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Silicon Valley in India?
2006-12-04 15:21:01
Mercury News is running this special series on India ’s rise as a technological powerhouse, with a lot of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs returning to India as Venture Capitalists. Some of the striking points from the article: “It took the valley 30, 35 years to get where we are today”, observed Ash Lilani, head of Silicon Valley Bank Global, which has an office in Bangalore and assists VCs looking for overseas investments. “We are trying to replicate that in India in two years”. -Not sure what is the magic formula here! In India, VCs have made 53 early-stage investments in start-ups worth $355 million during the first nine months of 2006. That’s still nearly twice as much activity in that period than the two previous years combined, according to Venture Intelligence, a Chennai research service focused on private equity and venture capital activity in India. -We are trying to find out how many of these are related to consumer Internet industry, will r...
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Exclusive interview with CEO of Guruji.com
2006-12-01 03:17:05
I wrote about Guruji.com on the very first day of their press release and then followed up with another post clarifying on what they are doing. My initial response was skeptic as I didn’t quite get what their value proposition was. Local search definitely sounded like an opportunity but that clearly wasn’t their main (or only) focus. In the Indian content search area, Google.co.in already seemed to be doing a good enough job. I am sure some of you would have got similar doubts, but hey, they are backed by Sequoia and generated quite a bit of buzz in the media. I had a chat with Anurag Dod, their CEO and asked a few questions to clarify some of the doubts (Update: added conclusion at the end - due to some technical snag, missed adding this when first posted the article) What is your biggest value proposition? We want to be the one stop shop for anyone search anything related to India. Be it India related content or Indian city specific data. “Think India - Think Gur...
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$1.5 million funding for Meravideo - joke or sign of boom?
2006-12-01 03:17:05
Introduction Recently came across this post at Mashable (thanks Vaibhav for point this out to me) that exposes how Meravideo.com is a rip-off of a $300 product from some software company. And if you haven’t read before, they recently claimed to be close to closing a round of funding worth $1.5 million. The interesting thing that I wanted to discuss here is whether this is a joke (how can you launch a company by buying an off the shelf product and get funded!) or a sign of a boom time (when you can convince investors that doing your laundry online is the next ground-breaking innovative idea to be implemented as a web service). Reality check I tried to contact Meravideo to get the real scoop, but there has not been a response so far (rather I did get a response that they would love to chat about this, but haven’t heard back since then). Personally, I think India is not really ready for video right now (I might be wrong, but I would not invest my time/money in doing this...
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Announcing iLeher reViews
2006-12-01 03:17:05
I’ve been getting a few requests lately for reviewing new startups in the consumer Internet space. Even though iLeher was not started with this aim initially, I figured it would be still valuable for readers to see reviews of startups/companies offering useful/cool services for users. Of course the usual analysis/commentary style posts will be there (thats what I like writing most). So to streamline the review process, I have come up with iLeher reView s . The way it will work is the following: The owner/promoter of the startup can contact me (madhur at iLeher dot com or use the Review Me link ) for getting their site/service reviewed. I will send a brief questionnaire, which the owner/promoter of the startup will fill and send it back to me. The question-answers will be put up on iLeher reViews. The readers will read these question-answers and vote/comment on these. On a regular basis, I will pick up an active startup/company, if any, in terms of number of votes and comments a...
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No money for early stage ?
2006-12-01 03:17:05
We have asked if India is ready for web2.0 here. Also we raised our concerns about our booming internet industry here. Although we have our doubts about the industry, we are seeing a lot of money flowing into India recently. We saw guruji.com grabbing $7 million and then we saw sulekha getting $10 million and more recently we see that travelguru, the leading travel portal got $15 million. See a comprehensive list of investments here. We have stats and reports of VC firms raising billions of dollars to invest in India. New funds are coming into existence every day raising even more money. But the point to note here is that most of the investments we have seen till date are either late stage in nature or in the companies that mimic proven business models elsewhere. Some of the companies we recently interviewed like redbus here, onyomo here and picsquare here are all still working on angel funding. These companies are more or less in early stage now. The feeling we got after talking to...
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India Strategy Series: Experiment with different services an
2006-12-01 03:17:05
I asked a question last week that generated a lot of discussion. In that post, I had concluded that market is hot and there is definitely a need for some of the Web 2.0 services like online social networking joint, India specific news/media sharing etc. Now how to take these needs and turn them to viable business models with the constraints of operating in Indian market (less Internet penetration, small online ad market) is the interesting aspect of it. There are a lot of players and they are applying different strategies to work through these constraints and make their model more appealing than others. I am talking to some of the players in the market and getting their views on the strategy that they are using and why do they think their model will succeed. In this series, I present one strategy in each post as quoted by these players to me. I do not know how well these strategies are going to work, just bringing them to fore to have discussion around them and see where they go. St...
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Is India ready for Web 2.0 ?
2006-12-01 03:17:05
Depending on who you ask, you will get a lot of cool sounding definitions full of buzz words for Web 2 .0. In simple terms it is a combination of two things: 1. It is about user generated content. Majority of the content on these sites is not from publishers but from users themselves using wikis, blogs, profiles, etc. 2. From technology standpoint, it is about the use of AJAX, which is a combination of Javascript and XML to interact with web server asynchronously, so every time something new needs to be displayed, the whole page does not need to be refreshed. As a result, pages get reloaded quickly and they don’t look clunky like traditional web pages. Turns out that in India we have a bunch of Web 2.0 sites related to social networking, social bookmarking and such. You can find a partial list here. So when you have a Web 2.0 service focused for consumers, where does the money come from? It is all about advertisements. Look at any of the signature Web 2.0 companies in the US li...
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Search engines in different languages, different interfaces
2006-12-01 03:17:05
Search engines seem to be the flavor of this festive season in India. There has been quite a bit of discussion on local search engines in the last couple of weeks with the launch of Guruji.com. We covered that in enough details here and here. Two important things came out of the discussions: Search engines will start indexing and providing ways to search local languages content as they become more and more popular on the web. To get mass users to adopt their service in the shorter term, search engines will need to provide alternate interface such as mobile access. In this post, I bring to light a few services that have taken the first step in doing the above. Note that I am NOT doing a complete review of these services here, I am just highlighting interesting things keeping in mind the above two points. Vernacular search engines Raftaar This is a search engine that indexes Hindi content on the web and provides a way to query Hindi words. It provides two modes of input for entering...
More About: Search Engines , Inter , Faces , Search , Languages

