Orkut-Indianization!

Most of you would have noticed by now that the Orkut homepage has changed. The change according to me is quite significant but in reality the change may not even get registered in the user's mind..

Orkut has changed the pictures of people which appear on the homepage. You may say 'Does it really matter?'. Yes, it does. The new pictures are an actual representation of the actual user community compared to the earlier pics. Orkut finally acknowledges the fact that Indians form a significant portion of the Orkut population by putting pictures of Indian users.

Orkut Homepage

Orkut Demographics

Some number crunching now:)
Total users on orkut as on 7/04/2007: 49,636,859 = 49.64 million (this number appears when you come online).
Indians = 13.9% (the third largest group after Brazilians and Americans)
This means that there are 6.9 million Indians. HUGE right!!

Is this change significant? I believe yes because now i feel Orkut (i mean Google!) will try to cater to the Indian audience through local content. For example: To catch on to the world cup fever, orkut had built a community.
Read it here.
Talk cricket on Orkut
Cricket discussions that started in the elevator can spill over to the Orkut network. Especially this season, in association with us, cricket expert and former Indian cricket captain Krish Srikkanth has created his own community on Orkut to interact with cricket lovers, debate the latest happenings and just share cricket views.

This really does not sound like good news for the India based SNS's like Yaari or Minglebox which have 'local content' as their key strength.

I feel Orkut has a lot up its sleeves and it will unfold very soon. Correct me if you feel otherwise.

Comparison of Internet usage:India and USA

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Indian equity brokerage firms and the ACTION..

There has been a lot of action recently in the equity brokerage sector. But it is interesting to see two different strategies being adopted by the players. On one hand we have a few firms like JM Financial and kotak who have decided to go out on their own by breaking their tie-ups with foreign investment banks.On the other hand we have Enam securities, Sharekhan, Geojit who have entered into partnerships with the foreign players.

JM to sell broking biz to Morgan Stanley for Rs 1,970 cr

Enam, JP Morgan in talks for alliance

Are Sharekhan, SSKI promoters exiting broking biz?

BNP Paribas picks 27.1% in Geojit Financial

Why are players in this space, in the first place, getting so active? The answer to that lies in some astonishing figures!! Investment banking houses have earned more than $200 million in fees from deals involving corporate deals compared to $150 million in the year 2006. Also, Indian corporates are today getting involved in a lot of HUGE cross border M&A firms. Look at the recent Hindalco-Novelis, Tata-Corus and the Hutch-Vodafone deal! Investment banking units are the direct beneficiaries of this trend.

Read this article to get the larger picture :)

I believe that local investment banking units are still pretty small compared to the global powerhouses like Goldman, Lehman, ML etc. and it would be definitely tough for them to win the large M&A deals on their own. They will not have the required financial syndication strength to finance the big deals. So it makes more sense to go in partnership with foreign banks who are also looking to roll out their presence in India. But on the other hand i feel they are pretty well positioned to get advisory roles because of the local expertise,which have higher margins.

So i believe companies like JM will definitely witness expansion in margins but on the other hand will take a hit on the topline.

Lets see which strategy works out best in the future. Only TIME will decide! :)

Let me know what you guys think about this.