The Incredible India website is getting a makeover. The ministry of tourism wants to bring all services to the website, incredibleindia.org. The ministry has floated a tender to invite bids for developing and maintaining the site. IBM and HCL Tech are among the companies that have shown interest in the project, sources said. No consortium will be permitted.
The the winner will develop the portal, as well as manage mobile solutions and web content, among other things. While there are 40,000 current users on the page per day at peak load, the revamped portal will be able to handle 5-600,000 requests per day, with at least 5,000 requests running simultaneously. The plan also entails listing details of places in India down to every village on a map that can be enlarged. Users will be able to post views, upload photos, view threads on discussion forums and share travel experiences.
The new portal will feature 12 international languages with provisions for adding more. The portal will also be integrated to provide bookings to different hotels, tours, trains or flights in a seamless fashion. Currently, the incredibleindia portal redirects the user to an external link for these activities.
With greater focus on data analytics and the growing chorus that the future belongs to Big Data in recent years, there's also a move to employ digital analytics. The portal plans to selectively target users based on website visitor needs, their website behavior, through visitor profiling, search and browsing preferences, location etc. However it is still not clear as to how this data will be employed, who will regulate this data mining or if a third party will be engaged to maintain the portal.