More on Guruji.com - Web search or Local search?
2006-12-01 03:17:05
I first wrote about Guru ji .com the day of the press release on Oct 12th. As expected, there has been a lot of news all over the media and quite a lot of comments/discussions here on iLeher because: 1. It drew comparisons with the media and investors’ darling Google 2. Search is hot (all Internet users today search because of the information overload on the web, and every searcher is unknowingly a potential customer) 3. They are funded by Sequoia - one of the most successful VC firms in Silicon Valley 4. They have a smart and experienced team on board I myself being a software professional working in the field of search, have special interest in the technology and so I have been actively following and participating in various discussions about what could it mean for Indian internet industry. Obviously there has been a lot of speculation whether it will replace Google in India, or just add to the list of previous attempts like byindia.com, khoj.com etc, or they will rule Local s...
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Exclusive interview with redBus.in ? India?s first vertical
2006-12-01 03:17:05
Online ticketing is big. It?s clearly leading the ecommerce industry in India . IRCTC (online railway ticketing) is the biggest player followed by air tickets. Not surprising that there are so many travel portals funded by the biggest VC’s in India. A quick look on Google Trends proves that search volume for tickets is quite significant in India (relative to other countries) Search volume for railway tickets Search volume for air tickets Search volume for bus tickets We had a chat with the three co-founders (Phanindra Sama, Charan Padmaraju and Sudhakar Pasupunuri) of India?s first vertical for online bus tickets called redBus.in. They launched the site just a couple of months back in August 2006 and have already partnered with 30 bus operators in India and are doing great in terms of sales. Below we share their experiences, insights and our thoughts on their business, industry and consumer trends. 1. What inspired you to start this venture? This venture has come out as a resul...
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Your feedback ==> New blog features
2006-12-01 03:17:05
Latest News Over the past few weeks, I got quite some feedback from the readers of iLeher. One of the common ones was that while iLeher carries good analysis type stuff, day to day action/happenings in the industry is not covered. My common reply to this has been that I want this to be more analysis/discussion/detailed oriented blog to foster healthy discussions and create a community to share opinions on interesting stuff that is happening today and where the industry in heading. But recently I came across this neat plugin, using which I can post news links on the side. Look at the “In the News” section on the right hand side of the screen. I will try and regularly link to the latest interesting news in that section. I am not including this section in the feed as I do not want to clutter your feed readers with repetitive news that you may already be getting from other sites (partial list is in the blogroll on the side, will be adding more links there shortly) Feedback ...
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Resources - List of companies and interesting statistics
2006-10-07 09:09:02
Tech entrepreneurship is on a steep rise in India fuelled by huge influx of VC money and a steady increase in the number of internet users. Think of a sector and you will find a bunch of players already trying to cash in on the opportunity. As a result, lot of new Inter net companies are making a mark in the market. To keep track of the latest developments, I’ve added a “Resources ” section to the blog (always linked from the homepage) that has the current list of companies as well interesting statistics. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I plan to keep adding more and more information and keep it updated with the latest developments. Also there are lot of statistics available, but I am quoting only the ones that I think are interesting. If you find anything missing or not adequately covered please leave a comment here or send me mail at madhur at iLeher dot com and I will try to add more info on that section. Your feedback will really motivate me to keep a...
More About: Companies , Interesting , Comp

