Moblogs in India

Posted on | August 10, 2005 |

Blogging is at a nascent stage in India and there aren’t a huge number of blogs in the country. This is because the current set of blogging service providers like blogger.com are PC-centric. You are expected to have two things in order to blog - a PC and an internet connection. Which unfortunately aren’t many in India.

But what is overlooked is the fact that blogging needn’t be dependent of these two. It is very much possible to blog without a PC i.e. by using a mobile phone. Moblogs allow users to share their cameraphone pictures, videos and comments through email or MMS which can be immediately viewed on the internet or mobile phone browsers .

With mobiles in India having four times the population of PCs, it is natural that the growth in blogging would be driven by mobile blogs or moblogs. This is the reason that there are portals like BlogStreet India and providers like Mobylog which focus exclusively on the blogging scene in India. Moblogging has great potential in a market like India where there is less PC penetration and fairly advanced mobile market and consumers.

Business Standard has a story which takes the online photo album angle while addressing this space. It talks about Yahoo Photos and Airtel’s MyAlbum services. For Yahoo Photos the money comes from product related advertisers such as Canon, Kodak and Hewlett Packard. For the operators like Airtel, it not only acts a differentiator but also brings in data revenue.

Sample some numbers. According to IDC India, a market research and consultancy firm, the Indian digital still camera market experienced a 114 per cent growth in unit terms during 2004. By 2007, the digital camera market in the country is expected to touch 900,000 units.

In value terms, it’s a 100 crore market currently but slated to grow to Rs 600 crore in two years. Digital camera’s advantage is that it doesn’t require a film. It stores images on a memory chip and the pictures can be edited and transferred electronically.

Complementing the digital camera growth is the growing number of camera phones. Phone manufacturers like Nokia, Samsung and LG have been flooding the market with new models. Airtel’s Khosla believes that the future belongs to “M(obbile) Photos, especially with prices of camera phones falling below Rs 10,000.

UPDATE: Also read Om Malik’s article in Business 2.0 titled “The Next Gold Mine: Moblogs”

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