The other day Rajiv, Raja and myself were heading to do some conspiration for MoMo (psst can’t let that out 🙂 ) and had pretty interesting conversation about valuation/innovation in the Indian context. The initial topic of discussion was the difference between percept value & real value, applications and R&D came up and were comparing and contrasting the facebook valuation with Navini networks buy out by cisco in the same week. Rajiv details this topic in his blog while Navini is a pioneer in beam forming antennas and WiMax and it involves very deep technology R&D and IP but facebook has 40-50 times of the valution of Navini.
Rajiv asked this question whether there is an Indian company that will see such kind of valuation , the answer we all agreed is no but the following question is what is more interesting. Can we name atleast one company from India that can be called us cool or innovative before even thinking of higher valuations ? Not surpisingly there was not a single company ( from India) that we could come to think of which has a wow factor in it or something that can be called as a game changer.
Tata’s 1 lakh car project was one contendor as it can be potentially a game changer but we could not identify many companies and say hey these are cool !.
What is your Wow Company in India ?
Off the top of my head…
Reliance web world -> started the beginning of gaming tradition in Indian context
Zapak.com -> again reliance i think.. trying to open up gaming market in india its’ not the only one.. but it definitely is pushing it hard.
Pace Soft India (now nvidia pune) was first company to have all the dshow components implemented for the mobile platform.
Your crieterion of what is Indian needs to be clarified here . When you say Indian application do you mean
1) Application developed from Concept to product in india and might be serving to overseas market .
2)An application which is serving to domestic market / Indian audience to start with .
you will find a few companies in first section . like Cypherix [ also known as Secure soft ] ,zoho , Emuzed , E-infinitus , Herald Logic , ThumbSpeed and to certain extent Ramco Systems [ For its Staying power at least ]. these are all Product companies .
but when you speak of #2 category there is surely a big GAP . there are few good attempt but noone in india is able to capture public imagination like Apple, Facebook,PayPal, Google ,Yahoo or Intuit . why ?
i think main reasons for it is that startups are Approaching the market either too early . if you want to be as big as Facebook start in a market which has as big a potential as FB . and thanks to our low PC & Net penetration its not the case as of now . so in this circumstance Novatium is more suitable candidate to capture public fancy than any other web 2.0 company . you may argue about the potential of mobile as a possible option to attain wide spread adaptation but we still got a few barrier [Telco’s role, Handset adaptation ] before we can harness its potential . all these noise about SMS numbers may be good for VAS companies but they don’t mean anything for Product startup in mobile internet space . At the bes VAS companies are like Trojan Horse in Telco Fort so lets wait if they open the door from inside . 🙂
i think this will happen in next 1-2 years . so we may see some action than . Amen !!!
Rajan! Nice to see you blogging again (albeit infrequently)
Not that I think my carpool app is the coolest one but it is back in a new and improved avatar. It’s now totally open source (damn, there goes the business model! 😉 and I figured you might want to take a look at the new interface. I know it’s been many years…what can I say? I’m a lazy dog!
the app is at http://patang.org/projects/carpool and the blog is at http:/projectcarpool.blogspot.com
The code is hosted at http://launchpad.net/carpool/
Hope you like it. Email me with comments.
cheers
Sid
http://www.babajob.com
more info on nytimes – http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/technology/30poor.html?ex=1194408000&en=ff49842cdf85c7e5&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVERNEWS
Prashant ! What I mean is pushing the envelope, or some extremely clever business value originated from India ( maybe or maynot be Indian markets). I will not use the word product company heres as it is yields itself to different interpretations.
Improper market timing is certainly a good reason for such inexistence.
@Vamshi – I know less about both so can’t comment much but from what you have described I am not sure it is exciting enough to wait I am trying to highligh here.
@siddarth – will check the new avatar of carpool and will revert back.
@sanyam – sean is doing a great job of creating a ‘linkedin for villages’ at babajob, it is certainly a very good representative for what I am talking about.
Guys thankx for the comment !
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