Project Saksham - Internet PCO
2006-10-07 09:09:02
In 1990, less than 5 million homes in India had telephone connectivity. At that time, I am sure naysayers would have easily doubted the growth of telephones due to cost, illiteracy, majority of rural population etc. But with the introduction of PCO’s (Public Call Offices), the telecom landscape changed completely. Today those yellow black booths are ubiquitious. They are available in every street of every little towns and villages. Cost has come down considerably and more than 300 million people use PCO services. Project Saksham, that is being undertaken by Microsoft and Hughes could bring about the same phenomenon to Inter net penetration. This project plans to set up 5000 broadband enabled Intern et kiosks in India across 200 small towns and villages. The kiosks will be run by local entrepreneurs and will also provide crash course on IT literacy for kiosk operators. I think if the project is executed to the plan, it can bring about a revolution in terms of computer literacy, i...
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Ecommerce roundup - where does online retail stand?
2006-10-07 09:09:02
Bunch of news last week related to developments in the ecommerce industry in India, so I decided to do a quick rundown on the current happenings and present some thoughts. Clearly, the leader is online travel market. You can get a lot of stats here but the bottomline is that it comprises of majority slice of the ecommerce indusy. It is not surprising then, that there are so many players (as many as 8 of them VC/Angel funded) that its already getting overheated for its size. The next two major sectors are matrimony/dating and jobs. Online matrimony sites have recieved a bunch of funding recently from big Silicon valley based VCs. You can read some news here and here. Online job listing sites are also turning out to be quite popular among Indian customers. Monster India has quoted an impressive figure of 1 crore (10 million) registered users, in a country where total number of internet users is estimated to be 37 million (of which only 10 million are “power users”). And th...
More About: Ecommerce , Roundup , Retail , Commerce

Project Nano City
2006-10-07 09:09:02
Couple of days back attended a talk at Stanford by Sabeer Bhatia on planning and development of the “Nano City ” project. This has been in news last week, but he revealed a lot more details in the talk, which I will list here. The impressive thing about this project is of course the grand scale at which it is being planned. The project is much bigger than a typical SEZ, both in terms of the area being planned and the amount of investment planned. The idea of this project is to develop a complete ecosystem that promotes research, innovation and high quality development in high-tech industry. Salient points from the talk: It is a public-private sector partnership between Haryana government and Sabeer Bhatia’s company It is being developed in a place 15 km from Chandigarh in Haryana on a land of around 5,000 acres A world class highway will be construcuted on the 15 km stretch, which will be an investment of $15 million Initially planned population density of th...
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Cybercafes as a tickets distribution channel
2006-10-07 09:09:02
There was a news last week regarding the tie up between Sify and IRCTC. The deal mentions that customers can book railway tickets by paying cash at the Sify Iway locations. This will definitely open a new chapter in the way tickets are sold/distributed. Considering that currently the total revenue from online ticketing for Indian Railways roughly stands at a paltry 2%, the room for growth is huge. At the present time, the only way of booking tickets online is through IRCTC website. With this deal two major barriers are broken: 1. Internet access: Even if you choose the best sounding statistic of 37 million internet users (I say “best sounding” because the number of pepole who actually use the Internet at least once a week is just under 10 million), there are lot more people who are trying to book tickets. Going to cybercafe and paying cash to book ticket is just like going to a travel agent. This essentially means many more railway tickets “travel agents” at ...
More About: Distribution , Tickets , Cyber , Cafes , Cafe

