Indian on-demand music service Dhingana has revealed that it saw 10.5 million visitors last month, a figure that, the Bollywood specialist says, makes it the largest legal streaming music site in the Asian country.

India is in the midst of a Web content revolution, with a number of music, video and movie sites growing strong user numbers and fan bases both in the country, and the world over, making Dhingana’s claim significant.

Earlier this year in February we wrote about Saavn – South Asian Audio Video Network – after it recorded some very impressive grow thanks to a partnership with Facebook that saw it become an early Open Graph partner.

The site, which is one of Dhingana’s chief rivals, picked up 700,000 new users in just one month, taking it to a total user base of 1.3 million. While its active monthly users hit an impressive 785,000 (up from 35,000), a figure that Dhingana has now surpassed.

Like Saavn, Facebook has been the rocket that has propelled its big numbers. Dhingana joined as an Open Graph partner last week, and it’s a move that has helped grow the service, even over this short space of time.

Other impressive stats revealed today include:

• Dhingana is now adding more than 200,000 new users per month.

• More than 60 percent of its traffic is coming from India and, in total, it is serving close to 100 million minutes of music every month.

• The company is seeing 10,000 downloads of its mobile apps per day, with 4.5 million of its monthly active visitors coming from the apps.

Despite Dhingana creeping into the lead, the gap between the two service is negligible, we’re quite sure that another change of lead could be on the cards, as the two firms lead the battle to be crowned India’s Spotify.

Spotify, Deezer and Pandora are yet to localise their services in India but already the country has a strong streaming music presence, and movie specialists like Spuul are also emerging.

The services have been all the more important of late, as a court order has seen two ISPs in India block access to a number of overseas-hosted video sites like Vimeo, DailyMotion and a range of torrenting services.

It is unclear exactly why the services were blocked, although it is likely that their user-generated content was judged to be ‘unsuitable’ for Indian cyberspace – a topic that continues to rage in the country.

The full details released by Dhingana are captured in the infographic below:

Google has introduced Business Photos in India, extending the global reach of the service that helps retailers attract customers by posting panoramic photos of their store or shop-front to the Web.

The pilot program will see Google take 360 degree photos of businesses’ premises, which are then uploaded to Google Places to give prospective customers an inside look (literally) at the interior of the shop or office space, and its a sample of its products or services.

The search giant explains more details of the service, which costs nothing for companies involved:

The photographs are shot by Google appointed photographers who work directly with the business owner to arrange a time to do the photo shoot. The images will show prospective customers the interiors, decor, merchandise — and all of this will be done at no cost to the business owner.

As we said earlier this month, Business Photos can provide a fantastic advantage for business — particularly retailers or restaurants — in their quest to bring in more customers and revenue, and it is well worth considering.

The initiative in India has begun in Hyderabad and will be rolling out to other cities soon, Google says.

Companies that are interested in participating can register their interest in having a Google-sponsored photographer take their shots by signing up here. In particular, Google is encouraging restaurants, cafes, spas, salons, gyms, showrooms, and retail stores, but any business can upload its own shots to Google Places.

You can find full details of the initiative India at this Google blog entry, via trak.in.

Business Photos initially launched in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and France, before Google expanded it to Canada, The Netherlands and Ireland on May 1.

Fans of Bollywood and other Indian films have a new option for watching movies on the go after streaming service Spuul launched an iOS app, bringing its catalogue of content from the Asian country to owners of the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch worldwide.

The app includes subtitles and allow users to resume watching movies from where they left off via their desktop, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. There are incentives attached to inviting friends on to the service, with the chance of winning free access to Spuul’s premium movies and other prizes up for grabs for referrals.

As well as launching its debut mobile apps, Spuul has added a ‘Stars’ section to its homepage to help users find content from their favourite Bollywood actors and actresses, and discover new films and other top stars.

The service launched in beta in early April and currently has a collection of more than 280 titles from a range of top-tier studios. That catalogue is being added to on a daily basis, the startup’s chief product officer Michael Smith told The Next Web.

Spuul has particularly innovative pricing options, which includes three distinctly different plans, each of which is ad-supported.

On the most basic level, visitors can enjoy free and unlimited access to selected films in its ‘Forever Free’ category. A monthly $4.99 ‘all you can eat’ subscription grants unlimited access to its ‘Premium’ films, while its blockbuster titles — ‘Specials’ — are available at a one off $0.99 price per title.

