Over 10,000 people have already signed up for this initiative. Some firms have already pledged 50 employees per week for 2 hours a week. India Times is trying something unique which is trying to provide a platform for everyone to contribute to the development of the country. According to an estimate, there are around 287 illiterate Indians who needs some sort of motivation to go back to school. Right now Teach India initiative is limited to the four metros only. Here is an interesting article on how we are trying to kill the Right to Education Bill. I am sure this initiative can definitely make a difference to the way we work for a social cause.

If you think you can spend 2 hours every week teaching something which you know, please sign up for Teach India.

Last month Raja (VentureWoods) wrote a post on the same subject. According to him the rise of the usage of cash cards can be attributed to the IRCTC agents. These agents sell train tickets to the consumers who do not have access to a credit card or debit card. He also makes a comment that right now the cash cards is getting popular with the agents who do bulk booking. The consumer segment is yet to be tapped. It is not clear what benefit (commissions) will an agent get when they use a cash card for transaction as opposed or a VISA/MasterCard debit or credit cards.

What is a Cash Card?

It is multi-purpose card which enables consumers to do transactions online as well as through mobile. The consumers have to pay upfront in full to get a cash card. This is different from a debit card where it is tied to one’s bank account and money is directly debited from the account. And a credit card where user gets a grace period of 30 days or more to repay a bank which issues the credit. The most popular cash cards in India are ITZ and Done. It is is similar to the prepaid recharge cards for mobiles and the gift cards. You go to a vendor pay the money upfront, get a card, scratch it for a unique number and use start using it! Once you exhaust the cash value of a card, throw it and get a new one.

One can also draw a similarity of a cash card with a temporary credit card numbers which can be used for online transactions for a limited amount of time or cash value. This practice ensures that the user’s original credit card number will not fall into wrong hands while performing an online transaction.

Data from IRCTC for June 2008

Based on the data from IRCTC, there were 2.7 million transactions worth 2.4 billion Indian Rupees. 22.7% of successful transactions were processed by ICICI Payment Gateways, 15.2% from ITZ Cash Card and 12.44% from Done Cash Card. And the remaining transactions(50%) is shared by around 30 other payment gateways.

Can Cash Cards over take VISA or MasterCard in India?

• The failure rate for a Cash Card transaction is 17%, as opposed to 29% for Credit card and 37% for Debit Cards
• The average number of days for refund of cash for a failed transaction -  1.24 days for Cash Card, 1.97 days for Credit Cards and 2.3 days for Debit Cards.
• Not all have access to banks and credit card companies. Cash cards can be bought over the counter from thousands of the vendors.
• Consumers gets to use the full amount (no processing fee) of a cash card. Visa Gift cards from IDBI, ICICI and SBI has a processing fee.
• Minimum for a cash card is 100 rupees and opposed to 500 ruppes for VISA Gift cards.

More and more consumers are getting hooked to internet and mobile. More people from far off places will start using cash cards. The E-Commerce companies in India cannot ignore the importance of Cash Card Companies for online transactions.

Google in one of its ambitious project has introduced a robot which writes the blog content automatically. Google has named their new robot as WriteBot. This is in addition to the Google News site which aggregates the top headlines from major sources of news. WriteBot has a very knowledgeable friend who reads millions of blogs, newspapers, and other user generated content. Yes, WriteBot depends on GoogleBot. As everyone knows GoogleBot is busy indexing the world’s content.

How does WriteBot generate content?

As soon as WriteBot gets tip for a new post, it calls GoogleBot to see if there are any reference material which can be used to create a new post. WriteBot relies on GoogleBot’s analytical ability as it is reading and analyzing the world’s information for many years now. WriteBot compiles all the information and refers the goldmine of Google user’s online behaviour and generates unique content for each user. Yes WriteBot knows that I like short posts. Occasionally WriteBot pushes longer post into my reader to see if I like it. Different users get different post based on their online behavior and taste. If WriteBot understands that its reader is a geek, it will use more geeky language in the post. WriteBot always links to the original source of the story. Each user has their own page with Google.

WriteBot knows the importance of speaking vernacular language

WriteBot writes contents in many languages simultaneously. In India most news content providers understands the need of being vernacular. WriteBot develops content in English, Hindi among many other languages. And finally, it uses the tried and tested Adsense for advertising. Needless to say all the advertisement are much more context sensitive and much more relevant (behavioral targeting) than ever.

