India Digital Summit releases report on impact of Internet in India

India Digital Summit 2012 concluded today with waning number of attendees and few good interactive sessions. The high-point of the day was the release of a report - India: Impact of Internet by R Chandrasekhar, secretary, DoT, DiT and chairman, Telecom Commission, Ministry of Communication and Information Technology.

The report was released in the presence of N Ravi Shankar, additional secretary, Government of India; Dr Parthasarathi Shome, director and chief executive officer, and Rajat Kathuria, external consultant from Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations; and Shailesh Rao, managing director, media and platforms – JAPAC, Google India. 

Delivering his inaugural speech, Rao said, “The motivation for working on this project was to ascertain the relation between the proliferation of internet in India and the change in the living index. It is sheer coincidence that we are releasing this report exactly two year after, on the same date, as we had released the report on the impact of mobile.”

Sharing salient points from the report Kathuria pointed out that he had expected internet and broadband proliferation in the country to affect the development index more than what mobiles have, however, the results show that mobiles had a greater impact.

Antony Rhin, co-global chief executive officer, Havas Digital who had a Q&A session with S N Bhaduri, country manager consumer media, Thomas Reuters, suggested that the need for the marketers to understand and utilise the power of data. “There is obviously a percentage of internet pop that is sophisticated than any other group elsewhere in world. However, they are a very minuscule part of the global numbers. In India, we need to understand how to activate the masses. Opportunity is not about the supernotes of 10-15 million, it’s about the growing middle class,” he added. He also said that it was time to go beyond the 360 degree approach to a more 360 degree and 365 days approach.

In another session on digital marketing, Srikant Sastri, country chairperson, Vivaki India, felt that digital is the future big thing when it comes to both revenue and engagement. “There will be a whole lot of data floating around, hence data management and semantics would be important,” he said.

L K Gupta, vice president, marketing, LG Electronics, felt that the industry was yet not fully-prepared for social network and digital marketing. He said, “I think the overall industry, we are very unprepared; even now. This might be the because of the constant paradigm changes that keep taking place. Nobody still doesn’t have a clear answer to how they would like to market their brands.”

Abdul Khan, national head, business marketing, Tata Teleservices, however, felt that there is no need to be scared of social media. At the same time he felt that there has been an acute lack of creative attempts on social network space. “Where are the new Prasoon Joshis and Piyush Pandeys of online and social advertising; because they are kind of archaic now for online?”

Rammohan Sundaram, founder chief executive officer and managing director, Networkplay, disagreed with Sundaram’s views and said, “I remember when I met R Balki, I learnt that there are many Prasoons and Piyushs of online, but they don’t get the limelight. Not all of their works might be kickass but still there are people like Web Chutney, Tribal Fusion who have done great works.”

In the session titled - The connected home: devices and service revolution - home automation, hardware, seamless protocols, and what it means when we say connected homes, were discussed at length by Sanjay Trehan, head MSN India, Microsoft and R Sivakumar, managing director, Intel South Asia. Through a presentation, Sivakumar suggested that by 2020, ‘anywhere’ will surpass the internet impact. “This means that people would use content information services where ever you are, on wired and unwired methods, on virtually any devices affecting around five billion people and trillions of dollars’ worth value created.”

A panel comprising Manoj Chugh, regional president, Asia Pacific and Japan, EMC Corporation; Frederic Moraillon, vice president- marketing, Akamai Technologies; Rajnish Menon, director – ISV and Cloud Strategy, Microsoft, discussed at length various issues related to the cloud computing technology.

The Summit closed the curtains with a highly-interactive and light session titled – To be or not to be an entrepreneur. The panel consisted of the young guns of the industry such as Manish Vij, founder and chief executive officer, Vun Network; Dhruv Shringi, co-founder and chief executive officer, Yatra.com; Dinesh Agarwal, founder and chief executive officer, IndiaMart; Rishi Khiani, chief executive officer, Times Internet; and Anisha Singh, founder and chief executive officer, MyDala.com.  Each of the panellists shared their experiences and warned about several potholes that an aspiring entrepreneur should avoid.