“The main reason for my move is the disagreement with Prakash Bhalerao, on the right strategy and direction for Mela. While the board of Verismo agreed with me on several aspects, board members were unwilling to confront Bhalerao. There were a lot of Verismo legacy issues as well and they made it very difficult to provide the right focus to Mela, which I launched as a new consumer business within Verismo in October 2011,” wrote Kanaujia in his personal blog post. He also claims that the company was not very sure about the right business model, the right content mix and the right platform strategy.

According to Kanaujia, he has presented the Verismo board a proposal to spin out Mela as an independent entity, controlled by the management team.

“My excitement about solving the global distribution problem for premium South Asian entertainment content remains intact. If we cannot find an agreement, I will launch a new company. I am discussing several options with some exciting potential strategic partners and we have some really interesting ideas on how to capitalise on this opportunity,” wrote Kanaujia.

During Kanaujia’s stint in Verismo Networks, the company launched the Mela service on three platforms (Mela dedicated set top box, Roku and iPad) with different content packaging, which included Live TV, regional South Asian content, Bollywood movies and regional South Asian movies, etc., and different pricing (subscription with bundled all-in and with movies stand-alone). The service also started streaming Bollywood movies in high definition (HD).

The Silicon Valley startup Verismo Networks, which also runs a research and design centre in Bangalore, had first raised an angel round of funding worth $2.5 million back in 2006. In November 2010, it closed another $17 million of funding, led by Intel Capital, the corporate venture capital arm of chipmaker Intel Corporation. In August 2011, the company took over Digital Entertainment Corporation of India (DECI), a holding company run by Kanaujia, for an undisclosed amount. DECI was incorporated as Verismo’s new entertainment services unit and was headed by Kanaujia.

Prior to setting up DECI in January 2010, Kanaujia was vice-president (digital product strategy and development) at NBC Universal, based in the New York headquarters. At NBC Universal, he handled digital product strategy and development across all digital businesses including nbc.com, iVillage.com, scifi.com, bravotv.com, nbcsports.com, usanetworks.com and accesshollywood.com. He had also served as director at AOL and American Industrial Acquisition Corp.

Sumant Kasliwal

Sumant Kasliwal, who quit ICICI Ventures last September, has launched his second e-commerce venture under the three-month-old startup Outletwise Retail Pvt Ltd. The new initiative is a high-end fashion and lifestyle portal.

Based in Mumbai, with a team of 12 on board, Outletwise went live in the last week of March. However, it is looking to scale up and will hire 10 more people within the next two months. Kasliwal, founder of the startup, has almost 17 years of experience in corporate strategy, business development and investments, and he had previously worked with Arthur Andersen, Star India, Microsoft and ICICI Ventures.

Outletwise offers a wide range of products including saris, suits & jackets, dresses, party shirts and tops, skirts & shorts, lingerie, home décor items (paintings, photo frames, trays, bathroom sets, candle stands and bar accessories), shoes, kids’ bags and even toys.

Talking to Techcircle.in, Kasliwal said, “Outletwise is a platform for offline designers and prêt label shops interested in selling online.” Designers bring the products and decide the pricing while Outletwise takes care of branding, marketing, backend and technical assistance.

“There are stores whose physical presence is pretty strong with a healthy clientele, but who are not too keen to invest much on online marketing. Moreover, getting traffic for a single brand is also difficult. Hence, this platform is helping them promote their products,” he said.

A self-funded company right now, Outletwise may look at external funding only after six months. “Now we want to focus on building the product, the brand and a respectable customer base,” said Kasliwal.

Targeting the premium segment, Outletwise claims that its average ticket size is between Rs 5000 and Rs 10,000. However, order volumes are negligible at present. Currently, the site has partnered with 25 stores, but keeps adding one every alternate day. The e-com firm aims to partner with 150-200 stores within the next 2-3months. It would be interesting to see how the economics works for a high-value, low-volume e-tailer like Outletwise.

The new site is bound to face competition from various other lifestyle portals selling similar items. Among these are Fashionandyou, 99labels, Freecultr, Heaven & Home, Rooja and SherSingh besides the horizontal e-com firms who have also added apparel and home décor products.

Last year, Kasliwal quit the private equity firm ICICI Venture, along with Satya Raghavan and Anthony Thottungal, to launch SkoolShop, a niche e-commerce site for school and education-related products. It also raised an undisclosed seed funding from Jaspreet Bindra, Microsoft India’s regional director of retail, entertainment and devices division, and Rajan Anandan, an active angel investor and currently the managing director of Google India.

