ContentSutra has reported the acquisition of Bixee, Pixrat by MIH, the Indian arm of the South African media company, Naspers. This marks the first acquisition in the Indian Web2.0 space and should come across as succor to many Indian web2.0 wannabes.

Bixee and Pixrat were two of the earliest (and very good) Web2.0 sites. Bixee is a job aggregator and was (to the best of my understanding) the first Indian aggregator site worth any mention. Pixrat is a cool mashup of delicious & flickr; it was probably the first Indian website to be featured on TechCrunch.

I’m really happy on this news, for I’ve had a very early association with these sites. I discovered Bixee way back in October 2005 and blogged them (on my personal blog) in Jan06, when they got involved in the naukri.com controversy. Then in March06, I profiled RHR Networks, the parent company behind these websites. Then again in April06, I blogged the launch of Pixrat. In fact, that incident had a small role to play in my decision to start Webyantra.

It’ll be interesting to know what the acquisition price was? For Silicon valley web acquisitions, we are used to listening to acquisition figures ranging from a few millions to a few billions USD. Any gussess what the Indian prices could be like?

Congrats to the Bixee, Pixrat team. You guys were Web2.0 trendsetters in India…you’re continuing on the the same path with this acquisition.

SupportMagic is a free customer interaction management (CIM) solution for web based business that can be set up in a jiffy. It is a hosted solution, which means you don’t need to download or install any software. And because its free, what this means is that now you have a simple, easy, zero cost solution for handling online customer interactions.

Support Magic is the creation of Genesis Interactive, a 12 member Bangalore based software startup and is headed by Shuhaib Shariff. I was struck by its mission statement which reads as follows “…our mission is to bring enterprise tools to small business at an affordable cost, with minimum deployment hassles.” Enterprise systems with minimum deployment hassles– that sounds very SAAS to me!!. The application was in closed beta for over two months and has just been released publicly.

Built totally on open source technologies, SM is a full feature CIM solution. It boasts of a multi-channel communications platform consisting of the following

Live Chat – This is a live IM system which allows customers to interact directly with support staff in a real time, synchronous mode for their problems.
Email management (ticketing)– This is the ticketing based email system that allows customers to report bugs/complaints and get that resolved by the support staff in an asynchronous mode.
Troubleshooter – This section contains step by step troubleshooting instructions that can be a self-help for customers in finding possible solutions to recurring problems. The problems are categorized logically for easy findability.
Knowledgebase – This is a repository of articles, manuals etc that can serve as a ready reference for customers to understand the product/service better.

The website contains logins for sample accounts for the admin (who has overall control of the system), the staff members (who provide actual support ) and the customers. Here’s the interface the customers are likely to see on the live site. Having checked out the sample accounts, I think Support Magic’s UI is simple & uncluttered and its workflow is quite intuitive. Setting up an account and getting your support staff trained on handing the system should happen quite fast. At an overall level, the product looks very comprehensive to me. It has the promise to be a single window solution to the online customer interaction requirements for small to medium websites.

I have some feedback for the SupportMagic team. A free product is always great for consumers, but for enterprises, a free offering can prove to be a trifle unnerving. For, companies behave very differently than individual consumers; they would always want a certain degree of predictability before they commit to any new system. Will the product always remain free or will it get charged at a later stage? This uncertainty could hamper their confidence and the ensuing willingness to use the system. Hence it would be prudent to give pointers towards the product’s future monetization and pricing model to allay such apprehensions. Secondly, there is no mention anywhere about data security and data-center reliability issues. After all, this is an enterprise solution and not a free consumer internet application. Business customers are usually sensitive to security issues. Also, I feel that the website’s content is somewhat overdone (in trying to explain the product and its features); it could probably do with some simplification.