Harish Bahl, CEO & Founder, Smile Interactive, and Manish Vij Chief Business Officer & Co-founder, Quasar Media
We want to be the largest retail chain for digitally delivered products and services in the country. It is an assisted e-commerce model and whatever we would be selling through the 'assisted kiosks', the same can be transacted through the web and mobile. By building this large infrastructure of physically manned e-commerce kiosks and aggregating multiple products and services, we would be catalysing the growth of e-commerce in the country and would be creating an alternate option for consumers to transact on the Internet.
Harish Bahl, an engineering graduate in Computer Sciences, is a serial entrepreneur. He founded Smile, one of India's first Internet business solutions company in 1999, and over the last eight years, he has created the foundation to start Smile Interactive Technologies Group. Bahl is considered to be a thought leader on digital technology, e-commerce, interactive advertising, online travel, and entrepreneurship, and is a regular speaker at various forums for the same.
Bahl is an active member of Nasscom and IAMAI, and proactively represents the Indian Internet community for addressing issues related to the growth and smooth functioning of the industry with various regulatory bodies.
Manish Vij is one of the youngest dotcom entrepreneurs with India's first auction website. Prior to starting Quasar Media, he was with Rediff.com for over five years. He has successfully incubated three leading digital media companies – Quasar Media, a WPP and SITG company; Tyroo.com, an SITG and Yahoo! Company; and Zoomtra.com. He has been recognised as one of the strongest online media professionals in the country and carries strong relationships.
Vij has represented the digital media in various domestic and international industry forums, events and seminars.
As is known, Smile Interactive recently offloaded 75 per cent stake in Quasar Media to WPP Digital. In this interview with exchange4media's Pallavi Goorha, Bahl and Vij speak in detail about the stake sale and its aftermath as well as the road ahead for Smile and Quasar.
Q. Smile Interactive will put up kiosks – 900 of them across the country, for a start – inside grocery stores, malls, petrol pumps and other retail points. When is that happening? What will be the revenue model?
Harish: We have not frozen a launch date as of now. The revenue model is primarily going to be revenue share deals with our various partners whose products and services we would be aggregating. We are focussing on travel, mobile VAS, photo printing and bill payment as the key verticals in the first phase.
Q. Who are the clients of Quasar Media?
Manish: We have the largest spending clients in most of the industry verticals. Our client list includes Microsoft, LG, Airtel, General Motors, Aviva, Makemytrip.com, Monster.com, and Zapak.com, among others.
Q. Recently, Smile Interactive Technology Group (SITG) rolled out its assisted e-commerce business. Tell us something more about it.
Harish: We want to be the largest retail chain for digitally delivered products and services in the country. It is an assisted e-commerce model and whatever we would be selling through the 'assisted kiosks', the same can be transacted through the web and mobile. By building this large infrastructure of physically manned e-commerce kiosks and aggregating multiple products and services, we would be catalysing the growth of e-commerce in the country and would be creating an alternate option for consumers to transact on the Internet by overcoming the current challenges of low broadband and PC penetration, cash payments, online credit card frauds, and making Internet accessible to all the consumers beyond the 40 million users, which is the current Internet penetration in the country.
Q. How is Quasar Talk doing? Who are your clients?
Manish: Quasar Talk focusses on enabling brand marketing and consumer connection through social media. In this division, we provide services like blog monitoring, online reputation management and review research. We already have four large Indian brands signed up for this service. This is a relatively new service from Quasar and the only one among interactive service companies in India.
Q. What kind of impact do you see on the industry following WPP’s acquisition of Quasar?
Manish: We feel it will add to the seriousness of the medium when advertisers are being pitched for, considering it for higher advertising concentration.
Q. Yahoo! Inc picked up a 35 per cent stake in Tyroo. Tell us something more about the deal.
Manish: Yahoo! has come in as a strategic partner, where apart from the fund infusion that Yahoo! has done to catalyse the growth of the business, Tyroo shall be leveraging on the technological platforms built globally by Yahoo! and also leverage from the vast global advertiser base of Yahoo!. The partnership shall also act as a stepping stone for Tyroo going international. The Yahoo! senior management was impressed with the growth of the Tyroo business and the technology excellence of the Tyroo platform, and saw this partnership as an opportunity to take a leadership position in the Indian Internet ad network space.
