Happy Diwali & Happy New Year
Here’s wishing you all a Happy Diwali & a Prosperous New Year. The last several months, since we launched this blog on Jan 26th, 2006, have seen a tremendous startup activity in the Indian market with a really interesting set of compoanies being started by an equally interesting set of entreprenuers. If I could broadly generalize, we are seeing a lot of recent grads taking the plunge and this is unprecedented. Let us hope it results in unprecedented upside for India 2.0: the big®evolution of the Indian online industry. Cheers!
October 22nd, 2006
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Vaibhav Domkundwar
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Miscellaneous
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4 Comments
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Hurray?
The recent Internet usage report from the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International presented an interesting insight on the consumer internet market numbers, which is close to our heart. Highlight: Internet users in India have reached 37 million this September – up from 33 million in March 2006. During the same period, the number of “active users” moved up to 25 million in September from 21.1 million in March. This is encouraging. If you are building for the users in the metros mainly (true with a lot of startups), the market is just over 10mn users? That sucks! This sucks more: “Active User” is an internationally-accepted and widely-used category to define users who have used the Internet at least once in the last 30 days. This is inline with what we have been assuming: According to the findings, youth are the main drivers of internet usage in India. This was a really insightful study though and it helps to understand the target market better. I think there are clear niches in this market and when building a consumer web service, focusing on these niches will be key. More here.
October 20th, 2006
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Vaibhav Domkundwar
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Market Numbers
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6 Comments
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Indian DEMO!
The Indian startup community and ecosystem is really growing rapidly in the past few months. After the series of barcamps in Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Pune, now a group of really interesting folks who did the first barcamp in Chennai are putting together what can be considered the DEMO of India: Proto. There is not much information on it right now (I just emailed the admin email they had to ask) but Amit covered the event earlier in his post. DEMO has grown to be one of the premier events to launch a startup here in the US, so the Proto folks will really have to do a lot of work to choose the best startups and create a similar brand. I am definitely looking forward to it and we will definitely be applying, though we are not really raising money anytime soon.
October 14th, 2006
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Vaibhav Domkundwar
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Miscellaneous
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1 Comment
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Search for the Baidu of India
There is a lot of discussion around an India-specific search opportunity. I believe it may be largely motivated by the immense success of Baidu in China which is leading the Big G in terms of search market share. As I read through some recent funding blog posts of guruji and a range of comments and remarks relating the opportunity to Baidu, I wondered if I am missing anything basic here. The reality of the small Indian online market is that majority of the online users are comfortable with english and, I believe, may not have ever wanted to search in marathi or hindi or telugu or tamil. So if one has to consider english search for India-related content, I think the need/technology/features are all covered fairly well by Google, Yahoo and MSN and I know of atleast one of them who has a focused initiative to bolster its India-specific search. Others will follow as soon as they see the market growing. Baidu’s unique strength was that they had built their search engine technology optimized to search in chinese, an opportunity that is non-existent in India. Secondly, it is not trivial to crawl the web and identify just India specific content. Anyone who is close to the search engine technology will confirm on that. Without a clear large problem to solve, which Baidu had, I really wonder if this India-specific search opportunity is even there, in the first place. Having said that, I do think there is definitey local/vertical search opportunity in India which we are considering at Lava, a search applications company. Lack of quality local and other vertical content may be a challenge as well as an opportunity for local search and it will be interesting to see if new content plays emerge to address this gap.
October 14th, 2006
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Vaibhav Domkundwar
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Miscellaneous
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3 Comments
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Painful downtime
It has been a really tough last few days tackling the backend issues for indiagoes as the data size grew, the auto tagging processes ate up CPU time and we had to scramble to optimize the backend, add server space and fine tune it further. Sometimes you really cannot prepare for or anticipate such issues. Nevertheless when they come uninvited it helps to test your teams capabilities and understand the strenghts and weaknesses. We surely have. indiagoes is very much back to its usual self (should load much faster as before) and we are continuing to make the backend more robust to optimally handle the auto tagging and personalization load. Let us know if you face any problems and keep spreading the word.
October 14th, 2006
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Vaibhav Domkundwar
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Miscellaneous indiagoes
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No Comments
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indiagoes blossoms
A few minutes back we rolled out the 1.0 version of indiagoes with all the features that we have been working on for the past several months to make news easy and fast. We strived hard to keep the user experience very simple and questioned every feature that we decided to show to you, the user. Our emphasis has been on keeping the backend technology at the back, however rich it may be, and to only surface the aspects that are most meaningful to you, as you spend a few minutes everyday to browse the news and catch up. Thats the essense of indiagoes – simulating that morning news paper reading experience with a cup of coffee, online. I will let you review the new version without any bias and will look forward to feedback and comments. Be sure to check out what’s new with this brand new version update. The images below capture the newness as closely as it gets. Enjoy!
