Red Alert for Orkut.com in India

Popular Star News program called “Red Alert”, recently directly targeted the most popular heavily used Social Networking website in India - Orkut, with a 20 minute long dramatic report. They had some very alarming and disturbing facts about how criminals, drug users and people were using Orkut.com for sex, drugs, criminal acts and to […]

People Interactive aiming for 2009 IPO. Whats the catch?

I’ve been reading a lot about People Interactive aiming to go IPO in 2009 - either in the domestic market or on NASDAQ. The main reason their executives say is to have money to acquire other players in the area for faster growth… the goal is to finance acquisitions in the online classifieds and communities […]

India Local Search - An Overview

As mentioned in my previous posting, it looks like local search is heating up with the entry of Google Local India. It seems that Google preferred not to acquire any of the leading players in the market - but preferred to use its muscle to fight directly instead of gaining an advantage by teaming up. […]

Local Search Heats up with Google Local India

The local search market is heating up with the latest entry of Google Local India. For some industry pundits, it seemed that Google would simply gobble up and acquire one of the current players in the market amongst - JustDial, Onyomo, Dwaar, Zook, Laila, Burrp and Guruji - which wouldn’t have been a surprise to […]

Redherring Asia 2007 - flaws in Indian nominees

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about blatant errors made by Business2.0 in their August 2007 issue… and my blog got picked up by Techcrunch’s Arrington who found similar errors in the same article in countries overseas. This time Redherring has made some incorrect nominees (in my opinion).
There are at least 5 companies that […]

my.indiatimes.com - whats the point?

Why on earth would anyone use my.indiatimes.com when there are countless other better personalized homepages out there with global rss feeds and better features. I still dont get what the strategists behind ideas at IndiaTimes online initiative are up to. They seem to wake up late, just like a lot of other dot com Indian […]

An analysis of Indian Social Networks

Every week we get to see a new India specific Social Network springing up. Many of them will fail miserably, and a few may somewhat succeed, but probably just a couple will wildly succeed. While, I admire the fact that some of the big names are taking this huge step and some big names are […]

Indian Social Networks. Whats going on?

Every week we hear of yet another India specific Social network being setup and launched. Many of them with big media budgets and deep pockets - throwing a slew of TV advertisements at us.
Some of it just doesn’t make sense. Are we going back to the Bubble1.0? Or is there a true hidden pot of […]

Indiatimes re-launches web mail - following the crowd… very late

I recently wrote about the ZapakMail venture being a terrible move by Reliance - a very high cash burn with not much value add. It just didn’t make any sense to do, and Alexa ranking and traffic figures confirmed my point. There’s not much value in providing a “local” flavor of web mail.
Now, Indiatimes has […]

The Internet Matrimonial Market Roundup

An oligopoly of 4 matrimonial sites is dominating this market and controlling probably 90% of it. Matrimonial sites tend to be of serious nature - and people and families that are less conservative are targetted by the service providers. The typical user of online local and dating services is not the right target user and […]