iLeher - All about interenet industry in India

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4

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