With 'hover', web content biz is easy

MUMBAI, INDIA: ‘Why should there be ads and why can’t there be contextual content?' This was the question Bhaskar Kode, a 24 year IT graduate from Chennai had posed at self in late 2007.

While, Kode was still searching answer for that question, he started working as programmer at a Bangalore-based e-learning company Tutorvista and developed products like calendar, syndication, white board and others.

Meanwhile, he met Arun Prabhudesia, a Pune based techie, blogger and entrepreneur. Later, the techie duo started Hover Technologies Pvt. Ltd in 2008. With excellence in software products, Kode successfully got the answer to his million dollar question in the form of 'hover', which he developed for user engagement platforms.

Hover is a space created above any underlined key word in the web content, where contextual text or rich content can appear to give additional information when the user rolls the cursor under the underlined key words.

Hover Technologies earned early recognition, when it was nominated among the top 5 upcoming startups for contextual web products at Proto.in. And this recognition helped the startup to get a seed investment from Mumbai based Alok Kejriwal of Media2Win, the full service digital agency.

After development and testing for over a year, hover.in — the contextual content platform was finally launched in June this year.

“Until 2008, browsers’ tool tips had a restriction on the number of characters. And two companies - Contera and Vibrant Media - had a monopoly for the online ads, which didn’t allow publishers to have full control of the content,” Kode says.

“Hover.in is a multi-lingual web plug-in which bloggers and publishers can install in three minutes and then can define key words to create hovers to place contextual content,” the young CEO adds. On other hand, co-founder Prabhudesia with his strong business acumen concentrates on acquiring new customers, marketing and business expansion.

In fact, Oneindia.com, the multi-lingual news site, was the first media firm to use Hover extensively. After working for 3 months with Oneindia.com using Hover and web analytics, the site marked a strong rise in page views and visitors’ number, Kode points, adding that ComScore reported Oneindia.com as the fourth largest media site.

According to Kode, Hover is built using Erlang language, which the mobile company Ericsson had created for its mobile messaging and later, was made available on the open source platform.

“Erlang is very stable and powerful language as its codes need not modify with any hardware change or upgrade such as processor’ cores. Facebook also uses Erlang for instant-chat.” he said.

The startup has launched its premium platform HasLaunched - an in-text advertising medium for marketers for customer engagements and content delivery. It helps to built hovers in product shapes and for delivery of ads or contextual content for online branding. For instance, a mobile company can create hovers in shape of mobiles using HasLaunched platform.

Kode observes, for websites, the page views and ads are staple food and part of monetization; and Hovers actually help to save additional cost on advertising as well as deliver more contextual rich content.

“This helps in cross-linking and bubbling of old and new relative content. For any website Hover ratio should be one-third of the site’s total pages.”

Today, about 2000 bloggers globally have signed up for hover.in and about five large Indian portals are working with the startup. Moreover, in short span the startup has got over a million Hover impression as well as have developed plug-in for Wordpress site to help bloggers.
©CyberMedia News