With 22 per cent annual growth and more than 80 million internet users, 725 million wireless subscribers and about 80 million internet on mobile subscribers, India is a melting pot of growing digital media businesses.

News publishers exploring the opportunities in this dynamic market are turning their attention to Digital Media India 2014, to be held on in Chennai from February 5-6.

Thw two-year-old WAN-Ifra conference is addressing crucial issues of content and technology development, strategies for monetisation of content and the ‘big three’ of digital media success: social, local and mobile. Case studies from leading news publishers in Europe, the USA and India will be presented.

Speakers in the conference include:

- Michael Maness, Vice President-Journalism & Media Innovation, Knight Foundation, USA. He will be speaking on how social media can be more than just a promotion tool. He will be joined by Oyvind Naess, Chief of Staff, VG, Norway, who will be speaking on successful digital strategies and building the organisation for digital business, and Sachin Gopalan, who will speak about premium content strategies.

- Sukirti Gupta, CEO, MMI Online of Jagran Group, N P Rajendran, Deputy Editor, Mathrubhumi, India, and Amitabha Sinha, Head-IT, Anandabazar Patrika, India, will examine how local language news sites engage their audiences in despite the challenges of language compatibility on internet, lack of “last mile” connectivity and other myriad issues of publishing on the net.

- Grig Davidovitz, CEO, RGB Media, Israel, whose organisation has redesigned many news sites including that of Times of Israel, will show how each story page can work as “mini-homepage” and deliver an incredible user experience in the first encounter itself. Grig will also lead a workshop on 'Content monetisation' on 4 February.

- Rajesh Mahapatra, Executive Editor, Hindustan Times, India will share the experiences at HT leveraging the strength of print to grow digital. Sachin Gupta, CIO, The Times of India Group, will tell discuss how newspapers can leverage Application Programming Interface (API) to create more and better digital products. Rajesh Patil, Creative Consultant of Adobe India, will join this session to talk about data structure for digital content.

- Tony Danker, Director - International and Partnerships, The Guardian, UK, will present the digital transformation of the Guardian and the positioning the Guardian name for the future. Anant Goenka, Director & Head of New Media, Indian Express, will join this session to speak about the company’s social media experiences and the work that won Indian Express group a gold medal at Asian Digital Media Awards for their use of social media in news dissemination.

- Markus Feldenkirchen, CEO of PPI Media, will share the US experiences of developing a framework for digital strategy. Salil Kumar, COO of India Today Digital, will share his views on how consumers play an increasingly important role in collaborative content creation and how this helps monetisation at at India Today Digital and Bagit Today. The session will also feature Shekar Sharma, Managing Director of GroupM India, Murugavel Janakiraman, CEO of Bharatmatrimony.com, and Porush Jain, CEO of Sportskeeda.com, India.

- Dan Barth, CIO & Vice President - Audience Development, OPUBCO Group, USA, the publishers of The Oklahoman Daily, will share their detailed content consumption analysis, for their six digital publishing channels, that mapped out guiding directions for a content strategy. There are other speakers to be announced.

The conference will also have a ‘round table’ discussion organized by the World Editors Forum on 'Journalism in the age of digital surveillance'.It will be chaired by N Ravi, Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu, who will be joined by Kalpesh Yagnik, National Editor, Dainik Bhaskar and others.

Details, including registration information, are available at http://www.wan-ifra.org/dmi