Institute For The Future

Sinha, Digital capitalization, Delhi, 01/10/09

Expert Interview

Arunava Sinha, Chief Product Officer for NDTV convergence, a media house in India. 

Forty-seven year old Arunava Sinha lives in South Delhi with his wife and six-year old son. He considers himself as an early starter in using and developing content for business in the Internet media. An English Literature Graduate from West Bengal, he has been experimenting with ICT technologies during his career as a journalist and editor at The Economic Times, Business Today,  and later stints as content manager and social product developer at Indya.com and Ibibio. Currently working at NDTV Convergence, he is innovatively focussed in giving a social spin to video content and developing an internet-based content management platform that will curate all news/media generated at NDTV, which is one of the top-most news channels in India.

Our interview with him revolved around identifying challenges, opportunities, emergent trends, and future growth areas in digital entrepreneurship and Internet media domain. The key questions raised were: How are people capitalizing on media culture? Who will be the new digital entrepreneurs of the future? What are the future trends in this domain and challenges in the Indian context?

As an expert he highlighted the tremendous potential of ICT for social and user-driven social networking. He argued that this was the case not merely because this was his explicit domain of professional expertise, but because advances in technology and its adoption were enabling faster and easier connectivity than ever before between strangers and among like-minded people who can collaborate effectively and virtually. He pointed that photo-sharing, blogging, video-sharing, social question and answers platforms, and development of social reviews platform of local areas would connect and promote social networking among existing virtual communities and create communities where none were existing previously. He gave us examples of Facebook to illustrate the importance of user-based content management systems, which are transforming sociality and connecting people locally and globally as never before. The mantra he emphasized here was to let individual users decide how and what content they wanted to generate and share, access and use, highlight trends and set new trends, thereby directly create communities and indirectly open channels of information dissemination, ideas-communication, and business models for the future.

He argued that the Internet and mobile technology was the greatest enabler permitting great ideas to be transferred speedily across geographies and operationalized through open-source software such as LAMP.  Commenting on the future, he opined that cybermedia would not displace traditional modes of advertising in print and multi-media, nonetheless business advertising in search engines such as Google and in social networks such as Facebook would give them higher visibility and permit strategically targeting of products and services.

He pointed towards three kinds of emergent business opportunities: advertising (search engines and platforms), micro-payment mode where users pay for services (mobile ringtones, and sms-based services), content providers providing content to bigger companies and search engines (gaming companies). The Internet would become a big revenue spinner with selling becoming a prime part of Internet advertising.

He forecast that business trickles down, many innovators currently working in established brand software companies would shift to starting their own ventures and launch consumer oriented social products. Keeping the Indian situation in mind, he admitted that with the number of educated professionals expanding the big companies would not face difficulties in recruiting and replacing such personnel. He distinguished between three kinds of digital entrepreneurs:

Ambitious professionally qualified youth fresh out of college who want to innovate and change the world;

Technology professionals in their early thirties who have some years of experience in product development and client-servicing in the big Internet companies such as Yahoo and Google and desire independence, and seek business opportunities with their savings enabling them to launch start-ups;

The senior professionals in the forties many of them returning from overseas who want to innovate and occupy positions of decision-making as CEOs and feel that time is running out for them. Many of them give up cushy careers to venture and launch their own business and explore opportunities.

He signalled growing digital entrepreneurship of floaters in India despite the downturn in the world economy. The biggest challenge for digital entrepreneurs in India according to him was to get capital from angel investors. Another challenge identified by him was of the unpredictable nature of the digital market since the broadband had not grown at the expected pace while the telecommunication sector had grown immensely. The future in his opinion belonged to mobile technology and companies while the Orkut generation would make decisions for tomorrow and become the greatest consumers of these services and developers of social content.

Talking about future trends five years hence, he stated that mobiles would become the playgrounds of social networking and business with the miniaturization of digital technology, bigger mobile screens, availability of photo-sharing and video-sharing along with greater telecom penetration, the declining costs of services and rapid expansion of consumers. He categorically forecast that more and more consumer services would be mediated through mobiles and sms based services such as payment of bills, sms-banking, and more and more companies would target consumers through sms. Health and education would be the big areas for growth in the Internet media.