Editor’s Note
It’s early hour as the silver light floats through and I lean behind on my chair catching the glimpse of dawn from my office window. The rain is steadily streaming, drizzling down one drop at a time. Even my black coffee tastes better now that the dotcom special has been wrapped up. The rain continues it’s soft advent, falling like dewdrops with feathers. Internet is so much like the rains. It just pours and pours and pours.
From a humble origin in an American base to protect information from being ‘bombed’ it graduated to sharing university research across the US. Today it has taken on the world. A staggering 220 million people log on to the net.
Internet entered India as late as 1995, where it was marvelled as an email-churning machine. At the same time one could go to a few sites.
That was 5 years ago, during which hotmail was sold for a whooping $400 million, the great Satyam Info ways’ boomed and rediff.com was listed on the NASDAQ. Indians licked their lips and jumped. Everyone wanted to join the bandwagon to find his or her gold mine. Everybody wanted the piece of the pie. What followed next was chaos, which is typical of Indians. Nothing less than 24000 sites joined the fray from India. India just went totally net-crazy that is one step further than a net-addict would go. The immense interest could be gauged from the long queue at Nehru centre last month. Naturally, Indians don’t want to be left out in this mad race on the net.
On the e-com side, people are buying railway passes, pizzas, books; winning contests, paying bills, chatting: not to forget trying to launch their own portals and some are even getting married to people they meet on the net.
It is our humble attempt to cover as much as possible about the net including a glossary and the how, why, where, what etc. of cyber space. Because of its enormity no one can cover everything about the Internet. Not even the Internet!
We hope that you will enjoy reading this issue as much we do bringing it to you.
Happy reading!
How to save time on the net
Time is money. The net will be free someday for sure, even VSNL who once held a monopoly and started at super rates is constantly slashing prices, cutting the halves into one-fourths and one-fourths into one-eighths. However Internet access costs money and keeps your telephone lines busy. Here are some tips to save your Internet time
Writing and reading emails offline. If you are using Outlook, the email can sit in your outbox till you are online when Outlook automatically prompts that there are messages in the outbox and would you get online next. If you are using pop3 addresses like hotmail, usa.net etc. you can type your email in a Word document (or better still Notepad) till you go online. Then simply cut and paste your letter into your email.
Similarly you can copy/paste the mails you receive and read them offline
While on sites you can open multiple windows as sites get downloaded
You can save pages for reading later by going into File and Save As option in your explorer
You can save pictures for later viewing
You can make sites available offline
Boss save your money, the boom will burst like a balloon. And, a penny saved is a penny earned.
My favourite email account
If you don’t get your ID with your first name on the first shot, don’t despair!
The email is the biggest marvel of the century. No stamps, no postman, no waiting. It’s quick, effective and easy. You want to get in touch with anyone, anywhere all you have to do is spend a few moments and within seconds your message reaches its destination.
Don’t have an email address? you should be ashamed. Today in India, email is an absolute must-must. Email addresses are status symbols, placed somewhere between mobiles and BMW. So if you do not have an address or have an email ID that looks like a computer code gone bad such as: ravi_anand_varma_28_12_67@hotmail.com, do not despair. According to Yahoo there are 13967413 matches for emails. How many? That’s right! I could have officially looked down upon you, called you un-cool, made you an outcast – but I won’t.
One of the biggest problems faced by the Vijays, Anils, Sunils and Sanjays (as in Johns, Roberts, Richards) are that their names are common nouns and thus every time they try to sign up for anil@somethingortheother.com , some other Anil has already beaten them to it. But that need not have you break into panic or heartbreak into blood pressure. There are sites that can give you multiple domain names that’s where it is @ for you.
For example at http://www.mail.com there are a variety of domain names to be chosen from: for example – ravi@cheerful.com or anil@consultant.com or john@2for4.com or arun@artlover.com (and there are a hundreds to choose from).
