Your Web News in One Place

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

Sign up for GreenGeeks web hosting
June 3, 2013 10:04 am GMT

Nimbuzz Offers Free Service To Hutch In Sri Lanka, Continues To Push Telco Strategy in Asia

nimbuzz_logoNimbuzz is continuing its push for South Asian dominance with its latest telco partnership.The Indian messaging startup just announced a tie-up with Hutch in Sri Lanka, offering six months of free Nimbuzz usage to Hutch subscribers. Today’s announcement is just another in a steady string of telco partnerships that the company has been striking up. In May, it linked up with Mobilink in Pakistan, to give the telco’s 35 million subscribers access to Nimbuzz at a flat cost. The deal was similar to one that Nimbuzz made with Indias Aircel in February. The company has a total of eight telco tie-ups in India, covering nearly 75 per cent of the country, except for Vodafone’s users, said Vikas Saxena, Nimbuzz’s CEO. The point of all these deals is to ease friction in getting Nimbuzz on phones in the country. Saxena explained that billing continues to be an issue in Asia, where credit cards are not as common as they are in the West. Here, telco billing is one of the easier ways to reach users, offering the option of prepaid credit or through monthly phone bills.”Ringtones and ringback tones sell (over phones) like hotcakes here, even though you can download these over the Internet,” he said. Telco billing is a strategy that even music providers in Asia have turned to. KKBOX and Deezer, for example, have used carrier tie-ups in the region to reach users more effectively. A second reason for the telco tie-ups is that bundled offerings are especially necessary in price-sensitive markets like India and the neighboring countries. In the Aircel deal, for example, signing up for Nimbuzz granted users 40Mb of data per month to use. It doesn’t sound like much, but it helps in a country where people hold multiple SIM cards to use different offers from rival telcos, such as more voice minutes from one and free texts from another. The smartphone messaging landgrab Nimbuzz has a total of 150 million users, and counts more than 210,000 new registrations per day. 25 million of its users are in India. Its plans to stake a claim to South Asia is not unchallenged. Other Asian messengers are eyeing new markets too, and have large existing user bases to pull new users toward them. Tencent’s WeChat app has a base of 300 million subscribers, and Japan’s Line just passed 150 million. US-based WhatsApp has 200 million active monthly users.

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/OW9ZrS7Ca3o/

Share this article:    Share on Facebook
View Full Article

Techcrunch

TechCrunch is a leading technology blog, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.

More About this Source Visit Techcrunch