Sunday, March 16, 2008

Web2.0 Startups –Indian Edition

Having a candid conversation with a friend the other day, I realized he was quitting his prestigious job at Credit Suisse NY to move back to India to materialize his dotcom dream.

What is that the Web can do for you? In this Web second edition what is otherwise known as the Web 2.0, there are certainly clear winners (lets call them Flickr, Facebook and Utube) with great potential for future revenues even though their profitability or business model is still being questioned very much. Some of my friends seem to have gone absolutely head over heels crazy for this Web stardom, not that I have not! They have tread another step further and left their secure jobs in the biggest cities around the globe to have their own web startup in India after listening to that inner voice deep down. I firmly believe one of them is surely going to do a Sabeer Bhatia or a Larry Page flick very soon. How good it is to be Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard educated wiz kid who started Facebook only to realize i its now worth close to $750 million?

One should not forget the fact that many startups that go belly up for every Facebook or Google to emerge. It is very confounding at times to note how startups survive the initial hiccups and have different approaches to profit route. Well, after the initial thrust, one has to certainly look out for a model to channel in some kind of profits rather than just run the footnote Google ads.

But, I have been so enticed recently to the world of Dot.com every since Nokia, the company that I work for completely changed the corporate structure as a Dotcom company and acquired Ovi.com and twango.com Even the grand old Rupert Murdoch, believes the dotcom is the way of the future for News Corp,proving it with his recent online shopping of myspace.com.

The question now is how far can we stretch this Web, going forward?

Given the fact there are going to be some real smart bodies at ISB, it will be exciting to swap ideas looking towards a venture. www.lootstreet.com is a new startup that gained sufficient media attention just because it was by IIM grads, even the home page proudly paints the IIM story. I am very sure ISB too has big ones coming in the class of 2009. Some of the Indian startups I will be watching closely some exciting ones here in the near future

www.loandukaan.com

www.aisapaisa.com

www.lootstreet.com

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