Even after going through the above rigmarole, you do not get your first name (vijay@any-of-above.com) then try mypad.com it will give you 50 more domain options. Try http://www.hollywood.com, http://www.homepage.com, http://www.email.com, http://www.freemail.com, http://www.clickchick.com, http://www.icleo.com, http://www.iname.com, http://www.juno.com, http://www.mailcity.com, or http://www.prontomail.com,
If you are a die-hard Indian craving for a khadi email try http://www.rediffmail.com, http://www.indya.com, http://www.mantraonline.com, http://www.satyamonline.com (now http://www.sify.com) etc. If you are die-hard feminist try http://www.icleo.com, http://www.ivillage.com or http://www.chickmail.com.
Ever since hotmail fetched 400 million dollars, all Indian sites give free email pop3. The problem with Indians is we are too bored with ourselves to do anything original. If one site starts giving free email addresses, everyone jumps, pushes and joins the fray.
In fact a while ago, http://www.mailmetoday.com had for a while, started giving away prizes (Radio Recorder from Thomson, Cricket Word Cup, CDROM, Titan Desk Clock, RayBan Aviator Sunglasses, Braun Silk epil duo etc.) for using their email services. Of course, you will have to use the mail a million times to get a small Delhi radio. However, the response was so tremendous (Indians have crossed the billion mark so even if 0.1 person respond, it will shake the net lines) that they had to temporarily stop their services.
If you still don’t get an email ID and there’s a good chance you might not because of thousands of bablis, pinkys and montoos in the country try some creative prefixes like Coolmale@hotmail.com or yoohooravi@yahoo.com or sanjayonline@satyamonline.com etc.
If your name is John or Sam then you can go to http://www.FirstName.com, which gives you over 500 first names like Alex, John, Sunil, Anil, Raju etc in the form yourname@alexsmail.com or @johnsmail.com etc.
By now chances are you might have collected half a dozen email ID’s and already have the luxury of having separate emails for separate purposes.
And if you have collected more than your share of email ID’s, don’t be greedy and cancel your account. Some other Raju, Ravi or Anil could benefit from your charity.
Also never ever jump email addresses: that is don’t keep changing addresses because people might send important letters to you previous address. Your ex-girl friend who left you for marriage might be divorced and looking for you.
My personal favourites
1. Friendlyemail.com: is the most easy to use and is strictly an anti-spam site and is the first one which forwards your mail to your other email addresses, instead of trying to collect mails from your other accounts in vain.
2. Hotmail.com: The unofficial king of spam is getting better and better, in fact it gives you a mini Word with features like thesaurus and spellcheck etc.
3. Netaddress.com: The usa.net has the largest history folder and lots of options worth checking out.
4. Yahoo.com: is the fastest site to load itself after all it started as a search engine
5. Chickmail.com: It has very cute graphics and casual terminology, feminine and cute.
Some of the common features that most good sites have and you must check:
Signature
Allows you to include a set block of text at the end of every message. You can include your contact information, favourite quote, or anything you want in your signature.
Folders
Use folders to organize your messages. For example, you can create a new folder named “Friends” to separate your personal email from any other email you receive.
Filters
Sort your incoming mail into different folders or blocking out unsolicited email. For example, set up your filters so that any new emails you get from your company are sent to your “Work” folder.
Search
If you can’t find a particular message, but know whom it’s from or some words that are in the body of the email use Search to hunt it down. You can also search for email addresses and phone numbers of friends you’ve lost along the way.
Vacation Reply
If you are out of town then you can send an automatically generated reply to any one who sends you a message. For example, ‘Sorry am out till the 29th June, will get in touch with you’.
What do Cc: and Bcc: mean? “Cc:” stands for “carbon copy.” Anyone listed in the “Cc:” field of a message will receive a copy of that message when you send it. All other recipients of that message will be able to see that the person you designated as a “Cc:” recipient has received a copy of the message.