August 10th, 2006
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Vaibhav Domkundwar
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indiagoes
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1 Comment
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indiagoes (not) at barcampHyderabad2
A long silence on our blog and the reason for that is just overwhelming amount of heads-down work, coding and designing and evolving the next update of indiagoes. We are almost there and will be releasing the next big update in the coming couple of weeks (or earlier). If you went to barcamp Hyderabad[2], then you almost saw a sneak preview. Rajat told me a couple weeks back that barcampHyderabad2 is being planned for the 15th and we thought it’ll be cool to present a sneak preview of whats coming and get some feedback. Unfortunately, due to deadlines and travel plans, none of our team members from Pune were going to be making it to Hyd. I almost gave up on the thought, before I asked and Rajat very kindly and graciously stepped up to do a demo of indiagoes, on our behalf (Thanks a ton, Rajat)! That put us on a deadline, and Pratik and Vikram worked to get all the loose ends tied just in the nick of time for me to give an overview of indiagoes to Rajat at 9:05AM on the morning of the 15th. I was in my car driving up 101 North and explaining context extraction, auto-tagging and our recommendation algorithm to Rajat. We got it all together and Rajat was set and Pratik and Vikram found time for a deep breath. Me too, though I was policing and QA-ing more than working But like Murphy’s Law says – “if it can go wrong, it will go wrong” – and we experienced it first hand. Internet refused to work at the barcamp location and Rajat was not able to do the demo. I got a note from him the next morning and he was very apologetic. Hey, come on, you couldn’t have done anything. I really appreciated that you stepped up to do the demo for us in the first place. So well, here’s the sneak preview that missed its chance to be live at the event. Take a look and let us know your thoughts and comments: indiagoes Sneak Preview
July 17th, 2006
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Vaibhav Domkundwar
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Miscellaneous indiagoes barcamphyderabad barcamphyderabad2
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No Comments
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Password: barcamphyd
(Note that the initial page load time will be high as it is on our staging server and Beware of Bugs!)
barcampPune is happening now…
barcampPune is happening now at Symphony Services in Aundh, Pune. The organizers did an awesome job of spreading the word and there is an impressive list of presentations scheduled and upwards of 150 attendees registered. Stay tuned for the updates! UPDATE: Check out the action at barcampPune here at Neil’s flickr photostream. I will be posting later today about our indiagoes presentation outlining some of the cool things that are coming up!
June 17th, 2006
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Vaibhav Domkundwar
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Miscellaneous
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1 Comment
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Community comments and inputs
I read this interesting piece on Amit’s blog and discovered The War for News blog earlier this week. War for News has a lot of intereting content and really seems to be bringing out some good critic for the MSM, but I think it does get gossipy and repetitive if you continue reading through the archives. The most interesting part was the number of comments on each of the posts. I think this was one of few indian blogs I have seen which has drawn so much commenting – user interaction & contribution, the way we like to define it. Impressive! This suggests that War for News has gathered a community around it and there’s nothing more valuable than that. But wait a second. As I read through most of the comments, I realized that – (1) comments were more in number for posts that were inherently gossip centric (2) most comments seemed shallow and either applauding the post or trashing it, without reason (3) several comments seemed that they came from the same people or people related to the person written about and lastly (4) almost all comments were anonymous. I guess this is okay for War for News, as the author himself is blogging anonymously. However, I started to think more about whether or not the Indian user base (beyond the bloggers, that is) is ready for some quality conversation with comments and contribution. Do they care to contribute? Do they want to contribute? Maybe they are more interested in the consumption of content, than contribution of it. This has been a topic of discussion at Better Labs, as we are building the next big update to indiagoes. We have been considering adding user contribution related functionality (which is all ready and tested) to indiagoes but have decided against it for now. The reason being that the larger percentage of the Indian online news consumption userbase is, we believe, more inneed of consumption than contribution. So we are going to let them consume news, in the simplest, easiest, fastest and most comprehensive manner first, and then slowly add the richer community and contribution features. Let us know what you think.
June 8th, 2006
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Vaibhav Domkundwar
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indiagoes design social plays
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2 Comments
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SINE
I just read this interesting BusinessWeek article on SINE, the incubator at IIT Bombay. SINE is a great example of how the leading engineering and management schools in India can encourage entrenrenuership. But reading the article, I could not stop thinking how it was sounding like hollow PR, as echoed by one of the comments:
May 28th, 2006
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Vaibhav Domkundwar
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Miscellaneous
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No Comments
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I am unable to figure out
.. Is this a article to promote IIT and the services provided by them or another stunt to promote an …
So I looked up the SINE website and went through the list of companies. Without really researhcing them further I cannot comment, but it was evident that there is no really big and successful company that had come out of this incubator as yet. There are a few other points I noticed: – The names of almost all companies sounded like they really needed to be changed – very difficult to remember, write or say them. This is a big point when you consider selling in a global market and its a big mistake to ignore this. – I visited the websites of a couple of companies and found that the messaging was poor, at best. It barely sounded like a product company message and definitely not something that would leave a mark for potential customer in the US, for example – considering that they are targeting a global market. – Broken links on website, management team pages that did not list the team members and their qualifications.
I thought all this seemed really strange for companies that are vying to sell to a global audience and are being incubated in a reputed institution. I am not sure what the reason for this may be. It definitely looks like they need a marketing uplift across the board. I am going to look at these companies further, but looking back the BusinessWeek article does seem very hollow.
I also think that this statement below is so wrong and hope venture capitalists know better:
SINE is also a one-stop shop for venture capitalists looking for smart ideas coming out of India.
Give me one example! There are a lot of interesting companies and ideas that are breeding well outside the IIT connection and the next few years will make it clearer. Lets give due credit to the IITs, but lets not diminish the innovation that is and will be happening outside of the IITs.