Rather than limiting access to Special titles from the moment users hit the play button, each purchase gives 72 hours of playback on the film. This avoids a ’48 hours to watch’ scenario and gives viewers more time enjoy each film at their own pace, not to mention better value.

Spuul is not limited to India but former Yahoo business development executive Smith says that it is very much aimed at serving the country’s vast population and those overseas:

Looking at big global markets for movies, you have English films — catered for by the likes of Hulu and Netflix — then the Chinese market, due to sheer population and size of industry, and the next one is India.  There are tens of millions of Indians overseas, coupled with the amount in India, and yet there’s nothing for them that caters to quality online video content.

The app is available worldwide and Smith points out that India’s entertainment industry is popular across the globe. The Indian diaspora in the US and Europe make those regions key markets, while Africa and the Middle East are two other areas where India films are particularly well watched, he says.

While Bollywood is catered to in part by a number of other video services, including Southeast Asia focused-Viki, Smith says that Spuul is “trying to put it all together” and wants to be the go-site for Indian movies.

There’s not a service that says [to Indians] come to this one spot and get it all. We’re trying to put together a real quality experience, coupled with a strong catalogue of films.

Smith reveals that, while in the short term the focus is on movies, the streaming service will soon add TV show content, and is looking into the possibility of expanding into other genres, including independent films, lifestyle and sports-related content.

“The couch potato era is over”, Smith says, and Spuul is focused on providing a equal experience across its website, mobile and tablet apps. Today’s video fans are multitaskers who consume content from different platforms,  often on the go, he adds.

Though it has been out in public for little over a month, Spuul has been a long time in the making. The concept of the service first came about in 2010 in Singapore when its three founders — which include Sony Entertainment TV in India founder Sudesh Iyer and serial entrepreneur S Mohan — first put a blueprint together.

Licensing and content deals take time to strike and the company didn’t begin working on the platform and other tech developments until the middle of last year. Smith came aboard in early 2012 after departing Yahoo — where he’d run business development in Asia — and he’s enjoying the change of scene at Spuul’s Singapore-based office.

The company’s other location in India has five full time developers who are focused on building and optimising the service.

Having launched its maiden apps for Apple devices, Android is next in line. Given that the Google-owned operating system is thriving in Asia, and most of the world, the move will likely open Spuul up to larger audiences in India and the surrounding area.

➤ Spuul | App Store

We recently reported that Indian Internet service provides (ISP) Reliance Communication had begun blocking video sites like Vimeo and certain torrent services , and now rival Airtel is now doing the same, citing a court order.

Both ISPs are said to be preventing customers from accessing a range of popular sites, including Vimeo, DailyMotion, thepiratebay, Isohunt.com, Pastebin and Xmarks, according to Medianama.

Access to the sites is varied for users of other ISPs across the country, the report says.

All of these sites are still accessible on BSNL Bangalore, however, MTNL Delhi has only blocked Torrentz.eu and DailyMotion. We are getting reports that MTNL Mumbai has also blocked major torrent sites.

That could soon change, as Airtel’s explantion for the blocking indicates.

The message displayed on the blocked pages — which read “The site has been blocked as per instructions from the Department of Telecom” with Reliance — has been replaced and Airtel customers are greeted with a rather ominous alternative: “Access to this site has been blocked as per Court Orders”.

The mention of a court order suggests that a wider crackdown may on the horizon. Given India’s stance on social media content — and its particular aim to manage ‘harmful content’ on the Web — it is plausible that a court has ordered the shutdown, but it is unclear why certain ISPs are exempt for now.

We’ve reached out to Reliance and Airtel for comment as we seek to clarify the situation. We’ll update this story with any new details that we are given.

It has just seen Brazil overtake it to become Facebook’s largest overseas market, but India is being tipped to overtake the US and the Latin American country to become the planet’s largest collection of Facebook users by 2015.

India currently has 57 million registered Facebook members, putting it some distance behind the US (157 million) and narrowly below Brazil (59 million) — according to Socialbakers — but India has barely scratched the service of its online potential, and could bring hundreds of millions of its population online in the coming years.

Speaking to CNBC, Gartner analyst Shalini Verma predicted that a change of order will take place before the end of 2015, driven by a continued growth in mobile-based Web access:

India could overtake the United States in the next three years. Last year, Facebook users in India doubled. Growth will be driven by mobile Internet users in second- and third-tier cities.