“Bcc:” stands for “blind carbon copy.” This is nearly identical to the “Cc:” feature, except that “Bcc:” recipients are invisible to the “To:” and “Cc:” recipients of the message as well as to each other. For example, if you send a message “To:” suneal@yahoo.com with a “Bcc:” to shobha@yahoo.com, then suneal will see himself as the message’s only recipient, while shobha will see that you have also sent the message “To:” suneal.
Note that to send a message, you must always specify at least one recipient in the “To:” field. If you do not, an error message will appear when you attempt to send the message.
Networking Dagdi Chawl
When PCs can’t LAN can. When LAN can’t WAN can. When WAN can’t, Internet can. Based on this premise, it was decided by the mawsies that Internet is the sabse bada khiladi and Dagdichawl.com was set up.
Women’s Liberation is a void constructor, which means nothing like most computer terminology.
All computers work on an operating system. The Operating System is the Shantibai of the computer. It does phatka, zaadu, pocha etc. inside the computer.
Times were changing and computers entered Dagdi Chawl and thus the women wore khadi jeans to give their Liberation the necessary momentum, though the bras remained un-burnt. The cablewallah Raju attached the cable Internet and everyone was happy and free from that sada-hua MTNL. Laddoos and pedas were given after agarbatti-ing the computers. Now their oldest feminine hobby “gossip” was going absolutely high-tech and just nuances away from being world famous. Orthodox gossip was losing its charm anyway. And tea and biscuits were becoming costly – ho bai! Sister-sites hit the momentum immediately.
Jhol-jhaal.com was Mrs. Khan’s idea she wanted to know which goods were smuggled via Dubai, what is the matka rate and how could you fix the Indo-Pak matches. She also gave free email addresses to local bhais/bookies just to be in their good books.
Shanpatti.com was Sakutai’s idea to keep abreast with who had given whom rag. Any midnight calls, any siti bajaoing etc. was kept note off.
Game-bajana.com was set up by Darshanaben to insure that if the ragpatti took serious proportions and if there were gang fights, she would be able to sell her goti sodas (which rival gangs could throw at each other). Banners of these were put on her site.
Kai-mhantos.com was Mrs. Iyer’s portal though the name was her kamwallibai’s suggestion. She was naturally more important than Mr. Iyer. Indian women can do without husbands but not maidservants. Kai-mhantos.com was a free portal where anybody could post news, such as:
1. Whether Mr. Sinha was having an affair with Mrs D (name withheld)?
2. How Mrs. Ramni’s habit of eating wafers in bed gave Mr. Ramni a rash on their honeymoon?
3. What was Ganpatrao’s bank balance? He was the local eligible bachelor, before he ran off with John, the parish priest.
Teri-maa-ki-aankh.com was the local fish pond where you could tease each other and discuss their personal habits in public like
1. How Mishraji never threw water in the toilet and passed gas publicly?
2. How Miss Firdaus cleaned her nose in public by putting fingers into it?
3. How Ramu the dhobi was called ghachkaran because of his scratching habits?
4. How Sunita failed in the 12th as a hat-trick because she was infatuated by Shah Rukh, Akshay and Hrithik respectively? Now she was after Dravid.
The server was kept in Santokh Singh Randhawa’s garage, which brought a glow of pride on Mrs. Randhawa’s face. But that lasted for a very limited time, since Munna (the panwala’s nephew from satara) posted the fishpond saying he feels that Singh Sahab fevicols his beard. Singh Sahab ran after munna with a naked sword after swearing “Teri Pen Di”. Muna immediately took the midnight ST from Dadar and went back to his sugarcane farming in Satara. Mrs. Singh downed the server and went to Ludhiana.
The flowing gossips started stammering and the aunties of Dagdi Chawl collectively after scratching a lot of dandruff, came up with the Sneaker Shoe Network.
Sanjoo, the 12 year old paperboy, was given half a dozen floppies, so that he could transfer data from computer to computer making it locally accessible. They had bought him a good pair of sneakers (not Reebok or Nike, it was roadchhap from Churchgate).