This is a fictional post. This is the first post in the new category WorkBench.

Last week I got a email from SnapFish saying that it I can send pictures to India for Rs.2.95. Well I do have an account with SnapFish.com. But I have not registered in their Indian version yet. And SnapFish needs just a email address to complete registration. In the email it is said that account details are universal. This means an account with SnapFish.com will work SnapFish.in. But how did they get to know that I am having family in India to send photo?

Well its all because of an outdated online profile that I have in BharatMatrimony (Consim). I received the email from Consim.in server. The only thing I know is that I have used the same email id to create accounts for both snapfish and BharatMatrimony. Did Consim share my email address with SnapFish?

The privacy policy clearly says that Consim (BharatMatrimony) will not share any personally indetifiable information with a third party without user’s consent. Well isn’t this a violation of privacy policy?

According to their site, 70% of the users of BharatMatrimony are from India. According to JuxtConsult BharatMatrimony is the most preferred matrimonial service. And about its users- 70% own laptop/computer, 53% have done online shopping, 40% owns a credit card and 74% have used Internet for more than 2 years.

I regularly listen to the podcasts from Business Week magazine. Every Thursday Business Week releases a podcast which discusses what went behind the scenes to create their weekly cover story. After listening to the podcast, almost every time I visit their site for related content. Several other magazines also provide the podcasts of their cover stories and other interesting discussion.

These podcasts are professionally recorded and circulated. Some of them even carries pre-roll advertisements. Podcasts can serve like a good advertisement to drive traffic to the site as well as increase the sales of the magazines. With the given popularity of mp3 devices it becomes inevitable for magazines companies and other content producers to create and distribute podcasts.

But Indian Business Magazine companies do not think so. The following are the most popular business magazines in India with the approximate circulation numbers - Business Today(416,000), Business India (291,000), Outlook Business (226,000) and Business World (224,000). Unfortunately none of these magazines provide podcasts on their websites. And even Google could not find a website for Business India magazine.

Well the good news is that foreign magazine publishers like Fortune, Businessweek and The Economist planning to release Indian version of their magazines. I hope this competition will force existing magazine companies to think of innovative marketing strategies to maintain and gain new customers. And definitely a better web presence cannot be ignored.

According to a study by EMarketer, by the end of 2008 there will be around 10 million active podcast listeners in US with advertising dollars going up to 240 million dollars. I could not locate any numbers for Indian podcast industry.

I have heard a couple of podcasts from India. Most of them are not professional recorded and I can barely hear the discussion. Most of us will subscribe to podcasts only when it can give a message or a lively discussion. I would not mind spending 30 minutes or so for listening to a good podcast while I am commuting to work or doing house hold chores.

I would love a listen to a podcast from a Indian Magazine (or Newspaper) which gives me a daily or weekly dose of information and insights. I think podcasts in vernacular languages like Hindi will sell like hot cake. Do you think Indian podcast market is not matured yet?

You have logged in to IN.com five times till now, but haven’t validated your mobile number yet. We need a valid mobile number to make sure you can continue using your account.

Why have we limited the registration to only one account per valid mobile number? Well, it’s to ensure that everybody gets the short, nice email address they like and no single person registers several accounts for himself. Also, it ensures that we limit registrations to people in India, our target audience, for the time being.

If you don’t validate your mobile number, we’ll keep your account on hold for up to a month, after which, the ID you used will be open for registration by other users again.

Cheers, The IN.com Team

It says that IN.com needs user mobile number to confirm if the user is from India. Well this requirement can be satisfied by just verifying the IP address of the users while registering. It also says that IN.com wants avoid multiple registrations. Most of us have 1-2 active email addresses. We use temporary email ids for a short period time and leave it inactive. Most email companies delete the mail account after certain period of inactivity and release the user name for registration. IN.com will delete my account if I don’t validate my mobile number. Isn’t more user accounts means more page views and hence more money. IN.com doesn’t think so

Well, aggregation looks like big business. The terms and conditions of IN.com is available only on the registration page which is also not accessible. Since I don’t have access to their terms page, I assume that they may keep an eye on what their users read, listen, search (flight, matrimonial etc) and collect data. They may use this data to create a unique profile for each user. Once they have traction they may leverage this profile to advertise on their website. So personalized advertisement huh?

And you may never know, they may even send you a SMS from advertiser. Did someone say that India has more mobile users than internet users?