Cybercafes as a tickets distribution channel
2006-10-06 21:06:05
There was a news last week regarding the tie up between Sify and IRCTC. The deal mentions that customers can book railway tickets by paying cash at the Sify Iway locations. This will definitely open a new chapter in the way tickets are sold/distributed. Considering that currently the total revenue from online ticketing for Indian Railways roughly stands at a paltry 2%, the room for growth is huge. At the present time, the only way of booking tickets online is through IRCTC website. With this deal two major barriers are broken: 1. Internet access: Even if you choose the best sounding statistic of 37 million internet users (I say “best sounding” because the number of pepole who actually use the Internet at least once a week is just under 10 million), there are lot more people who are trying to book tickets. Going to cybercafe and paying cash to book ticket is just like going to a travel agent. This essentially means many more railway tickets “travel agents” at ...
More About: Distribution , Tickets , Cyber , Cafes , Cafe

Project Nano City
2006-10-06 21:06:05
Couple of days back attended a talk at Stanford by Sabeer Bhatia on planning and development of the “Nano City ” project. This has been in news last week, but he revealed a lot more details in the talk, which I will list here. The impressive thing about this project is of course the grand scale at which it is being planned. The project is much bigger than a typical SEZ, both in terms of the area being planned and the amount of investment planned. The idea of this project is to develop a complete ecosystem that promotes research, innovation and high quality development in high-tech industry. Salient points from the talk: It is a public-private sector partnership between Haryana government and Sabeer Bhatia’s company It is being developed in a place 15 km from Chandigarh in Haryana on a land of around 5,000 acres A world class highway will be construcuted on the 15 km stretch, which will be an investment of $15 million Initially planned population density of th...
More About: Project

Ecommerce roundup - where does online retail stand?
2006-10-06 21:06:05
Bunch of news last week related to developments in the ecommerce industry in India, so I decided to do a quick rundown on the current happenings and present some thoughts. Clearly, the leader is online travel market. You can get a lot of stats here but the bottomline is that it comprises of majority slice of the ecommerce indusy. It is not surprising then, that there are so many players (as many as 8 of them VC/Angel funded) that its already getting overheated for its size. The next two major sectors are matrimony/dating and jobs. Online matrimony sites have recieved a bunch of funding recently from big Silicon valley based VCs. You can read some news here and here. Online job listing sites are also turning out to be quite popular among Indian customers. Monster India has quoted an impressive figure of 1 crore (10 million) registered users, in a country where total number of internet users is estimated to be 37 million (of which only 10 million are “power users”). And th...
More About: Ecommerce , Roundup , Retail , Commerce

Project Saksham - Internet PCO
2006-10-06 21:06:05
In 1990, less than 5 million homes in India had telephone connectivity. At that time, I am sure naysayers would have easily doubted the growth of telephones due to cost, illiteracy, majority of rural population etc. But with the introduction of PCO’s (Public Call Offices), the telecom landscape changed completely. Today those yellow black booths are ubiquitious. They are available in every street of every little towns and villages. Cost has come down considerably and more than 300 million people use PCO services. Project Saksham, that is being undertaken by Microsoft and Hughes could bring about the same phenomenon to Inter net penetration. This project plans to set up 5000 broadband enabled Intern et kiosks in India across 200 small towns and villages. The kiosks will be run by local entrepreneurs and will also provide crash course on IT literacy for kiosk operators. I think if the project is executed to the plan, it can bring about a revolution in terms of computer literacy, i...
More About: Sham

Resources - List of companies and interesting statistics
2006-10-06 21:06:05
Tech entrepreneurship is on a steep rise in India fuelled by huge influx of VC money and a steady increase in the number of internet users. Think of a sector and you will find a bunch of players already trying to cash in on the opportunity. As a result, lot of new Inter net companies are making a mark in the market. To keep track of the latest developments, I’ve added a “Resources ” section to the blog (always linked from the homepage) that has the current list of companies as well interesting statistics. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I plan to keep adding more and more information and keep it updated with the latest developments. Also there are lot of statistics available, but I am quoting only the ones that I think are interesting. If you find anything missing or not adequately covered please leave a comment here or send me mail at madhur at iLeher dot com and I will try to add more info on that section. Your feedback will really motivate me to keep a...
More About: Companies , Interesting , Comp