StartupDunia

TechTribe is one of the first professional networking sites to be launched in India. Last year, they secured funding from Canaan Partners, amongst other VC’s.

I’d hardly visited their site ever. Till yesterday, that is. Yesterday, it came to my attention that they are engaging in shoddy act of content piracy - not just content from StartupDunia but lot of other blogs as well.

Here’s how it works - registered users can sign up to blog feeds as part of their profile/dashboard. And instead of showing a small summary of the blog feed, TechTribe displays the entire story in such a spurious manner that it seems as if the TechTribe user has published the story.

See the screenshot below for an example. One of my recent blog posts shows up as if its “published by” some Ranvir Batra.

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iBibo owned Dwaar has launched a travel aggregator, which gets flight information from different airlines and OTA’s. They crawl data from various airline sites, Ezeego, Cleartrip, Travelguru, MakeMyTrip and Yatra but since the last two days, MakeMyTrip and Yatra have blocked their crawler. After displaying the results, users are redirected to the parent site for booking the flight. While the site works fine in IE, it failed to render correctly in Firefox.Its good to have such additional meta engines in the Indian travel market, which has been flooded with airlines and OTAs. I used ixiGo extensively during my recent India travel and was pretty darn pleased with the whole experience.

I’ve been procastinating to write this post for a long time now. However, when I read about Sulekha’s IPO plans for 2009, I knew there just wouldnt be a better time.

As per a BS story, Sulekha plans to launch an IPO in 2009 targetting revenues of $ 30 million. The company is also planning to expand services to 40 new Tier II & Tier III cities in India. They currently serve 8 Indian cities, 14 cities in the US and one in Canada.

Wow !! From its fluke, humble beginnings to an impending IPO. Sulekha has definitely come a long way in a short span of time. As a regular Sulekha user, I’ve personally witnessed the transitions it has gone through over the past few years and wanted to chime in.

Sulekha was founded in 2001, during the post-bubble era. It originated as a place for people to post short stories and showcase their creative writing skills. With time, the popularity, usage and traffic to the site grew. The site soon developed a strong, loyal user base who spent a large amount of their online time on Sulekha, generating what is, one of the biggest user generated online Indian content repositories.

Soon, Sulekha launched classifieds, which was a huge hit with the US based NRI population. There was a pressing need for such a service, with a nation wide reach, amongst the burgeoning Indian population in the US. At its peak, Sulekha classifieds served 32 + cities across US and Canada. The company transitioned from a pure content focussed site into a city portal covering city specific classifieds, events and even ticket bookings for events.

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ByIndia.com was recently put up for auction on eBay.
The auction ended on February 29th with zero bids received. Apparently, there were no takers for this “start Indian social media network”.

Erick@Techcrunch had an interesting post - The Internet from a global perspective. While US had the maximum number of Internet users (161.6 million), China was catching up fast (96 million).

With a user base of 25.2 million users, India came in at the 8th position. We (me included) keep whining about how Internet penetration in India is still negligible, but if you look at it from a global perspective, even with the pitiful penetration, we managed to come in at number 8. If the penetration increases by only 10% this year (wishful thinking), we’ll very easily jump two places in this list.

If you see the above penetration in terms of percentage of population, the table looks like below:

US - 53 %

china - 7.2 %

japan - 42.3%

germany - 40%

uk - 53.3%

france - 43.2%

south korea - 53%

India - 2.23%

And you can see exactly why China and India offer such a huge room for growth. The world’s most populous nations and the Internet penetration is still in single digits. Thanks to the forward looking communist regime, China is making tremendous progress in the Internet front (disregarding the online censorship, ‘great firewall’ etc.). Sadly, such aggressive efforts are still missing in India. The Indian Government’s initiative last year - “2007 - year of the broadband” was a big disappointment. Subscriber base grew at a much slower rate than projected. We need to act & act fast.

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If there’s one Indian site that has been executing exceptionally well since the Web 1.0 days, its undoubtedly MouthShut.com. Since inception, they’ve constantly innovated and evolved and over time, have amassed a huge,huge number of user generated reviews. Not to mention the strong community that has developed on the site. Never mind if they dont get as many blog mentions as some of the more newer startups.

So, why should someone buy MouthShut ?

As per a recent survey by Nielsen, 73% of Internet accessing Indians trust online user reviews over other means of advertising. That is more than advertising on TV, radio, magazines and search engine / online banner ads. Considering that MouthShut is the main (and probably only) consumer reviews site for the Indian subcontinent, you can only imagine how much influence it yields on the average, online, Indian user.

So, who should buy MouthShut ?

Amongst the international players, I’d say Yahoo, MSN, eBay and AOL. Yahoo has always been a proponent of community building, but considering the recent turmoil surrounding Yahoo, I’d say they have other things on their mind. MSN and AOL are both laggards when it comes to their Indian presence. Buying MouthShut would give them a good boost in terms of traffic, community and a decent competitive edge over Google and Yahoo. Of course, buying MouthShut would make the most sense for eBay, since MouthShut strategically fits very well into Shopping.com, the reviews site owned by eBay.

Amongst the home grown portals, I’d say HT Media should seriously consider it - they’ve been lagging the other Indian portals as far as their online strategy goes. Since they’re playing catch up, they might as well consider growing inorganically.

I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Cleartrip has raised an additional $ 18.5 million in a third round of funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. DFJ provided $ 10 million in the round while the rest came from the Mahindra Group and the earlier investors.

This brings the total investment in Cleartrip to $ 30. 2 million.

via release

Microsoft has launched its digital advertising platform in India. India is the only country outside of US, where the company has launched the service.

As per Rajnish, India head, MS Digital Advertising Solutions, “The total advertising market in India is of $5 billion. But the online advertising market is still minuscule. We find there is enough scope (for growth).We expect the online advertising market to capture two to three per cent of the total advertising market in as many years.”

BollywoodHungama, Equity Master, HDFC Securities and Facebook have been roped in for the launch. NDTV Media is the exclusive sales partner for Microsoft. I’m not sure if outsourcing the ad sales to an outside entity is such a good idea. A similar attempt by Sify last year, already flopped. (Update: I missed out that the MSN-NDTV relationship has been in place for some time now).

As per NDTV Media COO, Niraj Dutt, they plan to have 750 advertisers on the platform by end of the calendar year.

Hmm..Rediff could rope in only 230 advertisers in the last quarter - do you think 750 is an achievable target till the rest of the year ?

via ET

Around an year back, ByIndia announced free participation to its $5 million sweepstakes for anyone who registers on their site. They also claimed to be “India’s fastest growing search engine and social networking site”.

Boy, have things changed over the last year or what.

Today, they announced that the site has been put up for auction at eBay.

The starting bid has been set at $0.5 million and you can follow the auction (and place your own bid) here.

I guess, we’ll soon have to start our own equivalent of the deadpool.

New to join the bandwagon of portals catering to the “Indian Woman”  is MemSaab.  As you’d expect, it has  stuff related to fashion, relationships,  health & pregnancy, careers  and celebrities.  The site is moderately populated in terms of content and the design  is nothing to write home about.

Add Memsaab to the rest of the list - PinkVilla, SitaGita, IndiWo, StyleKandy.

When it comes to websites catering to women, I’d like to see the PopSugar model emulated in India. It started out as a blog - and now includes and entire network of sites — each addressing a particular topic.