Khichdee December 31, 2007
Posted by Pallav Sharda in : Local Search , add a commentThink of Khichdee as the Indian answer to Craigslist. Launched around October 2006, Khichdee aims to aggregate online and offline classifieds in India.
Just like Craigslist, it does a great job at displaying a no-nonsense view of the immense sea of classifieds posted. The interface is simplistic and thankfully devoid of distracting graphics. There is a lot of content- you can look for everything from a matrimonial, auto, property to coins, fengshui, home appliances. Khichdee was voted one of the best non-US web 2.0 websites by Business 2.0 magazine (link to the article in July’07 issue).
A part of Khichdee’s success can be attributed to the fact that they can afford mass marketing. Having a TV commercial about your website can go a long way in getting it off the ground in India. Khichdee is backed by a prominent Indian business family- MK Sanghi Group. They have diversified operations in Industrial manufacturing, Auto Dalerships, Hotels etc. Their eCommerce ventures besides Khichdee include lo.karloba.at, indiacar.com, cuttingchaai.com and indiabike.com. More on them later.
StudentIndia December 28, 2007
Posted by Pallav Sharda in : Education , 1 comment so farStudentIndia was launched as an individual effort in December 2004 to catalog the career and education options present in India. The site has grown in terms of content since- the founder claims a database of 16,000 course details (like institution address, hostel etc) across 300 universities. There was a navigation choice for almost everything related to education- from GRE/GMAT counseling to Educational Loans, Visa Guidance, Scholarship info and whatnot.
StudentIndia won the 2006 Manthan Award in the education category. Contrary to my expectations, compete snapshot usage data doesn’t show much activity (only around 600 hits per month- although they are rough estimates at best). The site serves a useful purpose, but it doesn’t look like there is business model in place. It seems like a good acquisition target for one of the Indian horizontal portals (timesofindia, rediff and others) trying to get a foothold in the student-profile user base.
ByIndia December 6, 2007
Posted by Pallav Sharda in : Technology , 1 comment so farThe nascent Indian online-businesses space has been growing like cancerous tissue- with no particular direction, an undifferentiated intense growth that has (almost) no cure. Local Indian content search is yet another niche in that growth.
Byindia found limelight when it was bought in October 2006 by Web2Corp, a U.S.-based technology company, with an intent of doing what Baidu did for Chinese people. The big additions planned are social networking, auction, classifieds, video and syndicated advertising elements. Great. That’s what we need- another horizontal portal. Why can’t these ambitious technology companies hunting in developing countries understand the stickiness of Google- it offers simple, reliable search without diluting it with superfluous additions. Heck, even Baidu does that. Focus! People, Focus! It’s not just about the search algorithms.
Anyway, there is no doubt that for Internet to get ubiquitous in India, people need local content; and users seeking that local content, need a focused search tool. There is significant leverage to be found in being a first-mover for local search, because all the big boys of search (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask..) are ultimately going to fight for domination outside US too. That would be a sweet time to flip over a successful local search engine for a truckload of money.
My ByIndia search with ‘car rental Delhi’ bought back a terse “did not match any documents” result. Same keywords in Google retrieved multiple websites of actual rental companies in Delhi. So Google won. What a surprise.
Indiblogger.in December 6, 2007
Posted by Pallav Sharda in : Blogs, Technology , 5commentsIt may now be time to start a list around Indian blog directories. Indiblogger.in is another addition to that group of directories specifically listing blogs of Indian origin.
It’s hard to set your site apart in a growing commodity-like space, but Indiblogger does a good job of being distinct. Apart from the hip language ( ‘no dogs were injured in making of this website’, ‘Indified by..’, terse FAQ page), they offer some niceties like badges (multiple flavors of graphics that bloggers can display on their blog), wordpress theme and Google-powered custom search for Indian blogs. All of these are good ideas that can make bloggers look at Indiblogger favorably.
Although I couldn’t find details on who actually is behind Indiblogger, the fact that they have a relevant, concise and lucid blog gives me an impression that the founders are passionate and serious about it. According to their blog, they recently added a social networking feature that will enable users to build a network of blogs they read. I couldn’t figure out the details of that feature (guess I’d have to register for that insight). Like I’ve said in the past, it’s always a good idea to put a ‘How it works’ or ‘Features’ type link from homepage so potential registrants can understand the benefits before they go through the effort.
That being said, eIndia and Indiblogger.in have one thing in common: no apparent business model 
(except the ubiquitous model of advertising, of course!). PS: Indiblogger does claim to be non-profit enterprise.
Update: On Jan 28th, Indiblogger team launched Indiboogle.in, a google custom search powered search engine for Indian blogs. I haven’t had time to play with it enough to review it’s performance yet, but if you did, leave a comment below.