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The Indian Internet landscape

May 9, 2007 · Posted in India Web 2.0, India portals, comparison

There is a lot happening in the Indian Internet landscape. New portals are emerging, existing players ramping up services, exciting new startups going live.

Here’s my effort at creating a taxonomy:

The Portals segment is definitely seeing some action lately:

Yahoo launched two new services during David Filo’s visit to India
AOL launched their portal for Indian market
MSN plans to become more aggressive and launches MSN Contribute and MSN Debate
Rediff launches free unlimited email storage
Google News now in Hindi

The News and Infotainment sites are going through a makeover phase - with several of them including NDTV, TimesofIndia, HindustanTimes getting a facelift.

Not a lot of news coming in from the E-commerce and Banking-Finance segment.

The verticals segment is seeing all sorts of action - from emergence of new segments (auto,real estate) to PR wars between players to major VC money being pumped into some others (travel):

PR Wars between Naukri and TimesJobs
BharatMatrimony knocks on Supreme court against MRTPC order brought in by Shaadi
VC funding frenzy in the Indian travel portal market

The community - Social networking space is also generating a lot of buzz recently:

Ibibo launches Cafe Ibibo
IndyaRocks makes beta launch
MingleBox gets $7 million from Sequoia
Orkut plans to offer Indian languages

The segment that comprises of the rest of the Web2.0 sites is also growing fast, with a whole lot of exciting new startups launching in recent times.

On the whole, I think its the upper and lower portions of the pyramid that are seeing and generating majority of the buzz. The activity towards the upper half of the pyramid is more radical and game changing. While the activity towards the lower half is more subtle - like introducing new services, cosmetic changes etc. Of course, this is based on which part of the evolutionary curve they fall into. Portals have become stable and mature while the verticals, SNS and the Web2.0 space are still taking shape.

With this rough classification of the Indian Internet landscape, we now need to cross-pollinate it with the technology adoption life-cycle graph. The portals, infotainment and e-commerce sites have already reached a majority, when it comes to user adoption (in other words, they’ve crossed the chasm). Indian Web 2.0 is still in its infancy and a lot will depend on the shoulders of the early adopter crowds.

But I’ll save this for another post later during the week.

PS - Any incoherence in the grammar-sentences needs to be pardoned. I’m mentally exhausted.

(No Ratings Yet)

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Comments

5 Responses to “The Indian Internet landscape”

Abhinav on May 10th, 2007 12:47 am

Yahoo! mail also now offers unlimited email storage. BTW, did you check, Reliance’s bigadda.com is launched.
pranav on May 11th, 2007 12:10 am

Yep..Have already checked BigAdda.com - nothing great..
Rita on May 14th, 2007 2:46 am

Well i came across this news aggregation site for India - really liked it. Simple.
http://www.netreputation.co.uk/directory/india
Amit on May 14th, 2007 6:13 am

I came across this exclusive classifieds portal called rakoFi recently. I think its a pretty good start. They have only offered rakoFi’s to select group of organizations.

http://www.rakofi.com
India Internet statistics on June 18th, 2007 12:11 am

[...] In an earlier post, I attempted to create a taxonomy of the Indian Internet websites. If you plot this taxonomy against the technology adoption life cycle graph, we can try to roughly estimate where exactly each class of Indian websites lie on the tech adoption life cycle graph. [...]