Conduct low-cost market research
Since it hardly costs your visitors any money to participate in quizzes and polls on your website you can use these marvelous tools to conduct low-cost market research and launch new products and services or make improvements to existing products and services.

10. Save on office space
If you manage most of your business operations through your website then you hardly need office space. There are many online store companies that conduct millions of dollars of transactions online every month and still don’t need a place to stock their inventory. Some online companies don’t even have regular staff; all they do is take orders from the website and then forward those orders to the original manufacturers and suppliers. All they have to do is maintain and promote a website and this can be done from your basement too.

11. Establish your brand
Many artists, authors and consultants establish and promote their brands through their websites and blogs. They make use of their authority and knowledge to create a fan following. Numerous bloggers and webmasters have got great book writing contracts through their websites.

12. A website opens a slew of new opportunities
There is a complete new world out there on the World Wide Web. Millions of people access the Internet for leisure, communication, education and business every day. It is a huge business, marketing and promotion potential for your organization.

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IT is a great pleasure to announce that Solutions Infini has extended its office to another floor. It is significant because of the cooperation of the individuals who have made the establishment of the office a success.

But the significance of this occasion extends beyond the establishment and opening of the office. Solutions Infini aiming at providing its Services for what this company has been known for years, promises to serve its clients with a large team and great support for the years ahead. This is perhaps the most important dimension for us.
Thanks to all who made this possible. Cheers..!!!

Everyone knows what a blog is. Well, almost. For those who came in late, a blog (short for “Web Log”) is a website that an individual uses to post content regularly, with content being displayed in chronological order, beginning with the newest. A recent Universal McCann survey puts the number of active blogs at 184 million and the readers of blogs at 346 million. A vindication to the fact that blogging can be a brand building activity, is the number of professional bloggers, which currently stands at 46% of all the bloggers according to a Technorati survey. Statistic notwithstanding, if you question the efficacy of blog in brand building, just type in a few keywords about your industry on search engines and see how many blogs turn up.
So how does one go about building and managing content on a blog? Here are a few insight.

Create a blogging calendar: It may be easy to embark on that all important decision of “I am going to create a blog” in a moment of truth, but if you don’t have an agenda, your strategy or the lack of it can deliver zero results. Decide which is a comfortable recurrence, say a month, and create a calendar for the next 12 recurrences, which could be a year of planning.

Decide on the subject of your blog: Remember, your little blog had to compete with gazillion of others for eyeballs and if it is to make any reader evince interest, and more optimistically make her visit again, your content has to be unique as possible. Let’s consider a fictional example of SolarTop Heaters, a manufacture of solar water heaters. In this case your blog could be called, “Nifty tricks to save energy” and address one feature of your product each month that save energy.

Do NOT Market: Since users are subject to a blitzkrieg of marketing material each day, You don’t want to add to their misery. Remember how you winced when the supposedly well-written article in your favorite Newspaper turned out to be a marketing feature in disguise. Keep your blog brand agnostic and do not give in to the temptation of promoting your product.

Give your blog a good address to reside: If you want your blog to be of any help in your website marketing, make sure it stays on your domain. There is a plethora of plugins that you can use to host your blog on your website.

Promote your blog: Once your blog is up and running, submit it to all the search engines. Most blogging plugins provide this feature by default. Use your social networks to promote your blog. Add footer to your email with your blog address.

Quality not quantity: Treat a blog as an email. You would not want to read long emails, so why would someone want to read long blogs. Keeping blogs sweet and short not only helps users assimilate your views better, but also helps you generate content consistently.

Manage your content: You may want to research your domain constantly and update your calendar accordingly. Writing content at least 2 weeks prior to posting it may be good idea, since you will have that extra to review and compare with other similar blogs.

Update your keywords: Every time you write an article, you should by default be selected a set of keywords for it. These can be added as tags to your blog. Further, you could use your company name as one of the keywords.

Treat blogging as part of your marketing: The time you spend on blogging should feature in your annual marketing plan. Unless your blogging activity becomes a discipline, it is not likely to sustain itself and you may lose users that you carefully built.

And if all’s well, your blog could make money: If your content is well accepted and you manage to get a fairly large number of users, you may want to set up advertising on your blog to generate additional revenue.

Good luck and happy brand-blogging.

Online-Payment has dramatically increased in popularity and each day more customers think about their convenience in paying their bills. Online Payment is popular, because it is generally easy and convenient. Based on these principals, Solutions Infini has decided to “go with the flow” and offer this function to their clients too. So please make the best use of it. To Make your Payments online please click here.

