Vivanews launches new design, rebrands to Viva

Today, Karaniya Dharmasaputra (founder and CEO Vivanews) announces that the news portal site is launching a new design and change the brand name from Vivanews to Viva. Vivanews was launched in 2008 as an online subsidiary of VivaGroup, a business unit that runs TV stations TVOne and ANTV.

Viva will be the bigger portal that hosts News, VivaSocio, VivaLog, VivaForum and other content verticals previously hosted by a single entity, Vivanews. Viva has decided to create a bigger umbrella for these products which has different audience and make sure all products gets exposure under the Viva umbrella.

In the competition map for online portals, Vivanews is still crawling for traffic and market share compared to incumbents such as Detik and Kompas; although so far Viva has been experimenting with some online content and seem successful at it. A few examples are VivaSocio and VivaLog which gained quite traction from users. VivaSocio is Viva's way to experiment with how content can interact with other social products such as Facebook and Twitter. VivaLog is a blog content aggregator which works similarly like Digg or local-owned Lintas.me.

It's going to be interesting to see how far can Viva experiment with content and readership, while the big incumbents are seemed happy with the way things work right now and not doing something new and innovative. But again, the reaction from incumbents are still remain to be seen.