The Venture Intelligence Blog

Sajith Pai, Director, Blume Ventures is sceptical. In an LinkedIn post titled "The Rise of Hyperlocal Vernacular Video News Apps in India" - which was abridged in The Mint -  he highlights how, in the last year, VCs have backed a clutch of hyperlocal Regional Language news apps - including LocalPlay, Lokal, Awaaz, Circle etc. - that primarily use short video snippets. Extracts: India2 doesn’t consume much text, instead it gorges on video, thanks to cheap data. Increasingly short-form video content has emerged as the dominant media unit of India today, spurring the emergence of homegrown social networks / platforms such as ShareChat, Clip, Mooshak etc., as well as the rise of news aggregators such as DailyHunt, NewsPoint, NewsDog etc. And now they are driving the rise of hyperlocal news apps built around video. ...A startup I spoke to estimated their annual cost for sourcing, authenticating, producing and distributing content (20–25 videos / day) to be close to Rs...

Economic Times has an interesting article on the opportunities and challenges of E-Commerce in regional languages. Extracts: About 75% of Indian internet users are expected to be regional language speakers by 2021, as per industry estimates. To reach this demographic, companies including Helion Ventures-backed Wooplr and Beenext-backed Elanic are working on launching platforms in vernacular languages including Hindi, Telugu and Tamil so sellers and buyers can engage better.... ...Industry players and experts believe that re-cataloging of products in vernacular languages is a massive challenge and a major cost for established ecommerce companies. Even Paytm Mall’s platform, whose user interface is available in several vernacular languages, has a lot of its product listings in English. The KPMG-Google study reported that around 44% of Indian language users find it difficult to comprehend product description and customer reviews on ecommerce platforms. “High involvement categories ...