After ten years of acquiring Hotmail, Microsoft Corp. has decided now to flag off the customized domains by providing free email services to the giant market of young Indians. According to Jaspreet Brindra, chief of Microsoft’s Indian subsidiary, Microsoft is ready to start the service at www.coolhotmail.com, at the weekend by using the same Hotmail platform.

Hotmail would also offer the customer to choose one domain from the 200 personalized domains in the service. Brindra said that the new service would definitely attract the young Indians and would generate huge revenue as well.

He said that more than one million Indians, who come on the net every month, are below 25 years of age. Hotmail claims to be India’s second largest e-mail provider following by Yahoo. Now, Hotmail has also decided to use the advertising means for the customized domains on television, radio and the Internet to get larger share of market revenue in India.

Brindra further said:

It is quite apparent that we are looking to have more revenue opportunities through the wider usage of this service.

According to him, almost half of India’s 1.1-billion population is below 25 years of age. At the same time, the country has the world’s largest English-speaking people that give an energetic boost to the computer software industry.

comScore Networks, an Internet usage monitoring agency, has revealed in its latest survey that in India the number of people using Internet has dramatically gone up this year in comparison of last years data.

According to comScore data, more than 21 million Indian people, above the age of 15 years, were found as habitual Internet users at the end of January 2006. It was 16 million in January 2005. The growth rate of Internet use was about 33 per cent in India while the growth rate in US was just two percent in the same period of time.

Samir Saraiya, product chief of Microsoft’s Windows Live Services said on the growth rate that the vast young Internet user population wants to get a personalized identity on net to advertise their choices. The Hotmail services would have all these domains to become the favorite service provider in India.

The economic rise of the country has actually boost the personal computer sales in India by 32 per cent to 5.04 million units to March 31, 2006. In the same period, the desktop sales went up to 4.6 million units with a growth of 27 %, while the notebook sales went up to 430,000 units with a growth of 144%.

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