A recent article - "India 2.0" in San Jose Mercury news (one of the better newspapers in the the Silicon Valley) got my attention. I was enthused to see that a major US newspaper carried a multi page portrayal of the Indian entrepreneurial spirit and recognized India's effort to move up the value chain to create global brands and businesses.
When I came to US in 1999, we guys used to joke that there will be a day when foreigners will come to India on H1 kind of visa to work and seems like that it is already happening. People from different countries are coming to India chasing their dreams for the next world changing start up, off course a large cheap pool of engineers does play a big role in their planning to set up their garage offices in India.
Anyways the article prompted me to surf net for what kind of ideas are brewing in Indian garages. It is a mixed bag, while some are original & creative, others are mere copy-paste of successful western sites.Some have even literally translated the name. Netflix clones which number at least half a dozen range from ClixFlix, CatchFlix etc and You Tube clones like MeraVideo, Apnatube, VideoDubba are all over the place.
One of the site that got my attention was a search engine called "Guruji.com" which has an interface exactly like Google and is also venture backed by the same firm Sequoia Capital and one of the founders of Bazee - Suvir Sujan. It does searches within Indian context but I am not sure what differentiates it from major players like Google, yahoo etc which can or already have features to have content sensitive searches. Maybe the crawlers work in a different way and I will love to know more about that. Off course Sequoia Capital might have plans to merge it with Google like they did with You Tube.
Off course there are whole buffet of B2C e-commerce sites being opened that are selling all kind of wares, travel, vacation etc. These will form the first layer of the stack and next might be the sites that collate results from these web sites to make Shopping.com and Sidestep.com of the Indian world.
It is really an exciting time for India, similar to the one US had in late 90;s when everything was a dot com. Off course majority of these will fail to reach sustainable revenue stream but there are lot of good original ideas that can and in due time make true global brands. A lot of American management gurus have opined that it will be hard for India to make global brands like Yahoo, Google as it lacks the top management who are marketing mavericks. I dis-agree with that, companies like Wipro, Reliance, Infosys are examples of the capabilities of Indian top management.
Intention of the this blog is to collectively exchange ideas on Indian startups and entrepreneurial buzz to fuel the eco-system through our thoughts.
Cheers
