News Broadcasting
Chess Grandmasters now on Zapak.com
BANGALORE: Zapak Digital Entertainment (Zapak) a Reliance ADA Group venture, announced the launch of India’s first full-feature online ‘Multiplayer Chess’.
The Multiplayer Option provides the advantage of playing against your friend who could be anywhere across the world, and also has three difficulty levels; for beginners, advanced players and experts. Zapak.com also launched ‘Multiplayer Speed Chess’, where the player has only ten seconds to make a move.
Koneru Humpy, the Reigning World Junior Champion, only 33 ELO points away from being called ‘Super Grandmaster Champion’ and Tania Sachdeva, the Reigning Asian Junior Girls Champion, unveiled the game and showcased the gameplay.
Speaking about the performance of the portal on this occasion, Zapak COO Rohit Sharma, said, “We have become the fastest growing portal in less than two months from launch reaching 5,00,000 registrations and crossing 5,00,00,000 page views.
The performance of the portal has surely exceeded our expectations and we are continuously adding new features on our website so that we exceed our players’ expectations. In fact we have even witnessed registrations from Vishakhapatnam, Siliguri, Jabalpur, Ludhiana, etc besides the Metros and even International Locations.
Computer gaming the world over is dominated by males – almost 85% of the gamers are male, however according to Sharma, Zapak has around 25-30% female subscribers, a swing from the norm, while discussing the current three TVC’s on air which focus on males. The TVCs’ have been created by Marketing Ants, while the Reliance internal team handles the media part. Over the last two months since the launch of the gaming site around Rs.45 million have been spent on the media campaign according to Reliance Entertainment president Rajesh Sawhney.
Currently on offer is a bouquet of 160 plus games on the site with plans to ramp this number up to 500 games by the end of March this year. Zapak also announced an online chess championship for the Zapak Grandmaster starting February 01 this year with a prize purse of Rs.100,000/- for the Grandmaster.
According to Reliance estimates, the global gaming industry is worth around US$45 billion and is expected to grow to US$53 billion (which would make it larger than the Hollywood film industry), while that of the Indian industry is expected to grow to US$424 million by 2010.
News Broadcasting
Senior media executive Madhu Soman exits Zee Media
Former Reuters and Bloomberg leader says he leaves with “no regrets” after brief stint at WION and Zee Business
NOIDA: Madhu Soman, a veteran of global newsrooms and media sales floors, has stepped away from Zee Media Corporation after a short stint steering business strategy for WION and Zee Business.
In a reflective LinkedIn note marking his departure, Soman said his time within the network’s corridors was always likely to be brief. “Some chapters close faster than expected,” he wrote, signalling the end of a nearly two-year spell in which he oversaw both editorial partnerships and commercial strategy.
Soman joined Zee Media in 2022 after more than a decade abroad with Reuters and Bloomberg, returning to India to take on the role of chief business officer for WION and Zee Business. His mandate was ambitious: bridge the newsroom and the revenue desk while expanding digital and broadcast reach.
During the stint, Zee Business reached break-even for the first time since its launch in 2005, while WION refreshed programming and strengthened its digital footprint across platforms such as YouTube and Facebook.
But Soman suggested the cultural fit proved uneasy. Describing himself as a “cultural misfit”, he hinted at deeper tensions between editorial instincts shaped in global newsrooms and the realities of India’s television news ecosystem.
Before joining Zee, Soman spent more than seven years at Bloomberg in Hong Kong as head of broadcast sales for Asia-Pacific, expanding the company’s news syndication business across several markets. Earlier, he held senior editorial roles at Reuters, overseeing online strategy in India and managing Reuters Video Services from London.
His career began in television and wire reporting, including a stint with ANI during the 1999 Kargil conflict, before moving into digital publishing as India’s internet media landscape took shape.
Now, after nearly three decades in broadcast and digital media, Soman is leaving Delhi NCR and returning to his hometown, Trivandrum.
Exhausted, he admits. But unbowed. And with one quiet line that sums up the journey: he didn’t sell his soul — because some things, after all, are not for sale.