Desire C has a 3.5 inch capacitive touchscreen display (320×480 pixel resolution) with 165 pixels per inch (ppi) and runs on Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) OS with HTC Sense 4.0. It is powered by a 600 MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and has 512 MB of RAM. The internal memory of the device is 4 GB, expandable up to an additional 32 GB with a microSD card.

It comes with a 5 MP autofocus rear camera that can record videos (not HD, though) but there’s no front-facing camera; so video-calling will become problematic. There’s is no flash either; so users will have to make sure that there’s proper light to click photos or shoot videos. However, instant sharing is there, which means you can post pictures on social networking sites right after capturing those. On the connectivity front, the device has Bluetooth, Wi-Fi (with Wi-Fi hotspot) and 3G, and it also has a microUSB port.

The measurements are 107.2mm x 60.6mm x 11.95mm and the phone weighs 98 gram. HTC has also provided a 1230 mAh battery, which should ensure an average battery life. The phone will have A-GPS support and will be available in white, black and red colours.

This smartphone also comes with Beats audio (which means you can expect good quality sound) and HTC is also providing an optional Near Field Communication (NFC) version. Through Desire C’s deep integration of Dropbox (HTC has struck a deal with Dropbox for providing Cloud storage), users will get additional 25 GB of free online space, which can be used for (secure back-up, sharing photos, videos and documents, etc.).

An India launch date and price are not available yet, but one look at the specs and you can make out that the smartphone will be priced below Rs 18,000. In that price range, it will compete with Samsung’s Galaxy Ace Plus (Rs 15,500), Motorola Defy Plus (Rs 15,990), Sony Ericsson Xperia U (Rs 16,499) and BlackBerry Curve 9380 (Rs 17,225), among others.

Now Airtel users can open no-frills savings accounts with Axis Bank, as these will leverage Bharti Airtel’s mobile wallet (Airtel Money) and enable users to make banking transactions like cash deposit, money transfer and withdrawal. Users will also earn interest on their savings accounts.

To begin with, the savings and remittance facility will be only available in the top four remittance corridors – Delhi, Mumbai, Bihar and eastern UP. Initially, money can be sent only from Delhi and Mumbai while Bihar and eastern UP will have receiving facility. Later, these services would be extended to other remittance corridors across the country. Other banking products and services like micro recurring deposits, micro fixed deposits, small loans and micro-insurance products will also be available at a later stage.

“With Axis Bank’s expertise in banking and Airtel’s distribution network spanning over 1.5 million outlets, this association will play a transformational role in furthering economic empowerment and fast-tracking India’s financial inclusion agenda,” said Sanjay Kapoor, CEO (India & South Asia) of Bharti Airtel.

Launched in Delhi-NCR and Chennai in May 2011, Bharti Airtel-powered mobile wallet Airtel Money was recently rolled out in 300 cities in India.

TimesDeal outdid its earlier feat of 50,000 orders a day, recorded on December 1 last year in a similar arrangement with PayTM.

It could not be immediately ascertained how many recharges PayTM does on its own site daily but Freecharge, another player in recharge business, run by Mumbai-based Accelyst Solutions Pvt Ltd, said it records around 10,000 transactions a day.

Talking about the new benchmark, Rishi Khiani, CEO of Times Internet Ltd, said, “The deal was a hit with users as it doubled the value of their money. Offering maximum value for money to customers is core to the deals business.”

According to TimesDeal, the portal witnessed a huge traffic surge, with more than 3,00,000 unique visitors in the latest offer.

PayTM CEO Harinder Takhar said, “The reach of TimesDeal, combined with Paytm’s perfect mass-appeal product, enabled us to strike the biggest online mobile recharge deal ever.”

Next time, the partners are aiming to reach 2 lakh orders a day.

The Magic Town platform is to be launched on Wednesday by Mindshapes, which was set up by two of the co-founders of Playfish, the UK online games company sold to Electronic Arts in 2009.

The aim is to create a hub where children aged from two to six can find interactive ebooks, from classic fairy tales to stories featuring popular characters such as Elmer the Elepha nt. Magic Town, which will be available online immediately and on Apple’s iPad from next month, will operate on a “freemium” model. About 20 titles will be available to read for free. The full catalogue will cost £7.99 for a monthly or £49.99 for an annual subscription fee.

“We are looking to become the primary entertainment brand for young children within the next few years,” said Christian Dorffer, chief commercial officer of Mindshapes. About 200 stories will be made available on the platform in the first year.

