Monday, June 06, 2005

Fifth anniversary of dotcom bubble bust

Business World feature on dotcom bubble bust. They have talked to five people involved in the dotcom up and down: We should have... we shouldn't have... (Free, but registration required)

Of the names talked about there, Rajesh Jain and BG Mahesh have built portals. Rajesh sold it, Mahesh, I think, is still involved in Indiainfo.com. Poster boy Lulla cannot truly be called an Internet entrepreneur. Indya.com was a Microland venture. Pradeep Kar was the brain. Lulla was the bait for Murdoch? I have no idea how popular or useful Indiaparenting was, or what they achieved, or are achieving now.

There are hundreds of entrepreneurs still out there building interesting ventures in the Internet sector, but the opportunity in pure Internet content creation and monetising that is zero for now.

5 comments:

  1. I am a regular at indiaparenting. While they may not be trail-blazing path-breakers,
    some of their stuff is useful. Among predictable inanities like
    'choose a baby name' or 'vote for the cutest baby', the site also has some topics on
    women's issues (health, cookery etc.). Its a sitagita.com meets pitara.com.
    They are not exactly burstingwith ideas at the seams, it seems.

    Having said that, I wonder what you define as 'achievement' or 'popularity'.
    Do you base it on number of visitors to the site? Number of ads they are able to sell?
    (They don't seem to have online ads. Wonder how they are able to sustain)
    Revenues? Usefulness/utility (how do you measure this)?

    Saumya
    Saumya

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  2. I am not dismissing indiaparenting as a hopeless site. I said "I have no idea".

    Popularity is rather easy to define. Amongst the target audience of a specific category of service, how popular or likeable a particular brand is. It is easy to rate Sify, Rediff, Yahoo!, MSN on this scale.

    Achievement can be defined on several factors.

    - sales
    - customer base
    - whether they have launched pathbreaking products or no (innovation)
    - usefulness of the service itself

    Mine was a rather innocuous question, since I do not follow them. It is upto their users to write what they think of their favourite site.

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  3. Expected to find the News here. Filling up the blank, Badri.Excuse ( nearly typed accuse!) me if you must for the intrusion.

    Date:12/05/2005 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2005/05/12/stories/2005051212651300.htm
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Front Page

    Railway official from Tamil Nadu is IAS topper

    Staff Reporter




    NEW DELHI: Railway traffic service official Srinivasan Nagarajan has bagged the top spot in the Union Public Service Commission Civil Services (Main) Examination. The results were announced here on Wednesday.

    In all, 422 candidates, including 67 women, have been recommended for appointment. While the top 20 includes six women, 193 candidates have been selected from the general category, including three physically challenged persons, 118 from Other Backward Classes, 64 from Scheduled Castes and 47 from the Scheduled Tribes category. The number of vacancies reported by the Government for IAS, IFS and IPS is 91, 20 and 88, for the Central Services Group `A' 235 and the Central Services Group `B' 19.

    It may have been his fourth and last attempt but for Tirunelveli-based Mr. Nagarajan, it could not have ended on a better note. A B.Tech from BITS Pilani, he had sociology and geography as options. Professionals have clearly scored, with the top 10 comprising an engineer, two doctors and an IIM graduate. Basant Garg and Gaurav Uppal are both doctors and hold the second and third ranks this year. Basant has cleared it in his first attempt.

    Manish Kumar, ranked fifth, is an IIM graduate. He had to choose between a New York posting with handsome salary and one that would help him serve his own people.

    "I decided to take the UPSC exam when I got the offer for a job in New York. Although the money was great, I wanted to do something here. I was not sure if coming back would be easy once I went there, so I decided to write the exam instead. It is my third attempt but I am glad to have finally made it," he said. Interestingly, at least six of the top 10 were trained at an institute here. "We were confident of having our students in the top 10 but six of them, including the top three, was completely unexpected. It has been a brilliant year for us," said Sri Rangam, the man behind the Delhi branch of Sri Ram Institute.








    © Copyright 2000 - 2005 The Hindu

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  4. ur thamizh blog is quite nice but i believe u need 2 reduce the font size..

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  5. //There are hundreds of entrepreneurs still out there building interesting ventures in the Internet sector, but the opportunity in pure Internet content creation and monetising that is zero for now.//

    Agreed.

    The first wave of dotcom tries to replicate what's available offline and convert that into an online offering from a macro perspective.
    The second wave will be of simplifying life with disruptive innovations like Flickr, iTunes, skype and others. The moral of the story is that chase the dream, provided the dream is unique and can be dreamed by others too.

    Looking it from a different perspective, well, 5 years are over. Take 5 more years. 10 years after the dotcom bubble, how internet & web will change our lives? The answer lies in the second & third waves of dotcom.

    ReplyDelete