Nimbuzz CEO sees great future for company in India

As Bharti rolls out its 4G network in India city by city and Reliance Jio Infocomm ties up infrastructure deals almost at the rate of one a week, there is one man cheering on the sidelines.Vikas Saxena, CEO of Nimbuzz, the messaging platform on mobiles, sees a great future for his company in India and for 4G.

Nimbuzz, which was launched in the Netherlands in 2006-07 and shifted its headquarters to India two years back, has around 150 million users worldwide. Around 25 million of those are in India. A huge chunk — 50 million or so — is in West Asia. Nimbuzz's messaging platform helps aggregate the phone book of a mobile phone with all other social media and email contacts to enable seamless messaging.
Now the company promoted by venture capital firm Mangrove Capital and African media group Naspers is working on creating its own eco-system of apps. It has 30-odd app developers working with it alongside a 100-plus development team comprising many former employees ofApple and Google.

Saxena, who replaced Evert Jaap Lugt, the founder of Nimbuzz as CEO about two years back in his second stint with the company, says: "The kind of speeds that I have seen on 4G demonstrations is fantastic. If only India allows us to launch voice over IP phone calls — Nimbuzz can reach a different stratospheric level."

Big bucks
Saxena has already held several rounds of talks with Reliance Jio aimed at having Nimbuzz loaded onto devices that subscribe to the Jio offering that is likely to be launched later this year. While no deal has been struck yet, Saxena is clearly hopeful. Saxena explains that Nimbuzz currently has one clear-cut revenue stream: mobile advertising, or edvertising. Revenues have grown 350% in the last year from advertising — not surprising since Saxena says that the entire mobile advertising pie has grown by 200% at the least in the past one year.

Saxena feels that voice-over IP telephony will become the second engine and can be even bigger than mobile advertising for the company. It is yet to be allowed in India and is still not legal in many countries. It involves terminating calls generated by apps on the internet onto landlines and other telephones. While internet calls are not banned, the termination of these calls or calling a landline from the internet is yet to be allowed.

Saxena dreams of a future where Reliance Jio will be able to offer voice telephony using VoIP, and Nimbuzz or a similar app can be the pivotal piece in the service. Reliance Jio has a voice telephony licence but it is not clear how it will bundle voice telephony alongside its broadband internet access. Reliance officials did not wish to comment on this subject but conceded that Reliance Jio might be in talks with Nimbuzz as the company is talking to a lot of players with a relevant offering in either infrastructure or content or technology.

Apart from mobile advertising and VoIP, Nimbuzz is also banking on a virtual currency that it has created and named Nimbucks. "You can play games and buy stuff in games with Nimbucks. There are all kinds of virtual stuff you can do with it," Saxena says. In India, Nimbuzz sells Nimbucks through an arrangement with telecom operators. The company is now doing a pilot in Indonesia selling Nimbucks through recharge vouchers. These vouchers can be bought at neighbourhood stores and translate into Nimbucks on the Nimbuzz platform for the buyer.

More deals
In the last week of April, Nimbuzz paid a small price for its popularity. A hacker in Iran broke into the website of Nimbuzz and posted a message there, announcing her achievement. "We are very popular in Iran," says Saxena. The company, he says, finds at least one attempt to hack its servers and website almost every day. The Iranian hacker only managed to hack into the company's website, but the services remained unaffected.

It means Nimbuzz constantly has to upgrade its infrastructure and security around its servers. Saxena says: "Infrastructure and people are the two things on which we have to spend constantly."

Meantime, Reliance Jio is not the only telecom company Nimbuzz is talking to right now. It is trying to crack a deal with Vodafone in India and Saxena hopes that it will see the light of day soon. "Deals with telcos are the way forward for Nimbuzz," says Saxena who also tied up with one in Pakistan a week back. While Nimbuzz offers telcos the benefit of churn by enticing its users to switch operators, Nimbuzz for its part gains by getting access to subscribers who are potential users of its platform too. Saxena would surely be hoping that Reliance Jio officials agree with his win-win worldview, too.