Looks like the winter chill is catching up with Venturewoods. Was at the contentsutra mixer couple of days back, and the participation seemed to be good.
One thing that I have been thinking about is the set of online businesses that are ripe for indian market. In 1999-2000 the dotcom boom lasted only 3 months in India, and as such, some ideas and teams that might have had merit could not get funded. Five years later, a lot of interest is coming back. One set of ideas are clearly around “concept arbitrage” — bring and localize ideas that have been successful elsewhere. JobsAhead was an example of this, so was Baazee. Some examples of obvious holes:
1. Online consumer travel. Makemytrip got funded few months back, and I hear some others have funding too. This space is getting competitive. Are there models which people are not looking at but are valuable? A travelog site for example (check out my Leh travelog).
2. Ecommerce — there is still no amazon.com equivalent in India. I still buy most books I need from amazon, and pay $7-8 per book for shipping. And I spend around $500 per year doing this. Firstandsecond and Fabmall started with promise but (imho) succumbed to low funding and premature entry (though I believe, both sites are still there and may make a comeback).
Horizontal portals are taking some of this action away, in travel, in ecommerce and so on. But, focussed brands will have potential.
Would love to hear about big ideas waiting to happen in India (either concept arbitrage, or otherwise)… Any thoughts?
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Hi
Though the Internet is overcrowded with Indian matrimonial and dating sites, I think there’s still room for something more focused or localised, as in matchmaking sites targeted at a certain community or caste or dating sites for denizens of a particular town or city.
Another thought that crossed my mind: Net penetration in India is still very low compared to the US or the UK. But it is 100 per cent in the IT sector. Together with aspiring techies (college grads-to-be), the number is in the league of millions. What about sites that cater exclusively to this segment? Something like the online certification course site started by 3 IIT students? I think there is opportunity here.
Facebook India — see http://www.yaari.com/
Lack of business model is still a critical issue…
I think that something like Facebook will also be popular here. After all, most colleges nowadays also have an internet connection…
Hi http://www.nbcindia.com is another strong book portal i have seen consistent on delivering on time and having books of all coverage and requirement. They need more capital to have a greater push towards indian e-commerce market.
Hi everyone
How about reseller web hosting services? I think the demand for hosting is only going to increase in the coming years. The top Indian web hosting companies currently charge the moon. It makes a lots of sense for India-based resellers of US-based hosts to get into the picture and grab some of the action, since storage and bandwidth are dreadfully cheap there compared to India.
PS: I’m an entrepreneur too. My company’s done some pioneering work in regional language computing. Check out my web site, friends.