India moves forward

For those of you that still think that India has a long way to go as far as using the Internet as a business model, braze yourself for this! We are doing a lot already. Infact in some cases, much more than some companies in the US! Long strides have been made in various sectors ..

Google,Yahoo and a bunch of other companies see India as a market with a lot of potential. Yahoo already has around 800 employees in India including a couple of VPs who moved to Bangalore from Sunnyvale, California. They already have tools, features specific to the Indian market!

Companies, both indigenous and external are all trying to establish a whole new world on the internet. Attempts are being made not only to enable businesses to run/use the internet, but also to establish internet core as the core of their business. Take a look at some of the below..

FlightRaja And Hutch Launch Mobile Booking Via SMS. You can book your tickets by just sending an SMS. Agents call you back with the booked tickets! Speaking of convenience..this surely is it! I am not aware of any product here in the US that can do it for us. Travel sector has been booming in India and we already have numerous travel agencies on the web. Some that I can think of are yaatra.com, makemytrip.com, cleartrip.com, travelguru.com..

Mobile is surely hot. If FlightRaja is doing something for travel, Reliance Communications is planning to launch a mobile video streaming service. The company has made strategic alliance with UTStarcom for this offering.Reliance plans to make money by tying up with event organisers and the like by broadcasting events on the mobile phone.

Media is another hot topic. Rajshri Productions is one of the largest content owners in the film and entertainment business in India, and Rajshri.com is their newly launched broadband video portal Rajshri.com and are showing their latest movie "Vivah" online. They aim to be the industry platform for video. With the vast repertoire of content and their relationships with other content providers, they are set for success.

We have Gaming portals like Zapak.com (with Indian games(versions of games) like saamp seedi :)), social networking sites like yaari.com, job-networking sites like connexions.com, video sharing websites like apnatube and more..

Every attempt to expand the scope of internet is being accompanied/followed by an attempt to expand infrastructure that it will run on. Goa To Connect The Entire State With High-Speed Broadband By End-2007
State government has signed an agreement with United Telecom Ltd for setting up Goa Broadband Network at a cost of Rs 150 crore. It will connect the state, district and taluka headquarters with 10Gbps bandwidth. Each taluka headquarters will be connected to every village panchayat with 1Gbps bandwidth, while every village panchayat will be connected to homes with 2 to 100 Mbps bandwidth depending on demand by the household. Dial-up forgotten, broadband embraced and lines that are only getting faster. Combine all this with a population of 1 billion+ (with an average age far less than what it is in the US) and you will dollaraa, dollaraa, dollaraaa :)