Q. What is the growth of Smile Interactive like?
Harish: We track the growth of our independent incubations and this year all our incubations have registered a growth between 50 per cent and 100 per cent, and anticipate similar results for the next three years.
Q. How is Zoomtra doing? How do you see the growth of Zoomtra ahead?
Harish: Zoomtra today is in the leading travel search engine in India. We have the largest base of participating partners and advertisers in our category. The growth for Zoomtra in the future shall be driven by our investments in enhancing the overall user experience by increasing the base of our regional/local participating partners with unique product/service offerings and by making the travel search experience faster and more engaging with the use of various Web 2.0 technologies and social media.
Q. Recently, Smile Interactive sold 75 per cent stake in Quasar Media to WPP Digital. What was the value of the deal? How will it benefit Quasar?
Manish: We are happy to align with WPP Digital to further strengthen the leadership of Quasar Media in India and its growth among Asia Pacific countries. Quasar will grow its world-class services in Internet and mobile marketing and e-business solutions to its current and growing client base in India, Singapore and Hong Kong with the help of WPP Digital's worldwide network of companies. It will also play an important role as a global outsourcing centre of excellence for WPP Digital. The value of the deal is not public. This joint venture will work towards further strengthening Quasar's position in the country, expanding the scope of its services, going global and being WPP's online centre of excellence in India.
Q. In terms of ideation and technology, do you think WPP can bring something to the table that Quasar can benefit from?
Manish: Quasar can benefit from international case studies, experience and technology, which will definitely help strengthen Quasar's service capability to its clients. WPP will also use our experience and case studies for international business opportunities. We strongly believe that India is not far behind in terms of digital business ideation and experience from our counterparts in the West.
Q. Do you see Quasar benefiting in terms of new businesses coming from WPP group’s global clientele?
Manish: Yes. We definitely see Quasar being involved in global business pitches. Having said that, we are fully independent to have our own compete policies so that it does not affect our current business or clients.
Q. What is the StudioSmile incubation programme?
Harish: StudioSmile is the incubation programme which is directed towards promoting entrepreneurship and new ideas besides building strong scalable businesses in the digital space. StudioSmile provides the right ecosystem comprising various building blocks of infrastructure, senior management, marketing expertise, technology excellence, operating funds, business networking and all other key resources required to build a strong scalable business.
Our leadership position in digital marketing and technology services, our track record of having created successful market leader businesses and finding the right strategic partners like Yahoo! and WPP for our previous incubations, our strong management team comprising industry guru's like Mahendra Swarup, Manish Vij and C P Singh make it the perfect mix of domain expertise in technology, media, business and e-commerce. Our working relationships with more than 1,500 digital companies in India, our influence in the industry due to the success of our previous incubations, our state-of-the-art incubation centres in Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai and Bangalore, and a $10 million dedicated fund contribute to the success of our incubation programme.
We are amazed at the quality of entrepreneurial teams and ideas that we have been approached with and are working very closely with our new partners to set up their businesses. Our current incubations are in healthcare, retail and mobile.
Q. What are future plans of Quasar Media?
Manish: From a boot strap operation in Mumbai, we have now moved on to opening a full blown operation in Mumbai and are experiencing amazing response and success from our customers in the West. We are now replicating the same model in Bangalore. Our percentage share of international revenues has grown considerably over the last one year as we have grabbed few good clients in South East Asia and the US markets, and now with our partnership with WPP we would be taking Quasar to other regions outside India. As a first step, we will have our Singapore operations, which will commence in 2-3 months' time.
Quasar is on path to becoming the global centre for outsourcing excellence for the WPP Network and will also be providing its employees cross-border working opportunities in partnership with its other global network companies, primarily in the West.