This data analysis will answer several questions like- Which is the best and worst payment gateways? Which mode of transaction has most success rate? If a transaction fails, how many days should a customer wait to get the money back to his/her account.

Transactions in IRCTC can be done through credit card, net banking and cash cards. The graph clearly shows that cash cards is quickly gaining popularity as a preferred means of transaction after credit cards.

Around 31% of successful transactions were made using a Cash Cards (ITZ, DONE, TRANS). While it is 38% for Credit/Debit card and around 30 % for net banking. The volume of transactions came down in May 2008 compared to previous month. In May 2008 Cash cards made around 950 INR per transaction as opposed to 1013 INR for Credit Card and 820 INR for Net Banking.

As far as total value of transaction is concerned again cash cards is just trailing behind credit cards. If you see the Total Transaction Value graph, the value for all modes of transactions went up. But cash cards have a steeper increase in usage. Cash cards yielded 727 million INR as opposed to 607 million INR for net banking and 971 million INR for Credit cards. The most interesting thing to note is that there only three vendors for cash cards. There are 7 vendors for credit cards and 24 for Net Banking.

As far as transaction failure is concerned CitiBank PG and Citi EMI continues to lead the pack. On an average credit card transactions failed 26% of the times. Net Banking and Cash Card Transactions failed 36% and 27% of the times respectively. Its not clear from the data from IRCTC the reason of transaction failure. But it would be appropriate to assume that the failure rates include human as well as gateway errors. (The above picture shows only credit card payment gateway failures)

ICICI payment gateway is having the most success rate of 84% in credit card transactions. HDFC Bank is leading net banking section with 73% success rate and DONE Card (cash card) with 86%.

There will be a temporary hold on funds when a customer makes a online transaction. Money is deducted only when the transaction is confirmed to be successful. If the transaction fails, Credit Card Companies take 1.97 days to return the cash back to customer. Net Banking companies take 2.53 days, while Cash Card companies take 1.35 days.

At an individual level the following is list of the payment gateways with the average number of days they take to return cash to customer for a failed transaction. ICICI EMI (credits card) 2.2 days, HDFC (credit cards) 1.68 days, OBC (net banking) 3.43 days, Canara (net banking) 1.47 days, ITZ (cash cards) 1.52 days, Done (cash cards) 1.21 days.

One thing is very clear, one cannot ignore the important of Cash Cards in Indian e-commerce industry. What would be the reason for cash card getting popular in India? Any thoughts?

Also read - Cash Cards account for 28.8% of all online transactions in IRCTC (May 2008) | Indian Railways’ New Cash Cow; Rail Sampark IVR Service (April 2008)

There is a news from Agency FAQs that WAT Consult team is working with United Nations Millennium Campaign (UNMC) to end poverty by 2015. I would like to congratulate WAT Consult team for assisting UN to spread the message in South Asian countries.

It looks like they have completed 2 months in this initiative and Rajiv has given update on the work. I will be closely watching this initiative as I think this is a real case study to understand the social media tools for spreading awareness. In two months they have reached about 13,000 people. I would guess this number is for both online and offline. By October 2008 they have a ambitious plan to reach out to about 1 million people in South Asia. That is over 7692% increase over the current number, in a span of 4 months. I know social marketing can be viral. But I will be interested to know the kind of activities that will reach the goal of 1 million people.

Currently they are spreading the word in social networking sites and twitter. I took a look at the activity of these initiatives. They have the most members (1073) in Orkut, which is the most frequently used social networking site in India. But the level of participation is low. I think the level of participation will go up in due course of time.

The Facebook group has around 92 members. There is a separate channel in Youtube which hosts around 22 videos clocking around 167 views per video on a average. 186 people follow this initiative on twitter. The last post on the Stand Up Take Action Blog was on October 2007. Isn’t blog a tool which can be leveraged for social media marketing?

I personally feel that the buzz in these tools can be ramped up by frequent discussion. See the graph which shows the participation level in the Orkut Community. I am sure there are various plans for ramping up the participation in due course.

BTW the some of the numbers do not tally from Agencyfaqs and WATBlog. Can any one from WAT Consult confirm latest numbers. As a side note there is an interesting post from RWW on the usage of Social Media for Social Cause.

Yuvi has interesting graphs on FriendFeeds of Bloggers, Techmeme and TechCrunch. Congratulations Yuvi! So, if a blogger has something interesting to say other bloggers will link to it and Techmeme will list it.