Nobody bothered with Mrs. Randhawa who got fed up of the Ludhiana heat, the excess weight her husband had put on and her mother-in-law’s bickering. She was back, rather sheepishly within a fortnight. And thus Dagdi chawl was a happy place again. The Singhs were given a warm welcome with Koliwada prawns, tangdi kabab and some bottles narangi tadi-madi from Khar danda.
Which brings us to the issue at hand: How long will Dagdi Chawl’s dotcoms last? Well, like all other booming portals in India and the world, it depends on the lasting of the VC’s money, the coming of at least one person on the site and the rise and fall of NASDAQ, of course!
Set up your e-business!
You don’t have to be the Sultan of Brunei to start a dotcom nor do you need a king’s army. A lot of sites are one-person dotcoms operated from homes
Worldwide there’s a stir as individuals and companies worldwide are being electronically linked. If you want to jump on the bandwagon the right time is now.
Don’t waste anytime
First register your site for around 6-7 hundred rupees. Do it fast.
Have an idea
If you don’t have an idea you don’t have a site. No matter how much you advertise you are throwing the money in the cyber loo. As more people pursue dot-com dreams, the chances that you’ll be the only person with your idea.com are getting slimmer every day.
How can you make sure your idea will become a reality? What can you do to set your team apart? How much of your business plan should you give away, and to whom? What are the top venture capitalists really looking for, anyway?
CONCEPT
We’ve all have brilliant flashes in the shower, or driving down the road, or in the middle of a completely unrelated meeting. But how do you take those business concepts that make so much sense and seem so earth shattering at the time from daydreams to incorporation?
Does your IDEA make sense?
Seven questions to ask yourself before chasing your dot-com dreams
1. Will the concept lead to positive results? The value of your product should increase with greater use or distribution. Retaining your customers could prove a tremendous barrier for competitors.
2. Does the idea scale with the growth of the Web? Transaction-based pricing and variable pricing allow for more growth than flat rate, one-time licensing deals.
3. Are there innovative, web-based marketing techniques that can be used to promote the concept? The special catalyst for Hotmail’s growth was through word-of-mouth networks. Every customer became an involuntary evangelist for the company as he/she spread the marketing message to their friends, when they received emails from him.
4. Will you adapt? Everything is changing. By the time it is in it is outdated. Start-ups like rediff.com have the advantage of being nimble and able to change business plans dramatically. In the Internet Age, success depends on speed of thought and action.
5. What are the barriers? Companies can grow more rapidly than ever before, but they can die from obsolescence just as suddenly. The critical difference is whether the company has built-in switching barriers for its customers and barriers to entry for its competitors. Rapid growth is of no value without customer retention. Whenever we consider an investment in an Internet start-up, we strategize about customer switching barriers, and the impact of the inevitable arrival of competitive imitators. The Internet supports a whole ecology of business organisms, and the “fast follower” is a classic form.
6. Are there personnel bottlenecks to scalability? Often the young Internet company’s growth is constrained by its ability to hire good people. This is why many of these companies try to engineer around people-intensive elements of their business, using such strategies as consulting and customisation.
7. Do you have a “market shrink” strategy? By lowering prices or offering free products, the new entrant can make it very painful for established companies with established distribution relationships to follow. Although the new market size may be smaller, the new entrant driven by Internet price efficiencies can gain significant share by restructuring the basis of competition. There may be less revenue in a free email market, but it’s tough for Eudora and companies based on selling client software to follow Hotmail’s lead.
Make a beauty: If you don’t have the know-how professionals to do it. It’s cheaper than you think
If you know the right people it can cost peanuts. Many companies in India are into Web-designing and this day, most site making does not cost much at all.
