17 April 2006

Living Digital (LD), the digital lifestyle magazine from CyberMedia becomes the first publication in the country to go completely interactive over SMS. Readers of LD can now interact directly with the writers over SMS, with their queries and are assured a response in less than 48 working hours. Readers can also see buying advice on digital products over SMS from LD.

Living Digital, was relaunched this April in a larger size with more pages and increased its circulation by more than 60%.

Talking about the interactivity initiative, Pradeep Gupta, CMD of CyberMedia commented “Today’s digital generation lives in a completely interactive world, with all information being instantly available at their finger tips. We have taken this metaphor to new levels by integrating a print magazine and SMS. All that a reader has to now do is send an SMS to 6767-LD, that is 676753”

For each story in LD, a reader can directly interact with the respective author by sending an SMS with a unique code. Each LD author has an application on his desktop, which allows him to directly revert to the reader’s query, which goes back to the originating cell phone.

The objective of this level of interaction is to give each reader a higher level of engagement and connect closely with the LD brand.  LD also uses the same SMS response method for the exciting contests that are carried in every issue.

Said Shyam Malhotra, Editor-in-Chief of LD “LD has traditionally been a strong source of buying and usage advice to its readers. We have taken that one order or magnitude further and directly linked the reader with the author using the most obvious mode of communication today—the cell phone. In the next stage we will build this interactive response to advertisements also by next month.”

“The new positioning ‘serious fun@your fingertips’ signifies the intense involvement that today’s generation has with their gadgets. Living Digital covers the complete gamut of this experience, and provide advice on how to choose the right gadgets and how to use them better”. Shyam Malhotra explained.

About CyberMedia

CyberMedia is South Asia's first and largest specialty media house, with twelve publications (including Dataquest PCQuest, and Global Services) in the infotech, telecom, consumer electronics and biotech areas; and a media value chain including the internet (www.ciol.com), events and television. The group's media services include market research (IDC India), job board (CyberMedia Dice), content outsourcing, multimedia, and media education.

Living Digital is India’s first interactive digital lifestyle magazine. LD enriches the reader’s digital life experiences with its focus on the personal technology space. The LD reader audience is predominantly affluent males spread across the metros. LD offers its readers an intense, involved digital life experience in the personal space this is communicated with its positioning - serious fun @ your fingertips.