Internet In India At A Growth Path

All internet loves must thanks comScore Networks on releasing the survey result which claims that the India has emerged as the fastest growing country of Internet users, surpassing the growth rates in the US, China, Japan. However, India is not there in the top 10 countries in terms of average monthly hours online per unique visitor.

comScore Networks also reports that India ranked eighth in terms of number of internet users as of January 2007. The US has the largest internet population of 153 million followed by China ( 86.8 million), Japan (53.6 million), Germany (32 million) and the UK (30 million) in the top five. The growth in the internet penetration can also be attributed to the fact that India grew at 33 per cent, while the world average was 10 per cent. I believe that the Indian Internet market is still at nascent stage and we hardly have any Internet success story. Indian Internet space needs a few Indian internet brands. I believe that its not enough to have just rediff, Indiatimes, and naukri. In current business scenario the Indian Internet market one needs a path breaking indigenous idea, two a local idea with global standard execution, three experimentation with local content. In current market scenario I can only see that the market is mushroomed with too many me-too ventures. I believe that Indian market is yet not explored well and needs experimentation.

No wonder VC firms from Silicon Valley now focusing on India and several Indian companies as part of their portfolio. The global VC films like Sequoia India, Helion, Matrix Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, NEA IndoUS Venture Fund , and KPCB in last few years have funded various Indian internet ventures. The internet companies which got vc funding are Guruji, Travelguru, MingleBox, ApnaLoan, Shaadi, Komli, MakeMyTrip, seventymm, Yatra, Sulekha, bharatmatrimony, cleartrip, naukri to name a few. A close look on these internet venture tells yet another story. These internet ventures can be classified into lifestyle, travel, or existing, prominent portals. All these internet ventures with low internet population are managing the revenue is a commendable task. A close look on these entire ventures also indicates that they are playing in the field which is closely linked to corporate world. Naukri is a job board; Travelguru, MakeMyTrip, Yatra are travel portals with focus on corporate or office goers.

Reliance Big Entertainment Acquires Majority Stake in Willow

The company in news is Willow.TV. It is the world’s leading portal for live Internet streaming of all Cricket events worldwide, and has been providing live streaming video of every major cricket series since 2003. It is a paid site with a subscriber base of over a million registered users, primarily in the US, Canada, Australia and Europe. It provides subscribers with an unparalleled viewing experience with enhancements such as live interactive scorecards and high bandwidth video streams as well as mobile and IM offerings

Willow.TV, last year, streamed all major cricket events live, including the iconic Indian Premier League, as well as all Australian, South African and English international matches. The Willow.TV gain maximum visibility in India when it telecasted the Indian Premier League.

Reliance Big Entertainment, which is on buying spree, has acquired a majority stake in the US-based cricket webcasting portal – Willow TV. According to report The Anil Ambani company will invest Rs 300 crore in the portal over the next two years. The amount also includes the acquisition price of the portal.

Reliance Big Entertainment has been aggressively strengthening its position in the entertainment and media space and has been building value across the value chain. The acquisition will strengthen the presence of Reliance Big Entertainment in new media.

Vivisimo – search engine

Vivísimo was founded in 2000 by a trio of computer science researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. The name was taken from the Latin root viva for “life,” with the Romance suffix – issimo indicating a superlative.

Vivísimo is a privately held enterprise search software company in Pittsburgh that develops and sells software products to improve search on the web and in enterprises. The technology that Vivísimo uses could classify search results based on clustering and metasearch technology. The company made active use of business intelligence and data mining techniques to explore its database and to bring out the veiled and hidden relationships therein.

Vivísimo technology is available to enterprise in the form of a cohesive search suite, Vivísimo Velocity, which includes the Velocity Search Engine, Velocity Clustering Engine and Velocity Content Integrator. The technology is also freely available to the public in the form of Clusty. Vivisimo , despite a negligible share in the search engine market, was able to achieve high quality results on any type of textual content with little or no customization.

Eurekster – search engine

Eurekster is a company based in Christchurch, New Zealand, with an office located in San Francisco, California, that builds social search engines for use on websites, the search engines are called swickis.

The co-founder and chief scientist of Eurkester is Dr Grant Ryan, who is also the co-founder and chairman of Christchurch-based company, SLI Systems, who specialize in search engines that learns from the users.

Eurekster a startup launched in January 2004, specialized in providing highly personalized search results to users through its proprietary SearchParty technology. Its search engine was capable of analyzing the search behavior of its users and supplied results based on their preferences and interests.

