The website for UTVi the business channel from the UTV Group, has gone live, albeit in beta. The site has news, market updates, industry-wise updates; there are “Guru Blogs”, which currently have just two posts - one from Govindraj Ethiraj, Editor in Chief of UTVi and journalist Hindol Sengupta.

The site has message board, guides in UTVi School, and SMS updates using the short code 59995. There appears to be consensus in the industry on what the top segments for a financial site should be - take a look at UTVi, and the sites for CNBC-TV18 and NDTV Profit. In case of UTVi and Moneycontrol.com, the footers are similar too. Thankfully, there isn’t as much clutter and content discovery is (relatively) easy in case of UTVi; that might change once they start selling ad-space, though.

UTVi also appears to have tied up with a number of online companies - the UTVi Loan section in the navigation bar links to (Sequoia Capital funded) Apnaloan.com; ticketing “Hot Deals” are from Travelocity India; Shopping with Rediff (NSDQ: REDF) Shopping and Gizmos link to Techtree. Readers will remember that UTV had acquired a majority stake in IT Nation, which owns Techtree. The UTVi site is apparently a part of UTVs new media company,  United New Media Ventures, with ex-Disney (NYSE: DIS) India digital media head TN Prabhu as the COO.

Update: Some inputs from Agencyfaqs - UTVi’s tie-ups with ABC and Business Standard are not applicable to the website. The blogging will be by invitation only, and content will be moderated. 59995 is UTVi’s own short code, and a voice portal - 5059995 is powered by OnMobile. A mobile site will be launched soon. Interestingly, UTVi has also created a channel on YouTube, here.More here.

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