Mobile is the key factor for the development of Internet access in India, which, in turn, would power Facebook and other services’ growth. Currently, fixed-line penetration is below 10 percent — the country passed 100 million users in November — with mobile already accounting for half of all Internet use, according to Statcounter data, and phone-based access is set to only increase.

Smartphones and Web-enabled feature phones are the driving force behind India’s online revolution. Smartphone shipments to the country passed 10 million for the first time last year, taking just ten months to set the new record, according to CyberMedia Research, but there is still much more to come.

Smartphones accounted for just 6 percent of the 160 million plus mobile devices that shipped to India in 2011. Shipments are very much in response and anticipation to sales and, with country-wide monthly smartphones purchases topping one million for the first time in November, retailers are set to order and sell devices in greater quantities than ever before this year.

The increasing affordability of low-end smartphones and Web-enabled feature phones is a key factor seen as having the potential to bring lower-income India’s online with a more app centric mobile experience.

Nokia is making a particular push for the first time Internet phone buyer market with a series of affordable feature phones, including its Asha series – which begins at $60 — while two sub-$50 phones were announced last week.

Facebook itself is also pushing its low end offering, having added seven new Indian languages to its ‘Facebook For Every Phone’ app, which caters for feature phones in the country.

There are also encouraging signs on the infrastructure side of things. India was a relative late adopter of 3G networks but it already has its first commercial 4G deployment, after AirTel launched its LTE service last month.

Initially available in just two cities and via dongles only, the service will expand to cover more parts of the country in time and, once LTE-compatible device ownership swells, smartphones and tablets will be included too.

Airtel CEO Sanjay Kapoor heralded the significance of the 4G service as “driving fundamental changes in society at large” and wider adoption of mobile Web and Internet-enabled devices is likely to see Facebook, Twitter and other online services seriously grow their presence among India’s 1.2 billion population.

Facebook itself has previously admitted that India will become its biggest market at some point, but it remains to be seen if Facebook user numbers there can accelerate at such a rate that it overtakes the US by 2015.

Based on recent growth (1.96 percent in the last three months) — which doesn’t account for saturation — the US will pass 200 million members by the end of 2015. That would require Facebook to grow by more than three and half times its current user base in India – a big ask.

Currently, half of India’s Internet users are registered members of Facebook, which suggests that the demand to support such growth is there. Assuming that the site held its popularity among Indians, it could break 200 million users if the country is able to bring a further 300 million new Internet users online by 2015.

However way you look at it, the requirement is challenging but Facebook will be concerned with growing its user base (and revenues) in India, and that is certain to happen regardless of whether India tops the US market, or not.

Note: For anyone sceptical that India’s impoverished hold any interest in owning a smartphone, it’s worth remembering that there are more mobile phones in the country than toilets, as CNN reported. Equally, the Internet (and Facebook) can provide genuine benefits for everyday life – as these Indian farmers can testify.

India’s mobile Web market is growing impressively, to the point that it will overtake fixed-line Internet usage this year, and Chinese browser maker UC is among the companies keen to take advantage of this shift.

The company is investing $5 million to develop its presence in India, where it launched a dedicated office last year. UC currently enjoys around 20 percent market share among mobile Web browsers in India, CEO Yu Yongfu told China Daily, putting in second, behind Opera’s 36 percent, but it has greater ambitions.

UC is slated to make the $5 million investment this year, as it aims to increase its user base in India to 100 million by 2015. That projection is building on encouraging growth that it’s seen to date.

“UC’s growth rate in India has accelerated over the past six months since we established an office there last November,” Yu told an audience at the GMIC event in China.

The Beijing-based event also saw the company announce two significant new partners, that join its list of more than 500 local firms and services that integrate with its browser across its worldwide territories.

Vodafone  has been recruited as a partner to help increase adoption in India. Separately, the company has expanded its existing partnership with Evernote to offer mobile users the opportunity to clip webpages and content from their phone, a feature that users of its desktop browser already enjoy.

Evernote itself just launched a standalone Chinese service — Yinxiang Biji – and the function will soon be replicated on UC’s Chinese mobile browser.

Worldwide, UC claims its suit of browsers — including mobile and desktop versions — has a user base of 300 million, making it the world’s most used. The company says that, while its home market dominates, it enjoys market share of more than 10 percent in six other countries, including Russia, Indonesia and India.

