India Today has a cover story on Wired Generation – dont know whether its humor or satire of India’s most respect editorial team to have claimed “most of India’s 200 million middle class homes now have computers”! And this is a managing editor… not once but twice in the same article!
Now just wait and watch entrepreneurs use this “fact” in their pitches 🙂
Latest posts by Alok Mittal (see all)
- Promoters or Entrepreneurs – A choice for Private Equity players - August 3, 2019
- Startup Marathon Mindset - March 25, 2019
- What’s your Customer Culture? - March 4, 2019
In big cities the trend of cyber cafes seems to indeed be on the decline as compared to a few years ago: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/297520.cms. But this is not quite so, from my experience, in places near colleges like Mt Carmels – if the cafes are losing business it’s because of the competition. With computers becoming so cheap and broadband being inexpensive, new cafes can offer lower rates and better stuff like flat panel monitors etc. at the same prices.
The article still says:
” While this is the case in the metropolitan cities, in smaller towns the business is flourishing”.
Here’s some more figures: http://www.iamai.in/section.php3?secid=15&press_id=1357&mon=11
It seems like about 4 million people (collated from the percentages and divided appropriately) access the net from home. In delhi and blore, 42% overall still use Cyber Cafes, and the collated figure for cyber cafes overall is 4.8 million. That’s quite up there with my original assessment of 2 million Internet connected PCs at home (2 people per “home”)
What’s dissapointing is the percentage of internet commerce users in the last graph: added up, the figure comes to less than 400,000 people. That’s the market. And the rupees spent is dismal at the moment: http://www.iamai.in/IAMAI_ECommerce.html – but you know what, this is a huge growth opportunity. 15 years, and we will be right there. I don’t mind the wait, really; but VCs will, I think. What the heck, time to bootstrap.
ok Ram, since you have told me not to tell you all the important stuff, let me make some up 🙂
As a VC, you get to see a breadth of whats happening, in my case, globally. It also gives great exposure to hundreds of entrepreneurs, and fairly detailed view of companies and entrepreneurs one is engaged with. As an entrepreneur, one is , correctly, very focussed on one problem.
Actually, VCs can land up calling shots, but they never want to do it with high quality entrepreneurs. Remember that if VCs are calling shots, something is already going wrong.
Alok,
Sorry for going a bit out of context but i have this question which you are in a position to answer.
Why do entrepreneurs become VCs ?
And please don’t tell me “its about giving back to community and stuff”.
Is it because as an entrepreneur one gets to see that it is the VCs who call the shots and finally walk away with the money (in most of the cases) or are you going to say that VCs are also entrepreneurs and stuff ?
Rediff run a story on the decline of cybercafes sometime back
From one of the owners of cybercafes below quote.
“Now, everybody has broadband connection at home. They do the chatting and surfing at home. With Wi-Fi, even the floating crowd got reduced. Those who come to cafes are mainly the floating crowd, and not those who live here. I don’t know what the future of Net cafes is,” Kothari sighs.
Till recently, he used to get families who wanted to talk to and see – through microphones and web cam — their sons and daughters abroad.
“Now, many of these families have all these gadgets at home. So, the number of such customers also has come down.”
http://specials.rediff.com/news/2005/nov/25cybersld4.htm
Funny, I notice this discussion. Just saw the cover page of India today while walking in the mall. Almost was going to buy the mag, but now looking at the discussion, it was a good idea I didn’t buy it.
Serious journalism in India is still ways behind.
Now the question of 200m households is quite a bogus figure, because the definition of middle class itself is quite complicated in India. anyone earning atleast 10k a month could be considered middle class, because they are above the poor & below poverty line who earn much less than that. Those who earn more than 50k would be upper middleclass, and so on.
Also, my own observation has been that I am seeing some decrease in the number of cybercafes. I don’t have figures, but just from 2001 to 2005, its not that easy to find cybercafes as it used to be.