Sarah Packenham, rights director at Andersen Press, home of the Elmer books, said the publisher was interested in joining Magic Town because the cost of producing its own animated books for many platforms was too high for a small company.

“We are creating our own ebooks, but they are very plain vanilla, with no narration or animation. The cost of adding those things on is very high. We don’t have the expertise to do it all or to foretell which part of the market to invest in,” she said.

The platform is being introduced at a time when ebook sales are a growing proportion of the overall market. The Association of American Publishers said ebooks’ share of the children’s and young adult book market hit 16 per cent in February.

According to estimates from PwC, ebook sales in Europe will grow 113 per cent this year but will still end the year as less than 2 per cent of the market.

Online games and social networking sites for children, such as Moshi Monsters and Club Penguin, have proved popular. Magic Town is targeting an age group that is younger than the typical users for these sites and will focus more on reading and literacy.

Magic Town has signed up three of the big six publishing companies, Simon & Schuster, Hachette and Penguin, owned by Pearson, which also owns the Financial Times. It is in talks with Macmillan and Bloomsbury.

The publishers will be paid royalties based on how many times their books are read online. Mr Dorffer said the fees would initially be modest, “not hundreds of thousands of pounds”.

Ms Packenham said that while the royalties from the site were important for Andersen Press, she was also interested in the ability to promote the company’s less well-known titles. Mr Dorffer said publishers could further benefit from rapid feedback on titles.

More News From Financial Times

After precipitously losing its position in the smartphone market to Apple’s iPhone and models running Google’s Android software, Nokia has also been losing its shine in the basic phone market, which had been a reliable generator of profits.

Nokia’s basic phone sales fell 16 per cent in the first three months of 2012, and have fallen in four of the last five quarters, while rivals like China’s ZTE 000063.SZ and Huawei HWT.UL have been growing fast.

China’s largest search engine Baidu Inc is also planning to enter the cellphone market with a cheap smartphone.

The new Nokia 110 model will be sold for 35 euros and will start shipping in the second quarter, while the 112 model will be sold for 38 euros from the third quarter, with both using Nokia’s Series 40 software, the Finnish phone maker said.

Nokia said new models would come with a licence to download 40 games by Electronic Arts and offer Internet access with the a new browser built upon its 2010 acquisition of US firm Novarra.

“These products are critical for Nokia to maintain traction in the face of mounting competition from Samsung and the Chinese rivals,” said Geoff Blaber, analyst at CCS Insight.

“Nokia’s Series 40 platform is under attack from all sides. Full touch support is a must if Nokia is to fend off the challenge from aggressively priced Android devices,” he said.

Around 105 million full touch-screen basic phones were sold last year globally, but Nokia has been slow to react. It is due to unveil a full-touch 306 basic phone model only in the coming months.

Nokia’s shares have lost 90 per cent in five years, and two of the three major ratings agencies cut its debt to junk last month.

Nokia stock was 2.6 per cent lower at 2.28 euros at 1150 GMT.

The Swedish-based project, www.aday.org , has got backing from figures in entertainment, politics and business, who are also going to upload photos of their day.

“There are tens of thousands of photos from all over the world,” said project editor-in-chief Ayperi Karabuda Ecer, talking about how many pictures had been uploaded to the website’s servers since the project kicked off at midnight local time across the globe.

“This is the biggest crowd sourcing still photography project that has ever been done,” added Karabuda Ecer, who has taken a sabbatical from her work as vice-president pictures at Thomson Reuters to work for the project.

“The idea is to ask people to document their own lives,” she added. She said the aim was for people to take photos on May 15 and upload them with detailed data to the website by May 22.

The organisers will then launch an exploration site with all the photos and ways to browse the pictures and information on the same website on May 30.

Though the bulk of pictures will come from ordinary people, the project includes many well known photographers and has got backing from several famous people on a global advisory council, who will also take photos.

These include Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Swedish diplomat and foreign minister Jan Eliasson, who is now deputy head of the United Nations, and singer Robyn.

VenturEast had invested $2.5 million in Atyati in August 2008 and would exit the firm with the acquisition by Genpact.

Founded in 2006 by ex-Oracle Financial Services managers, Atyati is a Bangalore-based company that offers a technology platform to provide banking services to the rural population. Its Ganaseva solution is a mobility-based platform designed to deliver the complete suite of banking services, including an automated and secure banking platform with smart card and biometrics-based authentication capabilities. Atyati hosts the solution on private Cloud and the service is charged on a pay-per-transaction or pay-per-village model.