UC is busy expanding its global empire and the US is next on its list. The company launched its mobile browser in the country in March and aims to ramp up the local offerings for it.

While UC’s Android browser has been heralded for providing faster speeds, it remains to be seen just how many North America-based smartphone owners will cast aside native Safari or Robot browsers for a third-party option.

Google and Facebook must wait until August before they are able to challenge an Indian legal case accusing them of failing to adequately remove objectionable content in the country, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The New Delhi High Court handling the case has adjourned the firms’ petition until August, but it will allow a lower court trial to take place May 23, the outcome of which could see the companies’ Indian executives handed a fine, or possible jail time.

The case was started when veteran technology writer Vinay Rai lodged a criminal complaint against 21 firms for failing to remove “objectionable content” from Indian cyberspace. Rai cited anti-religious content and objectionable images of politicians and other officials as the offending content.

A series of court hearings saw Microsoft, Yahoo and others acquitted, but the charges remain against Facebook and Google-owned YouTube. Though the content in question has since been removed, the case has rumbled on, centered around whether the Web giants breached censorship rules which form part of a 2008 IT law.

The regulations stipulate that Internet sites have 36 hours to remove sensitive content, which includes anything “ethnically objectionable”, “grossly harmful”, “defamatory” or “blasphemous.” Rai says that he filed the case because the “social networking giants need to recognize their social responsibility” in India.

Facebook and Google revealed in February that they had already deleted the content and they have both consistently claimed that their existing systems, which block locally sensitive content in countries, are suitably robust for India.

The case itself was filed during a controversial period, during which a separate series of events saw technology minister Kapil Sibal propose new content management systems to a number of popular overseas social media firms.

Sibal was reported to have requested the social media sites filter users’ content in real-time, however he subsequently denied making the request, claiming he was misquoted. He did, however, concede that a new system is needed in India, and revealed that the government would reach out to Web firms to find a resolution to the issue.

With comparisons to China circulting, government ministers spoke out to reassure concerned Indians that it not looking to censor the Web nor shut down social media sites.However, the flames of controversy were fanned when a local court ordered Facebook and Google to remove content, while a national court later claimed that authorities would not hestitate to introduce Chinese-style censorship if they failed to act.

Facebook, Google and other Internet companies could face other pressure in India however, with rumours suggested that the government is looking into the possibility of requiring them to set-up dedicated local servers to manage users and content in the country.

Yesterday we reported that some ISPs were restricting access to Vimeo and some torrent sites, and the country’s issues dealing with the overlap of free speech and undesired content continues.

We’ve reached out to Google and Facebook for comment on the adjournment of the legal case, and will update this post with any new details.

Use of the mobile Web is set to overtake fixed-line Internet in India by the end of the year, as the country’s mobile revolution continues at full speed.

Statistics from statcounter – via Trak.in – show that a steady depreciation in the use of Internet from PCs is coinciding with continued grow of Web surfing from mobile devices. The data suggests that, with PC usage just a few percent points ahead, the lines will cross and access from mobile will overtake the PC before the end of the year.

As the graphic shows, India’s mobile Web usage has grown strongly to account for just under 50 percent, as March-April, that’s up from just 2 percent in January 2009 and 18 percent in January 2011.

With the price of Internet prohibitive for many Indians, not to mention that infrastructure issues restrict access to services in rural areas, mobile has emerged a more cost efficient and convenient Internet access point. These reasons are behind the ‘leapfrog’ effect, that sees mobile Internet usage proportionally highest in emerging markets, as Pingdom explains.

The good news for India is that, following relatively late introduction of 3G in 2010, the 4G roll out has begun after Airtel introduced its service last month. Although limited to dongles and the city of Kolkota initially, the service will bring about “fundamental change” nationwide, according to Airtel CEO Sanjay Kapoor.

As is the case  in other countries, 4G offers the potential to increase Internet access and provide a better, faster user experience, once more compatible handsets are active in the market.

Last year I wrote about the ways in which the growth of mobile Internet is disrupting traditional measurement of the Web, and India is a good example. Internet penetration in the country is less than 10 percent but, given the rise of mobile as an access point, the stat literally tells only half of the story.

Mobile Web use is increasing across most other parts of the world, thanks to the ever-growing proliferation of smartphones — which saw global shipments increase 42.5 percent year-on-year — but India’s low use of fixed-line net access makes the trend more prominent in the country.