Benefits of Making an Payment Online :

• Customer convenience – You save the extra step of writing and sending a check or depositing the money in bank.
• Immediate authorization – With automation, you know immediately if an Internet payment is valid. No waiting for checks to clear.
• You will save time – You don’t need to line up in queues to obtain cash, set up direct debits themselves or go to the effort of mailing cheques. By completing just one form, the amount will debited of your account or your credit card and will save you considerable time and hassle… with more time to enjoy doing other things.
• You will save money – Paying “Online” will reduce bank float to as little as 1-2 days. It also will reduce the level of human error in the accounting department. At last there is no lost or stolen check to worry about.
• You will be safe – There is a lot of ambiguity in the minds of users when it comes to financial transactions online. We are working together with Direc Pay – one of the safest online-banking in India. Their guidelines of safety are strict and therefore they can provide a 100% safety on all bank-transmissions.
• You save trees – More and more trees are being cut to produce paper which is used in making checks and envelopes.  SAVE TREES and spread Greenery in the Environment.

Google’s “Next Generation” search engine, called Caffeine, will be in place shortly. Don’t be surprised !! You may be wondering how will this affect you and your website .

Well this is just not one of Google’s infamous updates, this is going to be a MAJOR “Overhaul” of the search index and algorithm. This will affect how Google ranks all the web pages in the Internet, and yes, even yours.

So how is the new “Overhaul” going to affect your website ranking? I will explain to you in detail what you may need to change in your website to rank in the new Google Caffeine Search Engine.

Site Speed
This play a good part in how Google Caffeine ranks your website. Site speed is how fast your website loads. The faster the better.
If your website is outdated and takes a while to load, whether it be because of jumbled code or huge image resolutions, you will most likely rank lower that other websites out there.

Broken Links and Bad Neighborhoods
We have all fought with broken links in one way or another. We hate clicking on a link and landing at a dead end. Google Caffeine is the same way, if you have broken links on your website, get ready to kiss your Google rank goodbye. I would start checking all my links now to be ready for the change over.

Now you may be asking what I mean about “bad neighborhoods”. What I am meaning are sites that are deemed inappropriate. These will be the virus effecting sites, which they are not easily noticeable, and many others out there.
If you link to these, I don’t know why you would, you might want to reconsider.

OnPage Factors
This will play even a much greater roll in how your website is ranked by Google. Google Caffiene will be looking for the following characteristics in determining your page rank based on the OnPage Factors.
1. Quality, unique content
2. Page design
3. Good, easy page navigation
4. Title of page
5. Page’s meta tags
6. Page’s alt tags.
7. Page’s Description
8. Density of keywords
9. Page views
10. Bounce rates
11. Traffic numbers
12. Social media bookmarks

Having a perfectly optimized website based on these OnPage Factors will get your website ranked higher than others in Caffeine and well as the other search engines.

Are you taking the appropriate actions to make sure your website is ready for Google Caffeine??

Confused???? Which CMS tool to use. Joomla of Drupal?? These are few points to refer before choosing the right CMS for your website

Use Joomla when:
* You don’t know about the tech stuff at all
* You want easy install & setup with your mouse
* You don’t want to learn the tool you’re using
* You don’t need to integrate other scripts etc. to your site
* You want a candy site and don’t mind several other sites using the same template(s)
* You don’t need SEO out of the box
* You don’t care about server resources
* You’re running (or planning to to run) only one or max a couple of sites
* You don’t need one log-in to several sites
* You don’t need user groups & permissions
* You don’t run membership site(s)

Use Drupal when:

* You want a rock solid & high quality platform for your sites
* You want or need a real multi-site-feature (only one installation for several sites)
* You need any kind of user groups & user permissions
* You need to run also membership- and community sites, not only CMS etc
* You want a Powerful templating system
* You’re ready to invest a bit of your time in order to realize all the huge possibilities of Drupal
* You understand the meaning of clear, high quality code and API (easy to integrate with other solutions etc)
* You want flexibility and don’t like limitations

Selecting or changing a domain name (URL) is a critical marketing decision. The problem is more than just a simple search for availability on registration site. A good domain name is an important part of the overall design of a website.

The following are few points which you must consider while choosing a domain name :

• Make the Domain Unique
• Keep it “Short and Sweet”
• Easy to pronounce
• Make it Easy to Remember
• Use Keywords
• Reject Hyphens and Numbers
• Make it Easy to Type
• Easy to read in print and online ads
• Easy to understand over the radio or on phone
• Avoid Copyright / Trademark Infringement