Founder of Hike Messaging app and son of Bharti Enterprises chairman Sunil Mittal doesn’t think that his father’s company is cool! Yes. When asked “Which do you think is a cooler compnay- Hike or Airtel?”, he quickly replied, “It’s Hike anyday,” with a smile on his face. Speaking at the Digital India Summit 2017  he said, “Online India is a very young India. 80% of all the internet users are under the age of 35 and this in itself is a pretty interesting fact”. “For Hike, most of the daily active internet users come from colleges and schools. We have 140-150 million daily active internet users in the country and around 85-90 million people come from colleges and school. And they are by far the most active as they have a lot of time on their hands. They consume the most content, they are messaging the most,” he said speaking about the messaging app’s target audience. When asked about the advice that he would like to give a telecom company or a non-pure play digital business, he quipped “The problem is people don’t realize how disruptive the internet is. It is as disruptive as what happened in the Industrial Revolution. The Internet makes distribution free”.

 

Meanwhile, Last year, India’s homegrown messaging platform Hike Messenger launched video calling feature for its users. The messaging app, whose primary target is youth, said that the video call experience with the app will be ‘simple, reliance and high quality’. “Video calling on Hike is a simple and easy to use the feature that works on a single tap that is integrated into chat threads with friends. The feature has been built for a reliance and high-quality video experience that works even under challenging network conditions, including good quality 2G,” the company said in a press statement, according to a report. Another feature of the update messenger is the ‘Live Caller Preview’, which gives a user the ability to see a preview of a live video before they answer the call. Hike management feels that this feature adds to the fun of video calling