[Link]

The Internet & Mobile Association of India in association with Pinstorm present the report on ‘State of Search Engine Marketing in India’.

This report is a first-of-its-kind in the field of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) business. You can expect to find some very interesting data, comparisons & revelations here.

• Find out where the SEM industry in India stands today.
• What sectors are hot.
• How much the key players in every sector are spending- Naukri vs Monster, HP vs Dell, Shaadi vs Jeevansathi. You name it, we have it.
• Are other players catching up with the giant eBay in the retail market?

Interested in learning about all this & more? Please do leave us a few details & get a free download of the report in the PDF format.

So we’re not sure what it was.

Whether it was our revenues quadrupling this year over last year (where they were anyway a 10x over the year before).

Or whether it was the opening of offices in Singapore, New Delhi and Kuala Lumpur, on top of growing the Bombay operation alone to over 50 people.

Or if that put us somewhere in the top 5 or 10 search marketing firms in the world.

Or if it was clients as diverse as HP, Kodak, INSEAD, MakeMyTrip, ICICI, HDFC and dozens more voting with their wallets for us.

Or if it was our December e-commerce advertising predictions coming true.

Or even the cool new algos our in-house math wonks came up with.

Or indeed our 10-million keyword database that’s threatening to grow alarmingly.

Or The Economist quoting us.

We really don’t know if any of these makes us among the “hottest companies in Asia” two years in a row.

It may even be the music on the 5th floor in Bombay. Or the mayhem on the 4th.

Or the purple walls in Singapore. Or the location above the sari shop in KL.

Or Sonali’s laughter. Or CJ’s tolerance of said laughter. Resham’s cool. Deepali’s calm. Lakshmi’s hyperactiveness. Or Geeta’s superduperhyperactiveness. Ratan’s quant leanings. Zainul’s wide-eyed wonder. Siddhesh’s spaced-out-ness. Javed’s oh-so-straight hair. Or even Shantala’s control-freakness.

We really, really don’t know.

But you know what - we’re pleased as heck to be among the “hottest”.

Or even the “coolest” - as one magazine termed us last year.

Just as long as we aren’t luke-warm.

Congrats to all Pinstormers, their clients, their families who put up with the work the clients threw at us, leaving us no time to even update our blog entries for over (gosh, we’re embarrassed!) 9 months, our friends, well-wishers, investors and everyone else in the whole wide world.

Let’s raise the temperature as we go into 2007!

The logo came in a little after midnight our time, confirming it. Red Herring has updated its site to reflect the final 100 winners.

It’s still sinking in. They looked at over 600 companies all over Asia - and Japan and Australia and Russia, and picked us in their top 100. Wowie!

We’re one among a dozen companies they picked with a base in India and, at 15 months of age, we’re by far the youngest of the lot. We’re also the only one in the world this year - across Red Herring’s Asia, Europe and North America lists that’s in the $12 billion business of search engine marketing.

Your wishes - when we last counted, over 60 on the blog itself and a lot many more on email - must have counted. Oh, yes, Sam - and those t-shirts you made for us.

What next? Off to Shanghai on Sep 5 to receive said award, meet the other 99 (and hopefully win some clients among them too!).

Ask us Ni Hao Ma in a couple of weeks!

Mahesh Murthy

…so says Red Herring.

Red Herring is pretty much the bible of technology-driven businesses - and they have an annual listing called the “Red Herring 100” where they pick firms they believe have the potential to make a big impact globally. In the past, they’ve picked Google and eBay when they were barely blips on the radar.

Well, Red Herring now has grown its list from just the Americas to Europe and Asia. And they’ve just told us that we’ve been short-listed for selection among the top 100 firms in Asia. We’re in their top 200 – and we’ll know in a week or two whether we’re in their top 100.

What makes this special for us is a couple of things: one, that we’re barely a year old – and this is a proof of the maturity of our technology and its effectiveness. Two – from what we can see of the Red Herring North American 100 and the Red Herring European 100 lists this year, we’re the only search engine marketing firm they picked from around the world. That’s a pretty nice honour.

We’re also quite thrilled to see some of Red Herring’s other picks this year – they include Skype, Vonage and Symbian – and we’re almost embarrassed to be in such exalted company.

Wish us all the best - as we wait to see if we get picked to be among the final 100…

We’re thrilled to bits to have Carolina James Bajaj join us as our Head of Corporate Communications.

CJ, as she’s been called since her days as a radio jockey, has over 8 years of corporate communications experience and was last in a senior position at a leading PR firm, where she handled Sify.com, the Internet and Online Association of India and other tech-driven clients.

There’s more about her here.