This seems to be buzzword in today’s web 2.0 scenario. We could see the mushrooming of social networking sites that are positioned for college goers, women, old age people, and may be to gay and lesbian (I’m not sure on this).
These sites provide tremendous opportunity for people to find new friends, enjoy time with people by getting date, even finding people for their business, people to sell their products and for satisfying day to day aspects in their life.
This space creates huge opportunity for intelligent guys who could possibly come out with innovative business model that could change the way we do day today things. Youtube is one of the greatest examples of this. This has certainly changed the way we think about our personal videos that could be shared online. It has really stood up against powerful competitors and eventually got acquired by Google for approx $1.65Billion.
Myspace is another example, but unfortunately founders of myspace couldn’t make killer compared to youtube (Even though it got sold around $565 million, analysts believe that it has more potential), but they made substantial returns. We knew the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckberg, a young genius who refused billion dollar acquisition proposal from Yahoo (How many of us have the guts and confidence to reject this mind boggling offer). And Ofcourse there is flickr and another killer www.last.fm. Its software creates a personalized streaming radio station based on the digital music you already listen to, shares your playlists on the Web, and suggests music from other closely related playlists.
Americans are traditionally strong in founding brilliant tech companies that use to have innovative model with great business viability. So why not Indian minds couldn’t come up with the model that could eventually make millions for its founders. There might be lot of reasons behind this. May be, innovative model in this space might have been unleashed by the likes of facebook, Orkut (Not a brilliant site, but having good market share in India) and others who’re already in this business. I’m very much confident that there is huge talent, Infact genius minds available in India that could possibly works in order to bring unbelievable model that could have ubiquitous place in the history of web 2.0 culture.
www.slideshare.net is one of the brilliant examples of innovative model. It’s an online PPT sharing site which is definitely having the potential to become another blogger and wordpress. I don’t know how they’re going to commercialize it, but it’s definitely an innovative model from Indian Entrepreneurs.
We need online community that could provide support for Indian start ups to large extent. There is no doubt that there are numerous sites like venturewoods, startups.in that are providing support for them, but we need extensive support for start ups. There are lots of sites that are there in United States, but we don’t have any great site that could be helpful for startups. Startups need advice from great guys viz., Alok, Mahesh Murthy, and others. There are infact numerous intelligent people who’d be having tremendous experience in various sectors. We need online community that could connect and work for both of them. There are really quality people who would work for equity, who could work freelance and could effectively contribute for startups.
We need to create trust between persons engaged in this noble issue of building startups. It’s difficult, but it’s quite possible. There might be site in waiting that could really connect experienced guys with start ups. Who knows, because Indians always springs up with surprise like recent missile announcement by DRDO? I’m not kidding!
- APPLE – Mind Blowing Facts - January 26, 2012
- Its Black Magic Stupid! - March 24, 2009
- Funny Sites - July 25, 2007
No seed can grow if it is dug up and examined every week, and for people to innovate and get things done, sometimes they need some time and space and resources… The one in a hurry can of course hop on to Amit’s [ tried and tested perhaps 🙂 ] idea above…
@Satpal,
Have you seen MTV bakra
you know, i think, in retrospect, we were bakras of incubation unit being experimented upon to get right policies. And these inspiring blogs are encouraging enough to produce more bakras. Ha ha!
Thats just my opnion and i could be wrong as well. Believe me, i have seen it all. Sell undergarments on ebay,rather than creating youtube here in india, you will do much better business.
you took that discussion off the topic
Yes, you are right even 99% of the startups fail in the valley. But the question is whether you can create google or youtube here in india. The answer is NO. Ofcourse you can create BPO that could be as big as another infosys. Often Young people get misguided when they read such inspiring blogs without taking stock of situation.My only point was that when you write such fancy stories also present the true picture along with them .Ofcourse, you can create a business in india, Infosys is an classic example of that . I am not denying that it’s impossible to do business in india. But please don’t lament about innovation etc and presence of youtube and myspace in india. Yes, wait for environment for the evolve. But i guess by that time you bloggers are gonna kill another 100 more entrepreneurs by publishing such stories.
@amit
Let us assume we dont have necessary environment. Then ?
Does that means we shud not try our best?
.Who will create envinronment?
How will that envinronment get created?
Slilicon valley is not created in a single day.Neither expect google or myspace being created from India in single day .What we expect is genuine attempt from identifying a local need to deliver a above average product to stify that attempt.Before a successful GOOGLE we will have hundreds of unsuccessfl XYZ.com companies.
Why dont u take ur attmept as a start of a new era when a collge passout India instead of looking for a fat salary decided to do somthing different more risky but worth trying.When we had such time in past? Slowly things are changing.And some day we do have furtile soil of failed start-ups to support a google.
This blog is a important part of ecosystem we want to create.By vitue of this we know about your story and I find intersting people like Iqbal.And yes, we all understnad that being “entreprenuer” may sound sexy in pink paper but its a challenge in reality.We cannot blame our failer entierly on ecosytem.We have sufficient example from history that no matter how tough condition are,”true entreprenuer” always find their way to success.I am sure you too know that very well.