Cuil – search engine

Cuil is a brand new search engine created by former Google and IBM veterans. Cuil, an old Irish word for knowledge, was co-founded by Tom Costello, CEO; his wife, Anna Patterson, president and Russell Power, vice president of engineering.

Cuil may succeed where others have failed and give powerhouse Google a run for its money. Cuil has developed new architecture and algorithms and that its search engine has indexed 120 billion Web pages. Cuil’s robot Web crawler, Twicler, supports the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive robots.txt to help small sites that are bandwidth-limited. Moreover, unlike other search engines Cuil’s privacy policy states that it does not store records of users’ search activity or IP addresses.

Ask Jeeves – search engine

Ask.com formerly known as Ask Jeeves is a search engine was founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. Three venture capital firms, Highland Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, and The RODA Group were early investors.

The original Ask Jeeves software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. The technology provided smart search features that lent access to weather forecasts, stock quotes, news headlines, etc. The search site offered various specialized search options apart from effective categorization facilities. It also offered the options to edit, to categorize and to annotate both saved searches and search history.

Ask Jeeves had its own search engine Teoma, which is now defunct. Ask Jeeves again on February 27, 2006 disassociated the character Jeeves and renamed the firm Ask.com and later in 2007 Ask.

Yahoo– search engine

Yahoo pioneered the online commercial directory concept when it first launched the service in 1994 but did not pay much attention to search services during its initial days, preferring to source it from other parties like Open Text, Alta Vista, Inktomi and eventually, Google. Yahoo realized the importance of search engines in the late 90s when they
gained prominence and started affecting e-commerce to a level that almost a third of online ad revenues were generated through them.

Yahoo started focusing on search engine business starting October 2002, by outsourcing the service to Google. The purchase of Inktomi for $235 million in late 2002 and subsequently Overture in October 2003 (for $ 1.6 billion) made Yahoo the owner of two of the largest and the oldest of the commercial paid search services. This also gave Yahoo 100 billion new users and the capability to promote its own internal search engine through innovative advertising solutions that competed with Google’s AdWords and AdSense programs.

In February 2004, Yahoo scrapped its relations with Google and began using its own search engine instead. The Cable News Network (CNN), the leading media giant, replaced Google for Yahoo in May 2004 to provide algorithmic and paid results to its users.

Google – search engine

Google was the largest and the most versatile search engine on the Internet. The search engine had a robust workload and query-processing abilities. Realizing the importance of a fast, scalable search engine, Google employed linked PCs to quickly find the results of a query. This resulted in faster response times, greater scalability and lower costs. Google used PageRank10 and Hypertext-Matching Analysis11 technologies to provide fast and accurate results. Besides, it employed special software robots called Spiders that built a list of important key words found in the millions of websites on the Internet. This process of automated listing was called web crawling.

About 95% of Google’s revenue came from advertisements, primarily through its two popular offerings, AdWord and AdSense.

Google – search engine

Google was the largest and the most versatile search engine on the Internet. The search engine had a robust workload and query-processing abilities. Realizing the importance of a fast, scalable search engine, Google employed linked PCs to quickly find the results of a query. This resulted in faster response times, greater scalability and lower costs. Google used PageRank10 and Hypertext-Matching Analysis11 technologies to provide fast and accurate results. Besides, it employed special software robots called Spiders that built a list of important key words found in the millions of websites on the Internet. This process of automated listing was called web crawling.

About 95% of Google’s revenue came from advertisements, primarily through its two popular offerings, AdWord and AdSense.

Yahoo– search engine

Yahoo pioneered the online commercial directory concept when it first launched the service in 1994 but did not pay much attention to search services during its initial days, preferring to source it from other parties like Open Text, Alta Vista, Inktomi and eventually, Google. Yahoo realized the importance of search engines in the late 90s when they
gained prominence and started affecting e-commerce to a level that almost a third of online ad revenues were generated through them.

Yahoo started focusing on search engine business starting October 2002, by outsourcing the service to Google. The purchase of Inktomi for $235 million in late 2002 and subsequently Overture in October 2003 (for $ 1.6 billion) made Yahoo the owner of two of the largest and the oldest of the commercial paid search services. This also gave Yahoo 100 billion new users and the capability to promote its own internal search engine through innovative advertising solutions that competed with Google’s AdWords and AdSense programs.

In February 2004, Yahoo scrapped its relations with Google and began using its own search engine instead. The Cable News Network (CNN), the leading media giant, replaced Google for Yahoo in May 2004 to provide algorithmic and paid results to its users.