This acquisition will provide Genpact with a technology platform in the rural banking space with last-mile functionality that allows Indian banks to tap into the millions who reside in rural areas.

Atyati’s platform reportedly serves 3 million end customers in 7,300 villages, with a targeted expansion to 9.8 million end customers in more than 16,000 villages by 2013. Post-acquisition, its team of 60 employees will join Genpact and the promoter Prakash Prabhu will continue leading the unit.

P2P Consultants and Nishith Desai & Associates were the financial and legal advisors for Atyati while Genpact was advised by Deloitte, PWC and AZB & Partners.

“This is a very strategic acquisition for three reasons. First, it adds a platform-based solution for a highly underpenetrated and large market. Second, we also add several marquee Indian banks and clients to our portfolio with the ability to cross-sell multiple Genpact products and services. Third, it leverages all latest cutting-edge technologies around mobility and biometrics that make it highly scalable and able to be taken to the global markets, including the micro-finance institutions (MFIs),” said Tiger Tyagarajan, president and CEO of Genpact.

For Genpact, this is the second deal in 2012 and the fourth under the new chief executive. NYSE-listed outsourcing firm Genpact had seen a change of guards early last year with Pramod Bhasin stepping down as CEO and giving the reins to NV ‘Tiger’ Tyagarajan.

Over the past one year, Genpact has made around half a dozen acquisitions, including Headstrong Corporation for a cash consideration of $550 million, among others. The company had also taken over California-based Cloud company Akritiv Technologies for an undisclosed amount, High Performance Partners, LLC (HPP) and its Quantum Mortgage Technology, and US-based media and business research firm EmPower Research. Most recently, it struck a deal to acquire Accounting Plaza, a European provider of finance & accounting (F&A) and human resources (HR) services, besides PeopleSoft ERP services.

Carazoo is a subsidiary of Logix Americas Inc, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of BSE-listed Logix Microsystems Ltd, a company backed by Passport Capital and also by Ashish Dhawan of ChrysCapital in his personal capacity.

Carazoo provides dealer management software, website development and marketing services to a variety of automotive and motorcycle dealerships in India. The company also operates Carazoo.com, an automotive portal for buying and selling used and new cars. The company claims that the portal has over 5 lakh unique visitors per month. Its Indian competitors include Carwale.com, Indiaautomobile.com, CarSalesIndia.com, AutoIndia.com and Motorexchange.in, among others.

“The acquisition of Carazoo is a major step forward in executing our strategy to provide international scale and reach as a marketing partner to advertisers with a global presence. This acquisition will provide an established platform for rapid expansion in one of the fastest growing automotive markets in the world,” said Chris Argentieri, president of Source Interlink Media.

The acquisition will allow Source Interlink Media to expand into India, a market where the company believes that the demographics support a long-term growth opportunity for the automotive sector. Source Interlink Media is one of the largest providers of content to communities interested in automotive, action sports, marine and other niche activities in the US that include more than 75 publications, 100 websites, 800 branded products, 50-plus events and TV & radio programmes.

Sanjay Soni, director of Logix Americas, said, “Carazoo is uniquely positioned in the Indian automotive market, both as a consumer website and a platform for dealer marketing. The resources and relationships that Source Interlink Media will bring to this partnership will enable Carazoo to increase the pace of its already growing business.”

Logix Americas is a provider of automotive solutions for customers in the US, Europe and India. The company’s products are sold under the brand Izmocars.

Techcircle had hinted at a possible sale of Carazoo last December. Logix had hived off Carazoo and turned it into a separate subsidiary.

Other deals in car portals

Auto portals have been one of the key e-com verticals attracting both M&A’s and capital from institutional investors. In September last year, CarSingh raised an undisclosed amount in its first round of funding from Seeders Venture Capital Pvt Ltd. Prior to that, pre-owned vehicle sales portal MotorExchange raised $13 million in a third round of funding, led by Tiger Global Management.

Also in 2010, European multimedia company Axel Springer AG and the India Today group acquired 70.4 per cent stake in Automotive Exchange Pvt Ltd (owner of the automotive classified ads portal Carwale.com). Again in 2011, the MIH Group, a subsidiary of the South African media group Naspers, acquired a majority stake in Gaadi Web Pvt Ltd that runs the auto classifieds site Gaadi.com. Other automotive portals in India include eBay Motors, Autojunction.com, Autoindia.com and Zigwheels.com.