Now, however, we are beginning to see some amount of coordinated promotion of a website. Leading the gang again is rediff.com, which has commercials on television, ads in the print media, a public relations exercise, presence at trade shows and extensive use of the outdoor media to tell Indian (more specifically Mumbai's) netizens that they had better get on to rediff.

Various sections such as singles, e-mail are being pushed. (It is paying Rs 3 lakh per week for its Chowpatty hoarding.) The reason rediff.com can afford to do what it is is because it is flush with venture capital-raised funds.

In fact, the arrival of websites onto hoardings must have come as a shot in the arm for the industry which has not been facing the best of times over the past couple of years.

Other websites too have venture funds behind them but they are resorting to patchy promotions. Examples are domain-b, lexsite.com which have used mainly the outdoors and public relations. The key point they have to note is that a coordinated marketing exercise will generate a lot more OTS. Yes, costs have to be kept under control, but then if you are going for the big league, go for it all the way, don't look for shortcuts.

E-commerce expections

While there is a lot of buoyancy about e-commerce and the potential of the Net for business, a recent study has revealed that the expectations may not be met. Mainly because the Net is slowing down and it is no longer the World Wide Web but the World Wide Wait. Nortel Networks chief executive John Roth told executives attending Telecom '99 in Geneva that a study conducted by his company has revealed that some 2.5 billion hours were wasted online last year as internetters waited for pages to download on to their computers.

Another study conducted by Northeast Consulting Services using data provided by internet performance measurement company Keynote for the period between October 1998 and June 1999 has come up with similar findings.

The study states that there has been an improvement in performance of the Net but the delays are getting longer. Download times have dropped for more complex average Web pages (90,000 bytes today as against 50,000 bytes in 1995) from 12 seconds to six seconds. But what is slowing down the Net is the complex Web of routers, DNS look-ups, server re-directs, protocol support, number and performance of advertising servers, complex screen layouts, and content on additional servers.

Roundtrip delays for a command have increased from 250 milliseconds in 1995 to 370 milliseconds in 1999. And these are likely to increase because of the increasing number of routers being used.

The firm goes on to predict that the Net will not be able to support and sustain performance based applications in the next millenium. Are we seeing creased brows on internet bosses heads?

India Post

The Indian postal service had better watch out. The Net is one day in the future going to impact it and pretty bad. Expect a greater shift towards online payments and transactions. You will be able to pay your telephone and electricity bills online and with a credit card.

Already some banks have gone online and users can download their bank statements onto their computers, find out their balance etc. No doubt, cyberlaws are necessary for transactions such as these to be in full flow. Once that happens there will be no turning back. Look at what's happening in the US. Fears are that the US postal service may well have to shut down some of its post offices nationally, as it gets sandwiched between online payment and transaction facilities and courier companies. The government expects a loss of some $17 billion over the next decade.

Most affected will be first class mail post, which will start declining after another three-to four years. Of course technological shifts impact industries and business, but the Indian government has a fair bit of warning coming its way as far as posts are concerned. And it had better work hard on preventing any more erosion for the postal services than there need be.

(The editor of The Indian Cab&Sat Reporter. Feel free to e-mail with your comments to television@vsnl.com or television@hotmail.com)