Make sure your site is visually appealing and beautiful. Choose a smart logo and good colour combination. Whether you like it or not most Internet is about logos. It’s a war of logos like most brands around the world. I would watch a TV channel like MTV, if I like the logo or if the logo is beautiful. Logo and brand is one and same on the Internet since Internet, at present is more of a visual experience. Of course voicemail and so is lot of music. Rediff.com have done this to perfection.
Try and make a snappy site with clear links otherwise people tend to get confused and they don’t have a lot of time to go through nonsense. Keep the test simple and short.
Where to look for a venture capitalist
Don’t be in a tearing hurry to find a VC. Manage your finance wisely and set up a good site. Chances are the VC will find you. However here are some you can look up. IndOcean, Chrysalis Capital, Citibank, ICICI, Edelweiss Capital, Infinity tech Investments, Intel etc.
Keep your story short with venture capitalists
Opportunity-rich and time-constrained venture capitalists don’t have the time to wade though business plans anymore. In the Internet Economy, the right business plan for winning the favour of venture capitalists isn’t a business plan at all, but a great start-up story. You’ll get the attention and, ultimately, the backing of venture capitalists through a believable, simple, eight-point story that both identifies your start-up’s strengths and explains how you will turn these strengths into the next multibillion-dollar Internet success story.
Storytelling Tips
Do a detailed mock-up. Not only will it boost your effectiveness in capturing others’ attention, but also the process of creating a mock-up will itself hone your story.
Sanity-check your conclusions. It’s easy to synthesize numbers or assumptions that are wrong. Check your valuation approximations, etc. at Yahoo Stocks or some other readily available source of information.
Listen to feedback. One good test: If you haven’t changed your story after interacting with the fifth venture capitalist, you aren’t listening.
Don’t wait! In the Internet Economy, no good idea goes unused for long. As evidenced by the simultaneous emergence of five vendors in the online pet-supply industry, odds are that when you had your idea, so did five or even 10 others. As a result, the time to start your start-up is when you think of it.
What makes a good portal?
1. MATTER
It matters less. It’s a cliché, but it’s the key to the New Economy: Processing information is dramatically more powerful and cost-effective than moving physical products. Increasingly, the value of a company is to be found not in its tangible assets, but in intangibles: people, ideas, and the strategic aggregation of key information-driven assets. Reality check: Despite very few physical assets and far fewer employees, a growing number of information-massaging companies have disproportionately large values. Consider the market cap of Yahoo, which went from $400 million to $5 billion in two years. Why? Because the market believes the company has a lock on key intangibles that will build a giant profit stream in the future.
2. SPACE
Distance has vanished. The world is your customer-and your competitor. Geography has always played a key role in determining who competed with whom. Now your business can connect instantly with customers all over the globe. Flipside: You’re exposed to worldwide competitors as well. The opportunity – and the threat – has never been greater. Reality check: During the last three years, Amazon.com has sold books to 1.5 million people in 160 countries. Out of an office in Seattle. Meanwhile, the giant U.S. Telco’s are starting to face competition from Internet telephony start-ups founded in Israel and Europe.
3. TIME
It’s collapsing. Instant interactivity is critical, and is breeding accelerated change. In a world of instantaneous connection, there is a huge premium on instant response and the ability to learn from and adapt to the marketplace in real time. Winning companies accept a culture of constant change and are willing to constantly break down and reconstruct their products and processes – even the most successful ones. Reality check: Dell Computer has revolutionized PC sales by offering machines built directly from buyers’ requests. Its lightning-fast inventory and purchase cycles terrify its competitors, and its analysis of customer orders allows it to adapt to trends ahead of the curve.
4. PEOPLE
They’re the crown jewels… and they know it. Brainpower can’t be tallied on a ledger sheet, but it’s the prime factor driving the New Economy. More than ever in history, huge value is being leveraged from smart ideas – and the winning technology and business models they create. So the people who can deliver them are becoming invaluable, and methods of employing and managing them are being transformed. Reality check: Microsoft successfully “locked in” one of the world’s most talented work forces by giving them stock options worth literally billions of dollars.
