Goto market strategy for lukup

Abstract

Lukup is a cross-media information and application delivery platform. It aggregates content and information from across media and distributes content and applications across media and devices. After graduating from the London School of Economics in 1998, Kallol Borah, founder of Lukup, established Aumega Networks, an IT solutions company focused on customer relations management through wireless infrastructure. He conceptualised Lukup seeing the potential of convergence media in Indian online market. Internet in India is growing at a very fast pace and reaching people through many medium like computers, mobiles, IPTVs, music players, e-books etc. Users are spending a great deal of time on various social media using IMs, VOIP calls, social networking. But there are very few systems which may deliver content or advertising across platforms and devices. To solve all these problems, Kallol came up with the idea of Lukup which can be used to search across media. It would be used to deliver applications and advertisements across devices. It also promises analytics capability that would help in aligning performance along with the marketing goals. There is a huge potential in this because revenue yield on ad delivery across rich media is very high. So Lukup would be creating the widgets for different social media to deliver content and advertising. It would help in personalising content to users based on their search. Various application developers, content owners and advertisers can use tools of Lukup to create widgets which would be published by Lukup server based on widget submitter’s choice. These widgets might be published to internet, mobile, ad networks, IPTVs, ISPs, desktops etc. Some of the examples are: public directories of Facebook, iGoogle, Yahoo etc; Widget directories with partners like mobiles, On Device Portals (ODPs) etc; ad network like ad magnet; search engine like Lukup and social media like Orkut, MySpace etc. Lukup is engaged in 10 pilot projects for testing the product based on customers’ needs. Based on the learning from the pilots, the final product has evolved. The plan is to roll out a complete suite of search, publishing, content, widget, distribution, and billing servers by December of 2009. It has already received 6 unsolicited queried from ad agencies. It has already entered into long term contracts with Nokia for widget downloads, Tata Indicom’s ISPs for Ad Targeting and with NDTV for publishing content through widgets. Thus, Lukup has a great potential of gaining competitive advantage being the first mover in this space in India.