'Made in India' Venus Browser provides hyper-local content in regional languages

NEW DELHI: BlueSky Inventions has recently introduced a new mobile browser named Venus browser, with a view to mainstream Indian regional content. It offers a lightweight web platform for smartphones users with functionalities like browsing, app store, and services. "Based on a lightweight custom platform offering all Top Apps, Services and Browser capabilities in less than 5MB, Venus Browser is easily installable on any RAM configuration starting 512MB, thereby addressing required market smartphone specs to give a seamless browsing experience to even consumers using the most basic smartphone," Venus Browser's founder Dinesh Prasad said. He said Venus Browser is designed and crafted keeping in mind essential characteristics and behaviors of a majority of Indian consumers, which will address the rising consumer demand coming from regional cities in the form of content like music, videos or news which comprise of 70% of the total usage of the internet in vernacular.  To explore more about the Venus Browser, we interacted with its CEO Dinesh Prasad, who told us about the idea behind the launch, market traction of the browser and more. Q. What makes Venus browser special and where does it fit in when there are already many browsing apps available in Indian for mobile users? Venus Browser is a “Made in India” mobile browser app built to cater to the growing demand for hyper-local content in the country by integrating the best in app technology. We are one of the first browsers offering hyper-local content in regional languages with a simplified user interface for non-mature internet and Smartphone users’ in India. While there are many browsing apps in the Indian market, with Venus Browser we are offering a first-of-its-kind app experience to our users by giving advanced functionalities like browsing, app store, and services in one app alongside solving the three main consumer problems of low storage/memory, applications/services discovery and access to hyper-local content and applications. In addition, with Venus Browser we are also addressing large user base of Smartphone in India who do not have Google account to download Apps from Play store. Based on a lightweight custom platform offering all Top Apps, Services and Browser capabilities in less than 5MB, Venus Browser is easily installable on any RAM configuration starting 512MB, thereby addressing required market smartphone specs to give a seamless browsing experience to even consumers using the most basic smartphone. Q. What's the idea behind the launch of Venus browser? We can all see that the market is filled with apps most of which are created for more advanced countries and the requirement there. But do they work in countries like ours? Yes, they do, but they are mainly confined to metros and urban cities. We realize the need for homegrown apps like Venus Browser created keeping in mind user-behavior and their needs across the country. It was born out of sheer necessity. With the world’s most significant millennial population residing in the country and growing fast to become the second largest smartphone market in the world, India is a unique market. Identifying and understanding this hugely diverse market, we built Venus Browser from ground-up for the majority of the population who are looking for simplified user interface and local language in their mobile devices. Q. How do you plan to deal with the challenges and promote Venus browser among the congested Indian market? Response: We do not consider ourselves to be just an app, but we are proud to say that we are the first Indian browser solution to provide hyper-local content covering primary Indian states considering complex demographics of 29 states & 23 languages. Venus Browser enables essential services on the go to the users and offers advanced functionalities like browsing, app store, and services made possible by its lightweight web platform. Designed and crafted keeping in mind essential characteristics and behaviors of a majority of Indian consumers, Venus Browser is first-of-its-kind catering to the growing regional content demand, and we do not see any competition to the kind of offerings we are bringing in the market. With the large integrated apps and personalized user content, Venus Browser will address the rising consumer demand coming from regional cities in the form of content like music, videos or news which comprise of 70% of the total usage of the internet in vernacular. Going by the considerable market traction as a preferred pre-loaded app, we genuinely believe that Venus Browser will be a game changer when it comes to mobile browsing. Q. What's the market traction of Venus Browser and how many mobile companies you have collaborated with for it? Because Venus Browser is a comparatively new browser app, we have seen substantial market traction already. While we cannot disclose the names of our partners due to the confidentiality clause in our agreements, several leading Indian and global mobile device manufacturers have pre-loaded Venus Browser as part of their consumer offering strategy with many more in the pipeline. Q. How much time did you take to research on the user behavior before launching the new browser? We believe the market was already set for us and we just needed to present the app. 76% of rural India and 66% of urban India already consuming content in regional language, created a massive demand for regional content in the market and it was just a matter of time that someone would come up with a solution to it. Before anyone did, we jumped at the opportunity to build a unique yet simplified browser app that will cater to this huge demand in the market while also providing solutions to the essential consumer problems in the country. We did some research on the UX/UI and expectations of users to make the product compelling enough for both existing & new Smartphone users. Hence, we created a browser from ground-up keeping in mind the user behavior of Indian consumer and to solve the three fundamental consumer problems of- low memory/data/ battery issues, app discovery, & hyper-local content.