5. GROWTH
The network accelerates it. The Internet can dramatically boost the adoption of a product or service by “viral marketing,” network-enhanced word of mouth. Communication is so easy on the Web that product awareness spreads like wildfire. So once a company reaches critical mass, it can experience increasing returns leading to explosive growth. This principle means that in the New Economy, first-mover advantages are greater than ever. Reality check: Hotmail, a free email service backed by relatively modest funding, was able to grow a subscriber base of 10 million within two years. Microsoft bought it at the end of 1997 for a reported $400 million, and today it is attracting more than 100,000 new sign-ups per day.
6. VALUE
It rises exponentially with market share. For products that help establish a platform or a standard, the network effect is even more pronounced: The more plentiful they become, the more essential each individual unit is, a striking exception to the economic rule that value comes from scarcity. In addition, some companies give away their products to establish market share, then sell linked services later on. Network effects were experienced historically in the adoption of telephones and fax machines. The difference today is that because everyone is linked, far more products and services gain their value from widespread network acceptance. Reality check: RealNetworks invested heavily in its streaming media players, distributed them free on the Web, and created a standard, which the markets now value as being worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
7. EFFICIENCY.
The middleman lives. “Infomediaries” replace intermediaries. Traditional distributors and agents are seriously threatened by a networked economy in which buyers can deal directly with sellers. But a new brand of middleman is being created. As the amount of info-clutter grows, these infomediaries are needed to turn dumb data into usable information. They offer aggregated services, or intelligent customer assistance, or powerful technology-based buying aids, or an attractive, community-based buying environment. Reality check: Wireless Dimension simplifies the dizzying array of cell phone service options, pricing plans, and competitive promotions with a one-stop online shopping guide. Other infomediaries include America Online, Travelocity, CDnow, and virtually every e-commerce site on the Web.
8. MARKETS.
Buyers are gaining dramatic new power – and sellers – new opportunity. It’s no longer necessary for your customer to walk down the street to compare prices and services. Your competitor may just be a mouse-click away. And intelligent software will help buyers find the best deal. So businesses that genuinely offer unique services or lower costs will flourish, benefiting from a flood of new buyers. Those that have relied on physical barriers to competition will fail. Reality check: The annoying haggling process of purchasing a car has been all but eliminated by online shopping services such as Auto-By-Tel, which allow you to research vehicle model and pricing information. Within 24 hours, you can be contacted with quotes from nearby dealers.
9. TRANSACTIONS.
It’s a one-on-one game. Information is easier to customize than hard goods. The information portion of any good or service is becoming a larger part of its total value. Thus, suppliers will find it easier and more profitable to customize products, and consumers will begin to demand this sort of tailoring. Reality check: Office-product supplier Staples uses personalization to reduce the costs large companies incur when ordering office supplies electronically. Staples create customized supply catalogs that contain only those items and prices negotiated in contracts, and retain lists of previously ordered items. In turn, Staples learns a great deal about its customers’ preferences and uses that information to make customized special offers. Even paper clips can be sold one-on-one!
10. IMPULSE
Every product is available everywhere. The gap between desire and purchase has closed. The shelf space of the World Wide Web is unlike any other in that it has no bounds. Artificial constraints on choice are replaced by the ability to purchase the precise product you desire. The impulse to buy and the purchase itself used to be separated by a combination of physical and mental barriers. When you heard a song on the radio, you had to both remember the song or the artist and actually go to a store to purchase. Online, it’s different. Discover a product you desire, and just hit the “buy” button. Consequence: The processes for marketing, sales, and fulfilment are merging. Reality check: A visitor to the Addicted To Noise Website who decides to buy a CD after seeing it reviewed can do so straightaway through a link with Music Boulevard – without leaving the media context (the ATN site) in which the demand was generated. No more month-long waits before the next visit to a music store. And the Internet’s powerful audit loop means that the agent of demand generation – ATN – can be correctly identified, credited, and compensated.
