The Telegraph has an article profiling Indian “Web 2.0” start-ups.
Exciting as all this is, the fact remains that most of these new websites are modelled on popular international formats or rely on providing an interesting mix of various features provided by different popular websites.
Take fropper.com, one of the biggest in the Indian social networking space, that aims to provide integration across the popular youth interests: photos, music, videos and blogging. Given the popularity of existing international sites, the way to differentiate yourself is to go local with a vengeance, feels Navin Mittal of fropper.com (backed by the shaadi.com team).
Indianising the content and making it simpler for a less sophisticated user-base are some of the tactics used by websites that have adapted global formats. Added features also help. Minglebox, for instance, plans to introduce something called MingleMobile to help users “blog from their mobile, upload photos from their camera phones and send announcements of blogs to their friends from wherever they are.”
Arun Natarajan is the Founder of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of information and networking services to the private equity and venture capital ecosystem in India. View free samples of Venture Intelligence newsletters and reports.
I just posted about something similar! In the long term I think the platforms must adapt to the Indian context. It’s not enough to place local content on general purpose platforms. I think mobile is the key to platform innovation in India – MingleBox has the right idea!