MUMBAI: The Shinde brothers, who started Dhingana in 2007, had a remarkable journey from working in Yahoo to starting an online streaming portal. The twins Snehal and Swapnil had created an impact in the Indian streaming business and they continue working towards creating an impact as they join the executive team at San Francisco based Rdio as VPs of Emerging Markets.
Going back to the year 2013, when Dhingana had appointed Rohit Bhatia as CEO, the act was followed by the creation of a new designation- President and CTO for Snehal in the company. During an earlier interview, Swapnil had mentioned the shift was need as it would allow them to explore new areas. Swapnil had explained that Bhatia would use his understanding of sales, marketing and business development, along with his history of leading start-ups to great success.
During the last year, Dhingana had been promoting their platform through various initiatives. It introduced geofencing which enabled Dhingana to distribute content on a country specific basis and thereby partner with music labels that have country-wise limitations. It also unveiled its new logo and website in order to match up with the international look, helping it shed the tradition look of the portal. In the same year it aimed to increase revenue through a subscription model. The model was first introduced in the iOS platform. Dhingana also went on to partner with Idea Cellular for a music subscription service which allowed users to download unlimited music with no data charges. The service was available to over 127 million postpaid and prepaid users of Idea using android smartphones and WAP Feature Phones.
Related Post
Dhingana officially shut down its operations on 14 February 2014 and refrained from making any form of comments as it was in transition phase. And after almost a month, it announced the Rdio acquisition.
A spokesperson from the Dhingana team (now Rdio team) informed that unlike all Dhingana employees who will be joining Rdio, “Rohit Bhatia has decided to pursue other opportunities and will not join the Rdio team”. The company had offices in Pune, India and Sunnyvale, California, with a team working in both locations.
It further stated, “We will definitely look to expand our Indian team and scale it further.”Without revealing much about the deal, Radioandmusic.com was informed that talks were on for the “last several weeks” before the deal was struck.
Hinting at what is expected, it was explained that Rdio India will be partnering with the 900 plus music labels, which previously partnered with Dhingana.
The key in this acquisition is the invaluable experience pioneered by Dhingana in the Indian markets which will help Rdio to build on its success and expand here. In one of the past interviews, Swapnil had pointed that Dhingana was getting 50 per cent traffic from India and is then followed by 30 per cent in United States which is followed by United Kingdom and Canada, Australia and United Arab Emirates.
Dhingana reached millions of users globally, providing access to an extensive library of music in 38 languages licensed from global, national and regional Indian brands. Music labels like T-Series, Saregama, Yash Raj, Sony Music and Universal Music, used the platform to showcase music by their artistes. It was available on the web, mobile Web and also as an app for iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Android, Windows and Nokia devices. Dhingana was backed by Helion Venture Partners, Inventus Capital Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Prior to Yahoo, Swapnil worked as a software engineer at Symantec Corporation and Software Engineer at IBM Software Labs. Snehal worked as senior engineer at Symantec Corporation; software engineer at Teradata, NCR Corporation and software engineer at ADP Company.
