The company has been offering free mail services (multilingual) to its NRI base in www.bharatmail.com. This loyal base is going to be targeted for other transaction-based services. Bharatmail, however, will continue to build on the relationship sentiment between NRIs and folks back home and this will remain free, according to director P Sundar.

``We hope to give some thing free which would be so useful to people that they wouldn't mind spending on something that is not free but offers high utility at our site,'' he said.

The company had started with an online mart where NRI's could send gifts to their relations back home. The mart also offers a choice of perishables - flowers, cakes, sweets which would be locally delivered. A franchisee arrangement has been made in eight cities including Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore among them. The franchisees have got their own password on Bharatmail to check on orders for the day.

They send confirmation of the order to the NRI and to Bharatmail and do the same after delivery. Bharatplanet arranges to pay them locally and gets a transaction fee from the NRI.

A large measure of the success of the online mart was attributed to the very affordable prices (flowers were delivered for $2.90 as against $20 charged by others in the initial days).The NRI can also state his budget for the gift and is given a choice online. Till date some 1500 transactions have taken place. This is projected to go up to 150,000.Bharatplanet is planning to launch travel and health related services along similar lines. These value-added services are expected to make the company breakeven in three months with even the beta versions drawing a good response. The average revenue has been Rs 7 lakh a month.It is planning to go for a second round of funding in July-August to the tune of $20-25 million.

There will be be a development centre in Chennai, a liaison office and a branch office in the US in California. A branch office is also to be opened in Hyderabad.Bharatplanet had introduced a dial-a-mail service earlier this month. About 200 users are availing of this service every day. In this, the user is allowed to send a message up to one minute to a subscriber of Bharatmail service through a local call. The user would have to state the pin code of the subscriber and dictate the message which is transmitted to the e-mail account of the latter.