Bhasker Kode, Co-Founder & CEO, Hover Technologies Pvt. Ltd, graduated in Information Technology in 2006 to pursue his love for accessibility that started from his school days building word processors for the visually impaired, speech recognition applications, kiosk software among freelancing. He was immediately captured by the potential of the internet as part of the core team behind several destination portals and startups from his college days in Chennai. His introduction to functional programming came from his stint as the first few developers at Bangalore-based Tutorvista where he built the calendar, syndication, whiteboard among other products used by thousands across the world everyday. While ideating hover.in towards the end of 2007, Bhasker soon become an ardent evangelist of Erlang, and it's fault tolerant nature traditionally intended for use in telecom & messaging circles and it's rising use in building real-time and low-latency applications at web scale.
hover.in is a user-engagement platform for portals and blogs that helps deliver the best of the web using tooltips. Started in 2008 by two engineers, the Pune-based startup had been nominated as one of the top 5 upcoming startups for it's contextual browsing product at Proto.in and further Hover Technologies announced a seed investment from Alok Kejriwal co-founded Media2Win for it's publisher-driven intext content & ad network and it's pioneering steps in multi-lingual in-text. After piloting with large portals and crossing several million hovers a month in 2009, Hover launched their monetization for portals in 2010 under the banner of HasLaunched - a premium network for marketers to run in-text campaigns in the shape of the actual product - a first in the country. Hover continues to gain strides by being able to add 30% of added inventory to the market and aims to become the defacto and largest facilitator of revenue for multi-lingual content in Indian advertising ecosystem over the years to come.
Replying to Anil Mascarenhas of IIFL, Bhasker Kode, says "hover.in helps deliver the best of the web using tooltips."
What is hover technology all about? Besides online publishers, who are your other clients?
hover.in helps deliver the best of the web using tooltips. Websites using our technology can allow their readers to hover their mouse over words and topics that they focus on, and provide contextually relevant content and ads. This is basically what intext technology is about, and we are the worlds pioneering and largest such intext network targeting multi-lingual websites for contextual content as well as delivering advertising campaigns. In fact we do several million hovers every month since readers find the messaging relevant and at the point of interest. As a result we have separated our products for just contextual content called "hover.in", and the intext advertising medium called "HasLaunched" targeted at marketers looking to engage their newly launched products with users online. In fact several brands have also found the ability to create hovers in the shape of the actual product to be a new innovation in brand marketing online.
Brief us on your business model.
Publishers know their audiences the best. So our contextual content product is freely available for large publishers for not just cross-linking to older archived content, but increasing the time spent by readers on the site and the average visits per session. In fact, when Russia was judged the world's most engaging audience only with these two parameters and we have seen up to 25% increase in both of these with the portals we've worked. Publishers looking to monetize through can opt for hoverads and our sales partners will ensure that the most engaging and contextual campaigns run on their sites ensuring various targeted creative’s are delivered at scale via this new intext medium.
What kind of customization do you offer?
Publishers can choose what words are underlined, what content is shown against them, and even how they should be skinned. The skinned hovers in turn are an opportunity for sponsored content which are typically campaigns of longer duration. We provide statistics of the engagement thereafter to both the publisher as well as brands. For getting started quickly, we also have a community of pre-built contextual hoverlets focused on various verticals such as showing the fan counts when you hover over actors , showing a graph of today's stock information when you hover over ticker symbols, showing maps of routes when you hover over places and so on.
These don't even need a signup and bloggers and websites can just pick up the script that matches their content and start delivering site-wide contextual content after just a one-time setup. At the other end of the spectrum - we've seen requests for hoverads in the shapes of tennis racquet's, cars, or consumer electronic products when readers engage with Brands on their favourite portals.
We believe that giving these options allow very engaging and contextual browsing experiences no matter what word is hovered. We respect constraints that sites want such as the number of words underlined on their webpages or manually deciding which words need to be hovered as against our system that already takes several heuristics into consideration in finding related words for both content and brand campaigns, analyzing their performance and introducing newer and interesting kinds of hovers.
Give us a revenue break-up from your services?
25% of our revenue comes from licensing our multi-lingual intext product to markets in Europe & Emerging markets where we are the only player. The rest is split between brand marketing campaigns via HasLaunched for brand hovers and sponsored content campaigns for content hovers. We are also exploring a premium version for publishers for handling multiple accounts, deeper analytics and features that help sell their hover inventory themselves once they reach a large enough scale. But the focus and learnings we have will be on how to enable the mushrooming of various facilitators for tapping the 30% of added inventory and non-standard ad units that we bring to the table through hovers and intext.
Do you hire from B-schools? What is your advice to B-School students?
My advice would be that sometimes it’s easier to know what you don't want to do; when you start off than realizing what you want to do. Take some time to decide what is it that you want to get your feet wet with, what is it that you want your peers to know you as.
If you spend few years as a developer you're not obliged to become an accountant all of a sudden. But if you join a startup, you can mould your career, get a more exciting and rewarding time and do what all magicians and entrepreneurs like to do - create something from nothing.
What is the entry barrier in this business? How do you distinguish yourself from competition?
Intext is a niche advertising medium that has enjoyed an initial dominance by two well-funded companies as far back as five years ago. But there has been little innovation from those players since intext was always associated with ads. We wanted publishers to decide what hovers would show.
Infact even when Hover.in pioneered with the world’s first publisher-driven intext network, and then quickly followed up with the first intext network for multi-lingual content it continues to be a black box for publishers with no level of customizations. Our platform in a way resembles a content management system in many ways and is far ahead of the other offerings - be it in the feature-rich dashboard to manage and customize the intext browsing experience, reports to analyze adoption, investment in a themes gallery or the technology called Erlang used by Faceboo, Amazon, Yahoo among others, behind the product that we've been invited to showcase at conferences across the world. From day one, we wanted to be multi-lingual and were surprised with the engagement & adoption from regional language audiences throughout not just the country, but the world.
What opportunities do you see in the multi-lingual space? Is there a big challenge to create multi-lingual content?
We're proud to be part of the movement and be on the fore-front of the multi-lingual wave. One of our largest users - oneindia.in, was recently noted as the fastest growing news site and among the top few in terms of engaging audiences. Indians read regional languages not necessarily do so by compulsion as depicted, but are often well-educated and English speaking readers who are in the consumption phase of multi-lingual innovation.
Infact most multi-lingual portals in India are frequented by NRIs from all corners of the world. It is only a matter of time when the long-tail of bloggers take a larger part in creating content as well, and that has already started.