Statcounter’s data for the world on average, for example, shows a clear and significant gulf between the two:

While India’s stats don’t break out the dependency on mobile Web — ie how many Internet users are mobile-only — a recent report suggested that as many as 38 percent of mobile Web users in China go online from their phone or tablet device only.

With more than one billion mobile phones in China, that’s an awful lot of mobile-only browsing, and it again illustrates the importance of mobile, which is set to become (or already is) the primary Web access platform in many emerging markets.

While the Statcounter data is likely to have its anomalies, the overall trend clearly shows that the number of mobile Web users in India will soon overtake those accessing from PCs.

Security and data protection solutions provider Sophos this morning announced the publication of its latest ‘Dirty Dozen’ report, covering the first quarter of this year.

Compared to the same period last year, India appears to have overtaken the United States as the top global contributor of junk messages, while spam originating from the United Kingdom has decreased by a massive 47 percent – meaning the UK is not even a member of the so-called ‘Dirty Dozen’ anymore.

For the record: Sophos competitors Kaspersky and Trend Micro had both already indicated that India was the world’s biggest source of spam in the past, and Cisco Systems even ranked India at the top in its 2011 security report (PDF).

According to Sophos, there’s a one in ten chance that spam was relayed from an Indian computer. The country obviously has a vast amount of Internet users, which is part of the reason India is ranked on top of the list for spam-relaying countries. Other reasons are lax legislation and not enough awareness regarding the security of networks and machines among both end users and ISPs.

After all, most spam messages are sent from home computers that have been compromised by malicious hackers and turned into a ‘botnet’.

In the first quarter of 2011, the UK ranked sixth on the list of spam sources, contributing roughly 3.2 percent of global junk emails. Since then, it has fallen off the Dirty Dozen entirely and, in terms of sheer numbers, UK spam has decreased by nearly 50 percent, according to Sophos.

The security software company also has some great news to share: overall throughput of global email spam messages has seemingly decreased since the first quarter of 2011. Hurray! Except …

Don’t break out the champagne just yet, because it means spammers are merely finding new ways to spread junk messages (on social networks and whatnot).

Also, the amount of messages that spread malware or represent more targeted attempts to ‘phish’ usernames, passwords and personal information, is increasing.

Facebook could be one of a number of Web firms that will soon be told to introduce local servers in India, as the country’s government seeks to better regulate ‘objectionable content’ on the Internet.

According to a report from Hindustan Times, “the option is already in process” with India’s union law ministry, which is looking into a solution that would see the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google and its video service YouTube asked to set up servers to handle content from the country’s Web space.

A similar move saw BlackBerry maker RIM set up a dedicated India server earlier this year, after more than a year of discussion and pressure.

RIM’s India server allows the government to scan content from its network — but not enterprise services — for security threats, but the a request for Web firms would likely form part of a wider plan to manage unsuitable online content in real-time, a proposal raised last year.

The speculation comes days after comments from a high profile politician suggested that the Indian government is considering a request to make overseas-headquartered firms introduce servers. Now the topic that has been discussed with representatives of the US government, as India looks to escalate its demands.

Home secretary RK Singh raised the issue of removing unsuitable content from Facebook and YouTube with US deputy secretary for homeland security Jane Holl Lute, who visited India as part of ongoing dialogue between the two countries.

The Indian minister is said to have suggested that the US develop a system to catch unsuitable Web content instantly, or within a specific period of time, to help cut down on “mala fide” postings.

While such a request seems optimistic, Singh told Lute that, if the US is unable to address the issue of managing content itself, India could require the Web firms to comply with the server request. However, the US politician’s responses are not known, at this stage.

India’s IT minister Kapil Sibal has previously lamented the inability of India’s legal system to extract information from online firms, and Sibal claimed that a new system would be required to tackle offending content.

Facebook, Google and other Web firms remain subject to a legal case in response to their slow response to removing sensitive content from India’s Web space, and a move to demand the installation of a local server would follow.

Those cases have seen India courts have previously threatened to block Facebook over issues with content in the country, which has since become the world’s second biggest market for Facebook, where it claims to have 50 million users. The company is continuing to push its service there, and it recently added local language support to its feature phone app.

However it remains to be seen how Facebook, Google, Twitter and other companies would respond to the request for a server. The firms have been reluctant to comply with requests to delete content in India. Servers and data security are important issues, and a dangerous precedent of following government requests could be set.

We’ve reached out to representatives of all three companies, and will update this article with any responses that we are given.